Lately my mind is hovering over a faction idea that popped in my mind. The idea is very basic yet and I will stop on developing it further when it gets negative feedback. But I want feedback on this idea, negative or not.
It would be a deviation of the Bounty Hunters Guild. As I've come to understand, the guild's current policy is not only Sirius-wide criminal management, but also capturing and studying Nomads and their technology. Supposedly they have fictional labs where they keep Nomads bottled up and wired to get all sorts of data.
Now the founders of this new faction would be some people who for some reason did not like poking these creatures in the labs. So they went their own way and settled up somewhere else. Their ideals were to study alien organisms and objects without gruesome experiments and more from a diplomatic view.
My goal would be the creation of an assassination-oriented faction which uses the help of aliens (Nomads or Phantoms) to make the dirty part.
Example: The faction gets a job request from a customer who wants a certain... let's say Liberty Navy officer killed. The faction assures the customer that they will arrange an "accident" on the target. A few days later news come (in the form of screenshots) that the particular Navy officer was ambushed and killed by Nomads. Job done.
Why Phantoms and/or Nomads? Because they can attack everyone without any change on their reputation - they attack Sirian targets all the time.
The hard part would be obviously the fact that the aliens on Sirius are not as diplomatic as our friend E.T. in the movies. This is probably the major flaw of my faction idea. There is hardly anything that the Nomads or Phantoms can gain from this contract, except for being able to dock on the assassin's base maybe (getting a base of operations deeper in Sirius). But I fear that this might be not enough.
Besides assassination division this faction could have a research division (for examining alien tech), diplomacy division (for negotiating with the aliens) and perhaps some sort of religious core division which believes that elaborates about harnessing the mystic energy found in alien artifacts and such.
As you can see, this idea is far from being mature and I won't put much more effort in it unless someone sees it as a good and plausible idea.
So... why not use a bunch of Freelancer characters? Noms aren't going to follow a Sirian, or anyone else for that matter. And Phantoms... I don't even know what the deal with them is, but I do not think they do mercenary work. Just use a ragtag band of mercs that strike quickly as a pack. Rename them every week or so to throw off the scent of any would-be avengers.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
I doubt you will get Nomads to cooperate with you....however, they have been known to be devious and cunning, so maybe if you arrange something via a Wilde Liasion....could be done.
What you can assure yourself of is that they are not going to work for you, it will most probably be the other way round.
Well I'm dumping the idea, because this requires a lot of faction-wise cooperation and I am not that good yet to pull off a thing like that. Still there are a few more things I want to ask and I think I won't need to start a new topic just for it.
So I dump off the assassination part, but what if I concentrated more on the religious aspect. A cult of sorts. Would such a thing be acceptable? Priests ranting about unity and "hearing the voice of the universe" kind of thing. Missionaries moving around Sirius and spreading their view of faith. Ofcourse Phantoms and Nomads would be considered something mythical like angels and demons and would have been referred to in sacred scripts (though obviously not by their real scientific names). Ritualists sacrificing cargos full of civilians and tourists and other human-commodities to please the spirits. Acolytes carriying artifacts in their cargo holds as tokens of luck (even if the lawfuls try to confiscate them as contraband).
