Imperious Command and Intimidating Rage

[Urpriest]

How do these two interact? I've heard it said that by combining Imperious Command with Intimidating Rage you can make opponents cower for the duration of the rage. Do the rules involved support this? Or does the opponent cower for one round, then become shaken for the duration of the rage? Or something else?

[Bang!]

Imperious command doesn't say anything about the cowering effect lasting the duration of a default shaken effect. The target should cower for one round and be shaken for the duration of your rage.

There's also a case that might be made for the shaken effects from the two feats stacking for a Frighten effect on round 2.

[Ernir]

How do these two interact? I've heard it said that by combining Imperious Command with Intimidating Rage you can make opponents cower for the duration of the rage. Do the rules involved support this? Or does the opponent cower for one round, then become shaken for the duration of the rage? Or something else?

The feats (Imperious Command and Intimidating Rage) conflict. IR makes the subject shaken for the duration of your rage. IC makes the target cower for 1 round and shaken in the next. Getting a multi-round cower out of this stuff would require some very creative reading.

Imperious Command can lock someone down if you just Demoralize every round, but Intimidating Rage is not the way to do that. Zhentarim fighter levels or the Fearsome armor enhancement (from DotU too) are the usual ways to pull it off and retain your standard actions.

[Urpriest]

Caelic's Fear Handbook seems to imply that Imperious Command works this way, but I couldn't figure out what the reasoning was supposed to be. It looked like it had something to do with the Rules Compendium's ruling that the worst stage of fear lasts for as long as the longest fear effect. But whether that actually works is unclear to me, so given what's been said here it looks like it's just a misinterpretation of Caelic's.