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Leliel
2008-11-22, 07:30 PM
As some of you may know, I am planning a game where the PCs are magitech space pirates. While I am dead-set on using the Ur-Quan Hierarchy as antagonists, I just read the TV Tropes article on Mary Suetopia, and I decided to use the Federation as villains as well...gone horribly, horribly, wrong.

Naturally, it won't be the ''true'' Federation-I like them-but the PCs native empire, which will be revealed to be a deconstructed version of them.

So, how would you go about taking Starfleet, cutting it open, examining all the bad parts, sewing it together after inserting marbles, and kicking it until it runs screaming?

Willfor
2008-11-22, 08:03 PM
As some of you may know, I am planning a game where the PCs are magitech space pirates. While I am dead-set on using the Ur-Quan Hierarchy as antagonists, I just read the TV Tropes article on Mary Suetopia, and I decided to use the Federation as villains as well...gone horribly, horribly, wrong.

Naturally, it won't be the ''true'' Federation-I like them-but the PCs native empire, which will be revealed to be a deconstructed version of them.

So, how would you go about taking Starfleet, cutting it open, examining all the bad parts, sewing it together after inserting marbles, and kicking it until it runs screaming?

I believe they have actually laid the groundwork for you with parts of Deep Space Nine. Plus the fact that the Federation is basically a communism-if-it-actually-worked type deal, there are a variety of ways of making it not work.

Widespread political corruption plus a great many people willing to go to great lengths to keep the status quo would be a good place to start.

theMycon
2008-11-22, 08:14 PM
Use the transporter to take off chunks of their hull, their onboard computer, or specialized (read: non-fighting but important) crew-members should they ever drop shields.

*reads more carefully*
Oh...
Well, replicators + necromancy should still work.

Speaking of which, they might work like "wish" in the dungeonomicon (http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=9483527&postcount=5)- no-one with any authority cares about money any more- they can make most items for free, and the rest are beyond cost because most people who could make them have better things to do.

You could actually enforce the Prime Directive, or enforce it whenever it's inconvenient.

If you're familiar with Zap Brannigan, from Futurama, model every officer after him, with a competent second-in-command (because they're bright enough to know Captain's first to die when someone wants a promotion).

chiasaur11
2008-11-22, 08:23 PM
The Alliance from Firefly might be a good place to start.

I mean, they do fit the niche without going too far.

Doomsy
2008-11-22, 08:27 PM
The Federation is a bloated, corrupt communist bureaucracy. The directives are conflicting and often ignored in favor of getting things done or employing the teeming mass of unemployed. Safety regulations are ignored, especially in engineering where jury rigging due to inefficient parts manufactured by hand to give the population a 'job' failing constantly, and 'red shirts' are basically drafted into the service to give them something to do and suffer from a lack of basic weaponry and armor, not to mention the callous treatment at the hand of the 'lifer' officers who honestly couldn't care if they survive.

Technology is advanced but actual understanding of how it functions and efficient use of it is starkly limited due to being manufactured from crap components and restrictive, often times retarded, directives, and a relatively small number of people who know how it works and jealously guard their jobs and knowledge. The poor parts result in infamously lethal working environments - the panels are so under safety regulations that they actually have been known to *explode* during use under stress, killing those nearby. The power transmission systems throughout the ship and its completely unsafe dilithium crystal reactor are known to be death traps to the rest of the galaxy, who stopped using them for safer but less out-put systems that have a smaller chance of randomly killing the users in power surges under duress. The Federation continues to do so due to mining deals worked out with various corporate interests and the fact that the power generated gives their weaponry a distinct edge in combat, as well as powering stronger than usual shields. The equipment is more valuable than the replaceable crew for the most part, and the Star Fleet is fully satisfied with its lethal performance.

War is common despite the proud declaration that the Federation has no warships and is always peaceful in intent. They meddle constantly in affairs to make the outcome in their favor, especially on less advanced worlds, with loose rationals. They get by the 'no warship' clause by having a 'science fleet' that is bizarrely heavily armed for mere exploration vessels.

The corruption of the Star Fleet has resulted in a laissez faire style of captainancy in their ships - a ships captain can get away almost anything short of starting an actual war as long as it looks good and profits the Federation. Acts of piracy, treaty violation, and sexual indecency are fairly common. Bridge crews often conspire to cover up or edit reports to the central command. As a result, Federation ships are infamous for bringing disaster in their wake.

SmartAlec
2008-11-22, 08:28 PM
The Terran Federation from Blake's Seven, if you want an Opressive Regime. Or possibly the Culture from Ian Banks's 'Culture' novels, if you wanted to go the 'hedonistic amoral advanced empire' route.

Emperor Tippy
2008-11-22, 08:40 PM
The Federation is a bloated, corrupt communist bureaucracy. The directives are conflicting and often ignored in favor of getting things done or employing the teeming mass of unemployed. Safety regulations are ignored, especially in engineering where jury rigging due to inefficient parts manufactured by hand to give the population a 'job' failing constantly, and 'red shirts' are basically drafted into the service to give them something to do and suffer from a lack of basic weaponry and armor, not to mention the callous treatment at the hand of the 'lifer' officers who honestly couldn't care if they survive.

Technology is advanced but actual understanding of how it functions and efficient use of it is starkly limited due to being manufactured from crap components and restrictive, often times retarded, directives, and a relatively small number of people who know how it works and jealously guard their jobs and knowledge. The poor parts result in infamously lethal working environments - the panels are so under safety regulations that they actually have been known to *explode* during use under stress, killing those nearby. The power transmission systems throughout the ship and its completely unsafe dilithium crystal reactor are known to be death traps to the rest of the galaxy, who stopped using them for safer but less out-put systems that have a smaller chance of randomly killing the users in power surges under duress. The Federation continues to do so due to mining deals worked out with various corporate interests and the fact that the power generated gives their weaponry a distinct edge in combat, as well as powering stronger than usual shields. The equipment is more valuable than the replaceable crew for the most part, and the Star Fleet is fully satisfied with its lethal performance.

War is common despite the proud declaration that the Federation has no warships and is always peaceful in intent. They meddle constantly in affairs to make the outcome in their favor, especially on less advanced worlds, with loose rationals. They get by the 'no warship' clause by having a 'science fleet' that is bizarrely heavily armed for mere exploration vessels.

The corruption of the Star Fleet has resulted in a laissez faire style of captainancy in their ships - a ships captain can get away almost anything short of starting an actual war as long as it looks good and profits the Federation. Acts of piracy, treaty violation, and sexual indecency are fairly common. Bridge crews often conspire to cover up or edit reports to the central command. As a result, Federation ships are infamous for bringing disaster in their wake.

That's the standard federation, you didn't change a thing. :smallwink:

Doomsy
2008-11-22, 08:44 PM
That's the standard federation, you didn't change a thing. :smallwink:

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :D


Edit: To be fair the Federation is pretty much already a monstrosity if you look at it even from the series angle with just a little criticism. To really deconstruct it, and I don't even know if that term would apply here, you'd probably be better off actually trying to make it a force for good - a badly outnumbered, struggling to do its best, shoveling back the tide organization of idealists and people who honestly want to help. Sometimes misguided, often in over its head, but at least trying.

Otherwise, I'd just rip away the 'trying to do their best' part of the canon Star Fleet and replace it with an insane post-Soviet combination of mercenary behavior, greed, corruption, nationalism, and ego.

theMycon
2008-11-22, 09:35 PM
shoveling back the tide organization of idealists and people who honestly want to help. Sometimes misguided, often in over its head, but at least trying.
That describes how I feel about the Ur-Quan (At least the green ones). They're exactly like my mother, if she had warships capable of reducing a world to slag.

Doomsy
2008-11-22, 09:48 PM
That describes how I feel about the Ur-Quan (At least the green ones). They're exactly like my mother, if she had warships capable of reducing a world to slag.

The Hierarchy of Battle Children is a remarkably hilarious mental image.

Mewtarthio
2008-11-22, 09:53 PM
You might find this link (http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html) helpful.

Nerd-o-rama
2008-11-22, 10:12 PM
It was called Deep Space 9. And Insurrection, but that sucked.

Yahzi
2008-11-22, 11:02 PM
The Federation is ...
Brilliant! :smallbiggrin:

Randel
2008-11-23, 01:35 AM
I imagined that the reason so many of the starships components blew up or broke from poor design is because they have replicators that can just whip up replacement components instantly so fixing things so they don't break isn't deemed necessary.

Plus, if they can just have computers replicate stuff, then many people forget how to repair things with their hands, so engineering skills are limited. They just use the same liable-to-break components because lots of people don't have the engineering skill to make ones that don't break, and those who do have any skill are busy recalibrating the entire ship to emit technobabblions to overfeed space whales.

Few people in the federation even know how to cook, since computers make food for them.

The federation also has an abysmal sense of scale or common sense as far as planetary economy is concerned. They have planets like Riza which is called a Pleasure Planet for some reason.

Riker: I think for my vacation I'll spend some time on Riza, the women there are so friendly.

La Forge: What was that?

Riker: I said I want to go to Riza for my vacation, if the Enterprise could just drop me off on the way...

La Forge: Let me get this straight... you want me to change this ships course... this starships course just so you can take a weeks vacation on one planet because you think the women there are 'friendly'?

Riker: Well yeah, its the pleasure planet.

La Forge: Listen moron, do you have any much power we are burning just getting this ship anywhere? We are traveling several thousand times the speed of light... every second those drives in there are producing enough energy to power a freaking planet for a month. Do you have any concept of how much power is needed to move a several hundred thousand ton ship between starsystems like this? The energy required to send you... just YOU... a 200 lb object, from here to Riza at warp 8 is enough to just plain DESTROY Riza... I could blow up the entire planet into dust with the energy I would need to take this ship to it.

Riker: Hey chill

La Forge: No! I will not *chill*. You want a date? Then talk to one of the women here! Oh, thats right... they all HATE you... you... imbecile! Why don't you just use the holodeck? I mean, that thing can simulate anything in the universe, what do you have to travel halfway cross the galaxy for something you can get right here?

Riker (sadly): The holodeck girls tried to kill me.

Talkkno
2008-11-23, 02:11 AM
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :D


Edit: To be fair the Federation is pretty much already a monstrosity if you look at it even from the series angle with just a little criticism. To really deconstruct it, and I don't even know if that term would apply here, you'd probably be better off actually trying to make it a force for good - a badly outnumbered, struggling to do its best, shoveling back the tide organization of idealists and people who honestly want to help. Sometimes misguided, often in over its head, but at least trying.

.

Sounds like the Tau before they got their own share of GRIM DARK.

Learnedguy
2008-11-23, 03:05 AM
Remember though, that the best Deconstructions are pretty subtle. Don't make it immidiately obvious how screwed up it is, but let them PC's know by carefully giving them impressions with unfortunate implications (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications). Sooner or later someone will go "Wait, what?".

Armoury99
2008-11-23, 06:28 AM
There's a quote from the 'traitor' Eddington in Deep Space 9 that probably sums up what your looking for nicely: He says (paraphrasing slightly)"We don't hate you, but you hate us. You hate us because we don't want to be a part of you - and worse - because we *left* you. You think everybody should want to be in the Federation. Nobody leaves paradise. In some ways you’re even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You assimilate people and they don’t even know it."

For a more fantastical eample of how the Federation can go horribly wrong but still think its the good guys, you could do a lot worse than to check out the Harmonium (http://www.planewalker.com/encyclopedia/harmonium)from AD&D's Planescape setting. A lot has been written about them on the Planewalker.com site, as part of The Ortho Project (http://www.planewalker.com/forums/planewalker-projects/ortho-setting) - and they're a ready-made spelljamming/planar force.

kbk
2008-11-23, 12:40 PM
I always liked parts of the Fading Suns (http://www.amazon.com/Fading-Suns-Second-Bill-Bridges/dp/1888906189/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227461663&sr=8-1) fluff and back story. The rules needed work unfortunately.

In short, technology in Fading Suns, is a savior and a means of oppression. Countless people are denied access to technology as its deemed "evil." However, it is a necessary evil, so certain people are sanctioned to use it to save the rest of humanity. They're like sponges of evil.

The Star Trek Federation, as written, is a Utopian paradise with human foibles. Depending on who you ask, they are either few and far between, or on the verge of collapsing the empire as a whole, but the fundamental point of the federation is that technology allows for the utopian nature to exist without actually oppressing its members (Now, their enemies, that's another matter all together). In short, technology allows production to be so great that most people are completely free to choose what to do with their lives.

Now, take that wonderful, amazing technology, and deprive it from the vast majority of the populace. That's just evil.

hamishspence
2008-11-23, 12:44 PM
the "evil, so must accumulate it to keep others safe from it" idea is parodied by Terry Pratchett in Discworld with "the richest sect in the multiverse"

the Feds attitude to rights of individuals, which meant evicting them to avoid war, led to The Maquis. Then there is Section 31. In general, pick up all their worst moments from DS9 and they don't seem quite so Utopian.

turkishproverb
2008-11-24, 01:09 AM
Every member agrees to be a part of the government because if they don't they get dissapeared VERY quickly.

kbk
2008-11-24, 05:52 AM
I was thinking about it, and I think you could play deeper on the social inequity and hording of technology a bit more strongly.

In the first few encounters, you see the technologically privileged. You know, the advanced cities or the star ships and space stations, which are very similar to what you see on the TV series. Gradually hint at unrest on certain worlds, and eventually, when the game moves to such worlds, they can see that the vast majority of the population lives in poverty and squalor with no sanctioned access to technology. In effect, they are serfs.

turkishproverb
2008-11-24, 06:04 AM
I was thinking about it, and I think you could play deeper on the social inequity and hording of technology a bit more strongly.

In the first few encounters, you see the technologically privileged. You know, the advanced cities or the star ships and space stations, which are very similar to what you see on the TV series. Gradually hint at unrest on certain worlds, and eventually, when the game moves to such worlds, they can see that the vast majority of the population lives in poverty and squalor with no sanctioned access to technology. In effect, they are serfs.

So the Federation is the IMperium?

Yakk
2008-11-24, 06:51 AM
In the federation, technology is everywhere. There are no serfs, they aren't worth bothering with.

Most of the population, insulated from any need, plays complex status games. These can include "growing food using back-breaking labor". Being unusual and quirky like that lets your ideals spread.

The federation navy is just another complex status game. They build ridiculously powerful ships, fill them full of civilian 'scientists' (basically people who play status games with numbers and information), and send them out to poke at things.

There are arbitrary directives: but ignoring the directive while playing lip-service to it, and pulling out ahead, is considered a plus-status thing. And paying attention to the directive when the consequences are horrible - also a plus-status thing.

Mortality itself is a choice in the federation -- if you die, you are given a choice to be rebuilt or not. Those that interact outside of the federation are given empathy classes to understand the mortality of others, but they really don't get it. They pretend they do, but...

They wander around, meddling, while refusing to really help out of arbitrary rules, and then break the arbitrary rules when they feel like it. Each ship is run by a pseudo-dictator captain (determined by their status games), and is crewed by death-wishing excitement addicts who aren't really killed when they die. They like to mess with the status-games of lesser civilizations (like money) because they find it amusing.

Tacoma
2008-11-26, 07:15 PM
I always imagined that while you always saw Starfleet and their fancy Academy but you didn't see anything else, that the rest of the world was a flaming mess. People fled to colonies on inhospitable worlds just because they wanted to get away from Earth.

Terraforming robots that precede a colony typically transform the environment enough to kill whatever lived there before.

And I always had a sneaking suspicion that EPS relays that blew out all the time were really just Tribbles put to good use as emergency overload circuits.

Ditto to people saying starship captains were pretty much just mobile petty kings who put their personal morality ahead of the Prime Directive whever they felt like it. Impregnate half the galaxy, blow the rest away with fiery torpedos!

Exploring the debasing effects on a society with unlimited replicator and holodeck access might be interesting too. I know if you gave me a replicator and a holodeck right now I would be embarrased to have my mom know what I was doing.

Leewei
2008-11-26, 07:50 PM
For a good take on what the Federation could be as a benevolent, decadent techno-anarchy, check out any of Iain M. Banks' spectacular Culture novels. (I just noticed SmartAlec had mentioned this already. Let me add another vote for this, then. :))

Adding a touch of 1984 paranoia into the mix might make sense. Check out The Stepford Wives (any edition) for a feel on how messed up utopia can get.

What if the Federation was up against threats that required an effective command structure? A Starship Troopers-style military republic might be more effective at running the show.

Another thought: keep the Federation as-is, but riddle it with conspiracies. Trans-humans must hide themselves and their superiority. True non-android Artificial Intelligences are suspected and feared. In many ways, the Federation is a very reactionary government, with a decided take on the right way to do things. Anyone violating arbitrary and downright oppressive rules is locked up. Several examples of this sort of thing already exist in TV episodes and movies. Just add a bit more emphasis to them and you end up with a much more sinister organization.

Lastly, perhaps lampoon the Federation. Make your bad guys a fascist regime with harsh punishment for traitors. The most unfortunate are drafted and clad in red body armor to make them more visible to enemies...

Tacoma
2008-11-26, 07:56 PM
Red Shirts and away missions as punishment. This is beautiful. Is best song played on prettiest guitar.