#third imperium

[dwarvendiaries]

World naming conventions in Traveller's Third Imperium setting are so funny like we have:

Greco-roman gods (Mithras, Mercury, Little Jupiter)

Famous swords from Middle Earth

People's Names (Mirriam, Winston, MacDermont)

X's world (Lazlo's World, Carl's World, Brandon's Rock)

Newcastle

[msvblight]

Converting some discord messages I sent to a friend about an idea I had for a Traveller secenario:

the party are hired for a resupply mission to a remote arctic world where there's an xenoarchaeological expedition happening

upon arriving the satellite around the planet is broadcasting a quarantine message

should the players go down to investigate the ship is hit by an EMP shortly after landing

what's been happening is that the archaeologists found a massive structure created by The Ancients

all was fine, until a few days ago when one of them was killed in an accident - then the next morning their grave was found empty and the killings began.

More and more of the dead crew start walking again, and killing - what's happening is that the structure they found was an ancient hospital. using nanomachines to repair injuries.

Unfortunately it doesn't know what a human is, so it treats death in humans like another injury. repairing the body and reactivating it. sadly all of the brain that activates is the deeply primal, animal, part. So now the party has to figure out how to survive and get off-world.

I'm thinking one of the NPCs, a member of the expedition, was secretly hired on by the "Imperial Security Presidium" - and is the one that set off the quarantine message, and rigged up the EMP to contain this issue. Stashed in the base somewhere he has a case given to him by the ISP that contains a laser pistol, prototype battlefield medication, and a 7 kiloton briefcase nuke. But there are other options available for the players to end the adventure however they want.

[thesixthchaosgod]

"..But in the Warmaster's heart there dwelt a hidden evil and he became seduced by this evil and came to nurture Deamons and other forces of darkness. And he did march upon Terra and with him marched a third part of the hosts of the Imperium which he had seduced to his purpose. And there was terror and bloodshed and for seven days and seven nights the hosts did battle. Until the Emperor - bless His honored name! - caught Horus by the heel and cast him to that place they call the Eye of Terror and with him the third part of the hosts of the Imperium..."

Reject the modern lore, The big E literally yeeted Horus and his forces back into the Eye of Terror, BY HIS HEEL MIGHT I ADD?!

Old lore go hard lmao

[lulu2992]

Decoding the scripts and secret messages in Rebel Moon

Part 2: Solving the riddle of Noble’s Bone Staff

On December 23, 2023, Zack Snyder posted this:

The idea of uncovering yet another secret got me very excited, so I looked for the Bone Staff in the guide. Here is the image as it appears on the website:

I slightly cropped it, but yes, it really is this small and you can barely see anything... Still, if you look closely, you will notice a series of little vertical lines all along the handle. Well, they’re not just lines; they’re letters, and they form the “secret inscription” fans were challenged to decode!

Contrary to what the post said, though, it seemed to me this script didn’t look like the New Imperium font. Instead, it reminded me a lot of the symbols I had seen elsewhere in the guide, on the Priests and Scribes’ outfits (more on this later), and on Kora’s gun:

I learned from AurekFonts, who worked on several typefaces for the film (along with Louie Mantia, Jr.), that this other font was most likely “designed primarily by the Speculative Civilization Advisor, Adam Forman” and called “Old Imperium”. This is the name I’m going to use from now on.

The guide says the message on the Guardian Gun means “My life for hers”, so I now had 10 letters to work with. On the bone staff, I also noticed the “brackets”, which I concluded served as spaces/word separators in Old Imperium, were upside-down compared to the ones on the gun, so I deduced that, to read the message, I first had to rotate the image by 180 degrees.

But even after doing all that, decoding the inscription remained difficult because of the image’s fairly low resolution... After a lot of squinting, I still managed to count the words and determine how many letters they contained. The message is a 38-word sentence that looks something like this:

---[-------(7th letter is grey)[-----[-----(puntuation mark)---[---[-[----[----[------[---------[--[-----[----(3rd letter is grey)[----[-----[--[---------[--[-[-------[------[---[----[-----[-----[---[----[----[-----[--[----[--------[-------[---------[--[--[----(puntuation mark)

I tried to find the 10 letters I knew... but I was struggling. Then, suddenly, I remembered this:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The poem... it had to be a clue! I looked at “The Second Coming” again, and my eyes were drawn to the last verses:

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

38 words, a punctuation mark between the 4th and 5th words, another one at the end... As for the grey letters on the staff? They correspond to double letters in the poem (“darkneSS” and “slEEp”). Everything works perfectly!

The secret inscription on Atticus Noble’s Bone Staff is the final sentence of the 1919 poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.

December 24, 2023, around 7 pm CEST; challenge completed!

And now that I had been introduced to the Old Imperium font, why not try to decode it too?

[sculptorofcrimson]

"Ophar had never been deceived – he understood why the Custodians looked the way they did. If you concealed your killers in the armour of gods, then they would be worshipped even as they raised their blades. Ophar had lived through the darkest of times, witnessing atrocity from coast to mountain, and knew murderers when he saw them. It didn’t matter what they wore, nor how politely they expressed themselves – Valdor’s soldiers had been created to kill, and kill, and kill again. They had no other function. Emotion had been knocked out of them, replaced by a horrifying sangfroid that bordered on the mechanical. They were devils. They were products of an age of nightmares." - Valdor, Birth of an Imperium, 100

Murderers? That’s calling them lightly. I prefer what that one Thunder Warrior called him:

“You’re a lying, murdering bastard, and we were all supposed to be cracking down on them.”

-That One Thunder Warrior(Whose Name I forgot)

[capitalisticveins]

Someone make Imperium Baaabe do something I wanna see them again

[lavellane]

couldnt sleep last night too busy rotating leda von valancius around in my head like a grimdark rotisserie chicken

[tms-ebott]

Is the Imperium run by Human's or monsters?

[theromaboo]

The Fourth Day of Britannicus

Today I am doing Imperium: Nero.

What. What did they do to him? I think the general rule of thumb is that when the actor for Britannicus has the five o'clock shadow, he's too old. I do not like this. He does not have the Britannicus energy.

This is supposed to depict someone who can't be older than 13 (I actually don't know how old he is supposed to be here because I didn't watch the entire movie. I merely skimmed it like you would do a book. I remember that earlier in the movie, Messalina was still alive. I seriously hope there was a time-skip and Brit was 13 here, because while this looks much too old for a 13 year old, this looks incredibly too old for someone who can't be older than seven. I'm just going to assume he's 13. But keep in mind that he can be any age younger. I just don't know)

I really don't like this one. When I saw that this was Britannicus, I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry (though it seems that Britanncius wasn't the only one to get the short end of the straw. *cough* LongDarkHair!Nero *cough*). No offense to the actor, of course. He just isn't a good actor for Brit. Brit was a child. This is a grown man. I cannot see him as Brit. To me, this is only a symbol to represent him.

And maybe that's the problem with this Britannicus series. It's either "Too old. Not good," or "Young looking. Good," which is kind of boring. Maybe I should look past age for a more interesting analysis. But it's hard!

I'm trying to imagine him as much younger, the age of Britannicus. Do I dislike this simply because of age? Yes. I think Britannicus would look great with that hair and facial features if only the actor was younger.

I guess, to me, the most important part of a depiction of Britannicus is the age. If he looks much too old, I will never be happy. But if he looks the appropriate age, I will be happy and I will be okay with quite a lot of variation.

This is different than how I feel about depictions of Cocktavian, because in that case, I'm extremely picky and will not be happy until he looks exactly the way he looks in my head. To this day, I have not seen a single depiction of Cocktavian I was happy about. I think the closest was an illustration of him from a children's book about ancient Rome. I really liked how he looked, but the thing is... the illustration had dark hair and eyes! Yes, I believe all colors of hair and eyes and skin are beautiful, but in my head, Cocktavian is fucking blond like the sources say.

[calypsolemon]

I'm curious about your take on Beatrix, Ras, Rapton, and Imperium as a whole. I know we're only halfway through the season, and some people like to wait till they see the whole big picture before making judgments, but I wanna know how you personally feel about them!

honestly its mostly None Thoughts on the characters. Ras is probably the most interesting character in terms of I think "something more seems to be going on there that we're not privy to," but without further info i can't exactly say what. Rapton is just kind of afunny guy. And Beatrix... I'm going to be honest my first impression of her is "that girl is not giving me ruling empress of a cult-kingdom vibes" but thats again, based on very little info.

As for imperium itself I do think its a little.... poorly thought out at times? I feel like so far we've seen this sort of flip-flopping between imperium citizens being scared of dragons, seeing them as mindless beasts that can be easily beaten down, and seeing them as friendly companions that work alongside imperium to give them energy. This could be somewhat intentional as a "mixed-messaging" thing on the part of imperium, but I think this combined with how quickly sora was convinced that hurting the dragon was bad makes their indoctrination look incredibly weak in a way that... doesn't really align with the amount of power they supposedly have? Personally I realyl think that sora should have spent a good montage or so working with LaRow getting increasingly doubtful of what she was doing, rather than immediately jumping to rebelling against them.

[g2battleconvoy]

So something I noticed in the later footage that they've released for Space Marine II is that, on the left, you see Titus doesn't have his trusty chainsword attached to his hip.

Yet the image on the right, from the Reveal Trailer that was unveiled during the Game Awards 2021, there *is* a chainsword attached to his hip.

Granted, the first Space Marine didn't have that detail either due to technical limitations, but it's a interesting detail. Perhaps it is a technical compromise due to how the game is working right now? I don't work at Focus, so I can't say for sure. But I figured I'd mention it anyway.

[biancabelairs]

i think it would be cool if the next time triple h needs to cut something because other segments went long, he chose literally anything other than a women's match

[lordcaptains]

i finished horus rising the other day

[jamieeeeee33333]

I NEED THEM WHATTTT

Imperium: President Moore and his Dear companion

[fuzzy-melonlord]

(A few years after Wrath was given to the imperium and uh. However long that breaks down into for after Milo and Viktoriya died. Lust is called into a meeting in the castle in the middle of the day while Wrath is out. When they get to the room, however, the king is nowhere to be found, and instead, Pride is sitting at a table alone, writing something in a notebook.)

(Lust audibly groans in annoyance when they see Pride)

Hey, where's the King? I'm supposed to here for a meeting with him, sugar. And maybe a little more if I play my cards right

@vampire-bite

[wwelove829]

Do they look hotter since stepping back on American soil, or?…