Outcasts as a cartel state/make unlawfuls more evil.

[Enkidu]

There's been quadrillions of attempts to create Outcasts. To the point that 'No True Outcasts' is a Disco-specific fallacy. Ironically, despite the massive potential for congressional intrigues and politicking Liberty presents, tension between crown and parliament in Bretonia, it's the veritable equivalent of Columbia in the 70s crossbred with Afghanistan in the Naughties that gets most of the political drama. Oddly very few people actually want to play politics in primary houses other than Rheinland and Kusari (which is quite understandable, there's a lot of red meat to use in both).


However, whilst factions like TBH come very close to the vanilla perception of Corsairs, creating a massive longevity for TBH, and, in turn, a constant cycle of Corsair groups which offer alternative systems to TBH (all of which are very well RP'd), there hasn't been 'Vanilla-ish' Outcasts forever.

Oddly, the element of Malta which makes Malta, Malta; slaves go in, cardamine goes out, pulling strings all across the underworld to enforce a covert agenda of transhuman supremacy, frequently gets dropped. I'm not in any way disparaging the National Council, former Crimson Cross, former Contari Lance, Fedelta, 101st, whatever, but Malta is either presented as the following:


1) Jolly reasonable chappies who help fight the gauls, are reluctantly lumped with cardamine. They do deals with major, normal human houses, as if they are one of them.

2) People who want to 'modernise' the Maltese state, by effectively becoming a regular human house, when in vanilla the OCs considered themselves better than human, thus pursuing almost Romulan-levels of behind-the-scenes manipulation and creating a vast planetary defence grid in support of their ideological isolationism, contrasted by their massive reach. They use.

3) Removal of slavery. Outcasts don't consider non-cardamine users human. I realise slavery is difficult to RP, but people shouldn't be seeing the OCs as some kind of moral grey area. The fact that they were wronged ancestrally should be empathetic, but ultimately they are an eldritch threat in the edgeworlds seeking to absorb humanity into their own genealogical type through RNA-reprogramming narcotics.

Slavery is brutal. Outcast slavers should be feared, horrific, and pervasive throughout their society.

I'm not going to tell people how to run their factions. I'm just concerned that Outcasts aren't scary. I'm more 'scared' of a Xeno. Outcasts always seem to me like murderous people-traffickers who will nonchalantly pluck an unwitting civillian population from their borderworlds settlement and put them into a life of backbreaking reproductive or agricultural slavery, whilst they sit around languishing in the Maltese sun, laughing at the unenlightened.




Super-cartels are fascinating cross-cultural institutions filled with sentiments of brotherhood, betrayal, murder, Robin Hood characters, corruption and even an introverted sense of social hierarchy and institutional supremacy over that of the law.

Hell, even a concept like the Maltese 71st (72nd? Sorry if I get the number wrong. Why are there 72 maltese fleets when they can support, what, twelve battleships and dreadnaughts), which has great RP behind it, irrespective of the number of fleets implied, doesn't work as a 'good guy' counterpart to Malta when Malta itself is just too darn' nice.


Hell, there's a problem with 'good guy unlawfuls' across Sirius. Unioners often recieve InRp comments about the Alster gas attack, but relative to the number of grotesque human rights abuses committed all the time across Sirius, poisoning about 200 crew and rescue workers should be a regular Tuesday.

Be more evil, yo'. You're free to disagree. Once again, I don't want to slander anybody's RP, just raise a concern where I see it. People like to play factions that appear to be malevolent. Wesker's RHA did that very well (minus exploit abuse), and it resulted in sizeable activity. Everyone InRp hates Order, and that's a good thing; they still preserve the terrorist Zeitgeist from Vanilla. Everyone hates Unioners, and I'm 100% confident Unioners will persevere when I leave relatively soon.

Don't be afraid to be the badguys.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

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(Links pending redevelopment).

[GrnRaptor]

You shouldn't (not) disparage what you don't know anything about. The Contari Lance, back in it's day, was the "our way or the highway" Outcasts who looked down on everyone and everything. I think we pulled off the "bad guy" thing quite well, actually. I can't speak to any of the others, though.

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[Jansen]

Bestest Outcast Cartel ever.

The Campania Cartel were essentially the OC LWB + evil slavery. What could possibly go wrong?

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[Enkidu]

You shouldn't (not) disparage what you don't know anything about. The Contari Lance, back in it's day, was the "our way or the highway" Outcasts who looked down on everyone and everything. I think we pulled off the "bad guy" thing quite well, actually. I can't speak to any of the others, though.

I was around at the time. I do consider the Contari Lance an attempt I truly enjoyed.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

Information | Recruitment | Message Dump |
Feedback | Diplomatic channel

(Links pending redevelopment).

[Corile]

You may want to monitor the Corile Consortium for the next few weeks.

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Reflections on the Revolution in Gallia
Custodi // High City of Heraklion // The Cult of Archangels
Log Filter // Post Creator // Manhattan

[Sciamach]

Hell, even a concept like the Maltese 71st (72nd? Sorry if I get the number wrong. Why are there 72 maltese fleets when they can support, what, twelve battleships and dreadnaughts), which has great RP behind it, irrespective of the number of fleets implied, doesn't work as a 'good guy' counterpart to Malta when Malta itself is just too darn' nice.


Hell, there's a problem with 'good guy unlawfuls' across Sirius. Unioners often recieve InRp comments about the Alster gas attack, but relative to the number of grotesque human rights abuses committed all the time across Sirius, poisoning about 200 crew and rescue workers should be a regular Tuesday.

The trope of a "goodguy unlawful" is a boring, poorly thought-out one that has never and probably will never be done well.

Unlawfuls by definition do the things they do most of the time out of necessity. Because it's how they survive, how they prosper, and how they grow. Taking that away makes them no different to lawfuls. Unlawful groups such as the Outcasts embrace the practices they do because without them, Malta and her people would not have survived up to this point, and probably would fall apart and die out completely if they suddenly were to go away.

The trope of a "separatist battlegroup" is a boring, poorly thought-out one that has only marginally ever been done well.

Just because you see this happen in TV or movies once or twice doesn't mean it needs to happen in Disco every alternate step. It's overdone, and it's 99% of the time simply so someone can have a crappy cap-ship SRP for some other faction than the one that would logically own the cap they want to fly. It's dumb, the idea isn't remotely original. Please stop doing these constantly.

Combining these two things with the most xenophobic group of people in Sirius that needs a specific narcotic just like normal human beings need water air or food, is probably the least logical and asininely silly things I've seen spring up on the server - and this is in a community wherein someone has used the phrase "bulgarian sleeper ship" and tried to be completely serious about it.

Fleets are comprised of ships. Ships have hundreds of people aboard as crew. Most if not all of those people probably want to go home and see their families at some point in their lives. Following Mr.Greatcaptainpants into betraying your homeland is almost 100% guaranteed to ensure those people wont get to see said families again. 99.99% of those people would not agree to betraying their faction, regardless of whatever petty politics would have caused a ship's captain to go awol. That captain would be killed or removed from power very quickly and the ship interned back home.

This isn't even mentioning the fact that fleets require a metric crapton of supplies to function on a daily bases, which is regularly forgotten and ignored in the thousands of "I stole a battleship/battlegroup" RPs. Your supply lines are more important than anything else in warfare. You lose those, and you're dead. Period. Betraying a faction is a surefire way to ensure they wont be sending you food, toilet paper, and repair components when you next run out of them in a week.

Furthermore: something a lot of people don't seem to understand is that the Outcasts rely on the import of slaves from other houses. Outcasts themselves aren't going full Reaver and raiding settlements for free labor(or in the case of the Reavers: food)-- they're more often than not imported from places like Liberty via shady independents, junkers, or full-on slavers. Outcasts support and make use of slavery, they do not often if ever do the actual enslaving. Many Maltese individuals are former slaves themselves, and slaves are frequently freed and accepted as full members into Maltese families over time.

Something that people also don't seem to get is that the Outcasts very much are enhanced human beings. They have drastically decreased numbers from other factions across Sirius, but they more than make up for it by having some of the best pilots and brilliant minds in the entire sector- all because of the intelligence and reflex-heightening effects that un-cut Cardamine has over an extended period of time on the human physique. Outcasts favor the quality of an individual, whereas a group like the Corsairs favor and make extensive use of the quantity of individuals.

One could make a case then that the Outcasts don't view the slaves they're taking in as enslaved people. Said slaves are in point of fact- physically and mentally inferior to their Outcast brethren, and the release of these inferiorities into a full-blown Cardamine-dependant individual may often be a deciding factor in determining if someone is fit enough to be freed of said slavery.

In that regard, you are correct that the Outcasts share a similar supercilious nature to that of the Romulans. Both are highly manipulative factions, insomuch that the Outcasts use puppet-groups in their thrall such as the Rogues or GC to exert their influence on Liberty and Kusari respectively. Sure both of those groups have their own agendas separate from Malta sure, but at the end of the day, one of them is highly dependent on Cardamine, the other is 100% dependent on it and regularly uses it in rituals and ceremonies. Something often overlooked is that the both of those groups also regularly trade with the Outcasts for needed supplies on both sides.

Finally, as Tomas. recently pointed out in a discord channel: plucking Zoners from their worlds for a few extra slaves, is not worth the cost of not being able to have safe ports of harbor throughout most of Sirius because someone pissed off the Zoner Confederation. As I said: thats not what the Outcasts do. Independent slavers, rogues, and junkers throughout the sector supply the slaves, the Maltese onboard, enlighten and eventually free them.

I hope that clears up as many misconceptions as possible.

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[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/

A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.

[LaWey]

CARDI MUST FLOW

[PRJKTLRD]

I am too for evil Outcasts that have a strong cartel that holds underworld around Sirius.

That was the plan for Commune to do. To fund and establish that kind of faction over the time.

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<"From Darkness, lead me to Light. From Ignorance, to Truth. From Death, to Immortality.">

Jared Nomak ||  The rise of the Overlord || The Commune

[Nerva Regis]

@Corile That Consortium this seems nice, I will keep an eye on it.

[Sciamach]

Something else I want to point out is that the reason the Corsairs have an easier time of maintaining some form of establishment, is that lore-wise there is no actual Maltese government.

Malta operates under an anarchic donship-system wherein the only political heads are the dons of the largest families themselves. The only unified Maltese entity is the Maltese Navy, which is assembled from the families combined efforts and directed towards the general defense of Malta from foreign threats. The Council of Dons used to be a regular meeting of the largest family dons to try to formulate a cohesive front for all of Malta, but lore-wise it's very limited in power and not officiated.

The National Council's RP establishes the Council of Dons (please for the love of gods, stop using the word "council" in everything) as a more formal entity, but it's not a case of their owning all of Malta and it's assets. They represent some of the dons of the families, not all of them. Claiming that a player faction represents all of a group like the outcasts would be nothing short of powergaming.

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[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/

A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.