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The Secrets' Crusade

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Ekzentric Lohner said:
I thought that 90% of humanity was either killed or collected (to later be worse-than-killed) by the Shiplords, not forced to commit suicide - did I miss something?
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There's an argument, a fair one, that could analogise this to forced suicide. I'm not really a supporter of it, as to me it actually reduces the horror of what the Shiplords did to humanity, but I understand it.
 
Snowfire said:
The only hidden one. There is a fascinating prevalence of white dwarf system primaries scattered in the direction of the galactic core from that system, though.
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That has...interesting implications.

MTB said:
The 90% were forced to commit suicide in the sense of having to choose between a) keep on fighting and you all die or b) accept our conditions and some of your children survive.
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I don't recall humanity being given a choice. Those people were taken. They didn't go voluntarily. And then the Shiplords left with the following mandate: Don't do X or we'll come back and finish the job. And then they came back anyway.
 
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My understanding on the Week of Sorrows is:
1) Humanity's military defeated.
2) Mars glassed.
3) Shiplord ultimatum: surrender and we let 10% of you live, otherwise everyone dies.
4) Humanity concedes.
5) Shiplords choose their 90% according to some process we're unaware of.

EDIT: I'd forgotten that the Shiplords had not made it clear what would happen to those who were taken.

On the "Shiplord apologism"... we still don't know the Shiplord reasons. As I've mentioned: we cannot yet exclude possibilities like "fate worse than death", "strong tendency towards genocidal interstellar war that makes the Shiplord actions look tame", or "the leadership is outright lying to their citizens".

Until such possibilities can be excluded:
1) Continue to wage war on the Shiplords, pressing for unconditional surrender if they don't stop shooting and start talking. If humanity is defeated, consider surrender; the Zlathbu Memorial suggests they're at least willing to consider accepting surrender.

2) Continue to investigate. The Shiplords at least believe they are justified, which suggests either a really, really good reason, weird ethical priorities, or a leadership lying to its citizens.

It's not like we can pass judgement anyways; there's the little problem of "Shiplords not exactly at our mercy yet". We're still operating on Project Insight suggesting that a conventional military victory will only come at the cost of burned-out stars and countless deaths, whereas understanding the Shiplords may lead to a better solution.

That may still wind up being a harsh judgement... but we lose little by choosing to investigate, versus a non-Shiplord piece of intelligence suggesting a much more positive outcome if we do. At the end of the road might not even be "peace and sunshine forever", but rather "the Shiplords still can't be turned around, but here's a countermeasure to their worst weapons".

We don't even know why they're refusing to say why they maintain the Tribute system. We can speculate, but it's like a defendant at trial who refuses to speak. The Shiplords clearly did genocide numerous races, but we don't yet have the motive, and there may be substantial coercion or deception at play.
 
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We also don't know if there's a Shiplord resistance, organized brainwashing of their own citizens, a downward ticking doomclock that requires a certain amount of psychic bleed produced by Ascended that don't involve themselves in the material universe, ... .
Somehow I expect the SL motivation having more depth than 'they are EVIL'.
 
thuealing said:
If it's about the mere mention of suicide, your story opened with your antagonists forcing 90% of humanity to kill themselves while begging for the remaining 10% to be spared. And your latest chapter contains sympathetically presented and sympathetically received apologism for such actions. You keep trying to leave the door open to the interpretation that they are sincere in their claims to actually care about all sentient life, are horrified by their own actions, and have a good reason for what they do. In terms of "Doyalist" story construction you have the relatively reasonable and wise Amanda entertaining the possibility contrasted to the mentally unstable Kalhia being the only one to reject their self-serving justification out of hand, implying that not giving genocide apologism a fair hearing is something only mentally unstable people would do.

It's quite gratuitous, you could show the Shiplords actually taking desperate actions and risking things of value to themselves in a search for alternatives (e.g, demonstrating the strength of their own convictions as I suggested - I'd be willing to accept the framing of decent people who believe they are forced into horrible things if we actually had that sort of example, it wasn't a call out of spite), or just explicitly show the humans resolving to break the system alongside contemplating the worth of individuals rather than coyly leaving approval for the whole thing up in their air (I.e, no, it doesn't "go without saying" that bad things are bad when you're stretching to give the people doing bad things a sympathetic portrayal).

I'll remove explicit words but I believe I'm within the bounds of thoughtful presentation that you've demonstrated.
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It was not known what would happen to the 90% who were taken at the time, and was not known by the remaining 10% for quite some time what happened to them. So your entire argument is based on a false premise.

Also, this is a quest, which means that Snowfire is restricted in what can be shown by our choices - so how about you give us a break from your mistaken assumptions?
 
MTB said:
The 90% were forced to commit suicide in the sense of having to choose between a) keep on fighting and you all die or b) accept our conditions and some of your children survive.
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"Not resisting abduction to an unknown fate" does not fit the conventional understanding of the word "suicide" in the way that "killing yourself" or "fighting until you are inevitably killed" do.
 
[X] Return to the surface
-[X] To uncover what secrets might hide within deep within the world.

I want to see what's down there that the Zblathu may have left.
 
EDIT: Removed vote (originally for stay/remember) in favor of new post.

Question to @Snowfire : what's the typical length of stay for a Shiplord, or if that cannot be determined, length of stay for a Shiplord vessel? Iris should be able to figure that out with access to the Shiplord logs.
 
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So far I see the Shiplords as something akin to the Imperium of 40k. There are legitimate reasons to why they do what they do and explanations on to the decline into worse as the years have gone by, which you have to understand and take into account to even try improve things. But it doesn't make it any less awful, evil and horrifying; the evil opposing a greater evil is still evil.

So talking about what is right, justifications, excuses and whatever is missing the point as far as I am concerned. We want to understand context so we know how to make the galaxy better, if the Shiplords will get to enjoy that improvement despite all they have done, that is just the price we have to pay to get true success at lesser cost to everyone else.
 
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Starman4308 said:
Question to @Snowfire : what's the typical length of stay for a Shiplord, or if that cannot be determined, length of stay for a Shiplord vessel? Iris should be able to figure that out with access to the Shiplord logs.
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Iris: Weeks to months generally, not counting travel time from the system shell. The Shiplords appear to take their time visiting these places. Interestingly, there's no pattern of ship ID repeats, which implies no 'regular route' to at least this system. That could mean a few things, though, so I won't speculate.

Oh, and folks, voting is very much open. Please do take the time to do so.
 
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[X] Continue on
-[X] to the yellow sun, somehow twisted off its axis by some monumental stellar event. Three major planetary bodies remain.

I don't think we'll find what we need to here.
 
[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
Starman4308 said:
[] Return to the surface
-[] To see the remembrance of the Shiplords for herself.

I'm assuming the remembrance won't take that long...
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We've been told we'd arrive late to the remembrance (it presumably plays like a movie, so we'd be out of synch with Vega and Elil when we arrived, and either they'd have to stand around waiting for us, or we'd have to leave halfway through viewing the movie, so to speak).

We've also already got two people with interesting and arguably more suitable Focuses taking in the remembrance. Vega will tell us broadly speaking what the Shiplords remember, and she'll remember it.

[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)

Having a bunch of different pieces from different areas will tell us a lot more than having exhaustive knowledge of one smallish subset of one particular facet, so I'd like to move on to another system rather than continue on here. Breadth-first approach rather than depth-first.

I picked the Hjivin Sphere because IMO what we really want is the core reasoning/motive behind the Tribute System, and since what we know of the Zlathbu points at said reasoning/motive existing beforehand and possibly being connected to the Hjivin that makes it our best lead. If it turns out the Tribute System (and thus it's motivation/reasoning) also predates the Hjivin Sphere we should move on and try yet another location to find something from the right time period, which hopefully we will learn more about from the former Hjivin Sphere.
 
Votes? Votes.

[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
Changed vote. "Weeks to months"... while the Shiplords might be enjoying the sunny beaches here for 95% of their stay, we're on a timer, and we can't risk this taking too long.

[x] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
Snowfire said:
But it comes far too close for our tastes. This is a story that touches upon horrific events, I will never deny that. It covers genocide, cultural destruction, and more. But something I try to do is to do this tactfully. I'd think it reasonable to expect the same from the quest's playerbase.
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Then I have to beg that you actually include a counterpoint from the characters, if you must take your readers on a tour of a genocide apologism memorial, and relay every word of the recorded excuses therein.

We don't actually need any plot spoilers to condemn a sob story about how much they regret that their "mistakes" compounded with their initial move of repeated genocide (which they claim to find distasteful, but not actually a "mistake" they will refrain from repeating) to make complete extinction the only conceivable resolution. The characters shouldn't either.

Apparently these systems are all "memorials", are you going to do this to us again?
 
thuealing said:
Then I have to beg that you actually include a counterpoint from the characters, if you must take your readers on a tour of a genocide apologism memorial, and relay every word of the recorded excuses therein.

We don't actually need any plot spoilers to condemn a sob story about how much they regret that their "mistakes" compounded with their initial move of repeated genocide (which they claim to find distasteful, but not actually a "mistake" they will refrain from repeating) to make complete extinction the only conceivable resolution. The characters shouldn't either.

Apparently these systems are all "memorials", are you going to do this to us again?
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If you need a counterpoint, perhaps you could read the entire previous quest. Part of this quest is going to be trying to get into the Shiplords' heads, so as to understand their reasoning. If you can't handle that, trying to follow their chains of logic, regardless of the repugnant premises, perhaps this quest is not for you.

Explanations are not excuses.
 
Lightwhispers said:
If you need a counterpoint, perhaps you could read the entire previous quest. Part of this quest is going to be trying to get into the Shiplords' heads, so as to understand their reasoning. If you can't handle that, trying to follow their chains of logic, regardless of the repugnant premises, perhaps this quest is not for you.
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To expand on this...

The characters ARE reacting in counterpoint. Kalilah was visibly pissed off about the Shiplords trying to make excuses. The whole reason they set out on this quest in the first place was to find a way to effectively argue against the Shiplord dogma.

I second the recommendation to go back and read The Practice War. There we were told that the alternative to trying to understand the genocide is to perpetuate it. We could stop the Shiplords through military force and we could probably win, but the cost of that would be more death than leaving the Shiplords to their own devices -- and even then we wouldn't know if the Shiplords were holding a galactic-level threat at bay that would be unsealed if we defeated them without understanding.

Finally: Not everything presented in a work of fiction is an endorsement by the author. It's obvious that people who write action films don't think it's good to go out and blow people away, even when they set up a sympathetic backstory for the villain. That sympathetic backstory only gives the villains a motivation; it doesn't make them stop being villains, and the heroes still have to stop them.
 
[X] Continue on
-[X] to understand the War of the Hjivin Sphere. (Original option: The star of this system is notably smaller and dimmer than it should be, yet appears to still be stable.)
 
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