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[Servant Corps]

Let me test this MMORPG concept.

It is the far off future. The galaxy is being run by the Tenth Reich, a massive galaxy-spanning dictatorship. The Tenth Reich is run by a mighty and wise supercomputer, The Lance, that helps mankind reach its potential by mastering psionics and time communication, in order to help communicate with the great Reiches, both in the past and in the future. The Tenth Reich has been propechized to last for 100,000 years.

It is now 99,995 years after The Lance was built. So, since everybody knows the Tenth Reich is going to end in 5 years, rebellions are popping up all over the place. It's up to you guys to help guide humanity in this dark time. Will you protect mankind during the age of turmoil and help to re-establish the Eleventh Reich? Or will humanity actually gain some IQ points and finally put these Space Nazis to rest?

I'm asking you guys, I don't really know.

[Dasleah]

Let me test this MMORPG concept.

It is the far off future. The galaxy is being run by the Tenth Reich, a massive galaxy-spanning dictatorship. The Tenth Reich is run by a mighty and wise supercomputer, The Lance, that helps mankind reach its potential by mastering psionics and time communication, in order to help communicate with the great Reiches, both in the past and in the future. The Tenth Reich has been propechized to last for 100,000 years.

It is now 99,995 years after The Lance was built. So, since everybody knows the Tenth Reich is going to end in 5 years, rebellions are popping up all over the place. It's up to you guys to help guide humanity in this dark time. Will you protect mankind during the age of turmoil and help to re-establish the Eleventh Reich? Or will humanity actually gain some IQ points and finally put these Space Nazis to rest?

I'm asking you guys, I don't really know.

• Calling them the Tenth Reich is a bit obvious, don't you think? I mean, a lot of bad guys in sci-fi are metaphorical Space Nazis, but these guys are literal Space Nazis. That and just assigning a number to a Reich is a bit stupid, considering the Third was meant to be eternal. Plus, if this is going to be marketed, you've already automatically cut Germany out of your userbase without alteration, and many of other European countries will certainly have a few words to say about a game that lets you play as Nazis in a positive light (there's a reason why most are metaphorical Space Nazis.)
• So they've mastered the ability to communicate both forwards and backwards in time, yes? We'll just leave the physicists to weep in the corner for a while, but stating something like this and then saying something about a Prophecy is just silly. You don't have prophecies when you can just literally turn on the Space Time Video Phone and ask the guys a few millenia up "So, hey, we still in power in 3000 years? Yeah? How about 5 years? No? Okay, what happens? Cool, yeah, thanks. We'll be sure not to do that, then." You at least need something to handwave this away.
• How did this prophecy even come to survive 100'000 years? You don't get to be a fascist super-empire by letting people say whatever they want. And 100'000 years is simply an insane time period. Rumours can die out in years, and somehow this empire that can look into time has somehow managed to not keep this under wraps?
• And no, odds are mankind would not rise up against the Lance. If it was any good, then mankind as it was then wouldn't even have a point of reference for life outside the control of the dictatorship. They'd be so far removed from any alternative to it that to simply imagine a different world be nigh-impossible. Odds are the language for even expressing such concepts would be long since extinct.

I'm sure there are more, but those are just the ones off the top of my head.

[JoshuaFH]

What Dasleah said.

Plus: What happened to the 3rd-9th Reichs?

[Servant Corps]

Okay, hm. Good. Let me just explain my idea a little more, and then use that to gague interest.

1) The reason I chosen Tenth Reich is because the idea of there being a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Reich that all gained power and all collasped seems rather interesting to me. It seems rather surreal to me, that an idea could somehow still survive. I don't think the Tenth Reich are going to be protrayed as a positive light though, they really are just Space Nazis, and I doubt most people would play for them. But they could. I guess. As part of a scheme to fill the Space Nazis with Sleepers and turn them into Space Liberal Democrats, or something.

2) In order to contact to the past and future, you need to have some sort of special Time Communication occultical ritutals. That need to be set up by special people, and it has been set up by certain Reiches. Some Reiches do have them, other Reiches do not.

I guess the best way of handwaving this away is to claim that the Tenth Reich has not been able to find anybody to talk to into the future, Reich or non-Reich. This just boosts the paranoia of the Tenth Reich leaders further.

3) Vicki, the creator of The Lance, said this quote, to the effect, basically of "The Tenth Reich would last for 100,000 years." Many Tenth Reich leaders saw this as just a happy quote, as a way to bring hope to the Space Nazis (Vicki didn't really mean that the Reich will suddenly implode in 100,000 years). At the begining of the Riech, this quote was promoted by the founders of the Reich, as a way to boost up morale. Now that 99,995 years has past, the Tenth Reich is being wracked by rebellions as this quote has basically being used to say, "In 5 years, the Reich will fall. We now have a chance to win!" Many Tenth Reich leaders just see this as a self-fufiling properchy, but some Tenth Reich leaders believe that prehaps The Lance might fall apart in 5 years, and is busy making precautions to ease the transition to an 11th Reich, if it is possible.

* Servant Corps shrugs.

EDIT:
As for a history of the 4th-9th Reiches, well...I haven't really came up with that. I was thinking of providing hints and histories. I did have a semi-detailed backstory for the 4th Reich though. A couple of Nazi Occult researchers was able to contact the 10th Reich, who, inspired by the belief that the 10th Reich could actually exist, was able to begin a secret program to basically colonize the far reaches of space, with one of their recruits, Sarah Synder, being the first Furher of this Fourth Reich.

I also found the 10th Reich's blog that I used when I used this concept previously in another game in the past, dealing with the Thule Society.

[Karlito]

Oh, cheer up for once Servant Corps.  If you keep on sighing, eventually, uh, I don't know, your face will stick like that.

[Servant Corps]

It's a habit of mine. Sorry for that.

[JoshuaFH]

Why don't you use the Tenth Reich thing as just a catchall origin for every major enemy in the game? I'm sure you could come up with some crazy, over-the-top enemies with a 100,000 year old nazi government creating everything.

Giant Robot Heinrich Himmler!

[Servant Corps]

See, the Tenth Reich concept would be used for two different game genres:
1) A space game similar to Eve, with two nations, the Tenth Reich and the coalition of anti-Reichists.
2) A time travel game where players lead warbands who are fighting in WWII (Axis against Allied), WWIII (China versus America), and WWIV (Fourth Reich invading Terra), with the Tenth Reich acting as a bit player trying to ensure history remains constant. By using time communication and time portals, the players can change history, in the hope of possibly wiping the 4-10 Reiches off the timeline.

I didn't think of Giant Robot Himmler. I should have though.

[Ampersand]

A couple things. Reich doesn't necessarily entail Nazi. What were the first two? The Roman empire, and the Holy Roman Empire. Reich is just the German word for Empire, and the Romans weren't even German. And while the Romans and Holy Romans could be a little on the oppressive side when it came to things beyond their borders, they weren't exactly genocidal. Hitler just hijacked the term in order to make allusions to remaking the Roman Empire. Probably because Benito Mussolini was doing the same.

All the term Reich really entails is an Empire that is in some way German.

[Servant Corps]

The First Reich is the Holy Roman Empire (which was primarly German), the Second Reich is Bismark Germany, formed in the 1870's.

But after the Third Reich, I think most people would associate Reich with Nazism, altough, the Tenth Reich will have little in common with the Third Reich, I think they would still share at least the same ideological origins. So, they may be Space Nazis, just that their conception of Nazi might be...well...corrupted.

[Ampersand]

Someone beat you too it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_National_Socialist_Green_Party

[Aqizzar]

I think they would still share at least the same ideological origins. So, they may be Space Nazis, just that their conception of Nazi might be...well...corrupted.

Hopefully that doesn't mean the kind of cartoonishly evil Nazis who exist just to be badguys.  Or the kind of fake Nazis designed to be Nazis no one can get offended by.

That's my main criticism - "Nazis?  Really, that's the best you've got?"  Unless the setting plays up the camp and parody of hundred millennium old Space Nazis, I just don't see how it can be taken seriously enough to try playing.

[Servant Corps]

The only "corruption" I was thinking is the Space Nazis having a expanded eugenics program to breed out 'subhumanity' rather than outright genocide. Trust is based on how pure your genetic code is, as determined by The Lance. The Space Nazis rely on the occult for their survival, and the more Ayran you are, the more likely you are able to be able to use the Occult.

Not really paradoic or anything. I was also thinking of having the Space Nazis have debate over if Hitler was "too good". But that would meet up with the 'fake Nazis' destingation.

EDIT: In the ARG I did with the Tenth Reich, the Tenth Reich wanted to prevent time communication from creating a 'temporal paradox', with the main reason being that if a temporal paradox occurs, the universe explodes, meaning the Tenth Reich gets destroyed. Not sure if that's cartoonishly evil or fake Nazis.

The reason I did come up with Nazis, by the way, was the ARG that spawned the creation of the Tenth Reich. See, the players, using time communication, was able to talk to many people within the Third Reich. The players had the choice of aiding a Nazi plot to kill Hitler (to stop WWII from occuring), to work with Communists to overthrow Hitler, or to keep the timeline at the same path in order to prevent the paradox. In order for the players to actually change history, they needed the assistance of the Tenth Reich, who will be able to send in temporal troops so as to help one Faction, and thereby keep the timeline stable.

The players convinced the Tenth Reich to aid the Communists. The result...was not pretty. So, hm. Seeing this was my first protrayal of the Tenth Reich, is it too cartoonishly evil or are they fake Nazis?

[Aqizzar]

By cartoonishly evil, I mean like in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on - spit on people, cackle, shoot their own guys, and generally just be pricks for the sake of being pricks.  A lot of settings with Nazis don't really bother to explain why they existed and how they lasted as long as they did, they're just portrayed as a naturally existing force of evil, like goblins or something.

"Fake Nazis" means something like the German translation of Wolfenstein, or the Starship Troopers movie - Nazis in all but name with the most obvious egregious elements removed, so the work can get around censorship laws, and use all the "evil is cool" trappings of Nazis without the historical baggage.

The way you describe it sounds more like the second one than the first, but a little of both.  A bunch of guys who call themselves Nazis for no obvious reason besides the Evil Empire cred that comes with the name, who rule the galaxy with an iron fist because, hey, how else are you supposed to rule the galaxy?


By the way, I just realized something.  Did the Tenth Reich already exist when it built the Lance computer, or was it's construction the start of the Tenth Reich?  Because if it's the former, I'm betting the Reich doesn't have five years.  How did a computer come up with exactly 100000 years anyway?

[Servant Corps]

By the way, I just realized something.  Did the Tenth Reich already exist when it built the Lance computer, or was it's construction the start of the Tenth Reich? 

Construction. The whole 100,000 years thing came from an idle comment by its creator, not by the computer itself.

I think I learnt that the Tenth Reich idea might have potential if I drop the Space Nazi portion of it, and just keep it as a totaltarian empire. And ditch time communication. And lower its lifespan.