Tell us Your Ideas for Solomani Supplements

dmccoy1693

Cosmic Mongoose
JBE is focusing on the Solomani regions these days. But what I want to know is what you want for your games in this region. More adventures? Ships? Details of worlds and corporations in the region? Careers specific to these sectors?

Tell us your thoughts. We'd love to hear them.
 
There are a lot of books that talk about the Confederation being a collection of essentially independent worlds or small blocks of worlds, such as the Near Bootis Cluster.

BUT, when I read the Solomani Rim book, I don't get a good feeling for how this really works.

My suggestion: pick a subsector or region and REALLY dig into the history/conflicts/loyalties of the region after the loss of Terra. How does the internal politics work within a region (obviously not the same over the entire Confederation).

IF the Solomani are not jack-booted neo-Nazi Racists, then what are they IN THAT REGION.

THEN

Do another region that is different, but still fits within the Solomani Confederacy...

:)
 
Back in the eighties, I eagerly snatched up the Solomani alien book as soon as it hit the shelves. Actually, a little before... the game store had a release schedule dry erase board and I got it out of the box before they put it up.
Then I read it, and I could not understand how a people who had overcome planetary racism and went to the stars together went all racial supremacist when confronted by a transplanted human species. Purity police? It made absolutely no sense. That was when I stopped buying anything involving the sphere/confederation.

I guess the suggestion is, given the negative reputation of the inhabitants, give me a reason to be interested in this area.
 
Rikki Tikki Traveller said:
There are a lot of books that talk about the Confederation being a collection of essentially independent worlds or small blocks of worlds, such as the Near Bootis Cluster.

BUT, when I read the Solomani Rim book, I don't get a good feeling for how this really works.

My suggestion: pick a subsector or region and REALLY dig into the history/conflicts/loyalties of the region after the loss of Terra. How does the internal politics work within a region (obviously not the same over the entire Confederation).

IF the Solomani are not jack-booted neo-Nazi Racists, then what are they IN THAT REGION.

THEN

Do another region that is different, but still fits within the Solomani Confederacy...

:)

That is a solid suggestion. Manageable in size and well within my wheelhouse. I probably won't do a subsector in size but rather a group like I did with the Kurland Cluster where I picked a group of underdeveloped planets and ran with what little there was. But yes. Good idea.
 
Arkathan said:
Back in the eighties, I eagerly snatched up the Solomani alien book as soon as it hit the shelves. Actually, a little before... the game store had a release schedule dry erase board and I got it out of the box before they put it up.
Then I read it, and I could not understand how a people who had overcome planetary racism and went to the stars together went all racial supremacist when confronted by a transplanted human species. Purity police? It made absolutely no sense. That was when I stopped buying anything involving the sphere/confederation.

I guess the suggestion is, given the negative reputation of the inhabitants, give me a reason to be interested in this area.
The CT Alien modules are written from the perspective of the Third Imperium - they are thus subject to the literary caveat of the unreliable narrator.
The 3I portrays the Solomani Confederation as goose stepping racist space nazis - but the truth is they are not (it was 3I racists who came up with the Solomani hypothesis after all, not to mention Sylean racists who claimed superiority over their Vilani cousins due to their superior Solomani heritage to found the 3I in the first place).
The confederation is just that, a confederation. Some of the polities within the confederation go all the way back to the Terran expansion during the ISW period and there is considerable cultural and political diversity.
 
Ideology is religion, and vice versa.

Whether it was intended to or not, and I suspect initially it was, the Solomani Confederation was presented as a variant of National Socialism, with a single political party representing the interests of proletariat, and acting as a power base for ambitious politicians.

I think the concept has evolved, intentionally or not, into the Chinese Communist Party, whose primary goal is continued survival and sole control, with a large tent of contradicting interests.

Propaganda and indoctrination probably has instilled in the majority of Terran descended humans are rather warm and fuzzy feeling regarding their ancestry and their place in the cosmos, with some more demonstratively patriotic in their expression of it, and others just paying lip service to it, keeping their head down.
 
You missed the point - it was the Imperium who represented the Solomani Confederation as national socialists as you put it. There is one major flaw in that argument - it is a true confederation and therfore not nationalist and in many of the polities capitalism rules and so socialism is unlikely.

The Third imperium wanted to portray the Solomani as something they are not in order to paper over the cracks in the Imperial model of totalitarian authoritarian rule.
 
Bystanders tend to be bored with nitpicking national socialism apart, but despite it's top down leadership style, it's more a bunch of policies that everyone was expected to carry out. Command may be centralized, control was not.

Upper management tended to expand and rigourously defend their fiefdoms, while middle management tried to interpret, or misinterpret, or subvert, the Fuehrer's Intent.

Mainland China is, or has, been governed by committee, with cliques developing that through patronage expand and defend their vested interests, actual governance carried through regional governments, who have vested interests in promoting their regions commercial interests, or attracting financial investments and subsidies.
 
Sigtrygg said:
Arkathan said:
Back in the eighties, I eagerly snatched up the Solomani alien book as soon as it hit the shelves. Actually, a little before... the game store had a release schedule dry erase board and I got it out of the box before they put it up.
Then I read it, and I could not understand how a people who had overcome planetary racism and went to the stars together went all racial supremacist when confronted by a transplanted human species. Purity police? It made absolutely no sense. That was when I stopped buying anything involving the sphere/confederation.

I guess the suggestion is, given the negative reputation of the inhabitants, give me a reason to be interested in this area.
The CT Alien modules are written from the perspective of the Third Imperium - they are thus subject to the literary caveat of the unreliable narrator.
The 3I portrays the Solomani Confederation as goose stepping racist space nazis - but the truth is they are not (it was 3I racists who came up with the Solomani hypothesis after all, not to mention Sylean racists who claimed superiority over their Vilani cousins due to their superior Solomani heritage to found the 3I in the first place).
The confederation is just that, a confederation. Some of the polities within the confederation go all the way back to the Terran expansion during the ISW period and there is considerable cultural and political diversity.

That theory would be nice... except that the Alien Modules were set up to create and play characters from those areas, and so the intelligent thing would be to write from the perspective of the Alien Race portrayed. Instead, they said your characters are part of a racist society, and if you have any non-Terran heritage, you live in fear of someone finding out. Not the kind of thing I want to use as a resource making or running a campaign. It says something when it feels better to make an unconnected universe than use pretty much anything from that source material, other than the sector map, and THAT without the border lines.
 
Again - they were written from the Imperial point of view, every single one of them. They are Imperial handbooks as to how the Imperium views other polities. A Solomani book written from the Solomani point of view would be very different, in much the same way the Zhodani are very different from how the Imperials paint them - see numerous interviews with MWM.

You can not take the Alien modules at face value, you have to read between the lines.
 
Sigtrygg said:
Again - they were written from the Imperial point of view, every single one of them. They are Imperial handbooks as to how the Imperium views other polities. A Solomani book written from the Solomani point of view would be very different, in much the same way the Zhodani are very different from how the Imperials paint them - see numerous interviews with MWM.

You can not take the Alien modules at face value, you have to read between the lines.

Again, I submit that a book written from the point of view of another culture when telling you how to create and run a character from an "alien" culture is counter productive. In my case, I shunned every other Solomani product. I seriously doubt that I am alone. This is a suggestion thread for a new set of resources. If they are no longer space racists, make that plain in the new material going forward. And make products, which guide character creation, from the point of view of the culture that the character is expected to be a part of. Anything else is not particularly helpful. (And again, the Aslan book did a far better job at this) That is my opinion, so stop arguing with it. Yours differs. Great. Mine was shaped by the expectation of relevant culture at a time when there was very little lore material out there and GDW was starting to pick up their slack that had previously been taken up by FASA and Judge's Guild, et al. There's been, what? Nine versions of the Game since then (including the video game RPG)?
 
The galaxy is large enough to include psychopathic ponies, office lady catgirls, extrasensory perception extraterrestrials, calculative cephalopods, warmongering wolves, and villainous Vilani, so superiority complexified homo sapiens doesn't seem an issue.
 
If you want your books consistent with canonical Solomani material, you'll keep the racial conflict. It's a big part of what defines the Solomani setting. Not sure why there's resistance to it. Dynamic, interesting settings have conflict and the racial and political factions in Solomani space are an excellent source for that.
 
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