I have sub-factions emerging, in my setting, that I call Phyles. they are subgroups of like minded people within or across several. For exemple, in the Scum, I have the Carnivale. Mostly based on the planet of the same name, their fun loving beyond any limits meme is starting to spread even inside the hyperelite of the Consortium.

I like to imagine that the factions are more-or-less successful at what they strive for (if they aren't, how do they still exist?) So with that in mind, I like to play the Consortium (and LLA) up as being stable and productive, even if they're rough on individual rights. The Junta is stable and secure, with basically no x-threats coming out of there, plus a stronger sense of tradition and history, at the cost of lower standards of living and individual rights. Automonomists have a ton of respect for individual rights (or for social harmony, depending on the hab), but are less efficient, slower, and more likely to get dead than other groups. Argonauts are producing a ton of knowledge and helping to advance transhumanity, but they're basically outcasts and actively hunted, which reduces their ability to produce goods and their quality of life. According to Panopticon, 'Mercurials' is a wide array of political groups and views, bound generally by the idea of 'non-human transhumans are good and have natural rights', but they're still young, rife with internal conflicts, and harbor a good number of dangerous extremists.

Quincey Forder wrote:

The fear born of a paradigm shift is one of the deepest, especially if it's progressive.

This is the core foundation of a lot of existential horror. Violation of normalcy [i]at an axiomatic/core belief level[/i]. Your most effective horror movies tend to be the ones which presuppose normalcy, then violate it. When everyone knows that vampires and zombies exist, they're less terrifying than when you're the only person [i]and no-one will believe you[/i]. Dead people are [i]coming back as brain eating zombies[/i]. The house [i]really is haunted[/i]. The walls are [i]bleeding[/i]. Your favorite food (from the Soylent company) [i]is people[/i]. In all of these cases you're taking something that is very near and dear to people, (survival necessities like 'home' and 'food') or axioms of how the world works ('we killed it, we don't need to be afraid of it anymore') and you're disabling them. A good standard that a lot of movies, books and adventure games play with is 'the room you left and re-entered...Is no longer the same room.' (And there was no time/person/capability for it to change.) This is the giant red flag that 'reality is no longer working the way it is supposed to.' because five-ten seconds is certainly not enough time to have layered that last room in slabs of obsidian, installed a large altar with a carved up dead person on it, and then painted intricate designs in fresh blood on every single surface, etc. It's amazingly simple and straightforward to translate most survival/horror situations into EP. Psi-sleights, exohumans, TITAN-artifacts and nanoswarms are capable of all [i]sorts[/i] of horrific things.

for the Junta, my models come from two of the Gundam series, Seed Destiny and 00 From Gundam 00, the Union provides a good militaristic state "protecting" its surounding, and showing some expensionism. The Federation from Gundam Seed (and its sequel, Destiny) provides a good anti-transhuman view, in their search to destroy the Coordinators, even using cloning, mind control, eugenism and genetic manipulation on children But that kind of stuff, their citizens don't see and don't know. for them, the junta is protected from the beings who gave their humanity to survive and would kill them to do just that (propaganda, anybody?)

LordMunchkin wrote:

I can understand them being isolationist, but making them seek death against a superior force is firmly placing them within the realms of MADNESS.

Having seen what a clever player can do with the 'Jovian Spy' starter character template, and looking a bit at the commentary regarding the Jovian navy, I'm not sure where you're getting this 'making them seek death against a superior force'. They're a highly capable force and quite possibly they are [i]the[/i] superior force as far as space control-type navies goes. The core book uses the phrase 'Jovian hegemony' in a few places and otherwise makes note of their powerful military. They clearly can't control all of Jovian space, but given the volume implied by 'Jovian space', that isn't saying much; it's sort of like suggesting that a fleet can't be everywhere on an ocean at once. Nevertheless, the Republic can project enough power to levy tolls against any significant use of the Jovian gravity well for close-orbit slingshots...And the rest of the system [i]pays[/i]. That alone suggests the Republic is powerful enough to avoid being trifled with. Consider Germany trying to take on the rest of Europe...Seeing as that very nearly [i]worked[/i]. If they hadn't had a lunatic in charge forcing them to fight a two-front war and expending resources on supertanks that weren't terribly super (And I'm not talking about things like the Maus, I'm just talking about the Tiger and King Tiger...If the metal in those had been used to turn out Pz.IVs, for instance) it darned well might have come out differently. The way I handle the Jovians, they are [i]not[/i] run by a lunatic. I treat them very much as a post-Stalinist Soviet police state, with a lot of attention to Solzhenitsyn's [u]Gulag Archipelago[/u] in terms of state-and-individual surveillance and informant-society behavior, and a distinct 'humans first' mentality. They see themselves as the only bastion of 'true' humanity and while they have some factions which are more hardcore than others about modifications, the vast majority are highly purist and view the sudden diversification of the rest of the system as 'inhuman' and a threat to species survival. They're very concerned with X-threats. ...And from their point of view, X-threats include [i]everyone else[/i]. The way the rest of the system feels about exhumans? That's the way the Jovians feel about the rest of the system: those scary people outside of the Republic have lost touch with what humanity [i]is[/i]: they have potentially infinite lifespans; they are no longer attached to their biological bodies; they let nanitic devices run rampant through their habitats and their bodies; they are [i]unlikely to reproduce as humans[/i] (even without their other perversions; that fact itself presents a threat to the future of the human race). In my visualization of them, the Republic is a fascist state in the senses that it is militant, it is elitist, it is intolerant, and it believes it has a necessary destiny to fulfill by its existence (the preservation of 'true' humanity). There's nothing funny about it. Fear is a powerful motivator, and it is the primary message of their controlled media. Fear of the inhuman. Fear of strong AI. Fear of the alien -- most particularly fear of the aliens that once was human. Their secret police and their military are highly trained and disciplined professionals, reliant upon skill and prowess rather than gene-tweaking. Their elite forces are the best that a splicer can be, and while that means in terms of raw ability various biomorphs and synthmorphs can out-lift, out-react, and even potentially out-think them, they are trained to be effective despite those disadvantages. I picture a great deal of use of HOPLITE-style PA (if you aren't familiar with it, check NPC File Prime) among their elite forces and reaction teams. Consider it this way: if they were an easy pushover, they're such an obvious threat to the rest of the system that attempts would've been made; instead, the rest of the system pays tolls to use Jupiter's [i]gravity well[/i] for crying out loud -- ergo, the Republic is [i]not[/i] easy. I will be frank: The caricature which Posthuman created by calling them 'Junta' except in a few spots, the use of naming conventions, etc., is simply cartoonish and silly. I have thrown out the Core Book's naming conventions for the moons. They're a joke. The Republic doesn't have to be based on hyper-Republican conservatives and obvious villains to be a meaningful threat. In fact, to do so simply makes them a caricature. They do NOT identify themselves with Hitler, or Pinochet. Their heroes are not dictators. Their military/fascist republic is not based on a 'We are re-imagining ourselves as a master race and we shall overcome.', it's based on 'Oh dear ghod, the neighbors are growing tentacles and wiring themselves into computers and switching bodies and turning into Frankensteinian monsters and someone has to think of the children and the future of [i]humanity itself[/i], because what they're turning into is [i]not[/i] human!' There's no need to call up images of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic types and the like. You don't even need to bring up hyperconservative religious fundamentalists. From the point of view of the average citizen of the Republic, the rest of the system is playing Call of Cthulhu [i]for real[/i], mucking about with alien genetics (thank you, Proteans) and TITAN technology that nearly eliminated the human race in a matter of days. By making their fears reasonable and understandable they become a far more powerful and interesting antagonist than by taking a bunch of neo-Nazis and filing the swastikas off them.

LordMunchkin wrote:

Three sub-factions come to mind when I think of the Junta, each being centered on radical/moderate/conservative bio-conservatism. The radicals would be analogous to the Ultimate in that they seek to improve existing human traits rather than creating new ones. Ironically, these ones might be the most militant in believing human superiority over artificial intelligence. The conservatives would be more like the Junta as portrayed in EP, flats through and through. An interesting twist, however, would be to make this group very amiable towards AI, preferring to have AI's fulfill roles human beings are incapable of rather than radically altering humanity. The moderates would be a hybrid of the two, favoring one or the other depending on the political climate. I could see Junta society made up of a variety of human derived morphs, with radically un/modified models such as Remade/Flats being the minority and ones that feature minor upgrade such as Splicers being the majority. Overall though, Junta society would value preserving the human form and mind, thus making transgenic models Novacrabs taboo.

This is not terribly different from how I have pictured the factions in 'my' Jovian Junta, although your radicals are a bit looser than my radicals. Splicers aren't considered to be 'radical', but they're predominantly viewed as a means of sustaining the human breeding pool by removing bad hereditary traits... Improved abilities are a side-effect of creating splicers, not the primary purpose. The most conservative Republicans favor Flats. Remade are right out. Remade and other attempts to create 'human 2.0' fall into the category of self-manipulation which the Republic fears. At the same time, cybernetics that do not involve AI or nanotechnology are highly prevalent in some military groups, as well as being used for medical purposes. Jovian society is not homogenous. There are religious elements and there are secular elements. They are not a transplant of the caricature of the North American 'tea party', but rather are a melange of myriad human survivor cultures and nations, all of whose members value their unmodified humanity over the seething morass of self-manipulation which they see the rest of the system indulging in. From my POV, the radicals are more inclined to push the benefits of 'tamed' AI/AGI research and in some cases limited 'controlled' use of nanotechnology. They're still highly restrictive about limiting themselves to human biomorphs that can 'breed true' and are not manipulated to such an extent that they can see themselves as 'apart from', much less 'better than', true humanity. Conservatives favor Flats (yes, we could remove many of the negative hereditary genetic elements, but we know very well that not all of that junk DNA is 'junk', and some of the negative hereditary elements are survival responses that the race might need again at some future date (if you're curious about how 'negative' and 'survival' go together in genetic terms, look up sickle cell anemia)). The vast majority of the Republic, the middle ground, T.C. MitS, if you will, remembers the debacle of the Fall only a decade ago. There is no prejudice against Splicers as such, providing that the Splicers don't start putting on airs and starting to believe they are functionally different and 'better than' Flats. They're terrified of strong AI. They're terrified of unleashed nanotechnology. They're terrified of the idea of 'losing touch with humanity' whether by export of Ego to other bodies that are 'functionally' more capable but less human; by extending longevity and reducing the urge/ability to breed; or by modifying intellect to such a degree that again, the recipient of the technology sees humanity as 'beneath them'. And that's where they see the rest of the system. From the Republic's perspective, the rest of the system [i]are[/i] the scary 'supermen', and the Republic is a last bastion of sanity and a genetic preserve to ensure that the human race does not go beyond its ability to remain true to itself. This doesn't change the fact that they're a very repressive society compared to most of the other options out there; that they heavily manipulate their own media to encourage fear and informant behavior among their own people; and that they see non-human sapient creatures (AI/uplifts) as little more than slaves and tools at best...And at worst, monsters that should be eliminated from existence. I personally believe that it's a big mistake to caricature fascism, because one of the most terrible and threatening things about it is how seductively it can be made to appear reasonable and sensible to those who participate in it. If you're not clear on that, google "fascism" and "the wave". The core values that enable fascistic societies to arise are very, very seductive and subtle. They aren't caricaturish. They don't involve jackbooted thugs, uniforms, death camps, or even necessarily war. They begin with the idea that 'Through discipline and unity, [i]we[/i] can be better than [i]them[/i].' Lose sight of that, and you're not dealing with how horrific and scary such societies can be, you're dealing with Hollywood Nazis...Easily mocked and dismissed targets with convenient swastikas for identification instead of clown noses. "By Jove!"? No. Ludicrous. Makes NO sense. How the hell did that get there?! Sorry, I can't feel that was anything but a fumble. Republicans don't worship Jupiter as a Roman god, and if they did they wouldn't be making MOCK Victorian euphemisms about it. "For the sake of [i]Humanity[/i]." Again, this is purely my take on the Republic. YMMV.

LordMunchkin wrote:

Anyway, I don't think we need to have "nationalist" uplifts spouting their superiority.

Just had to say...Since when has what [i]we[/i] needed had anything to do with the formation of various political spokescritters? :D Also, forgot to mention, I really do see the Republic as a relative of the 'classic' transhuman 'Mechanist' faction [i]a la[/i] Sterling's [u]Schismatrix[/u].