Please take all of the below as constructive criticism offered in a friendly manner. I'm interested in the project and would like to see it succeed, so it's worth reviewing a few things.
Here we're talking about the negative but not absolutely damning Voluval marks. There are shades of gray to play around in rather than just black and white.
I want to agree with what you just said. But there's an issue that comes up in the
Ray of Matar chronicle:
She feared she would get one of the degrading marks: the spiraling circle; the scarecrow; the purple cross; or any of the numerous other marks that could forever exile you from Minmatar society. Fortunately this didn’t happen often; Karin had only witnessed it once, when she was six years old. A teenage boy got the worst mark there was: the pale eye. The poor boy had been driven away from the town, not even his family was willing to recognize him, let alone help him. (emphasis added)
This gets repeated in the description of the
Voluval:
The rarest of the negative marks such as the Pale Eye, the Face of Helina, or the Broken Shield can see its bearer out cast by the Minmatar, banished to Arzad II. Less rare, though still not common, are the other detrimental marks such as the Spiraling Circle, the Scarecrow, the Purple Cross, or the Slaver's Fang. These marks may force the bearer into a self-imposed, life-time vow of silence, under traditional penalty of having their tongues cut out should they ever break it. In recent years it has become common for those with these marks to choose a life of exile over the burden of bearing their shame amongst their kin.
So the corp is named after a mark that, while not quite as bad as the Pale Eye, still leads to exile, shunning, or worse. This is shade of grey that's so dark as to be difficult to tell apart without a color chart.
Thukkers by nature are slightly outcast from the rest of Minmatar society despite the "re-unification" a few years ago. That is, while they might be accepted
de jure by the political system, they may not be accepted
de facto by broader society. So that alone provides some cultural basis without going to the extreme of the Scarecrow motif. (For now, I won't go into the question of training, except to say that I could think of a few ways to handwave it.)
Essentially, I believe you've mushed together two different types of outcasts: Thukkers and the "marked", if you will. A Thukker caravan following a nomadic lifestyle is a great option and one that obviously appeals to a lot of players (including me). But adding on the additional outcast bits overly complicates things in my mind.
I'd recommend a few things. You could do all, none, or a few of them, of course.
- Assume that some capsuleers may join without the outcast marks because, after all, who can tell them what to do? They would then incur significant cultural rejection from some quarters, much like interracial marriages in the American South during the Jim Crow era, without complicating their backstory as such.
- Lose the "marked outcasts" part of the background and focus on the Thukker caravan. As noted, this gets you shadiness and some level of shunning anyway because "decent people" don't associate with those thieving, scamming Thukkers.
- The docking restriction is kind of hard to handwave. CONCORD doesn't allow docking restrictions in empire space except in the specific case of FW, and even then that's only in contestable systems. (Yes, it's odd that Amarr militia can dock in Rens but not, say, Amamake, I agree.) So is this because people don't like the looks they get - which I have trouble imagining really mattering much to a capsuleer - or for some other reason?
Personally, I'd like to see a focus specifically on the Thukkerism without doubling down with the outcast marks. For a corporation focused on heavy roleplay, that may lead to a lot more trouble than its worth, because the limitations may become so great that players end up losing interest in what will be, after all, alts.
Thoughts / responses?
Author
Topic: Kindred of Scarecrows [SPOOX] (Read 12999 times)