Devil's Advocate: Empire of Humanity

[Axelmania]

Rifts Conversion Book page 40:

"These overzealous, embittered fascists make the average Coalition citizen look like a liberal pacifist."

This makes me feel like I'm taking the easy road by spending so much energy defending the CS on the MDC forums. This should, based on the above, be more of a challenge.

I am rather unstudied in these books though.

Would anyone here care to offer some defenses for the Empire of Humanity?

Or if not, would anyone care to make any criticisms open to countering?

Sometimes one needs a change of pace from the CS and this sounds like a fresh and interesting venue to reflect upon.

It seems a lot simpler since AtB has less magic (it all seems to be happening in isolated places like Avalon/Australia) and there's cool stuff like super powers and more variety in mutant animals.

The scape of humanity v. other is also complicated by the other being altered Earthlings due to human interference, instead of other-dimensional interlopers. They're also quite mortal and more human-like in power, less intimidating MDC juggernauts, no shape-shifting dragons, etc.

A lot of the standard justifications I come up with or see others come up with for CS treatment of non-humans doesn't apply here, so doing so would require being much more imaginative, digging deeper.

[asbjorn]

The Empire of Humanity are dog lovers. : )
Sounds like a good defense.
The empire of humanity are much like the Coalition. Exterminate intelligent non-humans, but the Empire is sloppy and careless, leading to further human death. That is probably due to their greater desperation. Unlike in Rifts, humanity really is on the brink of extinction. They will go to any extreme to save their species, genetic engineering of humans to biological war fair against non-humans.
The biggest threat to humanity is the Empire.

[Axelmania]

Why is genetic engineering soldiers to defend humanity a threat to humanity?

[Nightmask]

Why is genetic engineering soldiers to defend humanity a threat to humanity?

You're saying you've never seen any science fiction at all where their genetically engineered super-soldiers created to defend humanity actually turned on them due to being superior beings? Like oh Star Trek?

[Todd Yoho]

The Coalition IS the Empire of Humanity. At its core, Rifts is just a mashup of Robotech, Palladium Fantady, Heroes Unlimited, and the old TMNT/After the Bomb supplement from the 80s.

[asbjorn]

The problem is not genetically engineering super soldiers, the Empire will go so far as modifiing civilian DNA. If I remember correctly there was an adventure involving psychic children who's powers were augmented by the Empire and they tried to take over.
Even the Coalition is not foolish enough to genetically engineer humans, only rogues like Bradford do that and he would be executed of it was discovered.

[Axelmania]

Well... that could depend on who discovered it. Joseph II might be more tolerant of it than Karl, hard to say. Psi-X aliens are pretty offensive-looking. Maybe if they could be prettied up with some prosthesis it wouldn't be as outrageous.

[gordyzx9r]

The Coalition IS the Empire of Humanity. At its core, Rifts is just a mashup of Robotech, Palladium Fantady, Heroes Unlimited, and the old TMNT/After the Bomb supplement from the 80s.

Yeah, as someone who grew up with the original comics and TMNT & Other Strangness*...I concur. I've always made the jab that Rifts was an AtB supplement run amok.

As to the OP, there is a difference between the EoH from AtB1 compared to AtB2. I'm really not a fan of how AtB2 was fleshed out as a power in this version. EoH should be "the" most the powerful nation on earth and compared to all the new powers in AtB2 it's pretty pathetic.