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...He of the All-Seeing Eye, the Subjugator, the Deathless, a LIVING GOD! Submit your puny planet and LIVE! Resist, and be ANNIHILATED! You all know the type. There's at least one in every universe. Big fans of telling people to GROVEL AND ABASE THEMSELVES OR BE DESTROYED! Unfortunately for the universe, Marduk has the juice and the psychic powers (and the fanatical armies of laser-bearing spacemen) to back it up. KNEEL, DOGS! PROSTRATE YOURSELVES BEFORE THE POWER OF THE OMNISCIENT, THE GLORIOUS ONE!! The Imperials are extremely durable, and a combination of effective immortality and wormhole access has allowed Marduk to bootstrap and tinker with their evolution over the aeons. The average Imperial is strong as an ape, tough as a Krodox, almost as smart as a Martian, and gifted with psionic powers (and also lasers, can't forget the lasers and jackboots). They are also disastrously committed and/or brainwashed into the Imperial project. Marduk with his favored consort and General Zarek: With his daughters, each as ambitious and evil as they are beautiful: With his Hierophant, Vizier, and Chief Psi-Magus: And with a few among the rabble who have distinguished themselves in battle and won glory. There are planets across this spiral arm that bear evidence of crystal cities and advanced civilization, all abandoned now, with the sigil of the EYE cracked into their crusts, and a series of glyphs that have been translated as "CONSCRIPTION." It is not clear to those outside the inner circle what Marduk needs armies the population of worlds for, but it's probably not anything good. Keep watching the skies, cadets!

This is my scratch built Imperial fleet. They are 1/10,000 scale so that they would fit in with my Firestorm ships. They are not 100% accurate, since it is difficult to find scale pictures of these things. all of them use a combination of popsicle sticks and styrene plastic. Sadly for some reason the pictures suffer from some glare. The flagship currently is a Imperial class Star destroyer mark 2. It measures about 61/4 inches long, 2 high, and 3 3/4 wide. Next up is a Victory class star destroyer. And finally a trio of Vindicator heavy cruisers. And the fleet all together. Maybe one of these days I’ll get brave enough to tackle a scaled down Super Star Destroyer. Thanks for looking!

The Hype Priest spoke, his amplified voice shattering windows for blocks around. "Who is like unto ZAREK?" he said, "Or who dares to oppose ZAREK? ZAREK, the Ineluctable! ZAREK the Subjugator! ZAREK, the Undefeated! ZAREK--merciful to his vassals! ZAREK--cruel to the rebellious! ZAREK of the Shining Hawks! ZAREK of the Galactic Throne! ZAREK the Ever-Living! ZAREK the Conqueror of Suns! Prostrate yourselves before ZAREK and live! Surrender your abject planet to ZAREK and live! Resist ZAREK and be swept from existence! Glory to ZAREK!" Any good spacefuture game needs an expansionist god-king with a cult army bent on planetary conquest, and Lord Zarek of Hydra's Imperials seem up to the task. I went with blue skin partly to emphasize them as aliens, partly to evoke blue-skinned gods and demons of multiple cultures (and also the Kree, various X-Men and Smurfs), and partly because I'd already used a lot of non-blue color schemes. The green and gold and metallic red are garish, but garish in a way I could see Frazetta paint, or imagine from Buck Rogers or Ming the Merciless. Zarek is seen here with his Psi-Mages, Nodens and Oannes. Better views of the Psi-Mages: Commander Shamash keeps the legions in line with draconian discipline: Lugalbanda and Urartu, a pair of troopers. They drop out of the sky, take over a world, run it for a few hundred years, and set off for the next one. No one is quite sure why, but most of the sentient species in this sector have a cultural memory of the blue conquerors that came from the sky at the dawn of civilization. One such species, apparently very far advanced technologically, just up and *vanished* in the galactic recent past. Their ruined crystal sky-cities hung abandoned over a planet whose crust had been cracked into the familiar Eye motif. Glyphs a hundred kilometers long overwrote the main continent. Xenolinguists are still working on the translation, but have come to a consensus that one of the letter-groupings translates roughly to CONSCRIPTION.