IMTU Dreams of The Long Night

The Long Night's impact is still felt in policies, media, and cultural outlook of the 3rd Millenium. As much as there are still strong repercussions from the 2nd World War in the present, there is a very strong mental presence of the Long Night a thousand years after it ended. Imagine all the movies and stories one was able to take from WWII then multiply that in Trillions, that is how much media there is to be consumed about the Long Night. 

Unlike how people of the present treat the Dark Ages the advanced and enduring media technology has allowed such horrors of the Long Night be preserved at such detail and vividness that an event thousand years ago that lasted  ~2000 years is so ingrained in the psyche of the culture of the Imperium it can mentally scar those who peer into such macabre history. 

In the Imperium the amount of holo/vr movies and games that depict the long night are plenty, but none compare to the AI sensory recordings that have survived to the present. Complete sensory recordings of AI implants or AI infrastructure with their extended lifespan visualizing the human plunge into dark ages is so horrifying that no human has every consumed such study with an intact psyche. 

When the Long Night came, thousands of worlds, hundreds of Trillions of people experienced it differently and uniquely. There is in fact a Long Night Study division, part of the Psycho Historical studies in many of the major institutions of learning in the 3rd Imperium. There housed are a slowly growing library about the long night and what horrors have survived to be retold. This division works closely with the other sciences in order to prevent the economic and psychological collapse of the Imperium from happening again or at least prevent it from happening as terribly and long as it did. 

What many have done in desperation to survive are plenty, both inspiring and horrific. One of them will be discussed in more detail in an article I call, IMTU - The Transient Human Form.   

The Long Night Studies, is an economic and social movement in itself. Trying to prevent another Long Night is trying to create enough buffers and caches to protect the lives and trade of hundreds of Trillions of peoples that call the Imperium their home. Suffice to say, when economic surplus occurs, reinvesting the surplus in infra that would allow a system greater self-sustenance is a great driver in manufacturing and industry. 

The Long Night has also pushed many farther out of the empire, so strong is the influence of the long night many have chosen the life of Star Nomads (another article). Some Pioneer and Colonists have such a strong sense of trying to keep secure that they keep pushing outward, their so driven to keep moving that it has become an irrational programmed response. even if they knew its historical origins.

The Long Night may have been a bad dream a thousand years dead, but there are ghosts that have clawed its way to the surface.  The long night is the perfect set up for many many dark themes in a traveller game, and who knows, maybe the empire is slowly walking that fine edge. 

Some More Thoughts and Ideas 

• The Long Night is Coming. the dark motto of the Study Division that seeks to prevent it and prepares for the worse case scenario. 
• Some GoT in your Traveller, with messy messy human affairs amid-st an impending doom. 
• You can go Hellboy and have a division designed to fight evil creatures that have resulted from the Long Night.
• Cthuluh Mythos and the Long Night. Make that connections and BOOM! Definitely going to be part of my game, (if the players allow me lol)
• Visiting Long Night Ruins! Just visiting the graveyard of civilizations, where billions died a slow horrific death, but then something stirs. Haunted "systems" instead of Haunted houses. 
• Long Night Cults. there are those who seek to return the Long Night, those who view it as a perverse idealism. Your badguys. 
• Its basically your Mega Storage of Secrets. you want technology to be lost: Say it got lost in the Long Night. You don't want Meson Tech - it was lost in the Long Night. You don't want AI, blah blah blah Long Night. You don't want Beam Weapons blah blah blah Long night. 

there has been about 2 dark-ages that have occured in human history (to my knowledge it was Fall of the Roman Empire and simultaneous falls of Egypt/Hittite/Minoan Greek/Levantine Empires), people forgot the horrors and it takes imagination to understand how horrific those were... in the Long Night is a story that can be retold in vivid recordings and data. For the GM this is one of the BIGGEST treasure trove of stories.

Ai-yay-yay I can go on Blah Blah Blah Long Night