Reavers were once a symbol of the darkness that lurked within and beyond human understanding. And their ships? Nightmares to behold.
If you travel out beyond the Core Worlds, you ight hear the name Reaver mentioned, but only in the safest of spaces. They are a whisper. A terror. A nightmare that stalks the dark places, where even the stars fear to look. Even their starships are nightmares. To behold a Reaver ship, or even a Reaver fleet is to look at the past come back to haunt you.
To see ships that should not fly come hurtling out of the void, like some necromantic horror. An ancient monster adorned with flayed corpses of them as couldn’t fight back enough. And often running hot and uncontained, with radiation that should wash lethal over its crew. But those who think they can run long enough for a Reaver ship to cook her crew learn all too often, ain’t nothing can stop a Reaver determined to get its prey.
Reaver Ships – Terrors Adorned With Weapons Built to Snare Prey
Reaver ships are , as mentioned, a nightmare. Even their appearance devoid of horrific crew would be enough to spook the more superstitious of spacers. They tend to use older models, or even obsolete models. Perhaps it’s all they can get, perhaps it’s a ghoulish preference to dredge up the ghosts of the past.
Either way, what makes a Reaver ship truly terrifying are the modifications made to it. For a vessel that is crewed by bloodthirsty killers, these ships are sure adpated with lethal efficiency. And while a given Reaver ship is personalized to its crew, there are common themes repeated throughout the Reaver fleet.
Magnetic grapplers. EMP cannons. Even ship-to-ship harpoons. Anything that can cripple a fleeing ship without destroying it. The more helpless, the better. But even these are just a taste. Some say being crewed by Reavers changes a ship. Pieces of her hull go missing, or are stripped away in favor of bulky ramming plates. Or folding “arms” that end in bladed chunks of agged messel that can rend and tear a target’s hull.
Anything in service to bringing a Reaver ship’s crew in contact with their true target. Not the ships they prey on, or the cargo they carry, but the meat within.
A Reaving We Will Go – Pax Unleashed
What drives Reavers to modify their ships. To prey on people. To savage them completely leaving no survivors—only converts—for even those who “live” through a Reaver raid don’t truly survive. They descend into the same ferocious bloodlust that consumes the attackers.
For years, nobody understood where they came from. They existed as campfire tales and boogeymen. As calamities of blood and destruction for those unfortunate enough to come across their victims. However, this was all a lie. The leaders of the Alliance know all too well where they came from. They came from the desire for power and control.
The Alliance’s experiments with behavioral modification led them to develop the chemical known as G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, or Pax. Pumped into a planet’s atmospheric systemms, the chemical was designed to weed out aggression. It worked—too well. In most cases, 99.9% of the population stopped everything. Stopped moving, working, eating; they just waited for death. But the 0.1% that didn’t? They fought back hard.
Aggression grew unchecked. Their primal instincts and savagery were boosted beyond simple madness, flipped entirely on its head by the government’s intrusion—and subsequent coverup. Reavers were monsters that humanity made. A symbol of what happens when the people in power try to control those under them without concern.
And after a fateful broadcast in the skies above Mr. Universe’s ion-cloud concealed planet, the Reavers became a symbol of the Alliance’s downfall.
There might be a lesson in all that, somewhere, but that’s a story for another job!
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