Ozymandias
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: To create one of the more evil responses the Sith have to answer for invasions of their worlds.
Canon: N/A
Permissions: N/A
Links: N/A
GENERAL INFORMATION
Name: The Martyr Protocol
Reform Type: Political / Psychological Warfare / Religiou
Reform Passage:
The Martyr Protocol was instituted in 902 ABY through a unilateral decree issued by Darth Empyrean, bypassing both the Dark Council and the Sith-Imperial Assembly. The decree was classified under Level Black Operative Mandates and stored in the hidden archives of the Sepulchral Ultima, the Sith Order's domestic purity and information control directorate.
Description:
The Martyr Protocol is a classified psychological warfare reform enacted by Darth Empyrean in 902 ABY, designed to be deployed by the Sepulchral Ultima when a Sith-controlled world is deemed at risk of falling into enemy hands. Its purpose is to prevent the moral and strategic victory of conquest by flooding the target population with fear-driven propaganda, disinformation, and psychic suggestion—ultimately inciting mass ritual suicide among civilians.
This mass death event generates a potent surge of dark side energy through planetary anguish, empowering Sith defenses and ensuring any invading force is met with supernatural resistance and lasting psychological guilt. The Protocol serves as both a deterrent and a dark sacrament of Sith dominion, turning the population's despair into a weapon.
Though officially unacknowledged by the Dark Council, it has been tested covertly on small colonies to verify its effectiveness in producing targeted emotional trauma and ritualized obedience under pressure.
SOCIAL INFORMATION
Notable Figures Involved in the Reform:
- Collaborative Effort of
Darth Empyrean
and
Darth Carnifex
The Martyr Protocol, having bypassed both the Dark Council and the Sith-Imperial Assembly, was never subject to public discourse or legislative debate. Among the inner echelons of power, its implementation was met with a mixture of silent unease and covert admiration. Some Sith Lords saw it as a brutal but ingenious safeguard—an expression of ultimate control over life, death, and narrative. Others whispered of hubris, fearing its exposure would turn allies into enemies and the galaxy against them.
Among the population, the Protocol remains an open secret—rumored, denied, and mythologized. Survivors from test sites speak in hushed tones of broadcasts that made the air taste like despair, and days where people's bodies moved without their minds' consent. Many recall friends weeping in protest while their hands lifted weapons to their own throats, as if driven by something deeper than suggestion—as if the world itself had chosen their end.
To the average citizen, the Martyr Protocol is a ghost story, an unspoken threat hanging over disloyal sectors: "If you betray the Empire, it will make you kill yourself and call it mercy."
Foreign powers—particularly the Jedi Order and Galactic Republic—have no confirmed evidence of the Protocol's existence. Yet a string of inexplicable mass suicides on Sith border colonies, always just before enemy forces arrived, have left investigators horrified and disoriented. Some suspect biological weapons. Others psychic trauma. None agree. All fear what it might mean.
The Sith, officially, maintain complete denial. And yet, after every incident, they rebuild quickly—gifted with dark power, emboldened defenses, and disturbingly zealous new settlers.
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
The Martyr Protocol was born not out of desperation—but ambition.
In 902 ABY, at the height of the Sith Empire's expansion and consolidation, two Sith Lords—Darth Carnifex, the Eternal Butcher, and Darth Empyrean, the Deathless Voice—convened in secret to discuss what they both saw as an inevitability: the galaxy would resist.
Though no Sith world had yet fallen to Jedi occupation, both Lords foresaw a time when enemies would no longer arrive with fleets, but with ideals—peace, liberation, order. The Jedi would bring not fire, but corruption of the will, offering the Sith people "freedom" instead of chains, and in doing so, unmake the Empire from within.
They agreed on one thing: before such a threat could arise, it must be defanged. Before peace could be believed, it must be associated with death.
The Birth of the Protocol
In the black vaults of the Sepulchral Ultima, the two Sith Lords authored what would become the Martyr Protocol—a weapon of mass coercion hidden not in starships, but in minds.
Unlike traditional military reforms, this was not ratified by the Dark Council or passed through the Sith-Imperial Assembly. It was issued as a Black Level Operative Mandate under emergency dominion authority, placed under the stewardship of the Sepulchral Ultima and integrated into its Doctrine of Cultural Immunity.
The Protocol was to be activated if a world was deemed "At Risk of Loss"—not through force, but through belief. If a planetary population showed signs of wavering loyalty, peaceful sentiment, or openness to foreign ideology, the Ultima could begin a full-scale psychic and narrative collapse.
Function and Philosophy
The Martyr Protocol is not enacted through guns or armies. It is deployed through a saturation of fear.
Its purpose is to make populations believe that surrender is worse than extinction. Through propaganda, hallucinatory stimuli, and sorcerous psychic manipulation, civilians are driven into mass ritual suicide, convinced that the Jedi's arrival will lead to torment, soul death, and corruption beyond imagination.
Crucially, these deaths are not framed as sacrifice for the Sith—but as escape from the Jedi.
Some who try to resist mentally are overtaken by the ritual coercion woven into the air itself—their bodies acting without consent, completing the rite of death even as their minds scream in protest. This phenomenon was not accidental. It was engineered to break not only the spirit, but the illusion of agency.
These deaths then fuel planetary dark side rituals, empowering Sith defenses, overwhelming invaders with psychic shockwaves, or turning the planetary crust itself into a living alchemical weapon.
Testing and Silence
Field trials were conducted in remote, off-chart colonies bred and programmed for psychological experimentation. In every instance:
- Propaganda saturation triggered the collapse of moral resistance.
- Civilian suicides surged within seventy-two hours of initial exposure.
- Survivors experienced disassociation, hallucinations, and terror at the sight of their own reflections.
- Dark side energy yield exceeded expectations by 118%.
Its use remains rare, but ready—a poisoned blade kept behind the Sith's back, not because it is feared, but because it is sacred.