Introduction
So, I have decided that I want to run some Warhammer RPG. It’s been a long while since I ran anything (Dark Heresy back in college, I think), and I’ve got a serious itch to get behind the screen. For any of my players in the Monday game, if you want to be surprised, don’t read on. These are kind of my personal thoughts for the game, and it might spoil the larger ideas and themes I want to play with.
So: thinking about how to structure a 30k game set before/during the Horus Heresy. Going into it, everyone is pretty down to Chaos it up, so part of me wants to speed through the first half of the game. On the other hand, laying the groundwork of the setting is kind of important to me, especially since a lot of the players don’t have experience in the setting. Likewise, no one wants to play a Space Marine, and I kind of want them to.
One of the things I’ll need to get across is that Space Marines in 30k are very different than they are in 40k. In 30k, especially at the end of the Great Crusade and before the Horus Heresy, there’s this tension with what the Marines are going to be after the fighting is over. There’s a hundred campaigns between then and now, but still, it hovers heavy on everyone’s mind. What do you do with yourself when you’re allowed to do anything?
Some Marines are looking forward to retirement: they’re going to be Marxists, basically. They’re going to write, to make art, to basically bask in retirement. The warrior gets to beats his sword into a plowshare and go home. The Ultramarines are excited to be administrators because they’re a bunch of turbo-nerds, the Emperor’s Children and some of the Blood Angels are going to make lots of art and music, the Iron Warriors are going to be architects, the Iron Hands engineers, the Thousand Sons are going to be historians and scholars. For a lot of Marines there is a world after death, and they can’t wait to get there. So, the idea to get accross is that Marines are not just prayerful fanatics yet: they can see a future where they can be something more.
However, not every Marine sees this. The Word Bearers wanted to be priests, and were chastised for it with the destruction of their homeworld. The Night Lords want to skin people alive and the World Eaters and some of the Blood Angels just want to kill, and there’s not going to be a world for that after the Great Crusade. The Space Wolves are the Emperor’s executioners, so there might be a purpose for them in the end, but no one likes living next door to the town’s executioner; for them the end of the crusade represents the end of any prestige they might have. Some of the legions, like the Dark Angels and some of the Ultramarines, will always be vassals to the throne when they could be rulers of their own kingdom. For some, the world after death is death itself. For them, purpose comes from bloodshed, and there is coming a time when warriors are not needed and that is terrifying in and of itself. There is a division that runs through the heart of every legion: what does the future hold?
One of the things I need to think about is including the lore and motivations behind a lot of these factions in an organic way. Like the Word Bearers wanting to be priests, how do I explain that to someone who has never read anything about Warhammer? There is a flexibility that I’m looking forward to with that as well, though: a Warhammer that has my own personal branding on it.
In the same vein as the Marines, the Imperium is still young. Everyone’s an atheist, a progressive, and a Marxist: the Emperor is leading us to our post-sacristy post-superstious society under his benevolent autocratic rule! He’s going to institute the labor laws any day now! For a long time, there’s been room for diversity in the Imperium, different planets with different cultures and different ideas, all working together for the Golden Throne. Hell, he let Mars continue that “Omnissiah” shit. However, people are starting to realize that the loop is closing. Psykers are outlawed, the remembrancers are starting to be more propagandist than journalist, there are more and more bureaucrats everywhere, and the Emperor just put together a Council of Terra without any Space Marines. Not only are warriors are being crowded out, the people on the edges are being crowded out too.
I think the push to make the players move to the Chaos side of the house comes from this: during the Unification Wars, the Emperor developed another subrace of military minded humans called the Thunder Warriors. In the last battle of the last war before the unification of Terra, the Emperor betrayed his creations, having his Adeptus Custodes kill every Thunder Warrior and hide all the bodies. He rewrote the history books, and then he made the Space Marines for the galactic Unification War. Just as he fed the Thunder Warriors on the lie that they could retire after Terra was unified, he is feeding the Space Marines on the same lie after the galaxy is unified. The risk of a warrior caste without a war to fight overthrowing the administration hangs over every society that has a warrior caste in human history. So, the reveal is that the Emperor has betrayed the Space Marines already: there is no retirement coming. When the empire solidifies its borders and war is over the Emperor will kill all the Space Marines and defend the realm with the Custodes.
Which is where Chaos comes in. It lures the party into going against the Imperium by saying “Hey, weren’t you suppose to retire? What the fuck is wrong with that guy in gold? Hey, you should join Horus and eat babies.” And then the players are going to go “Finally we get to play Black Crusade, based.”
The tragedy of the setting, and this game in particular, is this: the Emperor is betraying the Space Marines by preventing them from retiring to the peaceful lives they want to live. Horus and the Chaos Gods offer them those peaceful lives if they overthrow the Emperor. However, on both sides of the conflict the peace is shattered forever. If you’re a Loyalist, you’re fighting to maintain a crumbling empire for the rest of your (apparently eternal) life. If you’re a Traitor, the freedom offered to you is an illusion and all the things you want to do are now villainous and evil cause the Chaos Gods are dicks.
Part 1: Introduction
So, game-ables. I kind of want to start at the Triumph on Ullanor. Open with the Triumph and the declaration of Horus as Warmaster. Do a touch of lore dump: this is the Imperium, this is what you do, these are the tasks you have for this first session (and are thinly veiled excuses to explain all the factions and why you should care.)
First, all the players have individual challenges to introduce them to the way rolls work. They’ll be on Ullanor for a couple days as the war effort is configured to better suit Horus’s ideas on how to run the Great Crusade. It’s a time for rest, relaxation, and introduction to the setting. Explain what a Space Marine is, explain they’re not space monks but dudes who are genetically enchanced for fighting and that they’re kind of normal dudes. (God, I hate to do it, but broach the topic of “female space marines“.)
Then, they get invited to two events: Imperial Army command is putting together a banquet for the newly formed expeditionary fleet. Players who want to go to that can. Later, they get a much less formal invitation to go bar crawling all the Imperial Army speakeasies and moonshine stills that have sprung up from all the logistic work going on planetside. Players who go to the banquet are shown the uneasiness of the Marines: some are excited for the future, some are hesitant, everyone is worried for the future except the baseline humans who are just stary-eyed at this great world ahead of them and “Did you see the Emperor!?”. Players who go on the bar crawl drink and gamble with the baseline Army troopers and hear about how excited everyone is to go home to their family’s (families, by the way, Space Marines never got the opportunity to start). They get to talk to other legionaries in a bit less guarded of an atmosphere and then get into a fight with a legion that thinks their Primarch should’ve been the Warmaster. Introduction to how combat works.
After Ullanor they go fight stuff. They fight one campaign and get the combat stuff out of their system and get some more worldbuilding (warrior lodges, Imperium at large, what’s the deal with the Mechanicum and the Gene-Witches of Luna), a second campaign that’s a bit more diplomatic, and then the third campaign where they get hinted at the truth of the Emperor’s Lie.
Part 2: Discovering the Truth
Somewhere in part one it gets slipped (maybe an alien cabal, the warrior lodge, most likely a Chaos demon considering how fast the players want to fuck the Imperium) that the Emperor might not be totally on the up and up. The party gets assigned back to Terra for something (maybe transporting a mysterious cargo from the second or third campaign back to Mars or Terra to examine or guarding an Imperial dignitary), and have the opportunity to discover the Emperor’s Lie.
I have this idea of a couple sessions sneaking around Terra and infiltrating the Imperial Palace, having to dodge Custodes patrols to get the information about the Thunder Warriors from the Blackstone, a prison, or even the Imperial Dungeon itself. They discover the horrible truth and take it to Horus.
Part 3: Chaos Shenanigans
They scramble out from Terra and get back to Horus, who’s already chugging the 64-ounce Haterade for the Imperium, and the Chaos Shenanigans start. At this point I open the gates and just let the boys run wild, whatever Chaos shit they want to do. Run through Istvan V, give them worlds and campaigns they can take part in, have broken legions they can hunt, whatever. However, always have the Siege of Terra in the foreground. It’s coming, taking the fight to the Emperor.
Conclusion
So that’s the broad outlines of the game. I’m already putting together pregen characters for players. I have been toying with the idea that each player could run two characters with each character on the opposite side of the character sheet: a human and a Space Marine. The humans are dialogue based, the Space Marines are combat monsters, and by the second part of the game they know which of the two characters is the “primary” character. Really want to reach out to Exmiscellanea and see what he thinks of this idea. The big challenge is this: how do I explain the setting to a character that is already kind of suppose to know what the setting is? I kind of want to say everyone is a recruit that traveled to Ullanor from Terra and that’s why they’re playing catchup: they’re fresh from the factory.
All in all, this was a fun writing exercise and I hope I can actually get around to sitting behind that table.
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