Uncategorized – Caravan Crawl

Warhammer 30k New Campaign Notes?

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.

House-Ruled: Lingering Injuries

More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week, and patrolled about it with Bren-gun carriers and light armoured vehicles. When you made contact with the enemy you maneuvered about him for a place to strike much as two fleets will steam into position for action. There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. Actually these patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing. They were simply designed to obtain information from personal observation and the capture of prisoners. And they had a certain value in keeping the enemy nervous. But always the essential governing principle was that desert forces must be mobile: they were seeking not the conquest of territory or positions but combat with the enemy. We hunted men, not land, as a warship will hunt another warship, and care nothing for the sea on which the action is fought. And as a ship submits to the sea by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanized soldiers were submitting to the desert. They found weaknesses in the ruthless hostility of the desert and ways to circumvent its worst moods. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert offered colours in browns, yellows and greys. The army accordingly took these colours for its camouflage. There were practically no roads. The army shod its vehicles with huge balloon tyres and did without roads. Nothing except an occasional bird moved quickly in the desert. The army for ordinary purposes accepted a pace of five or six miles an hour. The desert gave water reluctantly, and often then it was brackish. The army cut its men- generals and privates- down to a gallon of water a day when they were in forward positions. There was no food in the desert. The soldier learned to exist almost entirely on tinned foods, and contrary to popular belief remained healthy on it. Mirages came that confused the gunner, and the gunner developed precision-firing to a finer art and learned new methods of establishing observation-posts close to targets. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no new roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert liveable, nor did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war.

Alan Moorehead, The March to Tunis: The North African War, 1940-1943

It took less than an hour for them to get lost. They had ridden north from Halfa’s tribe towards the Iron Vein he had been going on about for the last three days. No one wanted to go with him, partly because he was more irritating than a swarm of blister beetles and partly because he had a notorious sense of direction. Salama had finally been chosen to go with the boy because she was a stronger navigator than him. The fact that she wielded a makeshift carbine and that she actually still had bullets for the thing made the decision inevitable.

The grass, long and strong and sickly green, swayed in the breeze, and you could see the waves of wind dance in the blades. The sun had begun its descent, but the night would not fall for hours at the least. If Salama could see the stars, she could plot a course to the tribe, or a scrapper camp to the northwest. Until then, the ocean of blue overhead threatened to swallow both of the travelers up.

“I said a prayer to it.”

“What?”

“The Blade in the Vein, the… shiny thing. The expensive looking shiny thing, I said a prayer to it. I asked it to still be there when I got back. I left it an offering.”

Salama was silent, so Halfa continued.

“I offered it a ration. Like the way grandpa and the shaman do when they talk to the Purple Lady. I know she’s different, she talks and all, but maybe it’ll listen to me the same way the Purple Lady listens to grandpa.”

Salama gently pulls the reins and her horse slows down just enough for her to launch a kick from the saddle into the rear of Halfa’s horse: with a start, the horse rears up. Had Halfa been a better horseman, he might have been able to get a hold of the reins in time, but he wasn’t. He tumbled across the horse’s backside as it bolted into the long prairie. He hit the ground hard, harder than Salama expected him to, but not hard enough for her to regret it.

He struggled through an “ohh gods eyes” on the ground before Salama began.

“I am bound by oath and honor to the Obscured Goddess. You do not give worship to every rusted bit of metal someone scrounges out of the veins of this earth.”

A huge part of my system is consequences, and a large part of those consequences are scars. When you take direct damage to your Soul stat, you gain a scar. At first, the scars were very abstract. Oh, you lose a hand, or you go insane, roleplay that, have fun nerd. However, as I started getting things a little more concrete in my house rules, I realized that I had the opportunity to make a system that helps other DMs wean themselves off of the modern-day RPG bad habit of just letting players get what they want physically with no consequences. And trust me, I’m also someone who needs a spoonful of the sugar.

Not my players, mind you, my mere presence inflicts harm upon the boys.

I think people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences on the players because they don’t want to appear to be mean. You’re the DM, responsible for the entire world: with a snap of your fingers, rocks fall everyone dies. If you want an army to march over the hill and decimate these pesky player characters, you can. However, as the DM you want to represent a world that is real, and real worlds have consequences. Or maybe people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences because they’ve had to deal with that guy, that one player who is way too invested in Gigachad Thundercock the Master of Magic and Getting Girls to Notice Him and any threat against him is a threat against the emotional and psychological well being of the player. In which case another solution may be required. Regardless, as I’m writing rules I’m thinking of how I can wean myself off feeling bad for inflicting tragedy and how to wean other DMs off it too.

I’ve got like ten different pages all with different tables for variant rules for Lingering Injuries. I’m still putting them together, but I’m mocking something up like this:

Roll	Minor Injury	Major Injury	Description and Effect
1	Blurred Vision	Lose an Eye	Reduce your Maximum Dex, Con, or Str score.
2	Broken Finger/Hand	Lose a Finger/Hand
3	Limp	Lose a Foot
4	“Got the wind knocked out of you”	Punctured Lung
5	Broken Rib	Internal Injury
6	Ringing Ears	Lose an Ear

This just includes physical maladies: Soul damage from magical effects or mind-breaking stuff I still need to write up. I can hear you now, “Oh, thanks, John Caravan of CaravanCrawl.com, a useless table. How so very usable at my own table.” Hey, man, I’m trying my best. One of the things this table informs is the kind of game I want my system to emulate. For example, in one of my favorite games Dark Heresy, characters have a Courption and an Insanity stat, one that continues to go up until the character is no longer playable. This mechanic informs something about the game, that while you are investigating monsters from beyond the stars, you are going to see things, and those things are going to screw you up to a point that you’re not going to be sane or innocent anymore. Likewise, my own Soul stat implies the opposite: you have one number always going down, and there reaches a point where you’re spent, there’s nothing left in the tank and you’re all scars and sad stories.

When your players take soul damage, roll on the table. In a low lethality game, a game where the retirement rules are highly encouraged, just stick to minor injuries. In a larger scope game, or perhaps a game that’s been running for a while, be a little more willing to use a major injury. Veins of the Earth and a lot of other LotFP games have tables where if you roll an entry a second time, you ignore it and remove it for future rolls (mostly having to do with searching the body). Maybe something like that here, where if you roll a broken hand two times, on the third you lose a hand. This allows for a lot of injuries to pile up across the party before things get serious. However, mechanically, it’s all very similar: you get a limiter on how high your stats can go until you heal up. No pumping all your stats into Str for this one hit if you’re suffering from a bunch of puncture wounds and broken bones.

I also want to build out conditions in my system more. I recently picked up the Torchbearer 2nd Edition books. I love the way that it does the downward spiral of adventuring, even though Luke Crane’s game design is just Burning Wheel carcinization. The question is how many times can he remake Burning Wheel. Having these conditions gives players a heads-up that things are turning for the worse, and gives them info to try and change that. Ultimately, that’s what I’m trying to avoid in my own house rules: making sure everyone knows that that rocks are falling, and they need to get out of the way.

I’m also thinking of writing up the rules for when you take soul damage from an obviously nonviolent force. Let’s say you’re beaten, you’re tired, you’ve slain the dragon and you come back to the Duke’s hall for your reward and he just starts straight up bullying you. Instead of dying, maybe you suffer a condition called Demoralized, where you have to take a break and figure out just what the hell you’re fighting for. I think Dogs in the Vineyard (one of my most favorite games of all time and boy could I say some shit about Vincent Baker but I am not) had a mechanic for this, where if you lose an argument you take a negative modifier and have to stew for a while.

I’ll try and work on getting a more fleshed-out table for injuries together in January. I’ve gotten through my second semester of graduate school, and I have a lot of family obligations over the holidays before the third semester starts. I’m trying to stay ahead of the reading I have to do, but I feel confident I’m still moving in the right direction. Like generally in life and more specifically in my personal rule system.

Quickfire Reflection

So I haven’t written an article in about two months, due to the holiday season. I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it seems 2021 is going to be very similar to 2020 for me. I have two articles in the works, both lore heavy, about a game setting I’m trying to get completed enough to run. I’m stepping away from my regular group for a while due to a bunch of new responsibilities and I hope that even with the craziness of my life I can still carve out some time to get game stuff ready to run. I have lots of lore ideas and some structural infrastructure in mind on how to write content in the future. I have this idea of an expandable map and each location on that map having something like a zine to explore them.

I guess this is just a quick post to say that I haven’t forgotten I have a blog, and that I have plans for articles in the future. I know I’m probably the only person actively reading this, but ultimately that’s fine. This blog should be used by me to think about gaming, to think about what I want to run and to remind myself of my own DMing tips and core rules. I don’t have as much actual game rules as other people running blogs, but I suspect I’ll grow into that.

I hope anyone who is reading this has a good 2021, and to expect more from this blog moving forward.

Here’s a New Blog?

What? Another RPG blog talking about tabletop roleplaying games? Yeah, I guess.

Still getting everything set up, still trying to get my blog looking good.

Patience is appreciated.