Warhammer – Caravan Crawl

Maybe Like The Beach Episode of a Slice of Life Anime?

So I’ve had a couple of articles in the hopper for about a year, maybe about five thousand words over a couple of different essays in the last few months. Most of my writing has been focused on my academics recently; researching and writing about religious liberalism and the Protestant Mainline in the post-war world is my primary focus, though I’ll likely drill into a particular time and place before it’s all said and done. I’ve enjoyed it immensely but I always want to return to writing for the blog. Blog writing is much more low stakes, especially blog writing about elf games that isn’t read by anyone, and it lets you get the bad habits out while trying new things. In academic writing, you build up to a golden sentence, with each paragraph and sentence lining the way. For blog writing, you can attempt to make every sentence gold and if you fail, fuck it, again, who is even reading this? It’s like poetry: you get better at wielding words by using words, shuffling them around like a marked card in a magic trick. There’s also the additional tension of blog writing for me in that I still haven’t formed a group and rolled dice since I moved last year. How can I still have gaming thoughts if I’m not gaming?

As such, I want to start putting out smaller articles to get some of these words out into the open. I need to break the habit of writing a thousand words for an introduction and then never finishing the article. Some great game bloggers write like that (Angry GM being the first that comes to mind), but I’m a child of the OSR first: scrappy, DIY, make it work or die, run under fire… the Game Master as Bass Guitarist for the band to keep the groove going. A thousand words are good for your personal notes, but when it’s time to run at the table, you succeed or fail, and reading your players a novel isn’t successful.

So, if this blog was an anime, consider this a beach episode. I’m going to write, and then edit, and then post, and then I’m going to do it a couple more times until all these words are posted. I’m going to do it in WordPress as a way to prevent myself from spiraling off into tangents. And then I’m going to put “blog writing” on the project management board I use for all my other work and do this more constantly. And then I’m going to find a game group. Promise.

Stuck in the Wrong Room

So, before I get too far into it, I wanted to quickly say that I was on a podcast with some good friends, talking about RPGs, almost six months ago. You can listen to the episodes Girl Genius and Labestomy here. I say some naughty words, I think, and I pontificate about elf games with the best of them. Also, go buy Trackmarks: Dieselpunk Fantasy Adventure here and subscribe to the Wrong Room podcast here.

Stuck in Drama Hell

There’s drama in the Warhammer community again, with a lot of more right-leaning people abandoning ship for a game called Trench Crusade, only to find a bunch of left-leaning people already camped out. Culture War bullshit ensued.

You know, thinking back on my time as a tabletop gamer, it’s actually kind of sad. I was a huge Warhammer fan for such a long time, but I’ve really fallen out of love with the setting as I’ve gotten older. DCC artist Stefan Poag had an interview where he mentioned that usually at some point you fall out of love with superhero comics and you can never get back in. That’s happened to me with all the Marvel slop, but it’s kind of happened with Warhammer as well.

Like with so many franchises and mediums, there is this fatigue that so many commercial communities are suffering from nowadays that stems from the general cultural fatigue we’re all feeling at this point. Jacques Barzun introduces this idea in his book From Dawn to Decadence about how the loss people face in the modern world is that of “possibility.” “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted,” he writes, “the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.” Another author who talks about this is Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society: “The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.'”

“Oh God,” you’re thinking, “the academic is out of the cage! Someone get your gun!”

Well, I’m not really “out of love” with the setting. It’s more like what I love now is how I imagine the setting should be. As the official setting moves further and further from my internal picture of what Warhammer is really about, the less devoted I am to the official lore. There’s some cool stuff nowadays; I don’t hate the Leagues of Votann with a passion and actually think there’s some cool stuff there once you stop seeing them as Squats, and I’m glad the Horus Heresy is finally coming to an end considering it’s long overstayed its welcome. But those things aren’t what Warhammer really means to me. This is healthy, by the way. The point of “franchises” should be to inspire your own creativity, especially when you’re running games at the table. There is only one canon, and it is Christ’s. Everything else is negotiable.

So, to combat the drama, instead of bitching and moaning, I instead offer a small modicum of what I think Warhammer is about and the humble beginnings of a setting that might give fans a way out. I’m jumping to the end of the article here, but the takeaways are to just fucking make your own shit, stop consuming other’s work uncritically, and if you don’t like a community, make something so unapologetically you that everyone who would be interested can’t escape the magnetic pull of your own tastes.

Old Hammers, Rusted Nails

I was playing Darktide and they released a new cosmetic for Psyker and it caused me to have a (1) thought, something unusual when anyone is playing Darktide. (By the way, Darktide itself also had a whole bunch of drama when it was originally released. Maybe Warhammer and drama really are just inseparable?) And I had this image that was interesting enough for me to devote some time writing about it. But first, (here we go), I have to explain what I think Warhammer is about. I’m going to try and be brief.

I think there are two elements to answer what Warhammer is. The first is simple and springs from the ‘87 to ‘98 editions: heavy metal ascetics. Many gamers are now flocking to what is affectionately called “Oldhammer:” the old art, the old models, the old lore. There’s something “SOVL”-ful about the game from this era, and there are bits and pieces of art and lore that don’t neatly fit together like they do now. There were Space Marine half-elves and butt tattoos and weirdly named Inquisitors and everything felt a little more gonzo and goofy. It was grim and dark, but not so grim and dark that you couldn’t go “hell yeah, that’s metal.” To put it another way, it was not so grim and dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The Chaos Marines of the era fucking rock, with just enough long hair and helmet horns to make you want to headbang. There’s no long and tragic backstory; they’re the bad guys because they’re bad guys. You can hate them or love them, do what you want, I’m not a cop. There’s motion and character and color. God, is there color. And there’s something missing from the lore now because it takes itself so seriously. Much of this is likely nostalgia-bait, to be honest, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with a little nostalgia, like putting honey in your tea in the mornings.

The second element comes from the more serious lore of the ‘04 and ‘08 editions of the game. The Imperium of Man is a shitty place to live. It’s a fascist, authoritarian hellscape of a society that literally feeds people to a dead machine god on life support. It’s a bad place to live. But the tension and the horror of the setting isn’t that the Imperium is a shitty place to live (and it sure as hell isn’t saying that fascism and authoritarianism are cool and people should seek to recreate it in their everyday lives), it’s that the alternative is worse. The Chaos Marines get more Hellraiser-y because yeah, you live in a factory where the foreman gets to beat you to fight against the Forces of Darkness and if you fight back they scoop your brains and make you a servitor, but living in a factory is worse than if the Forces of Darkness win. It asks the question “What if you lived in a world where this shitty way to live was actually justified? What if this actually was better than the alternative? How would people react?” It’s not a deep question and it’s handled inelegantly at times, but it’s an interesting enough question to stop and think for a bit about. It’s kind of like reminding yourself that you would be just as shitty as you are now in the 1960s, or the 1930s, or whatever era in the past you imagine yourself to be in and that you should be better now.

I could throw a couple hundred words here about moralism in art, the loss of media literacy, and the rise of the New Puritans, but I’m trying to be brief. So let me just say that the first element was lost as the franchise needed more and more artists and creatives to maintain its market cap and the second was lost as people tried to tell new stories in the setting and to carve off the weird angles of old stories. It changed, and considering that the franchise of Warhammer has been around for almost forty years, it was bound to.

What If The Victorians Were Right?

Okay, so if those are the two elements of a Warhammer game, what’s a good idea for a new setting? Some quick inspirations. First, I recently watched VaatiVidya’s five-hour breakdown of the entire lore of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, my preferred way of receiving FromSoftware games. Spoilers, by the way, but apparently the energy resource MacGuffin that all the factions are fighting over, Coral, is made up of people who died in the inciting incident, the Fires of Ibis, and people can use enough of it to start hearing the voices of the people in the Coral and experience some kind of ascension… I guess? Just go watch the video, I’m sure the game is even more esoteric and weird. I couldn’t help but compare it to Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Human Instrumentality Project, where a secret organization is trying to force humanity to evolve under its control. SEELE in Evangelion and Overseer in Armored Core share a lot of similarities from what I can see. Another inspiration is from the World of Darkness game Vampire: The Masquerade. In OWoD, vampires struggled against their Beast, which was the primal urge to just say fuck it, fangs rule humans drool, and just start drinking everyone’s blood. The Beast was the dark part of you that lets you be as vindictive and petty and cruel and downright beastly to everyone around you. If vampires in the Old World of Darkness were worried that they lost their salvation, then the Beast is their sin holding them back from throwing themselves into the sun. And obviously, Warhammer itself, its Psykers, and that cosmetic from earlier.

So, here’s the pitch: what if everyone woke up and realized that some shadowy organization had completed their secret goal and now everyone had psychic powers? Sure, everyone could throw boulders with their minds and cast firebolt, but it goes much further than that. Everyone could feel everyone else’s strongest-felt and innermost thoughts and feelings, every errant thought and emotion. Everyone is up in everyone’s business, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Think Denise Mina’s run of Hellblazer (spoilers, obviously). Of course, there are a couple of decades of the ole ultra-violence before society manages to reunite together without everyone going insane. The shadowy old white dudes who started this mess are either dead or will never face the consequences of their actions, obviously. But society has to figure out a way to come back together, and that’s where the Victorians come in. Everyone decides that yeah, maybe being buttoned-up prudes who just constantly write about sex instead of talking to a woman might be the way to go. Kind of like the Vulcans from Star Trek, only instead of being super emotional because you’re naturally super emotional, you’re emotional because some kid down the street lost his dog and you both can toss around psychic might like the goddamn Phoenix Force. Of course, the horror and tension of the setting is that just because you’ve got a howitzer behind your eyes and an entire society on your shoulders telling you what you can and can’t do, you’re still a person. People still need to love and hate and be happy and scared and mad, all the things that make humans human. This Space Victorian society fukken blows, but it’s the best we got going for us, and tall poppies will be cut.

Ascetically, think heavy metal Pride and Prejudice with sci-fi spaceship and personal combat being even more buttoned up Master and Commander. Think of lots of black formfitting skinsuits with collars up to the ears and crazy-colored eyes. Also think of lots of Dune-style house politics, with different factions that emphasize different ways of looking at the Big Event, religiously or practically or whatever else. Personality is king, with people being hollowed out by those who are the most emotionally powerful but everyone has to pretend everyone is acting reasonably. Not logically. In my fake sci-fi future, everyone has disabused themselves of the illusion that you can act totally rationally. Good table manners keep you and the people around you sane.

Wrap It Up, Chuck

Well, this isn’t even like the beginnings of a setting, but I was less interested in offering something useable at the table and more interested in what I said earlier: when you get mad at something on the internet, especially something related to a commercial intellectual property, please stop. Steal the parts you like, preferably from a dozen different places, and mash them together until you can see yourself or what you want to see in the shapes. Clean it up, send it to an editor, and then sell the PDF for pay-what-you-want or $6.66, the only legitimate options for selling PDFs. But getting mad that people you disagree with are in a particular scene is dumb. As I said, if you don’t want to share something with people you don’t like, then make something so unapologetically you that everyone who would be interested in it can’t escape the fact that they have to like you first.

I set out to edit the thousands of words I’d already written, and ended up writing a couple thousand words I had not already written for a blog post. I’ve got to start getting better at this. I really want to talk about the stuff I’ve been writing for The Long Rim and Most Wicked Man in Texas, and I can’t do that unless I have a better turnaround on posts.

I guess this is just a taste of my own medicine. Hopefully you can’t read this without seeing the stuff I love in it. Make cool stuff.

An Addendum of an Addendum, or Three Ways East, or Trapped Again in No Games Hell

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes it’s surprising to find that you’re the best in the world at something. Even with something simple, something anyone can do, the discovery that you are in fact the best person on the planet at something can make you look up at the stars and wonder.

Friend, I am the best person in the world at wasting my own time.

I know, I know, you’re shocked. The best in the world at poorly planning out your day and working on things that don’t and may never matter? Yes, that’s me. I wrote a long blog post about the themes of a Warhammer game that’s going to be absolute garbage because I’m running it for a bunch of people who know nothing of the setting, I’m dragging my feet on working on gameable mechanics for my house rules, and, to top it all off, I just realized all the hard worldbuilding for my setting needs to be thrown out. And that’s on top of all the work I need to do to finish my Master’s. I am truly the king of wasting my own time.

Warhammer 30K

This is the first addendum for the last article written. Two things: first, what is the everloving point of running a game of Warhammer 30K if none of the players have any experience with the setting at all? If the game has to involve the explanation of the setting, then just make a new setting. Steal obviously and flagrantly from the old setting, change all the names, add all the things you see as missed potential, and just go for it. The players can’t miss out on something they don’t know about.

Second, setting forward systems like Star Wars and Warhammer always fall apart inevitably because when you run a game in the Star Wars universe in the “Reign of the Empire” era then some jackass player is going to say “I fly to Tatooine and kill Luke Skywalker.” Unless there’s buy-in from the players that certain actions are off limits (“We’re not going to steal the Millennium Falcon from Han or go to Kashyyyk and kill Chewbacca as a baby”) then players are really just trying to steal the copper pipes from a setting. I’ve already got my head canon of what the Warhammer 30K should have been (namely with anything written by Dan Abnett thrown directly into the garbage), just do the extra work, file off the names, and let the players know all the shit they want to do in the name of Chaos is on the table. No worries about “Oh so and so character is canonically supposed to die here so blah blah blah” because it’s not the setting as is. A tabletop game’s rules evolve from table to table, why wouldn’t the setting?

Which is why knowing what the theme is so important.

Your eyes follow the lander that bears the Emperor of Mankind intensely. The first thing you see is the triumvirate sigil of the Imperium: three circles stacked on top of one another emblazoned on the head of the spacecraft. The first and largest circle, bronze inlaid with rubies, represents the Mechanicum of Mars, the engineers and mechanics of the Imperium. Within this first circle is the second, silver inlaid with sapphires, representing the Selenar of Luna, the architects of the gene-forges and keepers of the archive. Within this second is the third and final circle, the smallest but most splendid. It is gold inlaid with diamonds, fashioned into the image of an unconquered sun; it represents Him on Earth, the Emperor of Mankind. All three, combined, represent those kingdoms too powerful to be overrun by the Imperium in the early days of Unification.

In this setting, the Imperium is explicitly a Roman one. I also had this idea of a system or pre-Unifacation bad guy, but the only notes I wrote down were “Garden Tyrant, lord of a green garden fortress,” which is based and I will return to this idea in the future. Maybe when the party is sneaking onto Terra its a character they run into?

Cardinal Directions Make My Face Go Red

Earlier, I uploaded another blog post about how I was concerned about the geography of my setting and after I hit post I went to bed. As I was falling asleep, I realized something absolutely critical. One of the things that was kind of important to me about the setting was the distinction between the cardinal directions. When you travel from north to south, at some point you reach the poles and you can no longer travel south; every direction becomes north. This is the same with the north pole; at some point, every direction is south. The direction is determined by a point. East and west are different: when you travel east, regardless of how long and how far you go, you will never reach west. West isn’t a point, it’s distinguished by the fact that it is not east. And as I was going to sleep, I realized it doesn’t matter.

You see, the people on the Long Rim are trapped between a technology level of Medieval European and American Old West: there are sixguns and wagons, banks and universities, but a lot of the technology of the spacefaring race where they all spawn from is mysterious and unknowable at this point. Arthur C. Clarke and “indistinguishable from magic” and all that. There wouldn’t be a magnetic north for them to follow.

And then I came to the realization that again, I have wasted my time and people knew how to navigate before compasses, Caravaneer, they used the stars. The fact that the sun always rises and sets in the west is critical navigational knowledge, and if the sun wasn’t up then they could still navigate by following the stars. And then I talked to the man in the robe and wizard hat and he pointed out that instead of the cardinal directions, if each city or town was in a line where you hit them in order than direction would mean much less than which of the major cities you were moving away from or towards (X-ways or X-ward or something where X is the name of the city.)

So I’m just going to throw up some world building stuff for Long Rim and go die.

Three Ways East

The first city is Berseri, the Radiant City, the former capital of the world empire a thousand years ago and one of the three central trade hubs on the Long Rim. Berseri is a city of immaculately cut stone and perfectly manicured gardens and pathways, with districts both independent of one another and part of a beautiful tapestry. It almost feels like individual townships decided to start building towards one another, and have convergently evolved in the same architectural and societal way into this larger civic organism. There’s an organicness to the city: the roads aren’t straight, and you never know when a stone road will curve into a residential district, or a garden orchard, or straight to a massive cathedral. The Church of the Radiant Goddess is strong here, and while the city and the Church are not the same entity, there’s an understood allegiance in the government of the city. Many places in the Long Rim are ruled from Berseri.

The second city is Talcard, the Synergized City, a relatively new city that established its national sovereignty three hundred years ago. Talcard is like if a wooden fortress on the Russian border just kept expanding year after year until it consumed all the material around it. There are many stone buildings, usually churches but also many personal mansions and merchant manors that have been around long enough to warrant their reconstruction into a more sturdy material. The people of Talcard are liturgically led by a figure known as the Patriarch, who dictates the doctrine of faith that attempts to fully synthesize belief in both the Radiant and Obscured Goddesses. Sometimes it’s not really clear what the people of Talcard believe, just that sometimes they believe the same thing as you do “and as such you should buy from me, friend!” and sometimes they believe something completely different “and you should convert and come to my church, it’s very nice!”

The third “city” is Karam, the Obscured City, though to call it a city is somewhat incorrect. It consists of thousands of wagons and horses, all moving in a massive caravan from north to south. Every few years, the city makes it to Berseri or Talcard and it’s like a giant festival. Karami merchants buy out entire districts of goods, sell exotic and foreign goods from around the world, and the city doubles in size. Regardless of the stone of Berseri or the wood of Talcard, for a couple months the city is clothed in the wild kaleidoscope of silks from the Karam.

Talcard loves this, it’s a season of festivals, but also of spies, of information gathering, of making alliances and gauging strength. Berseri is starting to hate this: there are quite a few wealthy old hands in the government that enjoy the return of Karam and stock up on teas and luxury items, but many new up and comers in the administration are starting to feel uncomfortable with a city full of foreigners filling the streets every few years, especially when some of them decide to lay down roots. And they’re not exactly wrong, because there are a number of Talcardi spies currently living in Berseri who made it there under the cover as Karami horsemen who decided to stay. Likewise, Karam is starting to dislike staying in Talcard long: they see the spy games as irritating and getting in the way of business, and the Talcardi missionaries are starting to get pushy about the whole “Twin Faced Goddess” nonsense (“They’re not the same, we literally asked the Obscured Goddess last time we saw her and she said no.”). The war between Talcard and Berseri is a cold one, one waged on economic and political fronts, because neither has the military ability to really fight the other.

Karam does not tax its citizens, but requires much more than the other two cities: they are bound by steppe travel, and as such trust between travelers is very important. The consequence for theft of food or horses is typically capital punishment, and in cases that need arbitration, a council of merchants headed by the Caravan Lord makes the decision, with the role of Caravan Lord changing depending on the leg of journey and the navigation skill of the merchant. The Caravan City moves as fast as its slowest participant, fostering cooperation between travelers who want to move as fast as possible. There are great merchant houses who have lived generations on the road. Sometimes these Great Houses decide to settle somewhere they feel they can dominate an industry, and a town springs up overnight. As Karam travels, caravans splinter off, going off in wild directions whenever they feel the time is right to leave the Caravan City.

Long Rim Mechanics

As the party travels the Long Rim, they will pick up followers. These are divided into three groups. The first are caravan guards, combatants that can be used in combat, the second are camp followers, who help with tasks but aren’t combatants, and the third are tagalongs, people who, if the caravan gets large enough, really just want to travel along with the caravan.

I hate running retainers. Hell, I hate running NPCs that travel with the party for long periods of time. It’s always a pain to remember who is with the party at any given point in time, and then there’s always that point where a player goes, “Hey, where’s Joe?” and then you have to go “Fuck, I forgot about Joe.” I will admit I did have an enjoyable experience playing Bouncequartz Gazetteer with Ex Miscellanea where there were basically two kinds of retainers, hirelings and heroes. Hirelings were almost like a dice modifier for mass rolls and heroes were extra characters that players could use if things got spicy, almost like a 0-Level Funnel. There was a direct mechanical benefit to having a village of peasants following you into the basement of House of Leaves.

I don’t think anyone does mass group combat and management in the OSR like Into the Odd. The section about “Enterprise and War” is phenomenal, and I recommend trying out that system at your table and seeing how your players interact with it. What I’m trying to do here is figure out the first steps into a mass caravan management that’s actually fun to mess with.

So, here’s my first doodle: a caravan has fifteen slots. Imagine a five by three table; that’s all the space a caravan can take up. In the middle of the table is the party. The middle space is a free space. It represents all the horses and equipment of the party. As party members begin to build out their caravan, they can begin adding groups to these slots. Do you want a band of nomad horsemen to ride with you? Fill the slot next to your party. What about escorting merchants? Fill a slot. If you’re carrying lots of goods, like a wagon’s worth, then that’s a caravan slot. The good has a times-ten modifier: you’re literally got a wagon’s worth of opium.

Maybe some units require more slots. Let’s say you find an artillery unit for hire; that’s two slots, one for the weapons and one for the ammo wagon. Maybe units can provide the caravan with other benefits outside of combat. You’re riding with a band of farriers and saddlers, so the caravan can travel faster and any misfortunes that make you lose animals you ignore.

If a party discovers a dungeon, players can “check out” slots to bring with them. Want the nomad swordsmen to tag along as you investigate this ruin? Done. Either: 1) Players can each check out one group to bring with them, but are responsible for managing them. If a player brings a group of shotgunners with them and forgets to roll for them or use them, then they’re around the corner nervously smoking cigarettes and avoiding work. Or 2) The party can choose one slot to bring with them, and the DM runs them. Caravan guards are unique: they will do combat, but only combat on the overworld. They won’t go into dungeons, but they’ll make sure no one fucks with your stuff while you’re down there.

If the caravan gets attacked you can figure out who gets ambushed, with the three inner slots as “safe” slots in a maxed out caravan. If a merchant with their own caravan wants to travel with you, you can combine caravans. Let the players play the tetris game of putting the merchant, the

Karam is a caravan of a hundred slots. Karam is the caravan equivalent of the titular Spelljammer from Spelljammer. Karam is the Caravan Crawl.

Conclusion

So that’s it. Technically the first official blog post of the year, since this has the triumvirate of “thing I like,” “fiction I wrote,” and “game thing.” It was getting hairy there for a moment, not going to lie. Might go back to semi-quiet for the next few weeks as work picks up again. Roll more dice, play more games.

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.