Roleplaying in the 41st Millennium

[Elennsar]

Well, since Hive Tyrants (if I have any fething what you're talking about, and as of the moment...brain dazzled by overstimulation this afternoon means I may not) are things that should fucking kill you, having stats that are "Attack roll: You die." would be a good thing.

I've been thinking of a health level and individual injury system (trying not to be too complex with it) for a while, so at some point I'd like to post it and see how well/badly it meshes.

For now, that might work. The thing I do want is this.

A big hit can kill you. Lots of little hits should not add up that fast.

So "low hit point totals" may be a bit too harsh.

[Cielingcat]

You do really think this is a good argument? Because this is the kind of thing that racists around the world spew out. "These 'others' are here to destroy us so we must eliminate them. If any one of us protects them or associates with them, they must be destroyed too."

Get over it, the Imperium are a bunch of despotic racist genecidal maniacs. All of their iconic soldiers are parodies of the worst in human history and if you trying to idealize it is like writing a utopian alternate world history where the nazis took over the world.

Seriously, Elenssar, your argument is making you look niave at best and a racist at worst.

The difference is that in 40k, the vast majority of things actually do want to kill you and tear your soul to pieces. The only races that aren't a direct threat to your personal existence are the Tau and the Eldar, and the Eldar are perfectly willing to sacrifice your entire species just to save a single member of theirs.

It's Us vs Them, but the Them are soulless machines with guns that rip you apart molecule by molecule.

[Judging__Eagle]

I'm really, really sorry, but as soon as I read this I stopped and started responding here.

As for information: I'm reasonably sure most Imperial citizens know of Horus, if only in the sense most people on Terra now know who you mean when you say "Jesus Christ".

No.

No, no, no, no, no. NO!


Knowing this information is a capital offense in Imperial circles of power.

I'm fucking serious.

No Imperial Citizen knows about the Horus Heresy. That information has been purged whenever and wherever it shows up.

All information about the chapters that turned traitor is also non-existant.


The Imperium is seriously like ancient Egpyt in regards to how it deals with history that it doesn't like.

If the current people need to stop info on a Heretic or rebellion from spreading; they ban or delete the info.

"Months of travel time between worlds!" Big fucking deal. As stated a few posts ago, its a few months by sailing ship from Boston to California, but the two certainly influenced each other in a century and a half ago.

Warp Travel can take up to years of time, or hours.

That's seriously the Peril of the Warp.

You travel through the Chaos Demon dimension in order to, hopefully, get to a point in "Real Space" much sooner.

Sometimes entire Imperial Army-Armadas have shown up over a planet that requested help over 100 years ago, and is now an Ork world.


Really, we're not disagreeing that the Imperium is the best current thing for humans.

It's that it's also really sucky to be a human under the empire.

On the other hand, most humans never realize this, and they're not supposed to. Most people tend to be okay with their lot in life.

[Username17]

Really, we're not disagreeing that the Imperium is the best current thing for humans.

Actually, I would disagree with that. The majority of aliens are not out to eat your soul, and knowing about Chaos doesn't make you any weaker against it. That's the horror of the Imperium: all that Ignorance is Strength bullshit they got going actually weakens them against their real foes. And the story after story of meeting friendly aliens and then nuclear bombing them is a testament to how horrifying and pointless their xenophobia actually is.

Sure, Orks are a fungal construct that lives only for war, but knowing that they exist doesn't strengthen the Ork cause in any way. Purging people who have fought against Orks and won just kills the veterans who have an idea of how best to defeat Orks. Same for Tyranids or Eldar. A Dark Eldar raid actually kills less than the Exterminatus that comes after it, and that act of genocide actually hurts the cause of humanity. Those with the greatest skill and motivation to fight the enemies of humanity are secretly killed, their knowledge and testimonies lost to fire.

Only psychic people can summon daemons. And daemons can talk to psykers regardless of whether those psykers know about Chaos before hand or not. By not telling the people of the empire that daemons exist they save no one. In fact, it's basically just like putting a blanket ban on their own political advertisements on TV - the enemy made no such promise and can continue saying anything that they want. If you don't tell potential psykers about Chaos you don't tell them about the dangers of Chaos. And then people who actually matter (potential psykers) end up getting all relevant information from daemons. This "abstinence only education" for psychic power has a millennia long history of complete and utter failure.

They've killed trillions of people in the name of a policy that doesn't even work. And the policy itself forbids them from keeping records to even find out that it isn't working. Or that it will never work. Or that it has never worked in the past. Those humans who live on Eldar Exodite worlds or Tau collectives actually get a better life. A life with more safety even because Eldar tactics for containing the menace of Chaos (that is to say: engagement and even worshiping of it) are much more effective.

Eldar craft worlds have giant and official altars to Khorne, and you're still safer there from the Chaos threat than you are on any Imperial world because they actually test everyone for psychic power and get them informed on why and how to not get devoured by soul devouring daemons.

The reason that the Imperium's symbol is a Nazi SS emblem is because they are villains. Comical, over the top villains. It's like whining that the Star Wars Empire is portrayed as the bad guys. Of course it's the bad guys, they are the fucking bad guys.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

I don't think that the empire has purged people who fought orks.

Commisar Yarrick is somewhat well known for breaking the back of Ghazkull's 1st invasion of Armaggedon. He helped fight in the second invasion that Ghazkull ran as well.

Usually, I've seen the trend of "purge if they saw Chaos".

I don't recall any contact with other factions requiring the purging of their own people.

The "abstinence only education" point has a lot of merit though.

The trouble is, aside from killing the Emperor and letting him recreate himself, what else can be done to radically change the 40k setting?

[Username17]

I don't think that the empire has purged people who fought orks.

Oh they definitely have. The Imperium's response to stuff is anything but consistent. Tallarn and Cadia are strategically important, so they don't get purged even after repeated wars with Chaos powers, but other planets that are not strategically important get exterminatus for so much as trading with an alien species.

So even though the people of Tallarn fought along side Eldar farseers against an army of Chaos Daemons, the planet was spared. This is because the laws of the Imperium, in addition to being monstrous, are also unfairly applied.

The trouble is, aside from killing the Emperor and letting him recreate himself, what else can be done to radically change the 40k setting?

The thing is that even that wouldn't radically change the 40K setting for thousands of years. It took thousands of years for the Imperium to be established, and the empire has been falling for ten thousand years. Radical change of the setting as a whole would pretty much require you to join the Death Guard or the Blood Angels so that you could physically live long enough to see that stuff done.

But there's lots of things that you could do that would eventually change the setting out of recognition. The Tyranid Hive Fleet is a collective sapience, and you can communicate and even bargain with the Dominatrix. It is theoretically possible for you to make peace with one of the hive fleets - possibly by helping it to destroy rival hive fleets. The Alpha Legion has been attempting to awaken the Order God Hydra for fifteen thousand years - it is entirely possible that they could succeed and you could help them do it. The cult of the Star Child is actually right, and they too could awaken their favorite Order God. The secrets of science are lost mostly even to the Tech Priests of Mechanicus, and they are literally standing on the isolation chamber of one of the old C'tan gods. You could, with sufficient time, spread the word of the machine cult or even excise the Imperial Cult altogether with the power of real machines and real science. Even space marines don't really know how bolters are made (they pray to get them to function), and honestly bolters kind of suck anyway.

Within a lifetime of a man or a tabletop campaign you can carve out an empire in the galaxy of a planet or five that may have ripple effects that carry over to other planets and yet more planets and on and on to the entire galaxy and beyond. But unless something really weird is going on, you probably won't survive long enough to actually see your handywork completed. The Alpha Legion's plan to destroy Khorne has been going strong for fifteen thousand years, and it hasn't "failed" yet.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Those are some interesting ideas.

What more can you tell me about Hydra?

I'm guessing the Alpha Legion joined with it.... before the Heresy? Since it's their logo (or was it after?).

Also, their name is.... dumb, since they're the last founded legion.

The fact that Tyranids aren't an all-collective species is handy, since you can turn one fleet against an other.


As for living long enough.

Death Guard... is harsh. You turn into cancer-man, and will always be rotting.

Blood Angels 'looks' better, but there's the Black Rage looming over your shoulder the rest of your life.


Finally... destroying Khorne.

Wow. That's actually an idea that I've never considered at all.

The "pray to your power armour, and apply the sacred unguents and replace the blessed fittings" part of the Imperial tech has always been interesting; and I can see how bootstrapping their tech with real science would make change.

I'm not quite sure what the Cult of the Star Child is. I'm guessing the C'Tan gods that use the Necrons as pawns.

There's an idea, being changed into a Necron Pariah; they also live forever.

[Draco_Argentum]

The thing with Chaos is that just knowing about it really does drive you insane. Assuming you accept Liber Chaotica as cannon at least. The fictional author of that is pulled towards and driven to madness by each of the great powers in turn.

That aside, the point of the setting is that every faction is a pack of asshats. Even the Tau, who are normally held up as too goody-goody for the setting. They seriously get imperial worlds to join their empire by pointing rail cannons at them. Just because they treat their civilians better doesn't mean they are especially nice.

[Koumei]

I believe they also sterilise the non-tau that join them, and force them into concentration camps. Because remember, 40K does not use a "Black and White" morality, nor does it use a "Black and Grey" morality. It uses "Black and Black".

But yeah, the other races are such asshats, and out to kill you, that it's easier for the Imperium to feel good about themselves after virus-bombing a planet.

[Username17]

What more can you tell me about Hydra?

It's from the old fluff, which means that the current guys pretty much ignore it. I mean, in Dawn of War the Alpha Legion are played as pretty much just straight "Chaos Marines" who happen to be blue. The idea was that there used to be an alignment system that went like this (D&D 4e players take note):

Chaos - Evil - Neutral - Good - Law

And there were daemons available to be summoned for each of the alignments, as well as a set of gods for each of the alignments. The Hydra was a Law god. It represented unity of purpose and stuff, and it allowed you to summon Law Daemons.

In the current Warhammer fluff, the Chaos gods have pretty much destroyed the Law gods, and the Good - Neutral - Evil center plain does not exist (unless you're one of the people who claims that the C'Tan Star Gods or the Slaan Old Ones are good/evil/neutral, in which case they totally do). The Machine God is a Law god, the Star Child is a Law God, and Hydra is a Law God. All of them are worshiped by various human groups despite being weakened and asleep and the Empire is actively suppressing all of those cults, despite them being the only thing that can return the Warp to "balance."

The Space Gods of the Necrontyr and the Old Gods of the Slaan are probably Law or Chaos gods, but since they appear in legends almost exclusively they cold very well harken back to even older fluff pieces and be gods that lie elsewhere on the Law-Chaos spectrum.

---

The Chaos Gods are not in fact entirely bad, and many of them have aspects which are indifferent or outright helpful. Gork ad Mork don't demand anything from the Orks that Orks don't pretty much do anyway, and The Horned Rat does little except protect the Hrudians. Khorne isn't just the god of murder and destruction, he's the god of all martial virtues including bravery, camaraderie, strength, and even mercy.

The Avatar of the Eldar is a Bloodthirster. I mean, it's got a frickin Mark of Khorne for a face, how hard was that to figure out? And the reason that an Avatar can sit down and have a reasonable conversation with you is that unlike a Bloodthirster summoned by a group of World Eaters, the Avatar is sane. The problem faced by the people of the Warhammer 4K universe is not that the Chaos Powers exist, but that they have been driven crazy by the Eye of Terror - a construct that came into being because they defeated the gods of Order (which means that like everything else in the Warhammer universe, it is ultimately the Eldar's fault).

So all this stuff about hiding away from Chaos and not acknowledging its existence is distinctly counter productive. That literally makes the terrorists win, because without bringing power back to the Order Gods and worshiping the reasonable aspects of the remaining Chaos Gods, you literally can't bring balance to the Force.

The Eldar all literally worship chaos gods. Khaine = Khorne; The Laughing God = Tzeentch; Slaanesh = Slaanesh; and I honestly forget what the Exodites call Nurgle. And this genuinely works out kind of OK for the Eldar, because you can't actually stop the Chaos Gods from influencing things but you can influence the Chaos Gods into interacting with you using their less harmful aspects.

---

Anyway, as far as a system goes, the obvious ones to use would be Shadowrun, FUDGE, or Feng Shui, depending upon how apeshit you wanted things to get. Space Marines are clearly playing Feng Shui (high cinematics with a single die of bonuses and penalties for each roll giving a stark differential to better characters); Eldar Aspect Warriors are probably playing FUDGE (4d3 - 8 as the RNG gives a very minimalistic bell curve that favors certainty and high cinematic badassery); and humans are probably playing SR (pile of d6s, check for 5s means that people have a huge variance available whle being within the "human scale").

All of them pass Elennsar's demand that the game have a better way than "taking 10" to handwave off easy tasks. Shadowrun's Hit Purchase system scales smoothly to all levels of play, and the steepness of FUDGE or Feng Shui's bell curve makes pushing tasks to the edge of the RNG pretty easy (especially in FUDGE, as a +5 bous literally goes off the RNG).

-Username17

[Username17]

I believe they also sterilise the non-tau that join them, and force them into concentration camps. Because remember, 40K does not use a "Black and White" morality, nor does it use a "Black and Grey" morality. It uses "Black and Black".

But yeah, the other races are such asshats, and out to kill you, that it's easier for the Imperium to feel good about themselves after virus-bombing a planet.

Uh... no. Humas in the Tau Collective are in the Gue'vesa caste. They have children and live on planets. They are allowed to farm and work and fight on behalf of the collective. As far as I know, the Gue'vesa are never allowed to ascend to the rank of Ethereal, because leadership of Tau society is hereditary and no human could ever possibly be born into such a rank.

-Username17

[baduin]

Ethereals are not a rank, they are a different genetically modified subspecies. They command other Tau because they exude pheromones making all others obey them.

Tau are a caste society rather similar to the India, with alien species as Untouchables. If you like such things it is okay.

Both Ethereals and the whole Tau society have been deliberately engineered by some unknown aliens for some unknown purpose.

[Heath Robinson]

Ethereals are not a rank, they are a different genetically modified subspecies. They command other Tau because they exude pheromones making all others obey them.

Xenology is not canon from what I recall.

[zeruslord]

I thought that the Star Child cult claimed that the Star Child was the Emperor reborn as a Warp Entity. Is that true in the older books or only in the third edition onwards?

[name_here]

I thought that the Star Child cult claimed that the Star Child was the Emperor reborn as a Warp Entity. Is that true in the older books or only in the third edition onwards?

The Star Child cult also served Tzeentch in third edition onwards, and was seriously wiped out by inquistors in the last page of the rulebook.

[Elennsar]

You know, reading this thread, I have two conclusions.

First a response:

You do really think this is a good argument? Because this is the kind of thing that racists around the world spew out. "These 'others' are here to destroy us so we must eliminate them. If any one of us protects them or associates with them, they must be destroyed too."

Get over it, the Imperium are a bunch of despotic racist genecidal maniacs. All of their iconic soldiers are parodies of the worst in human history and if you trying to idealize it is like writing a utopian alternate world history where the nazis took over the world.

If the Jews, gypsies, gays, and everything else the Nazis killed were a threat to humanity that needed to be killed off because they taint and scar what they touch...then glory to the Reich. Seriously.

The fact that they weren't is (a large part of) why the Nazis were psychotic deranged evil bastards, not that exterminating something that was a virus would be wrong.

Back to your regularly scheduled discussion.

#1 It appears that GW is inconsistent in game fluff. As in, there's been retconning all over the damn place and there's been things that just "Huh? Never heard of that!"

#2: As stated, if the Imperium was so totally dysfunctional as to kill people who saw eldar and so on, there wouldn't be an Imperium at this point.

Or much of a human race.

And honestly, how the fuck do you manage to mix a power tyrannical enough to exterminatus anything that deviates from a norm with the "Imperium" being so disunited that no one knows what the norm is?

Great for a wargame. Great for a parody game. Not so good for a serious game.

So, I'm taking the approach that the Imperium is a pretty fucked up place in a totally fucked up galaxy where while the Inquisition is probably a little too kill happy the "them" is one of the more fucked up things you can run into and there's no cure for being tainted by Chaos...once it starts eating your mind, killing you is a coup de grace.

As for the Imperial symbol: The two headed eagle is Habsburg, as I recall. Not Nazi.

Skulls...maybe. Though at this point, I'm not sure if skulls have any meaningful meaning as representing anything, because its a tiresome cliche death symbol.

As for taking 10: I'd like to be able to reliably -roll- a 10...not just handwave off easy tasks, but actually reliably get "hey my results are something semi-predictable (10+modifier to use d20ish to succeed)" instead of having a wild chance of anywhere between failure and critical success without the bell curve stabilizing that.

[PhoneLobster]

As for the Imperial symbol: The two headed eagle is Habsburg, as I recall. Not Nazi.

Skulls...maybe. Though at this point, I'm not sure if skulls have any meaningful meaning as representing anything, because its a tiresome cliche death symbol.

Highly Relevant Informational Video

[Elennsar]

I stand by my point. Sixty years ago, "OMG skulls" would mean something.

At this point, its grim more than sinister.

Personally, I think its a darker form of the day of the dead skull, myself. Even if the "if you asked the artists why" probably had more to do with the SS.

Besides, what does a comedy have to do with it?

Good video, mind. Just that you'd have to come up with a better reason than the SS at this point to make me even think of the idea of skull=bad after its become such a hoary cliche as to not have any horror left in it.

[cthulhu]

There are a couple of sources where the Tau genocide the humans - Dawn of War: Whichever expansion pack it was for example.

[Elennsar]

...fluff...contradictions...for...the...lose.

There's a reason I'm picking the Imperial Line, and it isn't that I think double headed eagles are awesome (they are, that's not the reason, however).

Anything the Imperium did wrong is either human error or Chaos.

And anything the xenos supposedly did that wasn't evil was a lie.

There.

Now, I agree that this is arbitrarily deciding what "is really going on", but that's the simplest method if "the Imperium is totally wrong in all possible ways" isn't adopted (which I dislike for other reasons, Gaunt's Ghosts being one of them.)

[Judging__Eagle]

The human skull is used b/c only humans have them. It's not an eldar skull, or an ork skull, or a tyranid skull, it's a human skull.

If you strip down a human to their bones, you should be left with a skeleton, and the smallest and most easily depicted representation of a skeleton is the skull.

As for the grimness. Some middle age monastaries would fill their crypts with the bones of their previous members, others would build decorative crests out of human bones. I doubt that they did those because they were grim or dark; the did it as reverance to their deceased monastic brothers and sisters.

Personally, I think that the skulls are used to state "we are human" more than anything else.

I don't think that an empire of humans that are xenophobic is wrong; it's that the current Imperium seriously has people who use writing instruments covered in razors and barbs in order to "remind them of the value of writing, and not take it for granted."

[Elennsar]

That's not proof of evil. That's proof of how much technology has been forgotten and we don't know where the hell to look for it, among other things (like insanity).

Its not that the Adeptus Mechanicus wouldn't be overjoyed beyond measure to discover a STC (if I'm remembering the abreviation right).

They'd be thrilled beyond measure.

But after thousands of years of war, the better part of the resources of humanity are poured into survival.

So. Yeah, the Imperium has some pretty crazy fucked up shit. So has our world, and not all of it was even wrong other than incorrect.

Now, if the Imperium had a policy of forcing people to write like that, I'd be appaled. As is, I'm writting it off as one of the things that happens when you get zealots (zeal being a good thing for purposes of distinguishing) and fanatics (not a good thing at all). They take everything having to do with their faith uber seriously.

So the idea that the Emperor sacrificed ALL for Man means they feel they truly owe give Him EVERYTHING in return.

Bad? No. Not in and of itself.

So...its a pretty screwy thing. Personally, I favor the "we're human", because Sigmar is supposedly a more or less benevolent God in WF (to the extent that's a distinct setting, whether it really is or not is not something I care to get into) and his priests use skills.

Skulls just symbolize death. And the Imperium's "Death to our enemies!" mindset is not evil. Not when those enemeis are threatening death and worse back.

Which they are. Whether its evil or just selfish is beside the point, there. Humanity is very justified in looking up friendly xenos as a contradiction in terms...at best, after all, the Tau are expansionistic.

[erik]

Ahem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtLVfOCh-SU

[Elennsar]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSOJOiSW ... re=related

It is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself.

Now that we know that there's blasphemous parodies of the True Imperial Anthem out there, can we get back to game design?

As stated, the goal is the high end of RL and the low end of larger than life.

What systems can handle that as the tier desired (with anything higher becoming "too good for you to beat" swiftly but not so swiftly as to be 'utterly impossible".)?

[Username17]

First, systemically it looks like you are most interested in FUDGE and SR. Here's how each of them handle easy tasks:

in FUDGE you have a modifier and the average roll is zero. The dice can generate between -4 (1/81) and +4 (also 1/81), but it generates a +0 fairly often (19/81). And you can expend a limited resource (Fate points) to purchase +2 on a roll. So you can be absolutely certain that you can pass a certain number of really easy checks, and small bonuses make a big deal.

In SR, you roll a number of dice that can be actually quite large, and every 5 or 6 is a hit. The number of hits determines whether you succeed and the degree of success beyond that. You have the option of "buying hits" in which you don't roll but get get 1 hit for every 4 dice in your pool - which is 33% less than your "average" but sometimes worth it for the amount of determinism you get.

---

In any case, while we can talk about outright contradictions in GW fluff all day, and we should probably start with "what was the first contact between Tyranids and the Imperium" - a lot of the things you're harpng on are not contradictions. For example: the Tau are well acknowledged to give every planet they defeat the option of joining the collective as a lower caste. This is in no way incompatible with genociding the residents of planets that refuse that option.

Similarly, the Imperium's radical anti-mutant and anti-alien policies are specifically inconsistently applied. And there's even several given in-fluff reasons why this is the case:

• The call to exterminate things or not is made by one guy who is often not accountable to anyone and may never have to directly report their decisions or why they were made. So for example it has been made clear that many inquisitors disapprove of the choice to not wipe out the Ratlings and the Ogryn, but it was totally the call of another inquisitor who decided arbitrarily that they weren't mutants after all.
• The rules of the empire are written on papers and handed down incompletely, so that the rules are literally different in one area to another.
• Different agencies have different priorities. The Xeno Hunters, for example, care only about killing aliens and the Witch Hunters care only about psykers, and the Daemon Hunters care only about Chaos taint. You could seriously have a section of the inquisition land on a planet that was ruled by a genestealer cult, and if they happened to be an inquisitor who was a daemon hunter he might give the place an Imperial Seal of Approval even after the situation was explained to him at length because genestealer cults generate a shadow in the warp that harms daemons.

And that's why the Imperium is so full of "contradictions" without that being a "problem." There are seriously Xeno Hunters who use trapped tyranids and use them as bio weapons. And there are explicit commands to exterminate anyone who did that and everyone they ever talked to. But since the actual guy whose job it is to make that call is the guy using the tyranid bioweapons, it just goes "unpunished." It's not a contradiction, it's that the empire has been collapsing for 10,000 years and runs off of inquisitorial justice to begin with. It's unfair because the rules are nonsensical and archaic, such that actual implementation is left up to individuals who are grossly corrupt and often incompetent.

Go check out the Inquisitor fluff for Witch Hunter Tyrus. He seriously runs around using trial by ordeal to determine whether people should be executed or not. He runs into a genuine Slaaneshi worshiper who benefits from a mark and gives him a trial by ordeal that the guy passes with his frickin chaos powers so he gets out scott free.

That kind of stuff happens all the time. And if you wanted to improve things, you'd need to clear out what was left of Imperial Bureaucracy, because the only places that function at all in that setting are the ones in which people basically ignore the stupid Imperial Bureaucracy and hope that no fanatic Inquisitors come around to virus bomb their planet for perceived heresy. But there's no incentive to keep up stronger ties to the Imperial Cult, because the criteria that fanatic inquisitors use to choose planets for virus bombing are pretty much random.

The imperial cult is a bad thing. The redemptionists seriously just run around setting fire to people and chopping them up with chain saws. The haemovores attempt to get their imperial communion by eating people. It is no better than the Chaos Cults it is fighting against. The entire 40K universe is a universe out of balance, a universe where massive restructuring is required before any progress can be made.

And that's good. It means that from an adventuring standpoint you can cause big changes and get large scale defections from the main empire. If you want a game where you can run in and kill one dude in a climactic battle and end the empire, you want to play in the Star Wars universe. If you want to play in a world with virtually limitless possibility for incremental change and massive combat - then 40K is literally the most extreme example of that on the market. It has Dyson Spheres. Individual planets with populations that exceed the number of ants on our world.

-Username17