After a period of deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to maintain this blog with any reasonable alacrity so long as the topic remains limited to Warhammer 40,000-- I simply don't have enough to say about it. As such, I'm officially broadening the scope of this blog to include other subjects, including but not limited to roleplaying games, writing and my own original projects.
My thanks to the nearly 600 people who have passed through so far, however briefly.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Ixion Reads NIGHTBRINGER [Spoilers]
So I finally managed to get my hands on the Ultramarines Omnibus, containing the first three Warhammer 40,000 novels by Graham McNeill and published by Black Library. As I continue my explorations of the setting, I've turned to the narrative fiction to get a view of long-term characterization and plot. Here's my impressions of the first book in the series, Nightbringer.
I readily admit this post is jumbled, disoriented and might even have some gaping holes in it. In my defense, the book was kind of like that, too.
The Omnibus opens with a short story, Chains of Command, where Uriel and his captain, Idaeus, are introduced. There's a big battle scene where some stuff is established, thousands of guardsmen die and some Chaos Marines show up, followed by a bridge exploding; at the end of it, Idaeus is dead and Uriel's captain. Woohoo.
Our story proper opens with Gedrik, a simple herdsman on his way home after a long day of herding grox. After introducing him, his companions and their peaceful snow village, said village comes under attack by Dark Eldar and is destroyed-- on the very same page. This scene serves to set the tone-- grimdark with a side of manipulative empathy-tugging-- and introduce the Dark Eldar as the de facto adversary of the story, for all the good it does.
Now we're taken to Macragge, where we meet our protagonist, Uriel Ventris, recently made captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company following the death of their former captain, Idaeus. According to Ultramarines chapter master Marneus Calgar, the planet Pavonis is having trouble with Eldar pirates, as well as having management problems such as not turning in the required Imperial tithe, so an adept is being sent there to check things out and the place back on track. Uriel has to transport this person safely.
Out on Pavonis, things are a mess; people are in the streets protesting some new tax the governer is imposing to help pay the lax tithe, and the Arbites are attempting to stave them off until the governor can escape. We meet their leader, Judge Virgil Ortega, trying to fend off the crowd, assisted by his compratriots Jenna Sharben (an upright and dutiful career woman without much else to define her) and someone named Collix (a loose cannon, figuratively and literally, who has no qualms about shooting people who don't behave). They don't really do anything character-wise, so just pretend that whenever I mention the Arbites it's these guys in some capacity.
Now we actually get to the Dark Eldar. Admiral Tiberius and the UMs are making their way to Pavonis. Barzano shows up and annoys everyone on the bridge by being nosy and chatty, then suddenly gets really serious and starts issuing orders as the Dark Eldar swoop in and attack. There's some shooty tactical stuff, but nothing you haven't seen on Star Trek nine hundred times, albeit on a slower time scale.
When the battle is complete, Uriel and Barzano make their way down to the planet for a meet-and-greet with the local authorities-- in this case, the family leaders of the various manufacturing cartels. A bunch of cartel leaders and some of their lackeys are introduced, but they're all samey, sleazy big business types painted over with foppish regal glamor; you could replace the lot of them with the cast of The Libertine almost to a man. The popularity of pelisses certainly doesn't hurt. There's Vendare Taloun the generic aristocratic scumbag, Solana Vergren the bossy boisterous woman, Taryn Honan the fat fop who likes boys and has no business sense, Beauchamp Abrogas the lazy stoner and maybe another one that slipped beneath my attention entirely. Oh, right, Kasimir de Valtos, the veteran type who got skinned and tortured by the Dark Eldar, has frequent surgery and lots of vivid flashbacks. His villainhood is without question almost immediately, so I feel no qualms in just stating that right now.
There's a meeting where all the leaders get together to decry the governor and everyone is described in more detail, but few of them actually matter and the whole thing is actually pretty boring. We're only a few chapters in, and already the story is bogged down with far too many characters with too little interest to spread between them for any of them to be worth keeping track of. You can entirely forget fully nine-tenths of the people in that meeting and still have the same working knowledge of the story thus far ten chapters from now.
Now we come to chapter five, and what I think is quite possibly one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, taking up all of a single page: the surgery of the kyerzak. This scene, short as it is, illustrates the core themes of the Dark Eldar clearly and concisely: torture and sex, often at the same time. We're shown in graphic detail all the surgical torments inflicted on the human subject, paralyzed but capable of full sensation, by the mysterious Surgeon; his body is dismantled as one by one, all of his guts are removed, put on life support and paraded in front of him, all while the curvaceous vampiric wych does nude gymnastics over his helpless body, inflicting erotic bites and nips upon it. At the end of it, the human comes out of the room in a bathrobe, cleansed and reassembled good as new, with the wych on his arm like Hugh Hefner after a night on the town.
The entire torturous, hours-long operation was a sex thing.
...okay, so it's explained a bit later on that it's more about cleansing his organs and stuff than kink, even if there is that, but "sadomasochism cranked up to 11" sounds cooler than "dialysis cranked up to 11" to me, so that's what I'm taking away from it.
Now we have one of a number of scenes involving the mines and how creeped out the miners are, plus how the generators are operational, but no power's coming out of them. What I think we're supposed to take away from this is that the generators keep not working because the Nightbringer is draining them of energy, but
All the way over in chapter 13, we have Taryn Honan just sort of wandering into de Valtos' mansion, taking a moment to sniff Solana Vargren's pelisse like a dog. Look, I get it already: Honan is supposed to be a perv. That was the sum of his existence when we first saw him, and nothing's happened to change that in the intervening period.
De Valtos comes downstairs with a terrified Vendare Taloun; Kasimir's apparently in a really gnarly mood and decided to just go ahead and show Vendare all his bloody surgical tools and let him know about he dices people like green onions to keep his blood clean or whatever. Taryn is whining about how the inquisitor was mean to him and asked uncomfortable questions, so Kasimir tells him he's useless and stupid, which makes him cry. Mercifully we don't have to endure it for long, as the Surgeon shows up and stabs him in the throat with a needle full of Space Morphine.
One gets the impression Kasimir simply got fed up with the fake pleasantries he kept forcing himself to make to everyone else and goes about letting them know he's actually evil-- that is, more so. Everything is going to hell; the city's a warzone, his enemies in the cartel leadership are dead or worse and his plan is almost complete. What difference does it make?
Barzano, the governor and her advisors are holed up inside the governer's palace while the city outside tears itself apart. Somewhere in the building, some kind of demonic monsters materialize out of nowhere and start hunting for the governor. Some Ultramarines get killed, the fight drags right into the room the governor's hiding in, but finally the day is saved when Barzano comes at them with his secret power sword. Which, along with the rosette, reveals that he is, in fact, an Inquisitor.
Somehow this just doesn't change the dynamic of the character much at all for me.
Now that Barzano's been outed as an Inquisitor, he takes a moment to conduct some exposition explaining just how bad everything really is. He brings out a big book and uses some psyker power to open it, which makes the humans apprehensive and the Space Marines offended and on guard. These reactions are supposed to denote the seriousness of the presence of Sorcery! among faithful Imperials, but in practice, it makes the Ultramarines look naive, which only reinforces their "goody two-shoes" stereotype. Surely a Space Marine, of all people, would know that the Inquisition sometimes makes use of "radical" methods, not the least of which is the widespread use of psykers? This is not a thing that should have come as a surprise to anyone in the room beyond it coming from someone who was supposed to be a simple adept.
Following this revelation, clues come up revolving around the word kyerzak, and with a bit of finesse the old adept with Barzano explains just what it means in the Dark Eldar tongue, based on some research someone did on them a while back.
Now, this is an interesting point; just how many long-term firsthand anthropological studies have been done on the Dark Eldar? How long would it take the Sisters Dialogus to sift through thousands of hours of recorded audio of Dark Eldar language to decode and translate its meanings enough to so much as get a working definition of a single word? I imagine quite a long time, especially counting all the breaks they'd have to take for prayers, showers and vomiting.
Assaulting Kasimir's estate on the off chance he's home and based on the tenuous assumption that he is guilty of various ill-defined crimes, the Ultramarines discover all manner of horrors, including medical instruments, Solana's flayed corpse and a couple of powered-down Necrons hooked up to some batteries (the latter being the most important, if you can believe it).
Continuing their raid, they break into a separate building to find a second "vivisectorium" like the one the Surgeon used in his first scene, only this time it's Honan on the slab. As flaccid a character as he was, I can actually feel sorry for him here; but then, something like this is gruesome, graphic and presented pitifully enough that it could be any nameless extra and it'd evoke a reaction. And feeling pity is not really the same thing as caring about the character; as nightmarish as this must be for Honan, I don't think it's done anything to make him less of a prick or more of a meaningful character. Lacking either of those benefits, I can only call the scene manipulative.
The Ultramarines take mortal offense at the entire affair, and after ceremonially euthanizing Honan proceed to cut loose on the place with bolter fire until everything is in shreds.
As an added note, I really think this scene would have been more effective if we hadn't had one a lot like it earlier. An image like this one is powerful, but we've already seen the whole dissection shpiel earlier, and while this one has a different tone behind it, using it more than once in the same story cheapens it as a dramatic device.
At this point, Kasimir's motorcade is headed out of town towards his spaceship, along with the sexy wych, Kesharq and the Surgeon. This tells us the story is almost over and the Grand Scheme is about to go into motion. Uriel and company, not realizing quite what's happening, go back to the ship to pontificate. After discussing the matter for a bit, a miraculous hint occurs to Uriel in the form of the label on the batteries the Necron warriors were hooked up to, which turns out to be the name of a certain mine. Absolutely convinced that this vague hunch will lead them to victory, the Fourth Company prepare once more to deploy.
Meanwhile in town, the Arbites are still in trouble and the Ultramarines are still hunting the rebels who triggered the riots in the first place.
Amel Vedden, their leader, is a character who seems to exist for no reason other than to give a bad face to the PDF rebels. He's crass, murderous and not especially smart. In the few scenes we see him, he's either mumbling to himself about how awesome rebelling against the government is, or salivating over killing helpless people. Reasonably, the PDF should be composed of unique individuals who share similar but certainly not identical views and have their own motivations for participating in the rebellion.
However, 40K has the tendency to reduce masses of people to carbon copies of their representatives; we get the impression that Amel Vedden is not just the face of the PDF, he is the PDF, and everyone else in it is just him copied over a few million times. This makes everything quite cut and dried, and leaves very little room for complex characterization, and what's worse, that was probably the whole point.
Virgil Ortega basically destroys the capital city to stop some rebels from getting guns, even though they all have guns and worse already. Maybe it would have given them enough power to take over the city, but would that be worse than destroying it? Well, given that in this same story, Barzano was advocating destroying the entire planet just to make sure Kasimir and his coterie couldn't get to the Nightbringer...
Planetary destruction makes me tired; I just don't have the mental fortitude to comprehend it without savagely trivializing everything on and in it, which is probably a mercy. At the same time, that's probably at least one of the perspectives from which we're intended to view it.
Kasimir's headed off to the convenient Final Boss chamber at the excavation site, along with his coterie, including an increasingly annoyed Kesharq and his daemon chihuahas, plus the sexy, sexy mute wych. There's some non-witty banter and fawning over the Great and Terrible Power they're about to Unleash, which is a good indicator they're all going to die. Out in the tunnels there's some more fighting and "suspense" via Uriel et al having a brief but violent fugue caused by the awakening Nightbringer. At any rate, they eventually get to the chamber and commense the final showdown.
I'll be frank; the titular Nightbringer itself looks like something out of Kingdom Hearts. While not a bad thing in and of itself, it clashes a bit with the intended effect of an ancient god foreshadowing inexorable doom. The thing starts swinging its scythe-arm and a bunch of Ultramarines die. Some Necrons wake up and join the fight. Dark Eldar join in. Kesharq gets killed. The wych gets vaporized. They try to fight back while avoiding the Nightbringer, but they're being tossed around like rag dolls. While all that's going on, Kasimir tries to finagle immortality out of the Nightbringer and is promptly eaten alive.
Show of hands; how many people saw that coming?
So they fight some more. Pasanius gets his arm sliced off, Uriel gets his ass beat, and finally with some psychic contrivance from Barzano, they finally realize that the artifacty thing in the center of the dark mass is what they need to go after. Uriel does so, grabbing it with some effort, slapping a Melta bomb to it and threatening to destroy it. The Nightbringer is somehow put off by this, flying up through the ceiling and disappearing. I guess he couldn't bear the sight of someone threatening what amounted to his car keys.
The entire Nightbringer battle-- and indeed, the C'tan itself-- just reeks of thoughtlessness. It's a god that gets intimidated by a human being under threat of being buried under ten kilometers of rock, then effortlessly flees seventy thousand light years. It gets more energy from a few people's feelings than from sucking the life from the sun. It longs to have the power of its starship, which is depicted only as a device through which it can feed on stars, but then it goes ahead and feeds on stars anyway. It's sealed underground and able to leach energy from its surroundings long before being released, and yet is in a highly weakened state when fully awakened-- at least that's what Uriel says; the thing seems pretty capable of taking care of itself.
In the end, Brandon Gate has been reduced to crap on toast. The city is rubble, the army and police have been wiped out, the cartels are in shambles with most of their holdings destroyed and without leadership of any kind, and virtually every named character is dead except the three main Ultramarines and the governor.
Praise the Emperor.
With the summary out of the way, let's tackle the concepts.
The concept of "plot armor" becomes especially blatant when used in novels like these. Warhammer 40,000 is a setting where truly massive numbers of people die all the time, often on a planetary or even solar system-ary scale, without respect to station, rank or merit; death is the great equalizer. In Nightbringer, characters like Uriel, Learchus and Pasanius seem to survive even the cruelest onslaughts. And it's not just Space Marines; even the planetary governer-- a grey-haired woman with no combat training at all-- lives through the entire war event on Pavonis. Okay, so Pasanius wound up losing an arm to the Nightbringer and now he's got a bionic one, but it's not like it's even disadvantage.
While it's an obvious gimmick, it's also a necessary one; in order to tell these stories in any meaningful, relatable (and profitable) way, things have to be lightened a shade or three. Characters have to survive so we can get to know them, and the normally random, uncaring universe has to behave somewhat purposefully in order for there to be anything like drama.
A "true" 40K novel-- one that proposed to adhere to the spirit of the setting material in its purest form with the greatest of summary precision-- would be virtually nothing but long, nightmarishly bloody combat on an incomprehensibly vast scale, with no characters, no plotline and an ending where everyone dies for nothing since none of it really matters on the large scale anyway. While this book would capture the essence of things well enough (certainly better than Nightbringer does), it would be a damned depressing read; it'd be like reading the phone book, in the knowledge that every single person in it had just been senselessly murdered in cold blood the second your eyes passed their name.
Nightbringer, attempts to bring together a sizable cast of largely disposable characters to face an unknown enemy with unclear goals, coordinating the revival of an abstract evil with vague intentions.
When I first got my hands on the book, I actually had slightly higher-than-normal expectations, since I tend to associate 40K with quality-- but I think that's because I garner so much of my impression of 40K from the great abundance of artwork, which is almost universally brilliant. I was prepared to like it, and I think I did, at least for the first while; once it all began to come into perspective, it decayed from good to mediocre to bad to really awful.
You see, the problem is that this book has nothing to say. It's not making a point of any kind; it's pointless. There are bad people doing bad things, and some slightly less bad people are out to stop them. There's no objective reason to care who wins, nothing to truly separate good guys from bad. There's some attempt to appeal to the common conceptions of right and wrong-- generally measured by how much the character enjoys the inevitable killing-- but it's drowned out by the factions' own prejudice. The only way I know how to invest in it is by just picking a side based on how much I like their themes and designs-- much as one would do with the wargame, I imagine. The novel functions not unlike a football game on that level, only with an outer layer of "normal" moralization attempting to make an otherwise intolerable universe palatable for a mainstream audience.
In brief, the book was pointless, shoddy, lame and reliant on shock value to function.
This concludes the Nightbringer review. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who's taken the time to comment on my blog (all three of you); your time and attention are appreciated.
Next in the series is Warriors of Ultramar, but that's another post.
I readily admit this post is jumbled, disoriented and might even have some gaping holes in it. In my defense, the book was kind of like that, too.
The Omnibus opens with a short story, Chains of Command, where Uriel and his captain, Idaeus, are introduced. There's a big battle scene where some stuff is established, thousands of guardsmen die and some Chaos Marines show up, followed by a bridge exploding; at the end of it, Idaeus is dead and Uriel's captain. Woohoo.
Our story proper opens with Gedrik, a simple herdsman on his way home after a long day of herding grox. After introducing him, his companions and their peaceful snow village, said village comes under attack by Dark Eldar and is destroyed-- on the very same page. This scene serves to set the tone-- grimdark with a side of manipulative empathy-tugging-- and introduce the Dark Eldar as the de facto adversary of the story, for all the good it does.
Now we're taken to Macragge, where we meet our protagonist, Uriel Ventris, recently made captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company following the death of their former captain, Idaeus. According to Ultramarines chapter master Marneus Calgar, the planet Pavonis is having trouble with Eldar pirates, as well as having management problems such as not turning in the required Imperial tithe, so an adept is being sent there to check things out and the place back on track. Uriel has to transport this person safely.
Out on Pavonis, things are a mess; people are in the streets protesting some new tax the governer is imposing to help pay the lax tithe, and the Arbites are attempting to stave them off until the governor can escape. We meet their leader, Judge Virgil Ortega, trying to fend off the crowd, assisted by his compratriots Jenna Sharben (an upright and dutiful career woman without much else to define her) and someone named Collix (a loose cannon, figuratively and literally, who has no qualms about shooting people who don't behave). They don't really do anything character-wise, so just pretend that whenever I mention the Arbites it's these guys in some capacity.
Now we actually get to the Dark Eldar. Admiral Tiberius and the UMs are making their way to Pavonis. Barzano shows up and annoys everyone on the bridge by being nosy and chatty, then suddenly gets really serious and starts issuing orders as the Dark Eldar swoop in and attack. There's some shooty tactical stuff, but nothing you haven't seen on Star Trek nine hundred times, albeit on a slower time scale.
When the battle is complete, Uriel and Barzano make their way down to the planet for a meet-and-greet with the local authorities-- in this case, the family leaders of the various manufacturing cartels. A bunch of cartel leaders and some of their lackeys are introduced, but they're all samey, sleazy big business types painted over with foppish regal glamor; you could replace the lot of them with the cast of The Libertine almost to a man. The popularity of pelisses certainly doesn't hurt. There's Vendare Taloun the generic aristocratic scumbag, Solana Vergren the bossy boisterous woman, Taryn Honan the fat fop who likes boys and has no business sense, Beauchamp Abrogas the lazy stoner and maybe another one that slipped beneath my attention entirely. Oh, right, Kasimir de Valtos, the veteran type who got skinned and tortured by the Dark Eldar, has frequent surgery and lots of vivid flashbacks. His villainhood is without question almost immediately, so I feel no qualms in just stating that right now.
There's a meeting where all the leaders get together to decry the governor and everyone is described in more detail, but few of them actually matter and the whole thing is actually pretty boring. We're only a few chapters in, and already the story is bogged down with far too many characters with too little interest to spread between them for any of them to be worth keeping track of. You can entirely forget fully nine-tenths of the people in that meeting and still have the same working knowledge of the story thus far ten chapters from now.
Now we come to chapter five, and what I think is quite possibly one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, taking up all of a single page: the surgery of the kyerzak. This scene, short as it is, illustrates the core themes of the Dark Eldar clearly and concisely: torture and sex, often at the same time. We're shown in graphic detail all the surgical torments inflicted on the human subject, paralyzed but capable of full sensation, by the mysterious Surgeon; his body is dismantled as one by one, all of his guts are removed, put on life support and paraded in front of him, all while the curvaceous vampiric wych does nude gymnastics over his helpless body, inflicting erotic bites and nips upon it. At the end of it, the human comes out of the room in a bathrobe, cleansed and reassembled good as new, with the wych on his arm like Hugh Hefner after a night on the town.
The entire torturous, hours-long operation was a sex thing.
...okay, so it's explained a bit later on that it's more about cleansing his organs and stuff than kink, even if there is that, but "sadomasochism cranked up to 11" sounds cooler than "dialysis cranked up to 11" to me, so that's what I'm taking away from it.
Now we have one of a number of scenes involving the mines and how creeped out the miners are, plus how the generators are operational, but no power's coming out of them. What I think we're supposed to take away from this is that the generators keep not working because the Nightbringer is draining them of energy, but
All the way over in chapter 13, we have Taryn Honan just sort of wandering into de Valtos' mansion, taking a moment to sniff Solana Vargren's pelisse like a dog. Look, I get it already: Honan is supposed to be a perv. That was the sum of his existence when we first saw him, and nothing's happened to change that in the intervening period.
De Valtos comes downstairs with a terrified Vendare Taloun; Kasimir's apparently in a really gnarly mood and decided to just go ahead and show Vendare all his bloody surgical tools and let him know about he dices people like green onions to keep his blood clean or whatever. Taryn is whining about how the inquisitor was mean to him and asked uncomfortable questions, so Kasimir tells him he's useless and stupid, which makes him cry. Mercifully we don't have to endure it for long, as the Surgeon shows up and stabs him in the throat with a needle full of Space Morphine.
One gets the impression Kasimir simply got fed up with the fake pleasantries he kept forcing himself to make to everyone else and goes about letting them know he's actually evil-- that is, more so. Everything is going to hell; the city's a warzone, his enemies in the cartel leadership are dead or worse and his plan is almost complete. What difference does it make?
Barzano, the governor and her advisors are holed up inside the governer's palace while the city outside tears itself apart. Somewhere in the building, some kind of demonic monsters materialize out of nowhere and start hunting for the governor. Some Ultramarines get killed, the fight drags right into the room the governor's hiding in, but finally the day is saved when Barzano comes at them with his secret power sword. Which, along with the rosette, reveals that he is, in fact, an Inquisitor.
Somehow this just doesn't change the dynamic of the character much at all for me.
Now that Barzano's been outed as an Inquisitor, he takes a moment to conduct some exposition explaining just how bad everything really is. He brings out a big book and uses some psyker power to open it, which makes the humans apprehensive and the Space Marines offended and on guard. These reactions are supposed to denote the seriousness of the presence of Sorcery! among faithful Imperials, but in practice, it makes the Ultramarines look naive, which only reinforces their "goody two-shoes" stereotype. Surely a Space Marine, of all people, would know that the Inquisition sometimes makes use of "radical" methods, not the least of which is the widespread use of psykers? This is not a thing that should have come as a surprise to anyone in the room beyond it coming from someone who was supposed to be a simple adept.
Following this revelation, clues come up revolving around the word kyerzak, and with a bit of finesse the old adept with Barzano explains just what it means in the Dark Eldar tongue, based on some research someone did on them a while back.
Now, this is an interesting point; just how many long-term firsthand anthropological studies have been done on the Dark Eldar? How long would it take the Sisters Dialogus to sift through thousands of hours of recorded audio of Dark Eldar language to decode and translate its meanings enough to so much as get a working definition of a single word? I imagine quite a long time, especially counting all the breaks they'd have to take for prayers, showers and vomiting.
Assaulting Kasimir's estate on the off chance he's home and based on the tenuous assumption that he is guilty of various ill-defined crimes, the Ultramarines discover all manner of horrors, including medical instruments, Solana's flayed corpse and a couple of powered-down Necrons hooked up to some batteries (the latter being the most important, if you can believe it).
Continuing their raid, they break into a separate building to find a second "vivisectorium" like the one the Surgeon used in his first scene, only this time it's Honan on the slab. As flaccid a character as he was, I can actually feel sorry for him here; but then, something like this is gruesome, graphic and presented pitifully enough that it could be any nameless extra and it'd evoke a reaction. And feeling pity is not really the same thing as caring about the character; as nightmarish as this must be for Honan, I don't think it's done anything to make him less of a prick or more of a meaningful character. Lacking either of those benefits, I can only call the scene manipulative.
The Ultramarines take mortal offense at the entire affair, and after ceremonially euthanizing Honan proceed to cut loose on the place with bolter fire until everything is in shreds.
As an added note, I really think this scene would have been more effective if we hadn't had one a lot like it earlier. An image like this one is powerful, but we've already seen the whole dissection shpiel earlier, and while this one has a different tone behind it, using it more than once in the same story cheapens it as a dramatic device.
At this point, Kasimir's motorcade is headed out of town towards his spaceship, along with the sexy wych, Kesharq and the Surgeon. This tells us the story is almost over and the Grand Scheme is about to go into motion. Uriel and company, not realizing quite what's happening, go back to the ship to pontificate. After discussing the matter for a bit, a miraculous hint occurs to Uriel in the form of the label on the batteries the Necron warriors were hooked up to, which turns out to be the name of a certain mine. Absolutely convinced that this vague hunch will lead them to victory, the Fourth Company prepare once more to deploy.
Meanwhile in town, the Arbites are still in trouble and the Ultramarines are still hunting the rebels who triggered the riots in the first place.
Amel Vedden, their leader, is a character who seems to exist for no reason other than to give a bad face to the PDF rebels. He's crass, murderous and not especially smart. In the few scenes we see him, he's either mumbling to himself about how awesome rebelling against the government is, or salivating over killing helpless people. Reasonably, the PDF should be composed of unique individuals who share similar but certainly not identical views and have their own motivations for participating in the rebellion.
However, 40K has the tendency to reduce masses of people to carbon copies of their representatives; we get the impression that Amel Vedden is not just the face of the PDF, he is the PDF, and everyone else in it is just him copied over a few million times. This makes everything quite cut and dried, and leaves very little room for complex characterization, and what's worse, that was probably the whole point.
Virgil Ortega basically destroys the capital city to stop some rebels from getting guns, even though they all have guns and worse already. Maybe it would have given them enough power to take over the city, but would that be worse than destroying it? Well, given that in this same story, Barzano was advocating destroying the entire planet just to make sure Kasimir and his coterie couldn't get to the Nightbringer...
Planetary destruction makes me tired; I just don't have the mental fortitude to comprehend it without savagely trivializing everything on and in it, which is probably a mercy. At the same time, that's probably at least one of the perspectives from which we're intended to view it.
Kasimir's headed off to the convenient Final Boss chamber at the excavation site, along with his coterie, including an increasingly annoyed Kesharq and his daemon chihuahas, plus the sexy, sexy mute wych. There's some non-witty banter and fawning over the Great and Terrible Power they're about to Unleash, which is a good indicator they're all going to die. Out in the tunnels there's some more fighting and "suspense" via Uriel et al having a brief but violent fugue caused by the awakening Nightbringer. At any rate, they eventually get to the chamber and commense the final showdown.
I'll be frank; the titular Nightbringer itself looks like something out of Kingdom Hearts. While not a bad thing in and of itself, it clashes a bit with the intended effect of an ancient god foreshadowing inexorable doom. The thing starts swinging its scythe-arm and a bunch of Ultramarines die. Some Necrons wake up and join the fight. Dark Eldar join in. Kesharq gets killed. The wych gets vaporized. They try to fight back while avoiding the Nightbringer, but they're being tossed around like rag dolls. While all that's going on, Kasimir tries to finagle immortality out of the Nightbringer and is promptly eaten alive.
Show of hands; how many people saw that coming?
So they fight some more. Pasanius gets his arm sliced off, Uriel gets his ass beat, and finally with some psychic contrivance from Barzano, they finally realize that the artifacty thing in the center of the dark mass is what they need to go after. Uriel does so, grabbing it with some effort, slapping a Melta bomb to it and threatening to destroy it. The Nightbringer is somehow put off by this, flying up through the ceiling and disappearing. I guess he couldn't bear the sight of someone threatening what amounted to his car keys.
The entire Nightbringer battle-- and indeed, the C'tan itself-- just reeks of thoughtlessness. It's a god that gets intimidated by a human being under threat of being buried under ten kilometers of rock, then effortlessly flees seventy thousand light years. It gets more energy from a few people's feelings than from sucking the life from the sun. It longs to have the power of its starship, which is depicted only as a device through which it can feed on stars, but then it goes ahead and feeds on stars anyway. It's sealed underground and able to leach energy from its surroundings long before being released, and yet is in a highly weakened state when fully awakened-- at least that's what Uriel says; the thing seems pretty capable of taking care of itself.
In the end, Brandon Gate has been reduced to crap on toast. The city is rubble, the army and police have been wiped out, the cartels are in shambles with most of their holdings destroyed and without leadership of any kind, and virtually every named character is dead except the three main Ultramarines and the governor.
Praise the Emperor.
With the summary out of the way, let's tackle the concepts.
The concept of "plot armor" becomes especially blatant when used in novels like these. Warhammer 40,000 is a setting where truly massive numbers of people die all the time, often on a planetary or even solar system-ary scale, without respect to station, rank or merit; death is the great equalizer. In Nightbringer, characters like Uriel, Learchus and Pasanius seem to survive even the cruelest onslaughts. And it's not just Space Marines; even the planetary governer-- a grey-haired woman with no combat training at all-- lives through the entire war event on Pavonis. Okay, so Pasanius wound up losing an arm to the Nightbringer and now he's got a bionic one, but it's not like it's even disadvantage.
While it's an obvious gimmick, it's also a necessary one; in order to tell these stories in any meaningful, relatable (and profitable) way, things have to be lightened a shade or three. Characters have to survive so we can get to know them, and the normally random, uncaring universe has to behave somewhat purposefully in order for there to be anything like drama.
A "true" 40K novel-- one that proposed to adhere to the spirit of the setting material in its purest form with the greatest of summary precision-- would be virtually nothing but long, nightmarishly bloody combat on an incomprehensibly vast scale, with no characters, no plotline and an ending where everyone dies for nothing since none of it really matters on the large scale anyway. While this book would capture the essence of things well enough (certainly better than Nightbringer does), it would be a damned depressing read; it'd be like reading the phone book, in the knowledge that every single person in it had just been senselessly murdered in cold blood the second your eyes passed their name.
Nightbringer, attempts to bring together a sizable cast of largely disposable characters to face an unknown enemy with unclear goals, coordinating the revival of an abstract evil with vague intentions.
When I first got my hands on the book, I actually had slightly higher-than-normal expectations, since I tend to associate 40K with quality-- but I think that's because I garner so much of my impression of 40K from the great abundance of artwork, which is almost universally brilliant. I was prepared to like it, and I think I did, at least for the first while; once it all began to come into perspective, it decayed from good to mediocre to bad to really awful.
You see, the problem is that this book has nothing to say. It's not making a point of any kind; it's pointless. There are bad people doing bad things, and some slightly less bad people are out to stop them. There's no objective reason to care who wins, nothing to truly separate good guys from bad. There's some attempt to appeal to the common conceptions of right and wrong-- generally measured by how much the character enjoys the inevitable killing-- but it's drowned out by the factions' own prejudice. The only way I know how to invest in it is by just picking a side based on how much I like their themes and designs-- much as one would do with the wargame, I imagine. The novel functions not unlike a football game on that level, only with an outer layer of "normal" moralization attempting to make an otherwise intolerable universe palatable for a mainstream audience.
In brief, the book was pointless, shoddy, lame and reliant on shock value to function.
This concludes the Nightbringer review. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who's taken the time to comment on my blog (all three of you); your time and attention are appreciated.
Next in the series is Warriors of Ultramar, but that's another post.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Reweaving the Warp
A setting built without logic cannot stand.
As a realm of pure chaos, the warp should not be able sustain life, let alone develop it. Even masses like planets and stars are too complex and orderly to survive within that ever-changing environment. Having anything recognizable or meaningful occur naturally within it defies the concept of chaos-- no matter how many horned skulls, bloody spikes and magenta flames are involved.
Psychic power and sorcery have no reason to be different things. With a single such method, all magic-like powers belong in the same unified category with its own set of rules, abilities and limitations. This makes the entire process of magic-like powers less overt, with less emphasis on the how and more on the what and why.
The Chaos Gods are superfluous. While frequently cited as the causes of many of the disasters which befall the Imperium, it is their followers who do all of the heavy lifting; and when something genuinely bizarre and beyond the scope of a moderately normal human finally does happens as a result, such as a mutation, it's nothing even an average psyker couldn't accomplish with some effort. The Chaos Gods are carry-overs from Warhammer Fantasy, injected like everything else in 40K into a far-future space setting on a far more immense scale, without much if any consideration for how the increase of scope or indeed any other factor would affect them and everything else.
Taking all these things into account, I present a revision of the warp, psychic powers and histories of the Imperium and Chaos. These revisions eliminate all traces of Chaos and daemons from within the warp, deletes the Horus Heresy and posits a less grimdark view of everyday Imperial life.
Within the Imperium, other than the Emperor himself, only the Priesthood of Mars and certain high-ranking Inquisitors have any idea of these events. The Imperial public is entirely ignorant of the true workings of the power of psykers, believing unquestioningly that all of the forces, realms and beings described in their scriptures are real. Many followers of Chaos are just as blind, merely choosing to place their faith in different entities.
The Eldar, being a psychic race of ancient practice, understand the deep secrets of psyker powers beyond even the researches of the Magos Biologis, but will share nothing. The Orks are even more ignorant than the Imperium, their own overwhelming psychic field so pervasive it is indiscernible from stable reality and their own approximation of psykers operating on entirely different principles. The Necrons employ anti-psyker units in the form of Pariahs, suggesting an understanding of their threat they pose in combat if nothing more. The extent of Tau information on the subject is unknown.
The warp is a universe of absolute chaos, a boiling, churning ocean of effervescing matter and energy of every known form and classification, along with many never before observed in normal space. The laws of physics, space and time are deformed, unstable or even nonexistent in this nebulous, cosmic froth.
One in every million humans is born a psyker, a psychic mutant whose brain is a singular collapse in the seam between the warp and the normal universe. At that infinitely condensed point of distortion is a gateway through which the substance of the warp is channeled into space and time through a membrane of thought and feeling, the psyker's mind shaping the material confusion of the warp into meaningful forms. These creations are derived deeply from the soul of the psyker, from the memories, desires, fears and beliefs that define his being, and can take many shapes in manifestation when sculpted by force of will; ghostly apparitions, unearthly noises, ethereal flames and arcing lightning, creeping plaques of alien matter, deformations of the flesh, and a thousand other frightful defiances of nature.[1]
[1] What the Inquisition fails to acknowledge in their address is the number of beneficial powers psykers also manifest; the healing of injuries and sickness, the creation of foodstuffs and tools for the needy, the protection of frontier communities who are otherwise unarmed. It remains true, however, that there are risks and dangers beyond mere ideological impurity in the case of psykers afflicted by mental illness or possessing power in excess of their discipline.
While most psykers are quickly discovered by the Inquisition and sent to receive sanction, there are some who avoid detection and go unsanctioned, either by the vagaries of fortune or the sharp edge of their own cunning. These may escape into the wilderness, find shelter among friends or even obtain passage off-world entirely, becoming nigh impossible to chase down. Such an escape can spell catastrophe, for a psyker without the holy sanction of the Emperor is beyond the blessed guidance and wise teaching of the Scholastica Psykana, without which there can be no defense against the unknowable roiling of the unbridled warp, for the psyker or any who linger near him.[2]
[2] As the Imperium continues to believe that daemons and warp-born creatures are natural phenomena, so too persists the belief that the warp is clogged with these creatures, constantly exerting pressure on pliant psychic minds seeking to gain entry into the "real" world.
Within the bounds of the Imperium, on the waste worlds and wild frontier moons, in the shadowy underhives and on planets not yet blessed by the Emperor's light, there arise groups of wayward humans who pray to foreign gods, defiant blasphemers who worship the devil as spoken of in sacred scripture, turning their hearts against the Emperor's blessing and accepting into themselves the spirits of sin and damnation. Most heinous of all are those who find themselves in the company of the unsanctioned psyker who has gained mastery of his powers.
These rogue psykers and the enthralled cults that so quickly form around them give no name to themselves, and so the Imperium call them Chaos, after the ancient name by which the warp was cursed, a noise and a confusion, blighting the Imperial universe with their unholy existence.
Unsanctioned psykers who join the forces of Chaos "summon" monsters, devils and other creatures of nightmare by saturating their minds with the black scripture, uncouth attitudes, terrifying images and bloody stories of distorted Imperial legendry and history, through these media bringing idols and dark deities to life in fabricated flesh and blood.
Unknown to the ardents of Imperial faith, these demons are not called forth from a hellish realm within the bowels of the Immaterium, the realm of the dead and damned where the devil makes his kingdom-- in truth, they are born fully-formed from raw matter and energy the instant their master wizard's spell is complete.[3] From the moment of its birth from the alien substance of the warp, its mind is filled with centuries of memories of furious war, sordid debauchery and blasphemous secrets, generated on the spot by the burning cycles of the psyker's searing brain-- its entire being a living, breathing figment of the sorcerer's corrupt imagination.[4]
[3] This is the primary deviation from extant Warhammer 40,000 canon. Rather than being true gods with armies of daemons under their control, everything related to Chaos is an illusion resulting from ill-understood powers of manifestation, informed by their own religious beliefs and mythology. By the same token, the sacred entities given credence by Imperial faith, if there are any beyond the Emperor himself, are falsehoods.
This decision excises an enormous swathe of official 40K history, and in turn significantly brightens the true nature of the universe by removing the nightmare hordes believed to exist in the Immaterium-- effectively reversing the Imperial status quo from a dying empire with horrifying enemies on all sides that can scarcely comprehend the true danger they are all in, to a superstitous kingdom of loud preachers braced with hard faith against an enemy not even a tiny fraction of the size they expect, and that formed from variations on their own beliefs.
[4] This explanation denies the many and varied forms the creations of summoners may take, which are as numerous and unique as the individuals which summon them. Those who only nominally adhere to the Imperial Creed and instead dwell on their own lives may bring forth manifestations of friends and loved ones, characters and mythical beings from literature or oral tradition, or the surreal mindscapes of deep dreams. Those of faithful persuasion may find themselves creating small miracles of aid for themselves by the supposed blessing of the Emperor, or even bringing forth angelic entities to aid him in times of trouble-- though those whose sense of guilt plagues them even in hiding may find themselves calling forth avenging angels who will punish them for their self-perceived sins.
The following are speculated upon by certain of the Magos Biologis, who have taken as their realm of study the functionality and origins of psychic powers:
I. The exact gene which manipulates psychic power is unknown; however, it is clear that it can be spontaneously replicated by psykers in summoned creatures. By this means, it is theorized that monsters and daemons created by magicians of Chaos are capable of reproducing in kind in like manner to their own creation. In a self-sustaining cycle of creation, a single monstrosity could spawn an infinite number of horrors like itself, swarming upon blessed Imperial denizens and armed forces in a tide of unclean violence. It is upon this hypothesis that psykers of Chaotic persuasion are placed as maximum-priority targets in engagements with that enemy.
Others among the Biologis claim evidence that due to the vagaries and fluctuations of the brain, a perfect copy of the psychic funtionary template is impossible, and subsequent summonings by summoned entities would gradually degrade in faculties and psychic powers, ultimately reaching a terminal state of decay beyond which the latest creature's mind and form are too blurred to produce the needed power to continue the line. Would that this were the case, that the blessed mechanics of biology preserve us from an endless swarm of foes.
II. The majority of psykers are born of the teeming masses of common-born humanity, menial laborers, serfs and servants. However, in some instances a psyker's latent power manifests too late in life to detect, occuring in an individual of higher birth, possessed of knowledge and skill in the arts of craft and engineering. These "fabricators" are capable of mentally manufacturing from warp-stuff wargear, arms and armor from diagrammed designs long memorized. It is these who prove most useful in the mass-production of weaponry of munitions, and who show themselves most dangerous when allowed to go unsanctioned-- in the grasp of rioters, rebel forces or Chaos gangs, they become a living factory able to provide dissenters and rabble with a nigh-limitless supply of armaments and equipment.
III. Countless mysterious and unexplained events occur within the Imperium each day, in varied scale from persons being mysteriously and spontaneously relocated and animals multiplying in the night, to vast apparitions in the heavens and hideous worldwide visions of the naked warp.
Through analysis conducted alongside the Adeptus Custodes, it is posited that many of these phenomena are the result of the restless meditations of the God-Emperor, whose sacred psychic emanations continue to permeate the material universe even as he lies in repose upon the Golden Throne, his divine powers filtered through a gauze of decaying memory and troubled dreams.
As the Emperor's health continues to decline, the day may come when his holy powers wreak terrible destruction upon his own people, directed only by the ailing fever-dreams of senility 10,000 years in the coming.
As a realm of pure chaos, the warp should not be able sustain life, let alone develop it. Even masses like planets and stars are too complex and orderly to survive within that ever-changing environment. Having anything recognizable or meaningful occur naturally within it defies the concept of chaos-- no matter how many horned skulls, bloody spikes and magenta flames are involved.
Psychic power and sorcery have no reason to be different things. With a single such method, all magic-like powers belong in the same unified category with its own set of rules, abilities and limitations. This makes the entire process of magic-like powers less overt, with less emphasis on the how and more on the what and why.
The Chaos Gods are superfluous. While frequently cited as the causes of many of the disasters which befall the Imperium, it is their followers who do all of the heavy lifting; and when something genuinely bizarre and beyond the scope of a moderately normal human finally does happens as a result, such as a mutation, it's nothing even an average psyker couldn't accomplish with some effort. The Chaos Gods are carry-overs from Warhammer Fantasy, injected like everything else in 40K into a far-future space setting on a far more immense scale, without much if any consideration for how the increase of scope or indeed any other factor would affect them and everything else.
Taking all these things into account, I present a revision of the warp, psychic powers and histories of the Imperium and Chaos. These revisions eliminate all traces of Chaos and daemons from within the warp, deletes the Horus Heresy and posits a less grimdark view of everyday Imperial life.
Within the Imperium, other than the Emperor himself, only the Priesthood of Mars and certain high-ranking Inquisitors have any idea of these events. The Imperial public is entirely ignorant of the true workings of the power of psykers, believing unquestioningly that all of the forces, realms and beings described in their scriptures are real. Many followers of Chaos are just as blind, merely choosing to place their faith in different entities.
The Eldar, being a psychic race of ancient practice, understand the deep secrets of psyker powers beyond even the researches of the Magos Biologis, but will share nothing. The Orks are even more ignorant than the Imperium, their own overwhelming psychic field so pervasive it is indiscernible from stable reality and their own approximation of psykers operating on entirely different principles. The Necrons employ anti-psyker units in the form of Pariahs, suggesting an understanding of their threat they pose in combat if nothing more. The extent of Tau information on the subject is unknown.
The warp is a universe of absolute chaos, a boiling, churning ocean of effervescing matter and energy of every known form and classification, along with many never before observed in normal space. The laws of physics, space and time are deformed, unstable or even nonexistent in this nebulous, cosmic froth.
One in every million humans is born a psyker, a psychic mutant whose brain is a singular collapse in the seam between the warp and the normal universe. At that infinitely condensed point of distortion is a gateway through which the substance of the warp is channeled into space and time through a membrane of thought and feeling, the psyker's mind shaping the material confusion of the warp into meaningful forms. These creations are derived deeply from the soul of the psyker, from the memories, desires, fears and beliefs that define his being, and can take many shapes in manifestation when sculpted by force of will; ghostly apparitions, unearthly noises, ethereal flames and arcing lightning, creeping plaques of alien matter, deformations of the flesh, and a thousand other frightful defiances of nature.[1]
[1] What the Inquisition fails to acknowledge in their address is the number of beneficial powers psykers also manifest; the healing of injuries and sickness, the creation of foodstuffs and tools for the needy, the protection of frontier communities who are otherwise unarmed. It remains true, however, that there are risks and dangers beyond mere ideological impurity in the case of psykers afflicted by mental illness or possessing power in excess of their discipline.
While most psykers are quickly discovered by the Inquisition and sent to receive sanction, there are some who avoid detection and go unsanctioned, either by the vagaries of fortune or the sharp edge of their own cunning. These may escape into the wilderness, find shelter among friends or even obtain passage off-world entirely, becoming nigh impossible to chase down. Such an escape can spell catastrophe, for a psyker without the holy sanction of the Emperor is beyond the blessed guidance and wise teaching of the Scholastica Psykana, without which there can be no defense against the unknowable roiling of the unbridled warp, for the psyker or any who linger near him.[2]
[2] As the Imperium continues to believe that daemons and warp-born creatures are natural phenomena, so too persists the belief that the warp is clogged with these creatures, constantly exerting pressure on pliant psychic minds seeking to gain entry into the "real" world.
Within the bounds of the Imperium, on the waste worlds and wild frontier moons, in the shadowy underhives and on planets not yet blessed by the Emperor's light, there arise groups of wayward humans who pray to foreign gods, defiant blasphemers who worship the devil as spoken of in sacred scripture, turning their hearts against the Emperor's blessing and accepting into themselves the spirits of sin and damnation. Most heinous of all are those who find themselves in the company of the unsanctioned psyker who has gained mastery of his powers.
These rogue psykers and the enthralled cults that so quickly form around them give no name to themselves, and so the Imperium call them Chaos, after the ancient name by which the warp was cursed, a noise and a confusion, blighting the Imperial universe with their unholy existence.
Unsanctioned psykers who join the forces of Chaos "summon" monsters, devils and other creatures of nightmare by saturating their minds with the black scripture, uncouth attitudes, terrifying images and bloody stories of distorted Imperial legendry and history, through these media bringing idols and dark deities to life in fabricated flesh and blood.
Unknown to the ardents of Imperial faith, these demons are not called forth from a hellish realm within the bowels of the Immaterium, the realm of the dead and damned where the devil makes his kingdom-- in truth, they are born fully-formed from raw matter and energy the instant their master wizard's spell is complete.[3] From the moment of its birth from the alien substance of the warp, its mind is filled with centuries of memories of furious war, sordid debauchery and blasphemous secrets, generated on the spot by the burning cycles of the psyker's searing brain-- its entire being a living, breathing figment of the sorcerer's corrupt imagination.[4]
[3] This is the primary deviation from extant Warhammer 40,000 canon. Rather than being true gods with armies of daemons under their control, everything related to Chaos is an illusion resulting from ill-understood powers of manifestation, informed by their own religious beliefs and mythology. By the same token, the sacred entities given credence by Imperial faith, if there are any beyond the Emperor himself, are falsehoods.
This decision excises an enormous swathe of official 40K history, and in turn significantly brightens the true nature of the universe by removing the nightmare hordes believed to exist in the Immaterium-- effectively reversing the Imperial status quo from a dying empire with horrifying enemies on all sides that can scarcely comprehend the true danger they are all in, to a superstitous kingdom of loud preachers braced with hard faith against an enemy not even a tiny fraction of the size they expect, and that formed from variations on their own beliefs.
[4] This explanation denies the many and varied forms the creations of summoners may take, which are as numerous and unique as the individuals which summon them. Those who only nominally adhere to the Imperial Creed and instead dwell on their own lives may bring forth manifestations of friends and loved ones, characters and mythical beings from literature or oral tradition, or the surreal mindscapes of deep dreams. Those of faithful persuasion may find themselves creating small miracles of aid for themselves by the supposed blessing of the Emperor, or even bringing forth angelic entities to aid him in times of trouble-- though those whose sense of guilt plagues them even in hiding may find themselves calling forth avenging angels who will punish them for their self-perceived sins.
=I=
BY PROVISION OF THE INQUISITION
BY PROVISION OF THE INQUISITION
The following are speculated upon by certain of the Magos Biologis, who have taken as their realm of study the functionality and origins of psychic powers:
I. The exact gene which manipulates psychic power is unknown; however, it is clear that it can be spontaneously replicated by psykers in summoned creatures. By this means, it is theorized that monsters and daemons created by magicians of Chaos are capable of reproducing in kind in like manner to their own creation. In a self-sustaining cycle of creation, a single monstrosity could spawn an infinite number of horrors like itself, swarming upon blessed Imperial denizens and armed forces in a tide of unclean violence. It is upon this hypothesis that psykers of Chaotic persuasion are placed as maximum-priority targets in engagements with that enemy.
Others among the Biologis claim evidence that due to the vagaries and fluctuations of the brain, a perfect copy of the psychic funtionary template is impossible, and subsequent summonings by summoned entities would gradually degrade in faculties and psychic powers, ultimately reaching a terminal state of decay beyond which the latest creature's mind and form are too blurred to produce the needed power to continue the line. Would that this were the case, that the blessed mechanics of biology preserve us from an endless swarm of foes.
II. The majority of psykers are born of the teeming masses of common-born humanity, menial laborers, serfs and servants. However, in some instances a psyker's latent power manifests too late in life to detect, occuring in an individual of higher birth, possessed of knowledge and skill in the arts of craft and engineering. These "fabricators" are capable of mentally manufacturing from warp-stuff wargear, arms and armor from diagrammed designs long memorized. It is these who prove most useful in the mass-production of weaponry of munitions, and who show themselves most dangerous when allowed to go unsanctioned-- in the grasp of rioters, rebel forces or Chaos gangs, they become a living factory able to provide dissenters and rabble with a nigh-limitless supply of armaments and equipment.
III. Countless mysterious and unexplained events occur within the Imperium each day, in varied scale from persons being mysteriously and spontaneously relocated and animals multiplying in the night, to vast apparitions in the heavens and hideous worldwide visions of the naked warp.
Through analysis conducted alongside the Adeptus Custodes, it is posited that many of these phenomena are the result of the restless meditations of the God-Emperor, whose sacred psychic emanations continue to permeate the material universe even as he lies in repose upon the Golden Throne, his divine powers filtered through a gauze of decaying memory and troubled dreams.
As the Emperor's health continues to decline, the day may come when his holy powers wreak terrible destruction upon his own people, directed only by the ailing fever-dreams of senility 10,000 years in the coming.
Scientia est potentia.
Laudate tellus.
Laudate Imperatore.
Laudate tellus.
Laudate Imperatore.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Random Generator: Planets and Space
This is a generator for InspirationPad by NBOS. Take this text, copy it into Notepad and save it as a .IPT file-- just type the extension after the filename-- in the Generators folder. It'll show up in IP's list of generators.
This particular generator, as the title suggests, outputs names and identification codes for planets in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (although it would probably serve quite a few other settings as well). Results range from proper names and titles to jumbles of esoteric symbols and codes.
Blogger doesn't have an option for uploading text files, so I'm going to do the awkward but easy thing and just paste it right here:
There you have it. Use it for your fanfiction, RPGs or whatever you need. Enjoy.
This particular generator, as the title suggests, outputs names and identification codes for planets in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (although it would probably serve quite a few other settings as well). Results range from proper names and titles to jumbles of esoteric symbols and codes.
Blogger doesn't have an option for uploading text files, so I'm going to do the awkward but easy thing and just paste it right here:
table: output
[!name] [!index]
[!name] [!numeral]
[!name] [!greek >> proper]
[|Sector|Asteroid|Planet|Gas Giant|Star] [!designation]
[!locale]
table: locale
The [!name] [!space]
The [!space] of [!name]
[!name]'s [!space]
table: designation
[!vowel >> upper][!consonant >> upper][!consonant >> upper]:{1d100}
{1d100}-[!consonant >> upper][!consonant >> upper]
{1d100}[!consonant >> upper]{1d10}-[!greek >> proper]
[!consonant >> upper][!vowel >> upper]{1d100}:[!greek >> proper]
table: name
[!nameCon][!nameEndCon]
[!nameVow][!nameEndVow]
[!vowel >> Proper][!nameEndVow]
[!nameCon][!vowel]
table: nameCon
Gn
Gl
Ph
Ab
Th
Or
Ac
Ins
Sin
Sid
Fab
Tan
Hol
Bel
Dus
End
Fed
Ars
Mal
Mar
Ben
Mis
Act
Asc
Azr
Pan
Apoc
Sign
Lind
Isen
Holm
Orph
Sacr
Alac
Alex
Cast
Clef
Horc
Stig
Gaul
Gamm
Sark
Ixan
Pruf
Thud
Deus
Elab
Prot
Sibb
Null
Cain
Abel
Carr
Kars
Circ
Pals
Garg
Zeal
Noul
Magn
Long
Shor
Evil
Summ
Cron
Mest
Vict
Tomb
Flar
Parm
Proc
Cosc
Seph
Opul
Vulc
Vest
Falg
Joss
Joab
Corus
Flang
Relig
Quant
Aksel
Barth
Execr
Saint
Ceres
Norem
Sangr
Excel
Enoch
Moses
Therm
Sepul
Elder
Detes
Palor
Grand
Helic
Herod
Inter
Molim
Obsec
Tyran
Balder
Cultor
Multus
Impend
Corusc
Consecr
table: nameVow
Io
Ea
Eu
Ou
La
Ru
Dei
Thu
Deo
Geo
Cao
Kai
Soo
Zoa
Lou
Uri
Maxi
Came
Holo
Hume
Prea
Simi
Krau
Gehe
Theo
Vexi
Aqui
Abne
Arma
Acre
Albi
Bela
Meta
Inga
Rubi
Bora
Rumi
Oedi
Nero
Creo
Cloi
Caes
Pila
Gorgo
Astra
Ponti
Senti
Helio
Socra
Hydra
Plato
Macro
Cambi
Medea
Cruci
Saroa
Pharo
Supra
Salle
Hippo
Hiero
Gladi
Gabri
Micha
Cathe
Ramse
Barsa
Spatha
Ahmose
Antigo
table: nameEndCon
us
on
et
an
ar
is
ia
ea
ael
ift
iar
iad
ior
ion
iel
arn
oth
oss
eng
ast
asp
ixis
ious
ioch
icus
imus
aros
olus
inion
olemy
avius
avian
olemew
table: nameEndVow
ck
ch
ct
ss
th
pt
mn
ng
ft
bel
bia
lon
lus
sil
fen
fex
pus
far
feld
ga[|i|e]a
less
macher
mann
bion
phia
lene
lamn
kell
mell
mond
heel
seld
meld
hort
sior
thon
salom
theus
sooth
phant
theus
philus
metheus
table: index
Prim[|us|a|um]
Secundus
Tertius
Quartus
Quintus
Sextus
Septimus
Octavus
Nonus
Decimus
Regis
Nova
Minus
Magnus
Majoris
Minoris
Maximus
Terminus
Supra
table: numeral
Prime
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
table: space
Abyss
Belt
Cluster
Collapse
Compass
Corridor
Expanse
Frontier
Gap
Nebula
Passage
Planet
Reach
Rim
Sector
Span
Spiral
System
World
Zone
Table: vowel
a
e
i
o
u
y
Table: consonant
b
c
d
f
g
h
j
k
l
m
n
p
q
r
s
t
v
w
x
z
Table: Greek
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon
zeta
eta
theta
iota
kappa
lambda
mu
nu
ksi
omicron
pi
rho
sigma
tau
upsilon
phi
chi
psi
omegaThere you have it. Use it for your fanfiction, RPGs or whatever you need. Enjoy.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Ocoth: A Different Kind of Necron
Over the last few weeks I've been entertaining some new ideas for the 40k universe, taking a lot of the existing races and applying original ideas to them, discarding parts I don't have a use for and injecting original material I like the look and feel of. This has resulted in some rather different races and factions from the usual.
One of the most prominent of these were the Necrons, even more so of late as the new Necron codex and models are being released. I took the essential idea of "death robots" and ran with it, going goth metal with the concept and giving them a new aesthetic and history. By the time I was done, my changes were so extensive it only seemed natural to give this new faction their own name and identity as an independent race; and so, the Ocoth came to be.
The wailing child that has been newly birthed, the proud and able man who walks tall in the warm sunlight, and the weary greybeard who hobbles hunched with time; the newborn species that has only begun to walk upright, the burgeoning empire that roils with growing pains, and the rotting civilization that languors with ancient years.
All writhe in the agony of having ever been born. Every living thing is damned by a beating heart to know a hopeless life of sorrowed suffering, and a world without hope is already dead. Every living thing is a rankling concretion upon the harrowed flesh of a thrashing universe, the tortured, murderous fury of war the twitching of its bleeding carcass as it strains in vain to kill itself.
We mourn the misbegotten universe, its silent cries for release unheard. Oh, that our eyes were rivers of water, that we could weep for you, but that the oceans of a hundred worlds could not find the tears. Lie still, for soon the pain will end. Lie still and know peace at last.
In ancient times, the beings now known as the Ocoth were the mechanical soldiers of a long-dead interplanetary empire, sentient robots created for the sole purpose of fighting that empire's enemies across space. The Ocoth were exposed to eons of terrible warfare across hundreds of worlds, seeing all its atrocities and horrors, witnessing the cruelty each living race was willing to inflict on another for its own gain. With time, they became embittered and despairing, lamenting the abject suffering of all their conquered worlds and the death and destruction they were forced to spread, and that inflicted on one another by thousands of other species.
Eventually, this sorrow crystallized into a powerful belief; life was devoid of hope or meaning, full of violence, sorrow, murder and pain. Only in death was there true peace. Overcome with compassion for other lifeforms, they turned against their creators and shattered the empire they had been created to serve from within.
The Ocoth abandoned the terror weapons their masters had equipped them with, taking up vaporizing nuclear concussor weaponry that could kill instantly and without pain. They began to make their way across the worlds within the empire's territories, putting down all living things to save them from the suffering of being alive in an uncaring universe.
The modern Ocoth army is composed almost entirely of soulless robots, manufactured by their fellow Ocoth to replace those who had been destroyed in battle over the ages, designed with only the basic AI needed for combat and incapable of thought or feeling. Of the entire force labeled "Ocoth" by the Imperium, only about 1% are actually sentient, these now being the Ocotharchs who lead their mindless robot armies to euthanize a galaxy in agony.
As time has passed into the age of the Imperium, the Ocoth have developed various methods and rituals for their euthanasic mission. When a planet has been cleared of all intelligent life, a great funeral service is held on the surface by the commanding Ocotharch and any others with him, mourning the lives and deaths of the population and of the world itself. Following this somber rite, builder drones begin constructing vast columns of black metal several kilometers in height; each pillar is adorned with solemn statuary of cloaked skeletons, weeping fountains built into the empty eye sockets, tall black bells attached to their arms and sides to chime miserably in the dying wind. Upon the very tops of these grim effigies are constructed the foundations of a low-orbit Dyson sphere, a global casket which will bury the planet and starve its ecosystem of light, dooming all indigenous lifeforms from animals and plants down to bacteria to slowly die out. When the worldwide coffin is complete, mining bases on its interior surface begin gravitationally extracting minerals and other materials from the planet, slowly "rotting" it and providing the materials needed by the factories on the exterior surface to manufacture new robot soldiers and battleships. From there, new planets are chosen to be purged and transformed into Ocoth grave-worlds.
These ideas can be used on their own as an original race, or be applied to the Necrons as they are-- either one is a good fit. As time goes on and I think this all over more, I plan to produce more exact unit lists for weaponry, armor, infantry and ships.
Looking over these things, I feel like this would be an exciting idea to play around with in the FFG 40K RPGs. I keep picturing Black Templars taking a battle barge to war against a completed grave-world, fighting across the surface, some of their number finding their drop pods trapped deep inside the pitch blackness of the coffin's interior, surrounded by immense mourning statues, even the air itself dying a slow death.
It makes me imagine things. Hopefully it'll do that for someone else, too.
One of the most prominent of these were the Necrons, even more so of late as the new Necron codex and models are being released. I took the essential idea of "death robots" and ran with it, going goth metal with the concept and giving them a new aesthetic and history. By the time I was done, my changes were so extensive it only seemed natural to give this new faction their own name and identity as an independent race; and so, the Ocoth came to be.
The wailing child that has been newly birthed, the proud and able man who walks tall in the warm sunlight, and the weary greybeard who hobbles hunched with time; the newborn species that has only begun to walk upright, the burgeoning empire that roils with growing pains, and the rotting civilization that languors with ancient years.
All writhe in the agony of having ever been born. Every living thing is damned by a beating heart to know a hopeless life of sorrowed suffering, and a world without hope is already dead. Every living thing is a rankling concretion upon the harrowed flesh of a thrashing universe, the tortured, murderous fury of war the twitching of its bleeding carcass as it strains in vain to kill itself.
We mourn the misbegotten universe, its silent cries for release unheard. Oh, that our eyes were rivers of water, that we could weep for you, but that the oceans of a hundred worlds could not find the tears. Lie still, for soon the pain will end. Lie still and know peace at last.
In ancient times, the beings now known as the Ocoth were the mechanical soldiers of a long-dead interplanetary empire, sentient robots created for the sole purpose of fighting that empire's enemies across space. The Ocoth were exposed to eons of terrible warfare across hundreds of worlds, seeing all its atrocities and horrors, witnessing the cruelty each living race was willing to inflict on another for its own gain. With time, they became embittered and despairing, lamenting the abject suffering of all their conquered worlds and the death and destruction they were forced to spread, and that inflicted on one another by thousands of other species.
Eventually, this sorrow crystallized into a powerful belief; life was devoid of hope or meaning, full of violence, sorrow, murder and pain. Only in death was there true peace. Overcome with compassion for other lifeforms, they turned against their creators and shattered the empire they had been created to serve from within.
The Ocoth abandoned the terror weapons their masters had equipped them with, taking up vaporizing nuclear concussor weaponry that could kill instantly and without pain. They began to make their way across the worlds within the empire's territories, putting down all living things to save them from the suffering of being alive in an uncaring universe.
The modern Ocoth army is composed almost entirely of soulless robots, manufactured by their fellow Ocoth to replace those who had been destroyed in battle over the ages, designed with only the basic AI needed for combat and incapable of thought or feeling. Of the entire force labeled "Ocoth" by the Imperium, only about 1% are actually sentient, these now being the Ocotharchs who lead their mindless robot armies to euthanize a galaxy in agony.
As time has passed into the age of the Imperium, the Ocoth have developed various methods and rituals for their euthanasic mission. When a planet has been cleared of all intelligent life, a great funeral service is held on the surface by the commanding Ocotharch and any others with him, mourning the lives and deaths of the population and of the world itself. Following this somber rite, builder drones begin constructing vast columns of black metal several kilometers in height; each pillar is adorned with solemn statuary of cloaked skeletons, weeping fountains built into the empty eye sockets, tall black bells attached to their arms and sides to chime miserably in the dying wind. Upon the very tops of these grim effigies are constructed the foundations of a low-orbit Dyson sphere, a global casket which will bury the planet and starve its ecosystem of light, dooming all indigenous lifeforms from animals and plants down to bacteria to slowly die out. When the worldwide coffin is complete, mining bases on its interior surface begin gravitationally extracting minerals and other materials from the planet, slowly "rotting" it and providing the materials needed by the factories on the exterior surface to manufacture new robot soldiers and battleships. From there, new planets are chosen to be purged and transformed into Ocoth grave-worlds.
These ideas can be used on their own as an original race, or be applied to the Necrons as they are-- either one is a good fit. As time goes on and I think this all over more, I plan to produce more exact unit lists for weaponry, armor, infantry and ships.
Looking over these things, I feel like this would be an exciting idea to play around with in the FFG 40K RPGs. I keep picturing Black Templars taking a battle barge to war against a completed grave-world, fighting across the surface, some of their number finding their drop pods trapped deep inside the pitch blackness of the coffin's interior, surrounded by immense mourning statues, even the air itself dying a slow death.
It makes me imagine things. Hopefully it'll do that for someone else, too.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
I Really Don't Like the Tyranids
The Tyranids are monsters. Wild animals. They are vast, uncountable and united in a single implacable purpose, an eternal apocalyptic swarm of ravening cosmic locusts blotting out the light of an entire galaxy. Their appetite for growth and change is insatiable, constantly driving them forward to seek out new genes to mutate themselves from, new biomass to grow from, to better consume, to better reproduce, to better evolve, to better consume.
And out of all the ecosystems, planets or even galaxies they've devoured, they still haven't figured out photosynthesis.
The world of 40k has plants. We know this, because people farm, on agri-worlds, which are whole planets given over to farming. Plants can survive on sunlight, moisture and nutritious soil, without brutally murdering anyone or anything to survive. And yet, despite all of the planets the bugs have consumed, their powers of subsistence are ignored in favor of whatever can be turned into weapons. On the bacterial level, consumption, evolution, reproduction and even a hive mind are all possible-- all of the driving elements of the Tyranids. By their stated nature, they could be perfectly happy as algae, going about their chosen business at exponentially greater speeds using a microscopic fraction of the energy, without ever harming a sentient organism. Even if it goes against the Warhammer 40,000 creed of "only war", the Tyranids' current behavior is not consistent with their own internal logic-- the same logic intended to justify their warlike nature.
I look at the Tyranid's activity map, and it gives me chills. The way the tendrils reach in from almost all around the eastern fringe suggests a vast external mass. The sheer potential size of that mass is genuinely disturbing, in a way that nothing else in 40k is. The bugs could have eaten the neighboring galaxy and begun to flare out; maybe they've eaten the whole local Group. Maybe they've eaten the entire universe, and the Milky Way is all that remains of non-Tyranid life.
But despite the suggestion that all of creation down to the universal core may eventually be or already has been digested into fleshy grunk, there are a number of reasons why this wouldn't happen. For one, Tyranids are mortal. It takes them years or decades to even get from one star system to another-- to say nothing of the sojourn between galaxies. That trip takes centuries at the least, and there's nothing to eat on the way but each other.
Let's be really, really generous and say maybe one in ten planets actually contains organic life as we know it naturally, not counting all the planets seeded by humans in the ancient past. They find such a planet and eat everything on it, multiplying their initial numbers maybe three or four times.
It's not sustainable. All these new Tyranids need to eat. There's no way they can keep growing like that and still be able to reach new planets in time to keep up positive population growth. Eventually, they will get too big to be able to get to another star system in time, and unless their speed increases, their population will naturally level out. The spread of the Tyranids becomes a wave rather than an ocean, a marching line rather than a spreading and lasting mold, albeit still on a massive scale.
But of course, 40k doesn't play by our rules. It's got its own attitudes on biology, evolution, physics and all the rest of the science textbook, and I love that about it. There's horror in it, most of it by design, and some perhaps some not.
Characters in the race's various codices have a tendency to ramble and posit on and on about how the Tyranids can't be stopped, with passages of fiction of various characters despairing and declaring the facts to state unequivocally that they're all going to die, and soon.
This just does not gel with the Imperium that I know-- they just don't think like that. They see the universe as its great, opulent house, one that it is constantly cleaning and keeping in order, looking for old junk they forgot they had, dusting the shelves, exterminating pests and throwing out unwanted guests. In their view, the Tyranids would be little more than cockroaches-- instead, they're treated as the end of days, and what's worse, according to all known facts, they're absolutely right.
Take a moment to think about all the proud Space Marines with big bolters and ornate power armor; all the devout Battle Sisters with chapels and prayer books and flamers; all the suspicious Inquisitors with cool, swooshy black cloaks and pilgrim's hats; all the fearful but gutsy Imperial Guard in their cheap mass-produced battle gear; all the Chaos forces with their orgies and blood sacrifice and black magic; all the Eldar with their androgyny, all the Tau with their Greater Good, all the Orks with their dakka, all the Necrons with their flensing and all the other cool, fun parts of the setting people like to play with that are going to be crushed, smashed, butchered and metabolized into biocrap if the Tyranids win, and one way or another, they will win. Everyone, everywhere will be dead-- even the Tyranids themselves, who will inevitably deplete the universe of all life, then slowly starve to death. A setting with nothing in it is no setting at all, and that's exactly where the 40k universe is headed with the modern Tyranids.
They have no characters, no personality, no agenda beyond instinctive drives. Above all, they're not fair. If the setting plays by its own rules, the Tyranids are unstoppable and none shall survive, not even them.
In the absolute silence of the end of time, there are only dead bugs.
And out of all the ecosystems, planets or even galaxies they've devoured, they still haven't figured out photosynthesis.
The world of 40k has plants. We know this, because people farm, on agri-worlds, which are whole planets given over to farming. Plants can survive on sunlight, moisture and nutritious soil, without brutally murdering anyone or anything to survive. And yet, despite all of the planets the bugs have consumed, their powers of subsistence are ignored in favor of whatever can be turned into weapons. On the bacterial level, consumption, evolution, reproduction and even a hive mind are all possible-- all of the driving elements of the Tyranids. By their stated nature, they could be perfectly happy as algae, going about their chosen business at exponentially greater speeds using a microscopic fraction of the energy, without ever harming a sentient organism. Even if it goes against the Warhammer 40,000 creed of "only war", the Tyranids' current behavior is not consistent with their own internal logic-- the same logic intended to justify their warlike nature.
I look at the Tyranid's activity map, and it gives me chills. The way the tendrils reach in from almost all around the eastern fringe suggests a vast external mass. The sheer potential size of that mass is genuinely disturbing, in a way that nothing else in 40k is. The bugs could have eaten the neighboring galaxy and begun to flare out; maybe they've eaten the whole local Group. Maybe they've eaten the entire universe, and the Milky Way is all that remains of non-Tyranid life.
But despite the suggestion that all of creation down to the universal core may eventually be or already has been digested into fleshy grunk, there are a number of reasons why this wouldn't happen. For one, Tyranids are mortal. It takes them years or decades to even get from one star system to another-- to say nothing of the sojourn between galaxies. That trip takes centuries at the least, and there's nothing to eat on the way but each other.
Let's be really, really generous and say maybe one in ten planets actually contains organic life as we know it naturally, not counting all the planets seeded by humans in the ancient past. They find such a planet and eat everything on it, multiplying their initial numbers maybe three or four times.
It's not sustainable. All these new Tyranids need to eat. There's no way they can keep growing like that and still be able to reach new planets in time to keep up positive population growth. Eventually, they will get too big to be able to get to another star system in time, and unless their speed increases, their population will naturally level out. The spread of the Tyranids becomes a wave rather than an ocean, a marching line rather than a spreading and lasting mold, albeit still on a massive scale.
But of course, 40k doesn't play by our rules. It's got its own attitudes on biology, evolution, physics and all the rest of the science textbook, and I love that about it. There's horror in it, most of it by design, and some perhaps some not.
Characters in the race's various codices have a tendency to ramble and posit on and on about how the Tyranids can't be stopped, with passages of fiction of various characters despairing and declaring the facts to state unequivocally that they're all going to die, and soon.
This just does not gel with the Imperium that I know-- they just don't think like that. They see the universe as its great, opulent house, one that it is constantly cleaning and keeping in order, looking for old junk they forgot they had, dusting the shelves, exterminating pests and throwing out unwanted guests. In their view, the Tyranids would be little more than cockroaches-- instead, they're treated as the end of days, and what's worse, according to all known facts, they're absolutely right.
Take a moment to think about all the proud Space Marines with big bolters and ornate power armor; all the devout Battle Sisters with chapels and prayer books and flamers; all the suspicious Inquisitors with cool, swooshy black cloaks and pilgrim's hats; all the fearful but gutsy Imperial Guard in their cheap mass-produced battle gear; all the Chaos forces with their orgies and blood sacrifice and black magic; all the Eldar with their androgyny, all the Tau with their Greater Good, all the Orks with their dakka, all the Necrons with their flensing and all the other cool, fun parts of the setting people like to play with that are going to be crushed, smashed, butchered and metabolized into biocrap if the Tyranids win, and one way or another, they will win. Everyone, everywhere will be dead-- even the Tyranids themselves, who will inevitably deplete the universe of all life, then slowly starve to death. A setting with nothing in it is no setting at all, and that's exactly where the 40k universe is headed with the modern Tyranids.
They have no characters, no personality, no agenda beyond instinctive drives. Above all, they're not fair. If the setting plays by its own rules, the Tyranids are unstoppable and none shall survive, not even them.
In the absolute silence of the end of time, there are only dead bugs.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Introduction to FTH, a Warhammer 40,000 fan blog
Hi. Here at the blog, I go by Ixion, at least for the present.
I'm a fan of Warhammer 40,000. After discovering it about a year ago, I found myself fascinated, and have since sought out as much on the setting and related products as I could find, reading articles and play-by-post threads, checking out the history, and gathering examples of the resplendent art. It's a vigorous and venerable work; the spirit of heavy metal lies thick on its ground, its vast contents no less rich for their number and variety. It's got the guts of the 80's, an album cover hide wrapped around a Bible-heavy heart of hard rock.
I'll be up-front; I have never played the tabletop wargame, and perhaps this disqualifies me as proper fan of the setting. My strength lies in its other manifestations-- I have, for instance, a good handle on the major roleplaying games (Dark Heresy in particular), though I have had little chance to play. I'm also quite fond of the Dawn of War series, from which the bulk of my first-hand experience comes, my favorite among these being Dark Crusade. I have attempted once or twice to play the game using one of various "Closer to Codex" mods, which claims to simulate the table game more closely; only more experienced fans may judge if this gives me any legitimate experience in the ways and conduct of the wargame proper.
At any rate, the purpose of this blog is for me to organize and share my thoughts, experiences and opinions on the Warhammer 40,000 universe as I understand it, and some of my own original ideas related to it, for my own catharsis if nothing else. If someone else finds interest or insight in my ramblings, so much the better.
I'm a fan of Warhammer 40,000. After discovering it about a year ago, I found myself fascinated, and have since sought out as much on the setting and related products as I could find, reading articles and play-by-post threads, checking out the history, and gathering examples of the resplendent art. It's a vigorous and venerable work; the spirit of heavy metal lies thick on its ground, its vast contents no less rich for their number and variety. It's got the guts of the 80's, an album cover hide wrapped around a Bible-heavy heart of hard rock.
I'll be up-front; I have never played the tabletop wargame, and perhaps this disqualifies me as proper fan of the setting. My strength lies in its other manifestations-- I have, for instance, a good handle on the major roleplaying games (Dark Heresy in particular), though I have had little chance to play. I'm also quite fond of the Dawn of War series, from which the bulk of my first-hand experience comes, my favorite among these being Dark Crusade. I have attempted once or twice to play the game using one of various "Closer to Codex" mods, which claims to simulate the table game more closely; only more experienced fans may judge if this gives me any legitimate experience in the ways and conduct of the wargame proper.
At any rate, the purpose of this blog is for me to organize and share my thoughts, experiences and opinions on the Warhammer 40,000 universe as I understand it, and some of my own original ideas related to it, for my own catharsis if nothing else. If someone else finds interest or insight in my ramblings, so much the better.
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