The Emperor's blockparty RPG ghetto style

[The Wizard Joseph]

So there's this game that has a fairly modest but fanatical following out in the gamerculture called Warhammer 40k. Set in the year 40,000, humanity lives in all corners of the galaxy and has a central government of sorts on the world of Holy Terra. That would be Earth after several apocalypses, failed petty interstellar empires, and colonization attempts. Then something like the year 30,000 or so a hyper-human perfect being stepped up from the population of Earth, unified the techno-barbarian tribes, re established a peace with the Martian colony, and ultimately began the impossible task of establishing a unified Galactic Empire of Humanity. He is known only as the Emperor in all established records of the setting and was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

To make a long, epicly styled, and marvelous story short, The Emperor is betrayed by one of his clone-generals and the Empire nearly falls to the forces of Chaos. I do not mean nice, cutesy chaos either. Raw forces of sentient corruption and madness that hunger beyond the walls of spacetime. The kind that make you eat your family for kicks and burn whole worlds to test a new toy.

The corrupted general is defeated but the Emperor is mostly slain also after the cataclysmic final battle. He had by this point long since ushered in a Platinum Age, you could say, as marvels of technology and psionic power beyond imagining called the Golden Throne allowed his spirit to cling to his mostly dead body and produce a beacon on Holy Terra called the Astronomican. This beacon is a guide to all ships traveling through the Warp to reach other worlds of the still enduring,  but stunted, Imperium of Man.

I won't take up the whole intro with explanation of the setting. There's A LOT. But I'm setting up this thread for general discussion of the game and the story. If you're a noob to 40k feel free to ask something if you didn't understand the stuff you're about to hear. READ THE THREAD FIRST PLEASE as the topic will develop Emperor knows where and your question may well have already been covered.

I would very much like to avoid the minutiae of game mechanics, but won't care too much if it's relevant to what's being talked about.  I just don't want to get bogged down too much by it.

[The Wizard Joseph]

So Howl, I really like the Mechanicum concept and the Machine God. For all of the ritualistic and baroque tone of the setting the Mechanicum stands out as both not worshipping the Emperor and as a power in its own right. This despite being in the same system with the center of Galactic politics. Also Titans. I want a real one.

How do you see the concept in 40k, and when you speak of it here in more realistic terms how might it differ?

[Doktor Howl]

So Howl, I really like the Mechanicum concept and the Machine God. For all of the ritualistic and baroque tone of the setting the Mechanicum stands out as both not worshipping the Emperor and as a power in its own right. This despite being in the same system with the center of Galactic politics. Also Titans. I want a real one.

How do you see the concept in 40k, and when you speak of it here in more realistic terms how might it differ?

I'll get to this tomorrow.  And I'll holler at Richter.  He's sort of the high priest.

[The Wizard Joseph]

So Howl, I really like the Mechanicum concept and the Machine God. For all of the ritualistic and baroque tone of the setting the Mechanicum stands out as both not worshipping the Emperor and as a power in its own right. This despite being in the same system with the center of Galactic politics. Also Titans. I want a real one.

How do you see the concept in 40k, and when you speak of it here in more realistic terms how might it differ?

I'll get to this tomorrow.  And I'll holler at Richter.  He's sort of the high priest.

Awesome! Never a rush on this one. I'm only able to get so many posts out per day too. REALLY hands on job AND I'm slow at both typing and thinking about what to say if I'm also doing other stuff.

[Eater of Clowns]

Hail Tzeentch, Changer of Ways.

[Cain]

WH40K is the single most hilarious thing Games Workshop has ever done.  I never played the tabletop version, I preferred Fantasy Warhammer (High Elves, Dogs of War), but the setting is so purposefully GRIMDARK it becomes a self-perpetuating parody of itself, while remaining aware of the fact.  It's actually pretty brilliant.

[Eater of Clowns]

WH40K is the single most hilarious thing Games Workshop has ever done.  I never played the tabletop version, I preferred Fantasy Warhammer (High Elves, Dogs of War), but the setting is so purposefully GRIMDARK it becomes a self-perpetuating parody of itself, while remaining aware of the fact.  It's actually pretty brilliant.

I love it for that. I think GRIMDARK might have even come from 40k (In the grim darkness of...).

I'm not particularly interested in the money sink the miniatures are, but I've had fun with a few video games and novels. It's brain candy. I can imagine it's just a blast churning out one of those books. Writing about Nurgle is like a 10 year old boy going on for entire paragraphs about boogers in typically over the top style. I hear Dan Abnett's stuff in the setting is actually quite good though.

[Cain]

I cant speak to Abnett's novels, but Sandy Mictchell's are hilarious.  He has the dark comedy down perfect, and having the novels focus on the cannon fodder that are the Imperial Guard was an inspired touch.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I loved the sense of over the top horror and warfare. You don't just go to war you "purge the Xenos threat from the far flung halo star systems by the will of the Emperor" and drop several kinds of hell and space marines from orbit.

The stunted culture is also a bit of horrormirth in that it is comically exaggerated but not entirely outside the realm of human thought. People have been purged in history for one form or another of the basic things the Imperium will not, CAN NOT, tolerate. Space turns out to be the ever present threat our politicians can only dream of.. but would wake in a cold sweat if they did.

[Richter]

So Howl, I really like the Mechanicum concept and the Machine God. For all of the ritualistic and baroque tone of the setting the Mechanicum stands out as both not worshipping the Emperor and as a power in its own right. This despite being in the same system with the center of Galactic politics. Also Titans. I want a real one.

How do you see the concept in 40k, and when you speak of it here in more realistic terms how might it differ?

I'll get to this tomorrow.  And I'll holler at Richter.  He's sort of the high priest.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is at the same time the custodian / provider / regulator of all technology, and a group mired in routine / ritual when it comes to any construction or maintenance.

A Mechanicus Techpriest is at best able to fix anything with enthusiasm.  They live for that shit.  At worst they're the guys who won't close the cowling and re start the engine on a crashing spacecraft because they haven't finished the proper chants to the fuel distributor cap and applied the necessary anointing lubricants.  They do all this to praise the Mahcine God (present in all apparati), and respect the individual anima of whatever projects they are working on. 

This is not to say there are not average Joe mechanics running around.  To get the flavor, imagine car mechanics as lay-priests, and the whole works like a monastery crossed with a machine shop.  More when consciousness allows.  Dan Abnett wrote up a great description of these folks in action in the 2nd book of his Eisenhorn trilogy.  (solomon Kane in space - check it out if you can)

[The Wizard Joseph]

Sounds like I got 3 cheers for the novels. Might have to look into them. I've read "the fluff" as they say from the core rules and many a codex, even a few of the new ones. Also read much material from an RPG series called 'Deathwatch'. The RPG explores other aspects of the 40K universe, but all the Deathwatch supplements focus on Space Marines seconded from their home chapters to kill Xenos specifically. Great read, but the RPG system is a bloodbath and space marines fairly boring characters out of battle. It was pretty cool for all that. Players get clever when they start to realize they're a suprise round away from messy death just about all the time.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

So there's this game that has a fairly modest but fanatical following out in the gamerculture called Warhammer 40k. Set in the year 40,000, humanity lives in all corners of the galaxy and has a central government of sorts on the world of Holy Terra. That would be Earth after several apocalypses, failed petty interstellar empires, and colonization attempts. Then something like the year 30,000 or so a hyper-human perfect being stepped up from the population of Earth, unified the techno-barbarian tribes, re established a peace with the Martian colony, and ultimately began the impossible task of establishing a unified Galactic Empire of Humanity. He is known only as the Emperor in all established records of the setting and was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

To make a long, epicly styled, and marvelous story short, The Emperor is betrayed by one of his clone-generals and the Empire nearly falls to the forces of Chaos. I do not mean nice, cutesy chaos either. Raw forces of sentient corruption and madness that hunger beyond the walls of spacetime. The kind that make you eat your family for kicks and burn whole worlds to test a new toy.

That's kind of a biased account. The forces of chaos are evil, but (assuming that the party line is true and the emperor is conscious and in control and that the Adeptus haven't simply been running a 10000 year long rehash of Weekend at Bernie's) the Emperor of Mankind is pretty evil to. He's so evil he makes the emperor from Star Wars look like a hippie by comparison.

[President Television]

So there's this game that has a fairly modest but fanatical following out in the gamerculture called Warhammer 40k. Set in the year 40,000, humanity lives in all corners of the galaxy and has a central government of sorts on the world of Holy Terra. That would be Earth after several apocalypses, failed petty interstellar empires, and colonization attempts. Then something like the year 30,000 or so a hyper-human perfect being stepped up from the population of Earth, unified the techno-barbarian tribes, re established a peace with the Martian colony, and ultimately began the impossible task of establishing a unified Galactic Empire of Humanity. He is known only as the Emperor in all established records of the setting and was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

To make a long, epicly styled, and marvelous story short, The Emperor is betrayed by one of his clone-generals and the Empire nearly falls to the forces of Chaos. I do not mean nice, cutesy chaos either. Raw forces of sentient corruption and madness that hunger beyond the walls of spacetime. The kind that make you eat your family for kicks and burn whole worlds to test a new toy.

That's kind of a biased account. The forces of chaos are evil, but (assuming that the party line is true and the emperor is conscious and in control and that the Adeptus haven't simply been running a 10000 year long rehash of Weekend at Bernie's) the Emperor of Mankind is pretty evil to. He's so evil he makes the emperor from Star Wars look like a hippie by comparison.

Yeah, but part of the whole point of the setting is that it's a galaxy where everyone has to be evil. The closest we have to a non-evil faction are the Tau, and they're a) gonna get curbstomped any day now, and b) implied to have some 1984 shit going on themselves. In order of least to most evil, I'd say it goes something like this:

>Tau
>Eldar
>Imperium
>Necrons
>Tyranids
>Orks
>Chaos
>Dark Eldar

There may be a little quibbling around the middle, but I think that's roughly the order.

[Cain]

Not to mention Wizard Joseph said he was the best and worst thing to ever happen to humanity.

But that's not enough to satisfy PDS's inner pedant.  Nothing ever is.

[President Television]

Not to mention Wizard Joseph said he was the best and worst thing to ever happen to humanity.

But that's not enough to satisfy PDS's inner pedant.  Nothing ever is.

Hey, the bit about Weekend At Bernie's did get a sensible chuckle out of me.