That's a very fair suggestion to make, but I don't know if I'll change the thread title yet because, every possible choice you could've taken to distance yourselves from the setting at large aside, it's core to the later stages. I'll explain the reasoning that went into me posting the thread with the standing title. It all started when I was replaying Chapter Master a few weeks back in a vain effort to capture some of that mid 2010s-nostalgia and distract from the circumstances, when it occurred to me that if it was likely the vision would never be wholly realized, there was no incentive to continue when a forum game could do the same, if not in more depth, and ensure I wasn't the only person enjoying it. The problem is that a 40k Loyalist Chapter Quest would be, by necessity, somewhat restrictive, and while running a Renegade Chapter Quest had its appeal, I didn't feel inspired at the time toward that subset of the lore. It occurred to me that any Imperium-centered Quest that wasn't focused around an underhive ganger's or Rogue Trader's or similarly impressive or desperate individual's oexploits somewhere would have the same intrinsic intrinsic limitations, which is what gives the Imperium so much of its aesthetic and allure, and I wanted to run a faction management game that would get into the core of the 40k setting.
Running a Ruinous Powers-related thread of some kind was possible, but arguably even more narrowly fixated, which again, is what makes the faction as it is, and that's indispensable, so that wasn't an option. I'd given up on doing something with the 40k setting until I was trawling through some obscure bits of the Lexicanum, re-found a favorite minor xenos species of mine, and considering the duration of the canonical timeline, it all clicked. Instead of slotting a sub-faction into an already existing major faction, it would be centered around a completely different and almost entirely ignored perspective: that of the independent, minor species struggling to survive and ensure a future for themselves and their kind in the grim darkness of the far future. From there, I was going to give you a simple, by-rote series of choices to determine your starting circumstances and broad inhuman adaptions/psychology, but I remembered an
evolution game I lurked almost a decade ago, and realized that there was nothing preventing me from taking the same concept along with a hideous, purple-prose laden bastardization vaguely resembling
Haspen's brilliant SPAMKINGDOM series for the intermediary stage, and instead of foisting my own preconceptions on what a species could be, applying them to the thread as a first and second stage so that they could
make their species and define who they were overtime, with the hundreds of aspects and deviations from the norm not a single person could've ever foreseen, all to make something as deep as any 40k lore, so that when the species does attain sapience and reach for the hostile stars, it would genuinely mean something. That's what 40k is about to me, that grim hope that even if the galaxy is irreversibly terrible, that doom can be delayed, even indefinitely by anyone willing to put in significant effort and sacrifice, and maybe, just maybe, if an out-of-context species were lucky, fast, and brazen enough, that preordained outcome could even be changed.
That said, nothing is going to be handed to your cutrent species or its descendants. I'm going to be rolling for everything as transparently as possible without introducing the risk of metagaming, which I don't think is going to be a problem to begin with at all, and already have a handful of random tables at work ironing out the state of the sector surrounding your starting home-system. I'll be keeping OC donut steel to a minimum on my end, but given how vague the DAoT and Age of Strife are outside of select lore tidbits, some of that is inevitable, and I'll be making every effort to follow the precedent preexisting lore has set and preserve verisimilitude from a thematic and if not hard, at least squishy scientific standpoint. My apologies for getting carried away rambling, if anyone else is annoyed that the timeline hasn't entered the 40k, I'm more than comfortable changing the title, though I'm not entirely certain which Terran millennia life emerged on the radioactive, jagged, large mineral jackpot of a planet. Thank you all for participating so far, I've got a dentist appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning and noon, so I won't be able to get an update out upon awakening before getting into my day-to-day business as I generally prefer to, but I will be posting one later tomorrow afternoon or night, or morning, for those of you in alternate timezones to my own. You all take care.
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Topic: You are a Minor Xenos Species in Warhammer 40k (Read 23537 times)