Monday, January 18, 2010

The history of the Space Marine Primarchs

WH40K,Space Marines,humor
(You'll have to click the picture for the full effect)

Originally posted by cappadocius of rpg.net:

In the beginning, the Emprah decided to make twenty Magical Clone Babies to lead his hyper-masculinized psychopathic super-warriors. The Ruinous Powers (well, mainly Tzeentch, because he's the only one who cares about this shit) said, "Oh noes! If the Emprah succeeds, he will guide Humanity through their embarrassing psychic puberty and will then be no more our playthings than the Orkz!" and then Gork pantsed him. After snapping his fingers a few dozen times, he got Khorne and Nurgle's attention, and Slaanesh wandered over from the Eldar section of the Warp, and they got together and made a giant Warp Gate and sucked all the Magical Clone Babies into it, and then, because it's Tzeentch, rather than doing the smart thing and killing the little bastards, he threw them around onto inhabited planets where they could grow up big and strong and get a culture and shit.

Then the Emprah had many hilarious adventures running around the Galaxy saving his Magical Clone Babies, and all was well until they decided to make a series where the Magical Clone Babies were all grown up and would be lost based on their own hubris. The Primarchs, as the Magical Clone Babies called themselves, all met horrible fates, and were lost a second time:

1 - Lion el'Johnson, the Dark Angel primarch, lies in enchanted slumber in the ruins of his planet, which was blow'd up by Chaos, waiting for a beautiful prince to kiss him and awaken him.

2 - He was deleted from Imperial Records, probably because he said the Emperor's pauldrons looked "a little big. Don't you think you might want to tone it down a little there, Liberace?"

3 - Fulgrim was corrupted horribly by a Daemon Weapon and because The Emprah was too busy to teach any of his sons the powerful psychic shields he'd spent the last 38,000 years perfecting, fell to Chaos.

4 - Perturabo showed great inherent talent at trench warfare and defensive siege warfare. So his dad made him do that shit over and over and over again, I guess in the hopes that he'd get a Trench Warfare scholarship or something, until Perturabo grew to hate his dad, and he rebelled and fell in with Chaos.

5 - Jaghatai Khan rode his motorcycle into the Dark Eldar part of the Webway, and being kind of one of those weekend-biker types with the pretty bike and $2000 leather jacket, was kidnapped by real bikers and was never seen again.

6 - Leman Russ was a hard-drinking asshole and took a bunch of his favorite drinking buddies into the Eye of Terror and, being drunk 24-7, almost certainly promptly drove them into a planet. Being an asshole, they weren't wearing their seatbelts. No one misses him.

7 - Rogal Dorn is one of the only Primarchs to die heroically. Unfortunately, his Space Marine lackeys are creepy bastards who keep his hands in a drawer and carve their names into the bones.

8 - Konrad Curze was Batman. Tormented by nightmares his whole life, and coming from a planet that was basically Arkham Asylum, Konrad was snubbed by most of his brothers, outright laughed at when he asked for help getting his planet back under control, and eventually committed suicide by cop.

9 - Sanguinus got his ass shived by Horus. It's all right though, because he was a filthy mutant.

10 - Ferrus Manus was the guy who was ultimately responsible for Fulgrim's fall to Chaos. Fulgrim came to him and said, "Hey, our brother Horus is a little concerned that Dad's gone a little woo-woo, and he's going to make a bit of a war by way of intervention, because it's the only language dad understands." and, at the time, Fulgrim actually believed this. But Ferrus Manus freaked out and said, "NOOOOO! THAT CAN'T BE TRUE! OUR FATHER IS AWESOME!" and attacked Fulgrim. Fulgrim, being more of a badass than Ferrus Manus could ever be, chopped off his head. He was sad then, and the Daemon Weapon he had said, "I can make you not sad anymore." and Fulgrim, not knowing a goddamn thing about Chaos or Daemons, said, "Okay." and the Daemon burned out Fulgrim's soul and took over.

11 - We're fairly certain that Magical Clone Baby #11 was a girl, and so the Emprah never looked too hard for her.

12 - Angron kept getting treated like a bitch by his father, who also went out of his way to not only betray every value Angron held dearly but also to forbid him to raise his own Space Marine kids the way Angron himself was raised. Angron finally got sick of that shit, and joined Horus' Intervention.

13 - Roboute Gulliaman was a kiss-up and a brown-noser to his Father, but treated every other one of his brothers like some sort of half-witted fuck-up. Finally, Daemon Fulgrim couldn't put up with any more of that shit and stabbed his brother in the neck. Good riddance.

14 - The Emprah stole the only thing Mortarion ever cared about, so when Horus declared he was having an intervention for his father's massive assholery, Mortarion joined up tout suite. Then Nurgle held him hostage in the Warp until he and his Space Marine legions agreed to worship Nurgle in exchange for not dying of horrible diseases. Mortarion never really got to have that intervention.

15 - Magnus the Red had one shtick - he was really, really good at Warp Sorcery. So, of course, the Emprah forbids him from doing it. When Magnus finds out that Horus was not only going to have an intervention, but planned on beating their dad up, Magnus, being a good son, used Warp Sorcery to get a message to the Emprah as quickly as possible. Magnus barely got two words out before his dad flipped his shit and sent Leman Russ out to drag Magnus back to his room on Terra and ground him. Magnus was understandably put out, and joined Team Chaos, while the Emprah never found out about Horus' plans until Horus started dropping orbital fucking bombs on his house.

16 - Horus was the Emprah's favorite and put in charge of his other brothers. Then the Emprah decided that sharing any sort of information with his son and commander-in-chief would be stupid, and stopped talking to him, locking himself up in the garage, working on a way to hijack the Webway. Out in the wilderness, Horus got infected with a little bit of Chaos, which made him a little crazy, and the Ruinous Powers were able to convince him that his dad's suspicious behavior was a sign that he'd betrayed everything he'd brought Horus up to believe, and then they possessed his ass (Not even the Emprah's favorite is allowed to learn about psychic shielding, apparently!) and started killing bitches.

17 - Lorgar was brought up in a strict religious environment. The Emprah hated religion. Rather than explain this to Lorgar and use some of that logic and science to give Lorgar some perspective, he gives him 10,000 superhuman killing machines and tells him to go conquer in his name. Then, when Lorgar, rather understandaby, takes his time to thoroughly pacify a planet and make them ultimately loyal to his dad, the Emprah reams him out for "all this religion bullshit" and for "taking too damn long. Your brothers Roboute and Leman have conquered, like, a hundred more planets than you. Each!" So, when a offer came along to worship some gods that LIKED being worshiped and didn't care how long it took you to conquer the universe, Lorgar took the offer.

18 - Vulkan was the token black Magical Clone Baby. When that asshole Roboute took over the Primarchs and laid out all sorts of quotas and laws that basically screwed over the brothers, Vulkan said, "Fuck this shit." and disappeared forever.

19 - Corax was insecure and didn't have many space marines of his own. So, he tried making a bunch of his own, but they were ugly monster-mutants, and since The Emprah and his brothers Roboute and Leman were massive racists and hated mutants, he ended up having to kill them. Then he sulked in his room for a year, before driving into the Eye of Terror, and probably getting hit by the planet Leman Russ drove into and knocked out of orbit.

20 - Alpharius and Omegon were twins, and the youngest Magical Clone Babies. Their older brother Roboute mocked them for not having conquered as many worlds as he had, even though he'd been at it for 200 years before the Emprah even found him. But even then, he tried to be nice, until some wacky alien masons told him that Horus needed to succeed at his intervention, or the Emprah would start covering everything with skulls and bad Latin and flying aborted fetuses. Well, the twins were having none of that shit, so they joined Horus. Whereupon, Roboute killed one of them, and the other one was never seen again.

A sad story, of a dysfunctional family. It'd make a kick-ass anime. But that's the story of why the Primarchs were lost. Both times.

Friday, January 15, 2010

The NGR: in progress

I've started writing the "stock" army list for the New German Republic. If I can think of a half-decent back-story, I'll post it here.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Crater: the fledgling days

So I've written up a quick little 1:300 scale sci-fi armor rules set, borrowing from Dirtside II (Ground Zero Games) and OGRE Miniatures (Steve Jackson Games).

I still have yet to playtest it, but I'm in the process of painting up two armies. I'm using some Future Wars and Dirtside minis from GZG, and the Neo-Soviet line from Brigade Models at the moment.

The things that I like about Dirtside II are the vehicle design rules and the versatility, but I couldn't really work up enthusiasm for the chit-based damage system. I've seen house rules online that try to work around it, but they all seem more complex than they have to be.

So I decided to write up a hybrid rule set, with a strict K.I.S.S. mindset.

To me, the most boring aspect of most games is the IGOUGO system. John Q. moves all of his units, then Bill moves all of his, then John gets to blast the Hell out of Bill's stuff before he can even react. You can't really compensate for this mechanic. I've seen numerous rule sets try*, and I've seen even more players rabidly gnawing their dice in frustration as a result.

So in Crater, players take turns activating formations, until all units have either moved, fired, set to overwatch or designated targets for bombardment. Once all units have made their actions and all hits from the Activation phase are marked, the players take turns resolving them in the same order.

I liked the morale rules from Dirtside and I considered just using the default Combat Resolution Table from Steve Jackson, but I wanted targeting system and unit training quality to factor into the game as well. My solution was to add the ever-ubiquitous To-Hit roll to the mix.

I decided to use a simple attack strength/armor ratio, borrowing the CRT with a slight adjustment to account for the "To-Hit roll" element.

Anyway, I've got a skeletal website set up for the project, with a link to the rough draft of the rulebook. Once I've got some playtesting done the site will have more meat added to it.

I will also post battle reports and pictures of my finished miniatures here on this blog.

* Little additional rules that try to make the action seem simultaneous. It never works. Playing Battletech for example, had the infamous "I blew your 'Mechs leg off, but that doesn't take effect until the end of the turn" anachronism.