Kung Fu Jim wrote:My version of 40K has the Imperial Guard as the major factor, there are so few SM that they are more legend than fact. The Inquisition is like the old Spanish Inquisition, everyone is more afraid of them than an alien attack. Gangs rule the cities, and everyone is at war with each other. I am a guard player, that is why I view it this way. I have a Dark Angel army but never use them.

Nurglitch, Reimagining the Bolter wrote:I like to imagine bolters as being flechette firing automatic rail carbines, and being used as automatic rifles. Rather than a propellant they use a magnetic rail mounted in the smooth-bore barrel and have the battery located under the front grip. The muzzle-break is both as a flash and noise suppressor when the accelerated bolt leaves the barrel and rail assembly and hits any atmosphere that may be about. Each "shell" is simply a bundle of flechettes. The bolter fires the individual bolts or flechettes like a revolver, although without the added hassle of loading it like one as the casings for each bundle are conveniently delivered to the receiver assembly like a single bullet or shell. A nice high rate of fire, plenty of ammunition, a hard-hitting and armour piercing projectile, and the kind high-tech high maintenance high power gun that Space Marines would be proud to kill people with.

So imagine....

The recruits stood at parade rest as the veteran marched down their ranks, his resounding baritone cutting through the rarified atmosphere of the landing bay.

"Today, Neophytes, you shall be initiated into the third mystery of death: that of the howling death, the bolter. Eventually you will be able to deliver death with this divine instrument, but first you must know its nature the better to serve it. The bolter is not merely a weapon; it is the corporeal shell that houses a spirit of war. Your first duty as a marine, as an Initiate of all the ways of love, shall be to serve this spirit that it may realize the will of our master.

"In order to serve this spirit, you must serve its body, its temple. You must be able to load it with both munitions and batteries. You must be able to strip, clean, and machine every component. Unlike the las-weaponry to which you have become accustomed, the bolter is neither fool-proof nor disposable. Perhaps you have encountered debased copies in your previous lives and disregarded their utility on account of what has been termed their tempermental nature. Even properly sanctified tabernacles for such debased souls require ammunition as well as a source of nourishment such is provided for by STC power cells.

"These are not, as you may have imagined, defects which are corrected in more arcane devices. Limitations, as you will learn if you have not already, are more useful than mere power. To serve a bolter you must learn to operate within such boundaries that the opportunity for wasteful applications of force do not tempt you. And yet where extreme lethal force is required you will have both the means and the foresight to apply it."

As the veteran spoke, as he had spoken to recruits for centuries, he paid close attention to the chronometer of his autosenses, timing it against the beating of his own hearts. As usual, a Neophyte raised a hand to speak before the old man's hearts had completed 100 beats. He nodded assent, awaiting the same question that his centuries of experience as a docent had trained him to expect:

"Brother-Docent, why doesn't one of our Forge-Brothers teach us of these things? Surely the tutelage of arms and their maintenance is their province?" The Neophyte's voice still held traces of his hive-world heritage, his tongue still tripping and slurring over the clipped tones of Imperial Gothic speech.

The veteran waited another two beats of his hearts before replying, the prescribed period appropriate for that question in this stage of the ritual.

"The answer is simple: before you are permitted initiation into the mysteries of the machine you must learn the mysteries of death, for service as a Marine-Adept requires that you learn service before you can serve. Give not into the temptation that serving your bolter gives you insight into its spirit but merely the capacity to satisfy its demand for the death of its foes."

Nurglitch, Reimagining the Necrons wrote:So I was thinking, there's something pretty boring about the C'tan. For one thing there's only two available and four possible C'tan to play with. But the whole Cthulhuesque star vampire thing had me thinking about restructuring the Necron List in terms of background to better support the force organization of the Toe-to-TOW Necron Army List. Astute reader will recall that the Dark Millennium Necron List doesn't have access to any C'tan. As immortal space undead the Necrons really do need these things to match the Necromancer character of the Necron Lords. Right now the army basically functions like a Star Trek style of tech might, using co-ordinated and repeated teleporter attacks against an opponent. In a sense it acts like a host of undead being summoned out of the mist to attack the enemy. They hit, and if the player pulls it off, they fade and hit somewhere else.

So here's where the C'tan come in. Instead of being energy organisms in the corona of stars the C'tan are dark matter entities. Dark Matter, by its nature, cannot be seen. When something phases, it travels through space otherwise occupied by dark matter. The information it trasmits to the rest of reality is limited to gravity and time. The ancient Necrontyr discovered that through the use of tremendous time dams and gravitics that these entities could be brought into phase with the rest of the universe. Once in phase these dark matter entities were corrupted into weapons of terrible power, dark clouds of material that would suck stars dry in their ravenous thirst for the energy that their un-natural unlives demanded. But upon reducing a star to a red dwarf they because sated and quiescent, with time to explore their new form and worlds. Occupying the dimension of time, rather than circumscribed by it, they see the universe as an intricate machine whose past, present, and future they simultaneously inhabit. Hence their ability to manipulate local space-time is godlike, limited only by their whim. But their sight is obscured by the actions of Chaos, and their whims are coloured by the fatalism of their foresight that the universe will eventually fall to Chaos.

Their behaviour cannot be considered sane, in human terms, or rational, in any terms, or even conscious at all. They exist in a nightmarish state of permanent dreaming. To them the night sky and its galactic disc is a clock, a great wheel of time, counting down the time until their own annihilation. Within that dream they act out their ravening births compulsively consuming energy and ordering it into cold dead matter. If the Necrontyr had intended that they be a hateful life-extinguishing superweapon, capable of scouring star systems clean they that spiteful and ancient race succeeded beyond its wildest hopes of mutually assured destruction. As a result most life in the galaxy was destroyed, including the Necrontyr themselves as the C'tan assumed mastery over them first in mind and then in body. Indeed it was the ancient Necrontyr's wish to be granted the seeming immortality of their enemies the Old Ones whose psychic mastery had granted them as much life as they wished for.

But such is the cosmic irony of the universe that a race denied the psychic talent would be the one to perfect the mechanic talent wherein the C'tan excelled. The first C'tan were the culmination of long and arduous researches, trials, and calculations, of scientific endeavour where no natural sympathy existed. In the end converting the ravenous masses of gravity that held stars together into star-dimming weapons that swept star systems clean of hostile life seemed like the ideal 'clean' weapon to use against the reality-warping Old Ones. Where the Old Ones were content to commune with the meaning of the universe, the Necrontyr were driven ahead clutching for the power that science gives the Unsighted.

Where Necrons are involved then, the C'tan may be represented on the battlefield by an avatar, a manifestation of the C'tan, a puppet with which it makes its will known to its servants. There are three ways of fielding a C'tan in this fashion. The first is to simply include the C'tan in your list to represent when the C'tan in not manifesting an avatar and cannot be harmed. In a sense here the C'tan is acting like a support system maintaining communications, enabling teleportation, providing logistics, and so on. While the C'tan could conceivably make something out of nothing using vaccuum energy, it would do so at a net loss to its own energies to control the process. Likewise synthesizing gold from water is a slow and wasteful process. However bullets may be deflected, gravity over wide areas can be affected, electrons can be coaxed from an area, and the atmosphere can be stirred. It does so as a preordained after-thought, much like the beaurocratic ministrations of the indifferent civil servant may carry out a death sentence or deliver the mail. In this sense a C'tan provides a Necron force with the massive logistic trail that more conventional forces require. The C'tan cannot be harmed, unless through the defeat of its servants.

The second way to represent a C'tan would be with its avatar on the field and its strategic effects in play. The avatar is, in a sense, like the T-1000 from T2: Judgment Day and in another sense rather like a storage battery into which the C'tan has stored some of its energy. They can only be created in the massive pyramidal stasis tombs where a dark matter entity may be incarnated into three additional dimensions like an intrinsic field given a body. It moves and fights like a skimmer armour machine elite with the regenerate, pariah, and teleporter special rules.

That may give you a clue as to the C'tan's purposes with the human mutants known as the Pariahs. These hideous creatures compliment the C'tan, except that instead of being blind to the Warp they devour it with their own ravening presence. The C'tan, despite their nigh absolute power over the material or static part of the universe, are dependent upon that sameness and homogeniety. The power of the Warp is to them a flame that they can dampen momentarily but will eventually wither under. The human race, for the purpose of the C'tan, exists solely to produce human pariahs that may be turned into Necron Pariahs to ward the C'tan against the onslaught of warp-energy that psychic attacks are conveyed by. Their carefully ordered existence is a fragile existence, a crystalline moment in time that will shatter if subjected to uneven stresses.

Where such an entity can send its minions to hunt down psyckers and psychic threats, and even cleave off parts of itself, it becomes clear that only the greatest of warp blasts could conceivably destroy the whole thing at once. Such entites are so difficult to kill that the alternative, well known to Inquisitors of the Ordo Malleus, is to prevent the entity from manifesting in the first place. Stasis tombs, the constant work of the Necrons, are located around the galaxy and when activated seize the nearest dark matter entity and expand it beyond the bounds of mortal comprehension into a terrible nightmare of godhood and hunger. Without the Stasis Tombs the C'tan lose phase with the material parts of the universe and return to their previously placid existence resting outside of time.

The third way a C'tan may be included in a game would be as the sarcophagus of a Stasis Tomb on a planet or in a Necron vessel. The destruction of that sarcophagus would prevent the C'tan from acting either strategically or as a model but it would also necessitate ceding the homeground advantage to the Necrons. The only way to truly stop a Necron invasion where a C'tan is involved would be to destroy its stasis tomb and thus its existence in phase with the living universe.

Nurglitch, Reimagining Tyranids wrote:Here's what I'm thinking:

Imagine that the Tyranids were much more conventional than previously envisioned. Imagine the Tyranids being more like ants, more like they were envisioned in Rogue Trader.

Rogue Trader mentioned two interesting things about Tyranids. The first was that they were adapted to zero gravity and couldn't spend much time in a strong gravity well. The second was that long term exposure to them tended to drive other races crazy.

Now, suppose that Tyanids had evolved to be space-going creatures - resistant to radiation, temperature extremes, and well armoured. The problem is that Tyranid gene-engineering is restricted by the presence of strong gravity. A Hive could only regulate the kind of organisms it produced in a micro-gravity environment. Conversely long periods in micro-gravity environments results in them going haywire with cancers and other genetic damage.

This forces two things -

1. Tyranids must take and hold planets to produce more bugs.

2. Tyranids need fresh supplies of DNA in order to make their process of gene-engineering efficient. This is important, because when the Hive runs low on a particular organism, or needs a new organism the hive needs to benefit from the overall reallocation of genetic resources spent to produce the required DNA.

Like we need constant ingestion of foreign proteins to break down and reassemble into useful proteins. Except that the Hive recycles as much genetic material as possible.

Now, the reason why exposure to these Tyranids would cause insanity I offer the following:

1. Constant and pervasive telepathic communication between Tyranid organisms leaches into the brains of even the most psychically dull, warping their behaviour so they begin to think they're Tyranids.

2. Exposure to the sheer alien weirdness of beings adapted to live in micro-gravity.

3. There's something about being exposed to creatures that appear to live in the worst abatoir in Hell that's only one step down from being exposed to extra-dimensional incarnations of Chaos.

In a side note, in "The Mote in God's Eye", alien Moties are driven mad by humans by attempting to understand them.

Nurglitch, Reimagining Ork Technology wrote:Orks as steam-punk, or 'gas-light', gothic fantasy. Basically I remember back in the day when I was introduced to orks through Rogue Trader and Space Marine 2nd edition they made things like classic Tolkien-esque orcs: crude but sturdy.

They could make things like steam-powered gargants, whose boilers were comparable to fusion reactors (aka plasma reactors) driving Imperial Battle Titans, in yield if not actual power output!

Basically I've been reading lots of "Girl Genius" from Studio Foglio recently, and I've grown rather fond of the 'Jagermonsters' from that comic. In that comic they have people called 'sparks' or 'madboys' that are capable of extreme acts of mad science. These madboys still require an education, instead of having the absurd innate knowledge of mechanics that people suppose 3rd/4th edition mekboy-orks to have.

The way I read it, Anzion's wacky theory is the kind of magical bs research that stultifies progress in the 40k ficton. Basically because Anzion can't figure out how ork machines work, he comes up with an explanation that is as valid as contemporary theories of 'Intelligent Design' - that is to say it's not a valid explanation. An explanation that does not beg the question would be to say instead that ork technology follows a gaslight-style metaphysics.

One thing that irritates me about Anzion's theory of psychic resonance is that on the 2nd page of the spread, the piece's narrator makes an error somewhat related to that of the 'poverty of stimulous' argument. The preface even says: "Anzion has indugled himself in such a degree of speculation in the original as to render it highly supect." It's up there with the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer as a piece of Imperial pig-gak ignorance. Funny when taken with a grain of salt, silly if taken literally.

The poverty of stimulous argument notes that because humans produce more linguistic behaviour than they can learn, that there must be some innate mechanism that converts small amounts of input into a torrent of output. Individuals are not blank slates who can only know how to use the language that they are taught.

Noam Chomsky once proposes a 'universal grammer', suggesting that there is a single grammar from which all languages are derived, as one such mechanism. A problem with this prosposal was one mentioned by Daniel Dennett, who noted that ability to use syntax did not seem to actually precede familiarity with semantics. A case in point being children's tendency to overgeneralize the use of some grammatical rules.

We cannot assume from the fact that orks have a high degree of aptitude in certain tasks, and that attaining such aptitude appears to vastly exceeds the human ability to learn, that orks have knowledge in any sense of the term encoded in their genes. At most we can validly infer that orks can acquire certain skills very fast. At most orks only have an innate predisposition towards developing certain skills, rather than innate knowledge about those skills, or innate skills themselves.

The "Anzion Theorum of Orkoid Mechamorphic Resonant Kinetics." is likewise full of interesting epistemological errors.

I think a view of orks as being rather like a pack of madboy jagermonsters is not only preferable on aestheic grounds, but also on grounds of consistency. Anzion's theories are deliberately presented as being crack-pot theories in the ork codex.

While it's a neat little piece of atmosphere because it nicely represents an Imperial (Martian, really) attitudes and ability in science (i.e.: dismal), it's not so good for telling you about orks. Too many people taking it literally means that too many people think that ork weapons just 'work because the ork thinks it does', and other tripe that undermines the depth of the ork archetype.

I think that a spark-like aptitude for learning certain skills is more consistent with ork role as humanity's even worse twin - getting by on toughness, aggression, and pure bloody-mindedness. The lunatic machinery produced as a result of this aptitude is, of course, just the kind of super-science that W40k does well.

So in preference to the magical green plant-men of Anzion, whose natural abilities literally must be explained by magic (the kind of faith-based approach to science parodied in W40k) and the high quality kind of genetic science usually reserved for Hollywood, I'd suggest W40k orks that correspond better to a cross between HHGG Vogons, Foglio jagermonsters and sparks, and the vile orcs of Tolkien.

I mean, imagine the dark steamy interior of a space hulk captured by orks. They've effected repairs, and colonized the interior of the hulk. Deep in the bowels of the ship, where all the gak accumulates, ork slavers dig new orks out of the mud. Holds are converted to workshops, where mekboyz and gretchin assistants hammer out weapons and ammunition. The whole atmosphere is red-lit industrial revolution-style hell. Machines working perfectly, but with no safety mechanics or precautions take. Industrial accidents are common, but since they happen right before nosh-time, that's not really a problem. Vicious dog-eat-dog dickensian capitalism at its most base.

Ork physiology is something else that's crossed my mind. I've heard that thrill-seekers tend to be somewhat insensitive - hence the thrill-seeking to give these people the rush that more ordinary people get in less extreme circumstances.

To say that orks are physiologically insensitive, with a dull nervous system, fits nicely with the idea of them being very well adjusted for war. They get a thrill out of extraordinarily dangerous situations, mind-numbing recoil, and high-g forces. The kind of situations that would leave humans bruised, dizzy, shell-shocked, or worse.

Hence the orkish disregard for safety and apparent lack of death-fear - their emotionally insensitive as a result of being physically insensitive. They don't understand, and don't care, why other species sometimes cringe like grots when shot at or beaten. This brutality of spirit and body means that a special slaver caste is necessary to care for slave populations, else the slaves do not last long under the orkish lash.

In most healthy orks of all castes this insensitivity no doubt blossoms into cruelty, sadism, and other sociopathic behaviour. In a human society, an ork would be incredibly anti-social - if not criminally insane. In an ork society, a society of violent sociopaths with incredibly tough and insensitive bodies, a criminally insane ork is a well-adjusted ork.

Given the sort of equipment that such creatures would employ, it's no wonder that Imperial servants have difficulty making it work. These aren't the kind of user-friendly machines like STCs. If the barrel normally gets hot enough to burn unprotected hands, an Imperial servant likely doesn't think the weapon is working correctly. But the human doesn't know that the ork either doesn't care, or thinks that such over-heating was a bonus on the ice-world of its hatching.