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Hey guys, Decided that this would be the place to ask any questions about 40k ficiton writing, so here goes:

Part of my plot is that a group of 41st millennium "Guardsman" are tasked with investigating a pre-heresy ship that's been found drifting somewhere. Thing is, those a freaking huge, but I want to keep it focused on one group of troopers. I was planning on having them be just one part of the deployment, but still...

I'm just not confident in balancing between the overall action and the characters I want to introduce.

Hell, I'm not confident in my entire endeavor: I've read other people's fanficions, a lot of the general lore that's out there, but as far as any real fluff books go? nada. zilch.

Thoughts, people? Would it be better if I introduced the basic premise of what I'm trying to do? (It's just that I'm going to post it here later and I don't want to give things away).

Also, it's almost 3:00am as i type this, my apologies if I'm being incoherent.

Welcome to Dakka.

Dealing with the huge scale of 40k while keeping it focused is something that can be pretty difficult, especially when dealing with IG, the most numerous faction (besides nids, and I can't see a Gant telling a story)

The key thing is to decide what you want from the piece: Do you want an all-out action thriller, or something more focused on character? It seems like you want to go for the latter, and my advice would be to keep it simple. All you need is a couple of lines about the scale of the operation, maybe some vox-chatter from other units in other pars of the ship, and then focus purely on the characters. The reader, if familiar with 40k fluff, will know that anything involving the IG is on a huge scale, so you can kind of assume that you don't need to bring it up that often.

Think of it like 'Saving Private Ryan', if you've ever seen that. Everyone knows that it's taking place amidst a huge-scale military operation, but you are more invested in the character's personal stories so the film focuses on them, only dropping hints now and then to what's going on around them. In the same way, create some characters in your squad that people will be interested enough in that the larger operation doesn't matter so much. Make the opp as a whole a setting, rather than a story.

Resist the urge to plunge the squad straight into combat. Build up atmosphere, character and setting so that when fighting does happen, it means something other than 'let's kill aliens'.

The other thing I'll mention is that the community here is usually very helpful and willing to offer advice or criticism on work once it's up, so the best you can do is draft the story and post it, and people will be able to give you feedback that you can then act on. It takes a while to really get the feel for 40k, so your best bet is just to go for it, post it, and redraft it once you've had feedback.

Best of luck.

The ship doesn't have to be huge. Suppose it's a prototype from the Dark Age of Technology, and it's a highly advanced but much smaller ship than the flying Imperial cathedrals.

 Paradigm wrote:
Welcome to Dakka.

Dealing with the huge scale of 40k while keeping it focused is something that can be pretty difficult, especially when dealing with IG, the most numerous faction (besides nids, and I can't see a Gant telling a story)

The key thing is to decide what you want from the piece: Do you want an all-out action thriller, or something more focused on character? It seems like you want to go for the latter, and my advice would be to keep it simple. All you need is a couple of lines about the scale of the operation, maybe some vox-chatter from other units in other pars of the ship, and then focus purely on the characters. The reader, if familiar with 40k fluff, will know that anything involving the IG is on a huge scale, so you can kind of assume that you don't need to bring it up that often.

Think of it like 'Saving Private Ryan', if you've ever seen that. Everyone knows that it's taking place amidst a huge-scale military operation, but you are more invested in the character's personal stories so the film focuses on them, only dropping hints now and then to what's going on around them. In the same way, create some characters in your squad that people will be interested enough in that the larger operation doesn't matter so much. Make the opp as a whole a setting, rather than a story.

Resist the urge to plunge the squad straight into combat. Build up atmosphere, character and setting so that when fighting does happen, it means something other than 'let's kill aliens'.

The other thing I'll mention is that the community here is usually very helpful and willing to offer advice or criticism on work once it's up, so the best you can do is draft the story and post it, and people will be able to give you feedback that you can then act on. It takes a while to really get the feel for 40k, so your best bet is just to go for it, post it, and redraft it once you've had feedback.

Best of luck.

^This^

Have a comunique from.....(add preference) reporting on the vessel and it's location and add any other detail you want/require. Skip ahead to the reaction force being sent to investigate the ship. Have a rough outline of it's vessels, capabilities and troops rendered into fluff instead of just saying ba, da and blah and have the reader join your squad before deployment (or in transit through the warp to add more of a background) and set the scene for your characters personalities and quirks as they gear up and embark against the back drop of thier company/regiment doing the same around them. Use paradigms idea of vox chatter once on the vessel so you can concentrate on your squad/etc and not have to worry about writing the big picture. This is purely for ideas and you dont have to use any of what I have said.
Good luck

Thanks for the advice everyone. I've got several intro's going right now, and the most promising seems to be my idea of the "Earthborn Public Database" to introduce some worldbuilding. Unless it's a cheap move to segue into the main arc by revealing a guy browsing a terminal?

Anyways, stay tuned for said database anyway, it'd be good for feedback.