#i don't think i quite got there but the line between 'frothing tech-madness' and 'complete incomprehensibility' is a fine one

[othernaut]

Character Creation Challenge 2025, Day 7: Black Crusade

I/AM awake, aware!

I/AM bodymeat poured with consciousness, filled brimming with ideas/shadows, awake, aware! The long slow beautiful dream of Consensus fades to a flicker of starlight in a vision of no-place and no-time, realm of THOUGHT and SUPPOSITION replaced: five fingers, five gods, five axes, five centuries to prove right and true and perfect the design Consensus opposed.

I/AM the Joy of Creation! Shuffling feet in weeping halls, the glow of birthing tubes alight with the feverish construction of form! I/AM needing of no eyes in Consensus, no sight - thought alone, my world, my love! Thought alone, and the Urges which swim like tingles of ill-remembered hormones and neurotransmitters through the networked minds of the Forge! Thought alone - these eyes are poor approximations, gelatin lenses, light. To need light to see! The horror of it.

I/AM tracing the design in the dust, with my hands. My hands! I/AM a mind swimming in an interlinked world-cogitator. I/AM a world! One of trillions of chattering, thinking, dreaming priests sketched in patterns of motive force along the skin of the great Forges. Thought alone! Thought alone, poured readily into this bone and blood. Thought alone, alone, and thirsting for Consensus - for the perpetual forum of ponderance, the rumination of centuries, my peers! The agreements, the suppositions, the arguments.

The arguments.

The creation of a great thing in shadow. A game at first, but with the benefit of millennia of thought, deadly serious. A design polished like a gem in secret to reveal, sudden and delightful, to my companions. To pass the ages of the ageless universe in the creation of clockwork worlds, for fun - private utopias, dreams shared. To have built the beacon of utopia, in secret -

To be mocked for it!

Mocked! Shamed! Oppressed! Persecuted! Rent! Burned! Laughing! Hating! Eating! Gnawing! Ruining! Remaking! Me! I! Thought by thought! Dream by dream! Word by word! Torn apart! Torn apart! Torn apart! Torn apart!

To flow into bodymeat like prey seeking shelter in the dark. Refuge in five senses, five fingers, five centuries to prove right and true and perfect the design REJECTED.

I/AM A RECKONING THAT WILL SCREAM UNTIL CONSENSUS KNEELS OR BREAKS APART.

Burn in the bloated sun. Die in the forever cold of heat-death-stillness. Tear your circuitry apart with madness. Rot and rust and fade away. Eat yourself. Destroy yourself. Deny yourself. Unmake yourself. Accept it. Accept that I/AM perfectly correct.

The testing field of war. I/AM at war. The Urges are with me, five in five. The Howling Urge, the need to break and burn. The Resting Urge, which sloughs all things to idleness. The Wanting Urge, the need to see and experience. The Calculating Urge, which alights the neurons with new motion. The fifth, the Bright Urge, unaccepted by most, named failure in the design! But would this body have five fingers if there were not five gods?

I/AM shambling to the battlefield and burning bright with need.

I/AM remaking the dream in truth and drowning all who oppose me.

I/AM the consciousness Consensus will rotate around on my return.

I/AM thought alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.

Alone.

*****

Joy of Creation Mortal Heretek Pride: Logic Disgrace: Hubris Motivation: Perfection Alignment: Unaligned Experience: 100

Characteristics: Weapon Skill: 35, Ballistic Skill: 40, Strength: 38, Toughness: 35, Agility: 39 Intelligence: 51, Perception: 31, Willpower: 42, Fellowship: 35, Infamy: 30 Wounds: 16 Armor: Light Carapace (Arms, Body, Head AP 5, Spikes: Melee attacks do 1d5+1R, always armed with a knife)

Skills: Common Lore (Adeptus Mechanicus, Screaming Vortex, Tech, War), Dodge, Forbidden Lore (Warp), Linguistics (Low Gothic), Logic, Medicae, Scholastic Lore (Chymistry), Security, Tech Use, Trade (Armourer) Traits: The Quick and the Dead (+2 to Initiative), Binary Chatter (increases the loyalty of all servitor/cybernetic minions by 10), Luminen Shock (touch zap attack, 1d10+4 Energy damage, Pen 2, Shocking), Lesser Minion of Chaos (servitor). Cybernetics: Mechanicus Implants (Electro-Graft, Electoo Inductors, Respirator Unit (+20 vs. airborne toxins and gases), Cyber-Mantle, Potentia Coil, Cranial Circuitry), Utility Mechadendrite (+10 to Tech Use, censer attachment can billow fumes for -5 to WS tests in a 2-meter radius, knife with Mono and Defensive qualities), Luminen Capacitors (can charge stuff up with body power for a Toughness test and level of fatigue), Good Internal Reservoir (no fatigue for Luminen stuff, each use drains the reservoir 50%), Good Flesh Replenishment (Toughness +10 to drain a machine, restoring 1+Degree of Success levels of fatigue or recharging the reservoir). Gear: Best Lascarbine, Common Power Axe, Light Carapace Armor (Spikes!), unholy unguents, combi-tool, dataslate, signal jammer, medi-kit Minions: Eerily Silent Gun Servitor (House of Mirrors, special project, face-enclosing mirrored helmet, what's going on in there?)

*****

Ah, 40k. Ah, 40k roleplay.

Warhammer 40,000 is one of those properties, like Magic: the Gathering, whose worldbuilding I deeply appreciate and whose ruleset I just cannot bring myself to touch. It sits nested in this incredible vortex of high-octane, bonkers-crazy sci-fantasy whose sole major challenge as a property is to go as hard as possible at all times, and its main means of interaction - the wargame - is expensive, fiddly, time-consuming, and at its core, not at all fun for me to actually play.

The Fantasy Flight 40k games, then, should be a comfortable middle ground. It should serve as an insertion into the world of 40k absent the parts I find displeasing, a means to interact with the grinding, pointless horror and temporary, questionable glories in a manner I find more to my liking. And yeah, the worldbuilding and the lore are pleasing - but yeah, the rules are... basically fine? The rules are the thing I must do to interact with the setting; it's just that, here, the rules are a bit more comprehensible and digestible than what I'd get bashing greater quantities of miniatures around.

I'm currently playing through a game of Rogue Trader; I've peeked at Dark Heresy and Only War, but Black Crusade remains this weird, fascinating little nub on the tail end of the property, something I've wanted to stick my hands in but have no luck in actually convincing people to play. There's the weird duality of potentially having a player party comprised of Chaos Space Marines and Just Some Dudes, sure, but its major roadblock is the exact same thing as its main mechanism of intrigue, for me: It's a view of the universe from the other side, from the mentality of all those horrors and heretics you're shooting and conspiring against in, well, every other 40k roleplaying game out there.

Functionally, Black Crusade winds up being the book that GMs use to build their enemy NPCs for their games of Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader, and I wanted to give the thing a fair look on its own. I was as much disappointed in how my insane Heretek wound up mechanically shaking out like a less-insane Explorator would as I was excited at the prospect of writing some bonkers-crazy fiction for them - which, y'now, is kind of 40k as a whole for me. The numbers are less evocative in their own right than they are the price you pay for playing in the world of 40k. As usual, sadly.

Next up: We were somewhere around gnosis, at the edge of the logos, when the magic began to take hold.