Just wondering if enough people are here for posts and discussion about what people are creating for their table top games. If you are and want to share a snippet about what you’re working on, that would be great!
Just wondering if enough people are here for posts and discussion about what people are creating for their table top games. If you are and want to share a snippet about what you’re working on, that would be great!
I prefer Oldhammer to modern 40k tonally, so have created shall we think of it as a fork from the 40k universe. The conceit is a sector that has been cut off from the outside galaxy by constant almost nearly impenetrable warp storms for the last several thousand years.
Within this bubble my personal Space Marine and Imperial Guard forces exist, as do Ork forces run by a friend. They have history and fluff. I make fluff for the planets and major figures in this sector, creating a personal canon with 40k’s canon being a foundation that I feel comfortable being loose with.
So far most actual gaming has been done with the OnePageRules systems, though I am trying to drum up interest in playing 2e or 3e games for novelty.
The lore around 40k is interesting but I’m not a huge fan of grimdark. My settings and stories are on the noble side (though they can be rather dark, and I’ve inflicted sanity damage on players before.) What would you say is the difference between modern and oldhammer that draws you to the older tone?
Oh I like the dark. The darkness is very important for 40k.
A massive difference between old and current 40k is the amount of mystery and vagueness that existed in Oldhammer. The Primarchs were dead and gone. Everything about the Emperor was a question mark. There were only the smallest snippets of fluff about the Horus Heresy.
It created a particular tone about a universe where the glory of the past was long ago and never coming back. The current universe was sinking stagnation and fighting an eternal fight after humanity had already gotten to the “bad ending”.
Modern 40k has had the Horus Heresy novels, which replace the classy vagueness and mystery with detailed play by plays. Perhaps characters inside the universe don’t know about the details, but we as the audience do, and that changes the entire tone. Rather than Primarchs, the Emperor, and the Heresy having tantalizing rare clues scattered in the lore, you have thousands of detailed pages to explain them all.
Now with Guilliman back, the stagnation is gone and the door to flooding the setting back with Primarchs is open. Every single Little Timmy is screaming that they want their favorite primarch to show up. The setting has this distinctly power rangers and plot moving forward kind of vibe, which is completely opposite to the stagnation of eternal war.
That makes sense. An unwinnable war at the end of civilization is much more grimdark than having these big players moving and shaking things up.
Not for me personally, though I have wanted to do an end of the world tour as presented in Ryuutama as a black dragon campaign. The sort of thing where you can’t change fate, but you can scrabble together to see the ruins of the past and see how people have cobbled together something resembling a life even as the crops fail, the air and water stagnates, and the light of the sun dims.
I’m more a fan of what is usually described as middlehammer with 4th Edition where I got my start and maybe some 5th Edition. It used to be just fluff and background in a setting for your dudes. But nerds today need to have ‘lore’ for everything and it needs to explain all the things in excruciating detail.
Things used to be so much better with the old stuff.