Recently it seems like I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends about the settings we use for our games and events and how they have been converging, spontaneously and often incongruously to create a shared narrative. It occurred to me that really what we are doing is not that different to what authors do before they begin a story, but its collective and complimentary and it’s become the “Thing” about this hobby for me:
World Building.
The Grim Dark at its heart is an open sandbox. Go over here and build a castle, go over there and knock one down. Shine a light in the dark places. Invent a new xenos threat, found a new militia regiment or three, there is almost no wrong you can do because the overarching plot doesn’t require it. Whether you’re in M.30 or M.40 or somewhere in between the architecture is remarkably resilient.
About a decade ago, our group decided to use the D43 Sub Sector, or a “Secondary Imperial Cluster” to be more precise, as the backdrop for our games. D43 started as an upside down triangle on a map that Alan Bligh created for the Horus Heresy series of “Black Books”. But D43 didn’t have any background. It wasn’t a place where anything happened, but it was sitting there staring back at us from the inside cover and waiting. So my good friend Will took it and made it his. Will started running narrative events set in the Horus Heresy and each event linked to the next one, it was a shared experience, your armies gained fame, or infamy and you shared in the story.
When our group needed a backdrop for a BFH (Battle Fleet Heresy) Campaign because, well you gotta have Warp routes and know how systems connect and stuff, we blew it out! That Campaign only lasted a season but the background that we got out of the collective effort was well worth the “squeeze”.
Around the same time as Will was running his events in D43 I was running a series of large scale “Floorhammer” events for 28mm Titans and Knights. I had never run an event before but I knew I wanted to “tell a story” but also have the outcome influence the next chapter of that story. I remember talking with Will about whether or not I wanted Ariana Forge to be in D43, I was cautious of the narrative arc he had created and I didn’t want to desync the events in time and space happening in D43, we were still figuring all that stuff out, but Ariana somehow got thrown back in when we did the BFH campaign and now it’s the launching point for another long running Adeptus Titanicus Campaign, and remains the source of much inspiration!
I can’t remember exactly how I came across AUS30K but at some point Andrew and I talked and he said, “Hey that map of D43, I can put that on AUS30K.” And the rest, as they say is history. What AUS30K is doing is remarkable in so many ways. It’s World Building on a Macro Scale and I can’t wait to see how it’s all going to come together in his “Librarium Terra” Project!
Things keep rolling and I started up another AT Campaign with a friend and he had come up with all this lore that was amazing and deep and well it didn’t “quite fit” into D43 so we created the Diadem Cluster and then stuck the Archea Nebula in between and connected them via the Warp!
Everything is connected via the Warp!
The Archea Nebula was originally just a cool name that I came up with to stick a “somewhat” important rock in (Purity V)… but I didn’t want a lot of other “stuff” going on there… little did I know that Nebula or Nebulae are just clouds of expanding dust… the birthplace of stars so there’s by definition not a lot of other “stuff” going on there… but in a galaxy as old as ours there’s always room to tweak things just a little!
So these days, I try to make every game I play, and certainly the events I run, fill in lines just a little more. Thanks for coming over and look forward sharing some toys in the sandbox!
