August. Let’s not talke about RPGaDay. Let us rather embark on a journey into K-Space and through a selection of the endless possibilities for campaigns.
Epic Arbites
Structurally, this is somewhere inbetween. Hanging in the void between adventure and campaign.
On the one hand, we have a pretty well thought-out Warhammer 40,000 adventure (more or less ready to go), sending a group of Arbites judges off to uphold Imperial law. On its own, this starts not that surprisingly with the creation of the individual judges, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, the two main questions during character creation are to name the judge’s legal speciality, the one law they are an expert in and which they have fully transcribed into their personal copy of the Book of Law, and to name the greatest failure/ unsolved case/ unpunished crime from their career.
This maybe not quite typical adventure (I really don’t want to spoil it here, to avoid minimizing further the chance to ever get it to an actual table) is at the same time the testing ground for a rules… approach, that has been on my mind for a considerable time, but has started to condensate further and further around this adventure.
It’s no great secret that I believe the split into wargames and roleplaying games is artificial (and that puts it mildly). Playing Warhammer 40,000 roleplay using Warhammer 40,000 (miniature) wargaming rules (or hybrids) is nothing new for me either. The “new” thing here is scale and the specific rules set: Epic/ Space Marine 2nd Edition. The whole group is treated as a single unit (a single stand of infantry), following all the normal rules (for Command Units, that is). This also plays into one of my longterm interests: Shifting mechanical perspective from the individual characters to the collective of the group – transforming the individuals into contributors or sources for the larger gestalt entity (here, this will mean that their unit statistics will depend on the individual judges – I do have a general concept for this, but I see little value in going into that level of detail right here and now). This approach also underlines the image of little cogs in the immeasurably vast and entirely impersonal machine of the Imperium, and contrasts strongly with the above focus on the individual judges, their own accomplishments and their personal failures. (The rules could – could – be paired with a set of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition style skills. But that is of no importance to me, making it optional in the best way.)
A successful test would call for, would demand one thing: A campaign.
Victory needs no explanation.
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In dieser Idee gibt es erst einmal eine Menge zu verdauen; bedenkt man, welche Regelansätze hier kombiniert werden. Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis ist sicherlich die Individuen auf “winzige Zahnräder […] in der Maschinerie des Imperiums” zu reduzieren. Dies wird auch hervorragend dadurch verdeutlicht, dass eben diese kleinen Zahnräder nur eine winzige, sehr spezifische Aufgabe für das Große Ganze zu erfüllen haben; kompakt zusammengefasst durch die fachrichterlichen Qualifikationen im ersten Absatz.
Dass explizit Epic als Regelkorpus genannt wird, lässt mich noch mehr erschaudern, denn dort hat eine kleine Gruppe von Infanteristen ja nur den Hauch einer Überlebenschance. Ist dies denn so gewollt? Sind sich die Arbites ihrer geringen Möglichkeiten in der Schlacht gewahr, oder liegt der Fokus im Spiel eben doch mehr auf der Rechtssprechung, bei der sie abseits der abstrakten Zahlen die Oberhand haben?
Zuletzt überlege ich natürlich, für welche Figuren aus dem 40K-Universum dieser Ansatz noch funktionieren könnte? Hybriden der dritten oder vierten Generation eines Genestealer-Kults? Bosse oder Cyborks (mehr Maschine als Lebewesen) einer Orkhorde (dann vielleicht sogar in Rückbesinnung auf 40K 2e eines spezifischen Klans wie Deathskulls, Blood Axes, Goffs etc.)? Chaoshexer der Thousand Sons, heimgesucht von Ahrimans Rubrica-Zauber?