I have been doing this for twelve years now. Writing against RPG-a-Day. Against. Again and again. Every day, every August, since 2015. Most often on my own, sometimes collaboratively with others here on d6ideas or across different (German) blogs.
2015: ArtifactaDay
2016: Loot-a-Day
2017: Rival-a-Day
2018: Ad-Blog
2019: RPG+Ally+a+Day
2020: Not One Step Back
2021: Veteran-a-Day
2022: The Thousand Titles of the Cat Emperor
2023: Sommerverdichtung (German only)
2024: CampaignConceptaDay
2025: A-Piece-of-History-Every-Day / Calculating World(s)history
And now? The German next door neighbours at Kritischer Fehlschlag have issued the rallying cry “Crime Scene” (German).
But here? After twelve years of doing this dirty work? There is but one possible answer:
The Dirty Dozen.
Interpreted via the lense of the so called Dirty Dozen of persistent organic pollutants such as DDT and dioxins (although an earlier thought was the likewise so called Dirty Dozen of biological weapons and this might still colour some of the entries).
One-hundred-and-fourty-four poisons and pollutants (in the widest, freest sense). Twelve each for twelve systems. Thirty-one days. Twelve years. Against RPG-a-Day. Again.
Warhammer 40,000 appears a fruitful system, myriads of literal poisons and pollutants could be easily created and described for it (I will come back to that). However, at the same time, a focus on such details, a differentiation and description of individual compounds – organic, esoteric – appears to run counter to the larger narrative in a fashion, the superstitious, post-scientific, post-rational Imperium seems to call for broader strokes, less chemical analysis and more evil miasmas. It calls, too, for an entirely different category of pollutants, ones allgedly pollutig the mind and soul, imagined vectors of cowardice, visions of particulate unbelief, ideas of infectious and inheritable thoughts, and along with those, their actual peak and result, the physical – by poison and pollutant, as prevention and as cure – destruction of Exterminatus.
- Cowardice – held especially amongst scions of more primitive warrior cultures who rose through Imperial hierarchies, there is a distinct school of thought that cowardice is not merely a contagious disease (this much being almost universally accepted dogma) but one caused by an ill understood emanation from the building materials in common used on amny technologically more advanced worlds
- Fanaticism – likewise attributed to a physical agent is the fanaticism, too extreme even for the priesthood-administrators of the Adeptus Terra – due to the grave and acute risks it poses to the planet’s productivity and tithe payments -, of the planetary population of Antiqua Leonis, which is attributed to the tiniest fragments of the once famed stained glass windows of the planet’s primary cathedral, carried up into the athmosphere and distributed all across the surface following the destruction of the cathedral in a spaceship crash a generation ago
- Unbelief – unthinkable that humans turn from the light of belief without temptation, without external cause, how else to explain it then, when by merit of circumspect rule, and thought-out repression, and validation by higher authorities, it is guaranteed and accounted for that no recidivist and no heretic exist to spread the evil, how else than by the presence of some devious environmental danger, some substance, some thing, that must be in the water, in the air, some thing that must escape when ore is mined or metal refined, some thing that must cling to the inner surfaces of alchymical reactors or that must evaporate out of the fibres of mass-extrudes plasfabric
- Life Eater – fight fire with fire, if a planet’s very ecosphere is too polluted, too corrupted, then the poison has to be drowned in poison, one that will penetrate all, dissolve all, and will finally burn away all in athmospheric firestorms self-igniting and perpetuating by decomposition heat and liberated oxygen