It is estimated that over 5 billion species have gone extinct throughout Earth's history. In the year 21XX, Humanity came to join that number. The chain of events leading up to this exodus has long since been forgotten, but a silver lining remained: Mankind would cease to exist on Earth, yet avoided total eradication by shunting itself into a hidden sanctuary known as the Digital World.
Your dying race discovered the sprawling infrastructure of this virtual ark right as they reached the event horizon of global biosphere collapse. Myriad wars had already broken out over the remaining resources, cutting down substantial portions of the population and resulting in the fall of numerous states. When news broke of this alternate world's discovery, nations looked up from their bloody squabbles, sick of fighting over scraps like dogs, and listened well and hard. Then came the final cooperative effort humanity would undertake: A project to move the minds of every living soul into the network, where trailblazers were working tirelessly to establish a new frontier for mankind. One without borders, without limits, without the contrivances of a material world that was dying thanks to their actions. This effort was a resounding success.
And now, God knows how many years later, you're sick of it. You want out.
The winds blow hard across Ger IV, rolling aside the small stones that cover its dry plains and sending chunks of scrap metal tumbling across the dark dirt. The sky glows with the iridescent swirls of a warp storm, its dancing clouds gently descending to kiss the earth or scar it with the explosive touch of celestial lightning. The colorful display dances across the scarred and blackened pieces of a Battle Barge, the broken metal groaning as the gusts buffet its battered hide. In the shadow of this wreck a solitary figure stands, his armor warped and broken, black blood slowly oozing out, he is…
>Decarn Hexan, last of the Galvanized Brethren (Iron Hand successors) >Tiber Castellan, last of the Lances of Sol (Imperial Fists successors) >Munkh Sargat, last of the Interdictors (White Scar successors) >Zuhn Bellator, last of the Glaives of the Emperor (Ultramarine successors) >Write-in
(For the write-in I'd only need a name, parent chapter, and general idea of a chapter badge.)
As an open question while I wait for votes, is there any peculiar parts of 40,000 that you would want to see explored? While the story will loosely keep to 3rd-5th edition content, I'm open to incorporating or modifying other parts of the franchise or fanon and fitting them in.
After Fifty five years of the Confession of George Glenn's ancestry as the first coordinator in Human History.[/i:lit]
<span class="mu-i">Seventeen years after his assassination by suspected Religious and Genetical-purist extremists spurned by the deadly S-Influenza's virus death-toll being few amongst the coordinator race.</span>
<span class="mu-i">Twenty-Six years after the foundation of the PLANT colonies, wherein most Coordinators reside after unforetold violence and hatred befell on them and their genetically-altered birth.</span>
It has been almost a week since the CCCP was dissolved by the General Secretary, with a large majority of the various ethnic republics formed in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War by imported populations having gained their independence. Their journeys to statehood have been long awaited by their peoples. However, in the general confusion and chaos which followed the collapse of one of the world's superpowers, one region within the malaise was forgotten. Unclaimed by almost every other group, at least by virtue of no real historical claim to what had been Russian land for centuries.
Oskovia.
Having been established for the Oskov peoples, themselves descendants of Slavic tribes which had inhabited the Urals before the very concept of Russia existed or the Mongols rode their armies from the east, the Oskovia CCP had been a prosperous but small republic in comparison to their immediate and surrounding neighbors. For as long as the CCCP had existed, there were no issues with any in the region. Now, this has changed.
For the first few days, the regional government was silent on the matter of the entire west of the country splintering into ethnic republics. The Belarusians, Ukrainians, Kravo, Gorodniks, Cossaks in the south and a number of others all broke off from the Union; leaving Oskovia completely alone and independent as a result of broad language, and as many would come to find out, the very local party deciding to pick up and leave back for Moskva.
What local apparatchiks remained scrambled to figure something out, and that's where you come in. You, whoever you may have been in your previous life, doesn't matter. You have been selected to form the Central Committee of the Emergency Crisis Council, the de facto governing body of what is being called the Republic of Oksovia. Never mind that no elections have been held, and that no one within the nation asked for it to be created.
Ten years ago King Aiden Perenolde betrayed the Alliance and sided with the Horde of Orgrim Doomhammer. Nine years ago Prince Alric Perenolde, the second heir of Alterac was sent into exile for his own protection. This exile turned permanent and Captain Normand Garside, your guardian for the past nine years made sure that you were safe and learned the useful skills that would help you in the future.
Now you are ready to carry the responsibility and unite the scattered Alteraci people and reclaim the lands that were once the Kingdom of Alterac.
For Eligius the past several days have been rather dreary days. Since revealing to others that he is in fact a warlock, he has been forced to be more on his toes than before. And when they got into Strahnbrad, Pai decided that their cover story would that of a married couple, and of course later that night she tried to get close to Eligius. That didn’t work to Pai’s disappointment as Eligius was revealed to have the fear of being touched. Now the unlikely duo have enlisted themselves to help the Syndicate in Strahnbrad as things there are going to get more busy.
For Malevus the campaign has been full of work. To bury and bless the dead according to the rites and rituals of the Church. To console those who are dying or have lost their friends. To heal and patch up those who will survive their wounds. The work she did wasn’t easy and she knew that more work would be ahead of her. At least she managed to acquire an assistant that lifted a bit of work from her shoulders.
For Alric the campaign has been full of fighting and marching through the ancient forest. Battling both the gnolls and the influence of Fel, Alric metaphorically knee deep in dead gnolls and blood carved a path of Total Gnoll Death through Durnholde. He fought against a gnoll mage and its warband in the north, he brought the Alteracis against gnolls in the clearing and burned them all alive. Hundreds of gnolls dead for very few of his own at the end of the day.
Claude Gaumont had been but a boy when the spark of the Emrean Revolution had blazed into a wildfire, and since the first moments, he had yearned to be one of his people’s champions. The war had gone on, and he had learned more and more about the cause, but when had strength and nerve enough to have a hope of deceiving a less conscientious recruiter and finished the most basic of training at arms, the war had come to an unceremonious end.
That had been half his lifetime past, and ever since, he had yearned to find the battleground where the fate of tomorrow would again be decided. Vitelia seemed to have been that place, and many others had thought the same. A wrong assumption. The Revolution in Vitelia, it seemed, had not been theirs, and Claude had been forced to flee his comrades in the face of a sudden downpour of defeats.
A minor noble called Di Avolo had sheltered the Revolutionary, a stray flower of the Red Garden that he had found and put in a glass vase. Both knew it wasn’t for Claude’s sake, though. He was a toy, an item in a collection. The shame was the price of survival and comfort. All of the others who had not fallen in battle had been rounded up and deported to the wastelands, or scattered and fled on their own. The Utopian Front had left the lot of them in the cold- and even now, Claude repeated to himself…
“Why?” He asked out the window, to the crowd outside, assembled to listen to the man who had vanquished the <span class="mu-i">Giardino Rosso</span>, to that man himself. “What turned the League against us, to side with tyrants?” In the same room was his new patron- as well as a guest of Di Avolo’s, a young man around fourteen or fifteen. He had a certain handsomeness, but his grey eyes were heavy with a discontent, restless boredom, an empty searching that Claude felt some kinship with. A son of a friend of a friend of Di Avolo’s, visiting here to broaden his experiences, but the boy had little interest in the outside that Claude had seen besides looking at it from a window.
“What an obvious question,” Di Avolo said, “So obvious a child could answer it.” He glanced to the boy, “Well? Go on, tell <span class="mu-i">Signore della Rivoluzione</span> why the Revolutionary League deemed he and his lot unnecessary for their Dawn. We’ve discussed what has been happening here enough.”
Claude could not protest. Di Avolo kept him housed and fed on a whim.
“Do I have to?” the youth said dully, “It’s obvious enough to not be interesting.”
“Indulge us. Tell this man how he came to be here.”
Amongst the squat, broad, and thickly-forested hills north and east of Hawksong, between the savage barrier of the cold Orcwilds and the lush plenty of the elves’ shrinking Silver Realm, there is a land called The Steelwood by those who live there. For centuries, it has been a place of constant (if often low-level and intermittent) conflict. Elf and Man, Man and Orc, Orc and Elf, all have fought and shed blood there, and their fallen swords, shields, and spears litter the land and give it its name. Each of them claims a birthright to this inauspicious area. Eash of them claims that their ancestors staked their claim first, before the others arrived.
But if you ask the Dwarves, they are all wrong.
Your party—The Monstrous Regiment—came to The Steelwood to earn a cut of a lucrative dwarven corporate contract. The contract was initially taken by another adventuring outfit calling themselves ‘The Delvers’, whom you met after an unexpected team-up hunting lake monsters, and whose technical focus would complement your party’s particular skillset: goblin grit, the Feycraft of a faun you found, a shrewdness born of a difficult and colourful life, and a certain occult secret up your sleeve. The Steelwood Expedition’s purpose: to find and explore the ruins of a buried pyramid among the hills, a mysterious megastructure belonging to the last of the long-defunct dwarven. After a brief break detour to pick up some local orc muscle by making a deal with local orc horde, you journeyed into the hills to survey for some potentially quite valuable ruins.
What you found was far greater, and much stranger, than any archaeological discovery you could have anticipated.
The pyramid had been plundered and illicitly inhabited by The Ettercap, a spider-faced fairy defector from the Chaotic Good gods of elvenkind. Deep within the hidden hill-fort, the disturbed demigod had laid claim to ancient wonders of a technology that predated even the dwarven race—belonging to a blue-green breed of GOBLIN, of all things—and turned the transformative power of the great bio-magical forge at its centre to a terrible purpose. Using the same processes which (as you discovered) had been used to give ancient goblins new soul and substance, and to create the races of Dwarf, Gnome, and Halfling, she has made purple-skinned and bug-eyed ‘foundlings’ from kidnapped kids taken from all over the Steelwood.
One half of your party was kidnapped, and nearly suffered the very same fate.
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">You find yourself sailing upon a sea of molten red; an odor strong and metallic that burns your nose and lungs, a brightness that blinds the eye and hurts the mind. It sears brands upon your face and chains upon your body; a steel-gray shell, an iron ship, is all that stands between you and the burning lake. You have not come here by choice, but there is also no way back; you must continue forth, and see the river clear, yet the journey is so long, and the path there so unclear.</span></span>
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">Worst of all, you do not pass here alone.</span></span>
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">These mighty colossi, formless and bare, they wade through the fires, they march there upon you, like moving mountains of brick and stone. Their faces, if they be faces, remain hidden from your gaze; their eyes, if they be eyes, remain far beyond your sight. They hold hammers upon their arms, and raise them. They seek to sink you? Has death grasped your soul at last? You feel an impact that shakes the teeth, so hard your vision blurs. Their hammers had fallen upon your ship, side by side in perfect symmetry. Your sight dims again, and you feel another shake. Their soundless blows rain upon your vessel, deforming it, caving it ever more so; what had brought you to these fates? Yet they hammering holds no malice. Their touch, though rough, bears no malice; their hands, though heavy, seek to destroy not, but to shape it to greater heights, like a smith upon his forge.. They wish to forge it, then? To mold your raft into a vessel, a galleon standing proud? You know not, care not, think not of such grand designs! You know only of your fate, your current fate, your roiling fate. You grasp your arms around the mast, hoping you will not be thrown off and burnt into an withered ember! For now, you must hold, hold to your life, hold on tightly!</span></span>
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">You hold on tightly.</span></span>
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">You hold on tightly..</span></span>
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">You hold on tightly...</span></span>
To wit; it cannot be gainsaid that the Many Mysteries are well-without the purview of Flegmat, or any other author herein this Canon; truly, it is that they would write of Mysterious Medicine and Healing Arts with the same authority as a Counter-Clerk would of chirurgery! However, here Flegmat wrestles – gainfully, mind – with the long-historied role that those who Delved had on the mundane study of Humorous Nature. His accounting of the rise into good-grace of the Fourfold Theory is well-fleshed, though not novel to anyone passably read. The account of the subsequent fall from good-grace and the too-incremental acceptance of its successor, the Comprehensive Theory - elsewhere named as the Singular or the Singular Comprehensive Theory - is novel, controversial, and in the eyes of some, perhaps even dangerous. As its inclusion was not a decision gently made nor borne, so it may be said that it being rendered here at all is testament to the strength of Flegmat's argumentation, and the butcher's bill that the slow adoption of Singular Theory has needlessly wrought.
- A preface from a Stricken printing of <span class="mu-i">The Canon of Medicine</span>, a collection of writings on medical history by a number of authors. The Fourfold Theory held that for man there is an internal alchemical balance of phlegm, blood and bile - both yellow and black - and that when balance between these four is lost, illness and malady are inevitable. The Comprehensive Theory holds that there is but one 'family' of Humors, not four - hence Singular - and that it is the presence of these Humors, not the balance of them, that are responsible for illnesses. Medical interventions that ascribe to the Comprehensive Theory of Humors are more successful than those that ascribe to the Fourfold Theory, though as the Comprehensive Theory was developed by Witches as opposed to Physicians, its adoption in the fields of Mundane medicine has been slow, partially on account of the inclement association, but primarily as any benefits from implementing the theory in practice were misattributed to Mysterious Medicine, and were assumed to be beyond mundane practitioners.
<span class="mu-i">In Scrimshaw Mount, all graves are shallow. Even on the Promontory, where Nature, through the permutations of the Pattern had placed soil on the otherwise nude basalt of the Mount, the bone white stone was never more than a few feet down, commonly less than one. As such, getting graves to the standard depth of eight feet was simply not practical for those interned in the Mount's public burying grounds. But those that lived their lives and died their deaths on the Mount didn't take overmuch umbrage at their shallow graves. For both the practical and pious among them understood full well that under the panopticonical Gaze of the Patternmaker Above … all things are shallow.</span>
Metropolis, Gotham, Star City, Atlantis, Themyscira. These were once the homes of just some of the world's finest heroes, now these places are nothing but dust. Corpses of humans, metahumans, and aliens all from a previous variety of alignments, lay defeated and finally at rest across these many places, leaving only one being standing amongst them.
>HAIL DARKSEID
The sound of chanting and applause is so powerful it's as if this universe itself was rejoicing in his victory. Somewhere on this conquered planet, this world's new king sits atop a throne of his defeated adversaries. The few inhabitants of this planet who somehow survived this massacre have either submitted themselves to the whim of it's ruler, or, are hiding and biding their futile last moments. Among the king, his loyal servants. A monstrous creature with a vice like grip in one hand around the throat of a dead kryptonian. The next, an alien garbed in yellow standing stoic and looking off into the chanting crowd. A cackling jester, caged, but rejoicing in the desecrated environment around him. A shapeless and everchanging being is the last among them.
>HAIL DARKSEID
Somewhere out in these ruinous cityscapes, a speedster, beaten and barely holding on for his life wakes up and gasps for air. Taking in his surroundings the sound of the cheering drives the pain ringing through his head to a threshold never reached before. "This.. this is all wrong, he speaks to himself, barely being able to finish. Finally, he gathers the strength to hobble back onto his feet, trying his hardest to make a breakneck pace, though what is barely a jog is all he can seemingly do right now. "I can change this, I HAVE to fix this", he says, slowly gaining more speed as his attempts continue.
>HAIL DARKSE-
Time slows, bolts and crackles sound off underneath the speedsters feet, "I know there's something.. we missed, someone must know something", he says. Finally after his accelerated healing had kicked in enough, he makes a mad dash and is.. gone? The world turns backwards, previous lengthy battles flash by in mere seconds, those once dead are standing once again, the world is healed, the scales have been tipped, something feels different though he cannot place it. At the end of his run backwards through time he stops and looks around quickly once more, breathing raggedly he says, "A little further back than I mean to go but..", he slumps to the ground. Everything fades to black.
>BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
Your digital alarm sounds off, rousing up from your sleep you stretch and yawn as your eyes grow accustom again to the daylight filling your bedroom. Your mother calls you from downstairs, feeling like it's a good idea to not keep her waiting, you get up and prepare for your day. Standing in front of your mirror you get a good look at your;
