A Blaze of Glory OOC

[Paladin Dave]

Story thread: http://www.christianforums.com/t7528149/#post56549322

Hello, everyone! If you're a fan of sci fi who doesn't mind a bit of fantasy in the mix, or a fantasy fan that enjoys some sci fi here and there, then you may already be familiar with the dystopian setting by Games Workshop: Warhammer 40,000. Don't know it? That's cool too, you're not the only player in here that doesn't. We can help!

While Warhammer 40,000, or "40K" as I tend to refer to it, is a grim and dark setting, this thread will hopefully replace some of that gloom and doom with a bit of space-faring adventure. This story will, for the most part, take place outside of the Imperium of Man. The lead protagonist will be a Rogue Trader named Glory St. Claire, and she will be played by RPer extraordinaire, Woman of Faith. I will be keeping to the role of GM for this story, mostly due to the sheer volume of people the protagonists will be encountering.


Where do you come in, you may ask? Well, Glory is a darned good spacefarer by her own right, but she can't do her job alone! It's a dangerous galaxy out there, and a girl needs comrades to join in on the fun and fortune! This is an open RPG, but I must ask you to talk with us in here before joining. We want to make sure everything fits in well and flows smoothly with the story's progression.

So what can you play, you might ask? We have only a few restrictions:

-As this is outside of the Imperium, those currently employed by it will likely not work out. Ex-guard mercenaries or drifters, for example, will be fine.

-NO SPACE MARINES! Sorry folks, but the Space Marines, while an absolutely awesome faction, are warrior monks above all else, and would have no reason to be serving aboard the Arrow right now. If you REALLY want to play one, PM me and maybe something can be discussed. But for now, let's try something more mundane.

- Rules on non-humans: Eldar and Tau are acceptable, as they can be peaceful and work with humans if they feel so inclined. Glory is a good, tolerant person, so Dark Eldar will likely not be accepted unless they REALLY downplay their whole, er... sado-maso evil schtik. Orks aren't a likely fit, but stranger friendships have been made. Talk to us a little about it, but I wouldn't advise ork characters be played.

-Tyranids are simply out of the question. Shame on you for even wondering.

-Chaos is bad news, even outside of the Imperium. If you'd like to play a secret heretic of sorts, talk to us. But remember that Chaos forces will more than likely enter the party's crosshairs as foes.

-Multiple characters: For now, I'd like to keep everyone to one character. This may be subject to change as time goes by.

- Alignment: Being a hard-core Imperial will do little more than get you shot in this part of space. Otherwise, as long as everyone gets along onboard the Arrow, things should be good. Expect a good-aligned party.



The story will begin on a neutral spaceport, where Glory will be meeting with an interested party for a very special job. Characters can either be part of Glory's entourage already, or join up on the station by whatever means we decide.


Whew! That gets all that out of the way. Remember, our main goal here is to have fun spinning a good story. If you need help with 40K lore, or have an idea you wanna try, feel free to ask! If you need to do a little research and familiarize yourself, Lexicanum Lexicanum is a great resource.

Thanks for reading, and have fun everyone!

 

[Woman of Faith]

I'm excited! (and subscribing)

 

[Torn]

I am in (uh, you knew that already )

 

[Paladin Dave]

In case anyone's reading this, we really really do need more players. D= If you've any interest at all, please hit me up 'fore we get too much further in. We can work you in even if this first 'quest' gets underway, but it'd be nice to get folks in sooner rather than later.

 

[Paladin Dave]

Bumping to say, we're still open and very much eager for more players! First little story arc is drawing to a close, and new people can be worked in.

 

[swight]

I am new to this forum. And I am willing to join in.found you while looking for christian interactive stories. I have read the entire thread for the RPG. I am pretty new to war hammer(think I played 2 or 3 sessions of the table top game with a cousin of mine(who didn't have much experience either) when he came to visit once), but I think I understand enough to get me by to a degree. From what I read in the Lexicanum I think the best race for me would be a Psychic NightSider. I will use the name Swight as that is kinda my default name for most of the characters I play.He will have some abilities that helped him survive on his home planet and uses some special guns. He would aim to be an ally of the group. As for origin I think a lost colony would fit. method of arrival could be a capsule floating in space. I already thought of some back story for this set up.

 

[Paladin Dave]

I couldn't find any info on those in Lexicanum. Sounds dicey, but if you could link me the article you found 'em in, I'll read over it and make a decision. Should work, though.

 

[swight]

From the category page go to Species and Factions. Then go to Human in the second section. Then go to the bottom of the page and click the link for abhumans. They are at the bottom of that page. I would have post a link but I don't have the necessary post count.

 

[Paladin Dave]

Okay. Glanced over it, and I really only see two obstacles.

A. Nightsiders sound like they're a sight farther gone than the people of worlds like Nostramo, whom I don't think counted as abhumans yet. Their world was in near total darkness too, and many people who looked directly at the Emperor when he arrived and walked through the capitol went blind. That presents the issue: If the people of Nostramo could go blind at seeing the Emperor, wouldn't a Nightsider have the same problem from normal daylight?

B. While it's less of a problem and more just something that needs to be figured out: If Swight is a psyker, then he'll have to either A. be a rogue psyker like Drea, and thus lack the training needed to hone his powers to a fine point; thus his abilities will be more wild and less focused/deliberate. Or, B., he could have been sanctioned at one point, but is either on the run from the Imperium, or is on a mission/hit some hard times and is lost; like your capsule would suggest. It might help if you PM'ed me whatever of his backstory you'd like to send.

If you don't have enough posts to PM, we'll banter in here about inane and pointless things until you do!

Also, I've got another friend who is preparing to join. If you'd rather be a sanctioned imperial, this guy might be a good vehicle for getting into the thread. Either way, all this is up to you. We just need to make it all fit, and we're good.

 

[swight]

I will just go more in depth here. As I don't feel like trying to raise my post count for that purpose. For those who don't want spoilers stop reading here.

The reason he is in the capsule is indeed for a mission. His people saw very fast moving objects going through the sky then disappearing and wondered what happened to them. He is one of the first manned attempts to discover if the objects just disappear or actually go somewhere. His goal is to return to his people to report his success. The warp technology of his home planet is similar to the Tau's using the sling shot effect but it isn't able to be mounted to ships yet. So they essentially catapulted his vessel from a fixed location. His vessel has no self propulsion to keep the weight factor down.

His people are fairly peaceful but they deal with a lot of dangerous creatures traveling between their cities. They try to hide themselves when these creatures come near to avoid conflict that could end badly for either party, but sometimes their cover is blown and they have to fight. They avoid bright light and loud noises as this makes them more vulnerable.

His planet has not yet been discovered by the imperium. possibly due to the peoples natural tendency to not want to be found. Possibly the psychics without realizing sent this message to the passing ships."We are not here".

His abilities can act on their own to a degree. Particularly invisibility as this is his first mode of defense. As this is a mental rather than physical ability not everyone is susceptible to this. The Psychic abilities include invisibility. 360 night vision (just shapes and light, so lasers would be very easy for him to spot) . This is able to be focused on a smaller area giving much greater detail. Lastly he can suspend his psychic vision for a short time and release it in a burst to knock surrounding foes away from him a short distance.

For non-psychic he has his guns. not really more powerful than any other but they are designed to be quiet and emit no light. so as to not give away his position and not harm his eyes. He would definitely avoid using laser weapons but could make do with more conventional weaponry if his own guns were unavailable.He fights mid-range using his psychic knock back if his oponnent gets to close.

His eyes are near non existent and he doesn't have extra organs really as he depends mostly on his psychic vision abilities. he is otherwise blind except being able to tell the brightness of light around him(if it is too bright it hurts his eyes). Aside from his eyes (and maybe skin color) he looks perfectly human.

When he first comes on the ship he will likely have problems with the brightness of the lights. This may be remedied by a pair of goggles to block out the light as he can see without his eyes.Not sure if these should be with him or provided by the medical staff or something like that. He has almost no trouble with computers but his warp theory is pretty weak.

That about does it for most of the data I have come up with.

 

[swight]

Since no one has responded for several days to this thread or continued on the main thread I am going to assume that this RP is dead for now. So I wont be checking back for a while assuming I don't forget about it completely.(I was checking almost daily since my last post). May things go well with you all.

 

[Woman of Faith]

Ouch! Bad timing, man. We're getting going again.

 

[Paladin Dave]

Sorry, I got slammed with a couple of papers and tests all at once. I suppose I should have mentioned that I'm a senior in college and fixing to graduate soon, so disappearances may happen once or twice. >.> I'm very sorry, and I'm really trying not to let it happen too often.

 

[Torn]

I'm a momma... I forget if I dont write myself a note.

 

[swight]

I am back. I didn't get the PM til a few days ago as I only visited this forum for the purpose of this RP and didn't visit it otherwise. And since then I was busy myself with work and the things I do in my spare time.

I went ahead and posted my first post in the main thread. After pickup you can open the capsule. Just let me handle my character's response to that.

 

[swight]

PM replies since I don't have sufficient post count to PM back, and sorry for the late replies I only noticed them today:
To Torn:
I will try to take your editing suggestions into account. By the way most of the speech was actual talking.
To Paladin Dave :
I don't blame her either. I have been trying to cover for mistake after mistake and they have been growing rather than shrinking. She has been acting very much in character considering how things have went.

nightsiders on swight's planet all adapted to the darkness in different ways depending on what sense they depend on.

On whether or not it is a Tau planet. The original idea was for the planet to be one that is frequently passed but mostly ignored due to psychic messages from many of the people saying they weren't there as they try to hide from the inhabiting beasts. This idea is kinda up in the air now due to how things played out.

Swight's vision was supposed to be strictly sonar and not xray. On the radio wave thing for some reason I was thinking radio waves had mass thus if there was enough of them sonar could bounce off of them. this was a mistake on my part that I will try to fix tomorrow. I have a headache from writing a long response.


here is my prospective next post for review since I am in kinda a tricky spot.The whole stationary slingshot idea was tricky to try to explain away. Not to mention the rest of it.

"Sorry if I oversimplified my explanation. I was trying to explain quickly as I knew you were already annoyed with me. I by no means wished to annoy you further or imply any difference in intelligence. you obviously must know more than me in the field of warp technology. Be prepared for a long answer.

I guess I should start off by saying my people are quite seclusive by nature. This is because it is necessary for survival on our planet to be so. If we are discovered by the fierce beasts which live on the surface one can not be sure if it will be us or them that will survive. Due to this survival trait we typically do not venture from our planet and do a pretty good job at being ignored by the bestial inhabitants and outsiders.

While this is the case it doesn't keep us from being curious however. We wanted to know about the outside we just didn't want the outside to know about us.

As a side note I should say that this is because we tend to assume the worst when it comes to meeting an unknown living entity.Case in point when I first came in contact with your vessel I feared that if I didn't respond I would be fired at. And please don't say "I should have fired at him". I am really trying to resist disappearing from sight right now.

It started several years ago with my people looking at shooting stars in the sky and wondering what they really looked like closer up. This lead to the development of large telescopes to look into space. Once these telescopes were developed we began to see that many of these shooting stars were actually ships. The strange thing was that after a certain distance these ships disappeared from our view and we were unable to track them further. Using our telescopes we learned a lot from those ships. We managed to make a few non-warp capable vessels based on the hull designs but we never ventured very far from the planet.

There were some among our people that feared that if we went to far we would disappear from existence like those ships we couldn't keep track of. But the more scientific types quickly dismissed this theory and sought any thing that might have separated the disappearing ships from the ones that didn't. On this point they came to an almost unanimous conclusion that the high speed of the vessels differentiated the two sets of ships. So they went about calculating the speed the ships attained before disappearing. There was some significant variance in the values they got from this research, but there seemed to be a minimum speed before disappearance so the research team focused on that speed.

We tried to modify the engines on our current ships to go faster but failed significantly as our engines just couldn't handle the mass of the vessels. To compensate we continually reduced the size of the vessel a until the engine was about 90% of the vessel. This gave a significant improvement over the original vessels but was still short of the target speed. At this point all that was left to the vessel that wasn't the engine was the crew compartment which sat 2 people. Since we wanted a manned mission all that was left to reduce the weight of was the engine it's self.

We tried optimizing the engine's power to weight ratio as best we could but we were still just short of the requirements. So we went back to the drawing board and considered what do these other ships do if their engine fails? so we looked through our files for cases where a ship managed to disappear without their engine doing all of the work. The case we found was of a ship doing a sling shot around the sun. This gave us the idea of taking advantage of planetary gravity. We also saw the disposable booster rockets some of the smaller vessels used.

To take advantage of the planetary gravity we dug a long tunnel through the planet surface that would maximize the gains from gravity and angular momentum. Then equipped the vessel with a disposable engine to be ejected when the vessel reached the engine's maximum speed. Then proceeded to do a slingshot around our planet which finally gave us the speed to send the vessel now before you into warp.

If my explanation is still insufficient feel free to put me in the brig. It would give me some time to relax. I have had a real stressful day. And I am sorry to be the cause of such stress to you."

 

[swight]

Did some major editing to get rid of the communications array incident. Main post besides mine that should need to be changed is post #191 at the top of page 20 by Woman Of Faith. It was the only one with a direct mention of the incident. I had to change practically all of my posts before that one. But I was able to keep the story flow the same until the mentioned post.

 

[Woman of Faith]

Okay, my post is edited. I have to say, Swight, I know you're trying hard to get on here, but maybe you're trying too hard? Just relax and be yourself. This is supposed to be fun, right? As to that long post above? I think, no, I know he wouldn't get far. As soon as he said get ready for a long explanation, Glory would be sighing heavily and telling him she'd just told him to make it quick, he should have listened. Gridley would be thinking he was trying some linguistic trickery and Swight would find himself in the brig lickety split. As he was dragged away, Glory would tell him she'd come to the brig when she was ready for a long talk, which wouldn't be anytime soon considering the day she's already had. So, that in mind, have at it. Let's lighten Dave's load and keep this thing moving, eh?

 

[swight]

I am just a bit timid and my character kinda inherited that. Also I try my best to stay in character and do things so that they line up with what he did previously. But you are right I do need to loosen up a bit. I do admit I have a tendency to take things too seriously.

I shortened the post quite a bit and also tried to get things moving a little. The guns are those special ones I mentioned on the first page of the OCC thread. In summary they emit no light and almost no sound. A detail I think I will add is they should be black in color but not shiny. More details may be added. those are just the basics I want to keep.

I couldn't think of a good way of giving clues to the gun in the main thread but maybe this will give a way to move on. My thought was through Gridley though you may have better ideas.

 

[Paladin Dave]

I appreciate how hard you're trying, Swight, but you really can't go back and edit story posts like that without asking. Don't overthink things; just try and move the story along.