Experimenting with a new idea

I've been wanting to write something about child soldiers in an occupied territory. Here's the test run. If I decide I like it when I'm less out of it, I'll write more. I haven't really gotten into the characterization yet, but if there's more of this story, there will be more character. So far I've really only described the PoV character and a little bit about Brod, and that's intentional.

     We all cried sometimes. We had all lost something - nobody could join the Young Guns if they hadn't lost something - and we all cried. A very bad man had cut off Boomer's arm when he was just a kid, and he cried because it still hurt every night. Ajax cried because it was easier than smiling. Grendy cried because it drowned out the voices. I cried because I would never see my mom again. Everybody had lost something, and everybody cried. Everybody except Brod. Brod wasn't like the rest of us. He was smart. He had gone to school. He was strong and fast and he was tactical. Every time we went on a raid, Brod would get tactical, and he would promise us all that if we did what he said, we'd come back alive. Brod kept his promises. He was our captain, and he was smart, and he never cried.

     I never knew how Brod got to be captain. When the Young Guns found me, back when there were only thirty of them, he was already in charge. I knew he was the boss because he had a real fighting man's jacket. It was thick and warm and it had gold bars on the shoulders and he said it was a captain's jacket. I had asked him, once. We had killed some blues and one of them had a bottle of stuff that tasted like prunes and burned like medicine. It wasn't until later we found out it was alcohol. So we all drank a bunch of the stuff, because it was better than muddy puddle water, and then I got brave and asked him how he got to be captain. Brod hit me so hard I blacked out. He was gone when I came to. The next morning he came home and I never asked again.

     I didn't know much, but I did know that the blues were bad. When I was a little squirt, my parents used to talk about the bad men from across the sea. That's why Dad went off to fight. That's why they killed him. And when they came to my house four years ago and saw the flag above the door and the eagle on the mantel, they killed Mom. They made me watch. They were going to kill me too, but that was when Brod showed up. One minute they were all there, getting ready to hurt me and I was screaming and crying. The next minute they were all dead and Brod was standing over me, as tall as a blue, looking for all the world like an avenging angel. I joined the Young Guns the next day.

     Yesterday we hit the blues where they live. There were twelve of them there, squatting in some poor dead man's house. They had smashed the dishes and pissed on the furniture and their stink was everywhere. There were two of them out in the yard, smoking their foul grass and bragging about how many prisoners they'd killed. I wanted to shoot them right then, but Brod's orders were clear. Not until they started running for the house. I knew better to ask why they would start running. I just trusted Brod, because Brod was the captain, and he was the boss. So there I was, laying in the filthy mud, holding a lasgun, when the side of the house exploded.

The Battle for Zandesh III: Hostiles sighted!

This is the first mission in the Battle for Zandesh III campaign. It is a scenario that uses the core Warhammer 40k 5th Edition rules. There's a fluff section a'coming, but for tonight you mostly get the crunchy bits. The basic story is that, after months of crime and cult activity, conditions on Zandesh III have come to a head. Creatures of the Warp have been spotted in the outskirts of Zand City. The Planetary Defense Forces are struggling to send off an emergency distress call before the forces of Chaos arrive, but they are hampered by the ancient, indecipherable technology. Suddenly, the sky rips open, unfathomable howls ripple across the sky, and the Chaos forces attack the unsuspecting Imperial forces.

The Battle for Zandesh III

First of all, apologies for the Wednesday post - I was sans internet from Friday night through Tuesday and I didn't think to schedule a post in advance.

In the search for ever-more-ambitious fluff projects to distract me from my current fluff projects, I have decided to create a campaign for Warhammer 40k that borrows from numerous different rulesets within the Warhammer 40k umbrella. The campaign would include Apocalypse, Battlefleet: Gothic, Epic 40k, Planetstrike, and core 40k games in a grand "conquer this world or burn it to cinders" style campaign - a no-holds-barred grindfest that envelops every major aspect of planetary conquest. This is the story of that battle. On one side of this grand campaign are the forces of the Imperium, driven to conquest by the greed of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the zeal of the Ecclesiarchy. On the other side, the forces of Chaos. However, I plan to make the rules flexible enough that one or both sides can be switched for other factions (although I can't promise the fluff will make the jump so easily).

The Contemptor and You

So I slept through about 50% of yesterday and I was at school or similar the rest of the time. Life is busy, I've got things to do, and my blog unfortunately sees the lag. With luck, next week I'll not only be able to get a post up on time, but start working on some extra posts so I can have something to put up when I don't have the time/inclination/ideas required to write.

Don't be so hard on the Ultramarines

As a fan of Not The Ultramarines, I can understand why some people would be upset by the fifth edition Space Marine codex. Matt Ward made some comments in a White Dwarf interview in which he pretty much revealed himself to be a squealing Ultramarines fanboy of the highest order.

Like these.

Entombed: Prologue

So this post took a total of two weeks to get done, but I think the effort shows. It's 1500 words, which is more than I've written in one chunk for months. It's a prologue to the Entombed storyline, so now when you start reading the story you don't just get dropped straight into blackness.

Don't worry, there will still be a post for this week. It won't be a great one, because I dumped all my effort into this prologue, but it will be a thing.

Entombed: Planning for the Future

So I've come to something of a standstill on the Entombed storyline, and I think the reason is I'm not entirely sure where I want to go next. So, in order to give myself a bit of much-needed direction (and in order to give you, my teeny tiny cabal of followersm a bit of a sneak peak regarding what's coming) I've decided to try to do some kind of outline of what I'll be doing from now until the end of the book. I'm going to break it down by storyline in the hopes that I can figure out what all the characters need to do, then decide where each chapter is going to go in a bigger timeline.