Which is a more interesting Cursed Founding ability?

[Olgerth Istaarn]

Woooh, first post in the Liber. Release the hounds.

 

I am writing my Chapter as one of the unfortunate products of the 21st Founding. I, quite frankly, realized long ago that I didn't like any of the existing loyalist Primarchs, did not want my Chapter to originate from a Lost Legion (not that it's possible anymore, considering the recent developments), and did not want to sheepishly hint at being descended from a Traitor Legion, a'la Blood Ravens.

 

Plus, I wanted to have a special ability. So Cursed Founding fits: nobody knows who the primogenitors are, Chapters have special abilities, and a skeleton or two in the ol' wardrobe.

 

The skeleton notwithstanding, lately I've been wondering whether to rewrite the fluff as far as the special ability is concerned. And I cannot decide which one is more interesting or at least less cheesy.

 

Overall Premise:

 

The Chapter's geneseed was tampered so as to make it more resilient to losses and attrition.

 

Version 1.

 

The Chapter's geneseed stores, in addition to everything else, the genetic memory of the Marine it is extracted from. This is genetic memory in a parapsychological sense (past life regression from genetic material). So, when a new initiate is implanted with the SM organs, he gradually "recalls" the combat experience of the Marine before him. Because of the Cursed Founding modifications, the new Marines mature faster, and they require minimal training and indoctrination - essentially, they gradually "recall" all the skills of their predecessors. On the downside, sometimes the entire personality of the dearly departed Marine would "overwrite" the initiate's own personality. In the best cases, dead Marines would be spookily "reborn" in the new inductees. In the worst cases, the strain of such "possession" would drive the poor bastards mad, and they'd have to be put down. Still, success rate is high enough.

 

Version 2.

 

The sus-an membrane organ has been modified in such way that the Marines are no longer capable of hibernation. However, instead they gain incredible regenerative abilities. They aren't quite like Wolverine or Deadpool - regrowing a lost limb would take a week, for example. Moreover, a Marine who is, for all intents and purposes, dead, would gradually regenerate and return to life. Even severe cranial trauma would not prevent this - the regenerated Marines would literally "grow their memories back" after the brain reasserted itself. The downside here is that coming back from the dead is extremely painful, and the shock of resurrection would sometimes kill the Marine outright - for good this time. Others experience memory loss - especially those with cranial trauma, because things sometimes don't quite grow back. Yet others would wake up as a blank slate, remembering nothing of themselves, and functioning on the level of an infant. Finally, those who lost and regrew the same limb several times would eventually have the limb stricken with cancer-like growths; it would have to be amputated and replaced with a bionic.

 

So yeah. Don't laugh. But I can't choose which superpower looks better on paper...

[Sigismund Himself]

I prefer Version 1, it's very Dune ghola-like. It has all kinds of ways you could go with it. Version 2 sounds a little overpowered, it might work if you toned it down a little but I think V1 has more promise.

 

With both of them, I'd not come out and directly state it. Hint at it, show evidence for it but don't come out and say "Oh yes, they're actually descended from the Thousand Sons the same marines living on through genetic memory."

[Octavulg]

Number one sounds way more like an interesting curse. Lots of potential for excitement and horror. Which is, after all, half the fun of the Cursed Founding.

[Banelord]

I’d say Version 1 is the better of the two, could be interesting if the newly dead chapter master’s personality suddenly comes back. Reminds me of an old film called Zardoz ;)

[Lysimachus]

1 is interesting, especially as Marines have the Omophagea implant which allows them to absorb memories, etc from genetic material that they eat. Perhaps the Tech Adepts in charge of creating this Chapter could have tried to reverse engineer this implant?

 

The curse side of it is cool too, you could end up with Marines driven insane by multiple personalities fighting for dominance.

[Omega Striker]

I would go with version 1, definitely.

 

Not only does it do everything mentioned above, but eventually all your chapter's geneseed would accumulate so many lives that all the initiates after a point would be driven insane. It's kind of like a 'memory meter' that will fill and fill and fill throughout the millenia, and then suddenly, all the chapter's geneseed is the crazy-inducing kind, as eventually all the geneseed is a legion of voices in each person's head. Which, by the way, is a great lead in to chaos worshipping. If you had hundreds of space marine minds all sharing one body, they would quickly get mad at each other and compete for control of the body, and that would do one of two things: one would be one former marine trying to seize control at an inopportune time (middle of a swordfight with a chaos lord), or two, no voice ever gains control, each having control of just a pinky finger or a toe or part of the leg, and the initiate just quivers there helpless as his body is overridden by hundreds of angry, vengeful marines.

 

Or, the chaos worship as mentioned above. All the marines would become angrier and angrier and angrier, and eventually the endless anger of hundreds of astartes compressed into one body would either attract the attention of Khorne, the blood god, or there would be the birth of a new, angry Chaos god of angry anger. The question is, how much angry emotion can you pack into one body? Emotion is what powers the warp, so if your marines are super-emotional (even if it is something as manly as astartes anger) then they will eventually become the playthings of the chaos gods.

 

Just saying the inevitable consequences sit well with the 40k universe.

[Tutteman]

I like Version 1 very much. It fits very well with the Grim Darkness and with the trend of Cursed Foundings looking like they're fine and all is going great. Then after a few "generations"... Plus its a Gene Flaw that is interesting and adds so much room for character! Go for it!

[Leonaides]

I'd say go with no 1. My biggest problem is that your overall premise doesnt make sense... Losses and attrition are dependant on the enemies you face, your marines tactical ability, luck and combat ability. Gneneseed is incredibly irrelevant to any of that. You can be the toughest marine in the universe, but blindly walking out in front of a tyranid swarm with a bolter and a knife is going to get you dead dead dead (an oversimplification, but serves to illustrate the point).

 

I'd also suggest not even thinking to yourself about it as an ability, or a power - its a curse. There should be no long-term up-side, in fact it should be firmly on the bad side of things that could happen to a chapter... Having a 'sufficient' success rate is probably a bad thing too - if you're going to make a cursed chapter, make a cursed chapter. A chapter where the chapter itself is visibly dieing, even though the marines themselves might be living longer/surviving more, would make an interesting combination.

[Octavulg]

The thing is, the Cursed Founding works. It always works. It's just that there are always consequences. Nasty, nasty consequences.

[Tutteman]

I'd say go with no 1. My biggest problem is that your overall premise doesnt make sense... Losses and attrition are dependant on the enemies you face, your marines tactical ability, luck and combat ability. Gneneseed is incredibly irrelevant to any of that. You can be the toughest marine in the universe, but blindly walking out in front of a tyranid swarm with a bolter and a knife is going to get you dead dead dead (an oversimplification, but serves to illustrate the point).

 

I'd also suggest not even thinking to yourself about it as an ability, or a power - its a curse. There should be no long-term up-side, in fact it should be firmly on the bad side of things that could happen to a chapter... Having a 'sufficient' success rate is probably a bad thing too - if you're going to make a cursed chapter, make a cursed chapter. A chapter where the chapter itself is visibly dieing, even though the marines themselves might be living longer/surviving more, would make an interesting combination.

 

Well I suppose what the OP is aiming for is something like Son of Something beginning with A. Their curse/blessing gave them enhanced skeletons so they were tougher and harder to kill. And he can have an upside I suppose, but I think it would be something to be very careful with. You don't want it to shift from "Tragic Heroes" too far towards "LOOK HOW AWESOME WE ARE!"

[Olgerth Istaarn]

OK, version 1 it is.

 

@Leonaides: I have no idea what you're on about, I'm sorry to say. Any combat unit is expected to take losses and replenish them. The logistics of making new Space Marines are complex and time-consuming, which tends to punch large holes in Imperium's defenses when a Chapter is depleted. Creating a Chapter that could come back from the brink of annihilation - something that happens frequently enough - seems just the thing that the Cursed Founding would have attempted. Well, one of the things.

 

And no, I don't want to give my Chapter an outright curse without upsides. Sons of Antaeus made out quite all right. So did Black Dragons and Minotaurs for the most part (our curse is that we are angry, awesome and use radical indoctrination techniques! Or that we grow additional CCW and scare people and radical inquisitors hate us!). I plan absolutely no Chaos conversion at any point.

 

Thanks to everyone for their opinions.

[soddinnutter]

Not all the memories need to be stored. So there need not be an irrevocable and unavoidable decent into madness. Just day-trips. Maybe it was an attempt to cure the Black Rage that went wrong, thus making them siblings of the Lamenters.

 

And it's a good one because the =I= would always suspect that there was something not quite right with them but be unable to prove it is anything worse than something in the training. In the same way that they are unsure if being overly aggressive is a genetic trait of the White Scars and descendants or just cultural inheritance.

[Leonaides]

The problem there is how on earth you'd get genetic coding to work out which memories to retain, and which were irrelevant. Thats probably beyond the capabilities of the magos geneticos, I'd suggest.

 

Octavulg - The Cursed founding doesnt always work - its just doomed chapters to a slow failure (if they've not already gone) - even the Lamenters have failed since they now suffer the curse of the Blood Angels line, as well as their bad luck.

 

Olgerth - waht I meant was, even though the individual marines live longer, and survive more, if they are havin gproblems with losing nre recruits to madness or implant failiure, then they will see their chapter fallign apart around them, for even longer, knowing that even though they themselves will live for longer individually, their chapter is slowly dieing and there's nothing they can do about it - a bit like Seth being told, upon his ascencion to chapter master of the Flesh tearers, that the Chpater was already doomed, no matter how hard he fought. To a marine who is trained and instilled with the will to fight everything and anything, even in the most hopeless of circumstances... Being betrayed slowly by their own flesh, by the very things that make them what they are... And no way of fighting it... creates a very powerful background for a Cursed chapter.

[Octavulg]

The problem there is how on earth you'd get genetic coding to work out which memories to retain, and which were irrelevant. Thats probably beyond the capabilities of the magos geneticos, I'd suggest.

 

Who says it wasn't? Maybe that's half the problem. They end up with memories of people's childhoods.

 

Alternately, maybe they just mindwipe people a lot.

 

Octavulg - The Cursed founding doesnt always work - its just doomed chapters to a slow failure (if they've not already gone) - even the Lamenters have failed since they now suffer the curse of the Blood Angels line, as well as their bad luck.

 

The Red Thirst has reawakened and worsened - they still may be better off than other chapters (if you're going by the Badab War). If you're going by C:BA, then I'm impressed you can get any meaning out of that borderline incoherent paragraph.

 

The Cursed Founding succeeds at what it sets out to do. The Lamenters avoided the flaw (for what length of time depends on what you accept as canon). The Sons of Antaeus are tough. The Minotaurs are ferocious. The Flame Falcons can, well, flame. The Legion of the Damned are the aberration (god knows what their improvement was supposed to be). It works. There are just costs. Big, big costs.

[voi shet magir]

This is the interesting thread for the week, everyone else can go home until next time.

 

So they have the personalities of dead people. The problem with implementing that is that IAs do not really have people in them. Diyers and marine players generally just substitute color schemes for individual personalities. there are no nerdy polar ice-warriors in the Raptors, and it good thing too because that would be awkward to write.

 

There has to be some kind of effect where they become obsessed with undoing the mistakes which got them killed, or they are paranoid about failing again, or angry at brothers who let them down.

 

edit: Leona i des, the marines die just as quickly as normal chapters' do. It's just that their replacements don't face a learning curve. It is hardly a super power.

[Tutteman]

Olgerth - waht I meant was, even though the individual marines live longer, and survive more, if they are havin gproblems with losing nre recruits to madness or implant failiure, then they will see their chapter fallign apart around them, for even longer, knowing that even though they themselves will live for longer individually, their chapter is slowly dieing and there's nothing they can do about it - a bit like Seth being told, upon his ascencion to chapter master of the Flesh tearers, that the Chpater was already doomed, no matter how hard he fought. To a marine who is trained and instilled with the will to fight everything and anything, even in the most hopeless of circumstances... Being betrayed slowly by their own flesh, by the very things that make them what they are... And no way of fighting it... creates a very powerful background for a Cursed chapter.

 

Oh I definitely agree that it's always good to have a bit of tragic demise forthcoming overtones. I once did a Cursed Funding DIY (The Bladeborn) where they were Imperial Fists gene seed which had been modified in an attempt to restore the Sus An Membrane and the Belcher(spelt wrong?).

 

But the flaw was that many recruits fall into comas and die as their body rejects the Sus An membrane (and their immune system attacks the Sus An whilst it is still trying to integrate with the brain destroying both slowly). And fully fledged marines could also fall into these comas, except they would simply be in an indefinite one (as their Sus An was fully integrated and their body had accepted it) and would then be taken back the Homeworld and placed in a very big caven and honoured as "The Eternal Sleepers".

 

There's another DIY I'm watching right now, "The Inheritors" which has a very interesting theme going for it. Check it out and look for some inspiration, because at the end of the day yet ANOTHER chapter with a gene flaw is fairly boring. But a Chapter with a gene flaw and a really great exploration of how this affects their beliefs, combat doctrine and relationships is fabulous! For example if the Sus An Membrane is causing these issues for The Bladeborn, why for Pete's sake are they still implanting it!? Do they KNOW that's the problem? Have the =I= noticed. Where do they get all those tanks for the "Farms".