Telepathic communication and narrating the alien

[ThePenitentOne]

So I'm going to try to write the story of this campaign for NaNoWriMo.

 

If you don't know NaNo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month; the idea is to write 50k words in November. Now ostensibly, the "heroes" of the story would be the sisters of battle, but they don't come into for quite some time. The campaign begins with the cult. I've been trying to figure out how to write from a stealer perspective forever. It's hard, because we're used to perceiving them as this vague alien threat that robs them of identities.

 

So for starters, stealers don't need to vocalize or use sound to communicate; would they even conceptually understand that sonic communication in other species was in fact communication? I suspect it is something that they could learn- especially if they end up outside the hive mind and end up founding  cult. But in the beginning, it would be as alien to them as the hive mind is to us.

 

Would telepathy be narrated as images, or feelings? Which other senses would be impacted be the mental contact. Can stealers resist unwanted communication from others of equal rank? What's the range?

 

Do stealers have names, or does each stealer's mental presence feel unique, like an aura or a smell that clings to the thoughts that it creates in the minds of others. As a species that needs no vocalization, they may actually lack the apparatus to produce conventional language. Clicks, pops, whistles and chitters. So would they name themselves using sounds that they can create, or would their "names" be things that only had meaning to the host species- and therefore pronounceable by the host and not the stealer?

 

The fluff as written tells us that the hosts are mercilessly exploited, and certainly I think it's fair to say that the Tyranids don't care about the cult, but might the purestrain not feel a bond with a brood brother it created? A brood brother who helped it to learn how the human aliens communicate? How powerful would a stealer feel to understand just one word in a spoken language, with all it's connotative and symbolic meanings? Might the stealer value these teachings as much as the human host watches its four armed progenitor to learn even a fraction of the stealer's ferocity?

 

Are any of these questions addressed in the existing fiction? Is there cannon? Or do I have a sandbox?

[Soulhunter1995]

Ah, a fellow follower of NaNo :D with regards to communication between genestealers unfortunately they are that alien (pardon the pun) that it would be very difficult to try and convey a story from the perspective of a genestealer. It might be interesting having it from a brood brother's POV however they treat genestealers & the patriarch as gods/angels so I doubt they would get near enough to teach them. 

 

I`m still curious to see what you come up with fellow NaNowrimo writer :)

[Arson Fire]

Genestealers are intelligent, but incredibly alien in their thinking.  

 

There's a scene in Vigilus Defiant for instance where a primus comes up with a battle plan involving starving a city of water.  He requires a magus to telepathically communicate it to the patriarch.  The patriarch ponders it briefly, before deciding to take charge of it personally, making its own adjustments along the way. 

This makes it fairly clear that the patriarch would not understand the primus if he tried to communicate verbally. However it is still able to grasp an abstract idea like a complex battle plan.  

 

I don't believe this lack of verbal comprehension to stem from anything like the patriarch believing itself above such ideas, or not considering them important.  I think its brain simply doesn't work the right way to comprehend language.  It is intelligent, and can understand the concept of language in the abstract, just like we can understand the idea of its telepathy.  However it cannot comprehend language itself, any more than we could actually perform telepathy.

[Arson Fire]

I'd also add that they have very little individuality.

They're in constant telepathic communication with all the other purestrains, and likely see themselves as little more than nodes in a synaptic web.  A miniature hive mind.

They're quite literally the tyranids on a smaller scale.

 

Names would mean very little to them.  A concept they can understand in the abstract, but not one that applies to them.

[Rogue]

Have you read 'The Alien Beast Within'? It's a short story about an assassin who uses polymorphine to infiltrate a genestealer cult.

 

From Black Library:

 

Meh'Lindi, the foremost assassin of the Callidus temple, is tasked with the most demanding mission of her career - to infiltrate a genestealer cult disguised as one of the monstrous four-armed hybrids and destroy them from within. As she adopts the mindset of a alien-influenced cultist, Meh'Lindi starts to worry that she may lose herself and, even worse, fail in her mission and doom a world to destruction...

 

Written by Ian Watson. This story also appears in the anthology Deathwing.

The narrative is from the assassin's point of view, but as I recall there are interactions that you might find useful.

[Exilyth]

An alternative to telling the story from the perspective of the 'stealer would be narrating from the perspective of e.g. a victim - receiving 'the kiss' and being introduced and indoctinated into the cult.

 

 

 

C.L. Werners Cult of the warmason (featuring GSC vs. sisters) tells the story mostly from the perspective of humans e.g cult members like the magus. Telepathic communication between magus and patriarch is described as mostly image-based.

 

The few short non-human perspectives are of a predatory nature and focus on perceptions like sight, hearing and smell. Also, a perception of other 'stealers is described like some sort of additonal sense - they just know where others of their brood are. 'stealers perspectives are having not much reasoning above an instinctual level and only minimal inner monologue concerning the situation at hand.

 

 

Peter Fehervari's novel Cult of the Spiral Dawn is another novel about GSC. Can't say much about that one though as I haven't read it yet.

 

 

 

edit:

the short 'The Alien Beast Within' also appears in certain omnibus editions of Ian Watsons 'inquisitor' triology (which, itself, features more of said assasin).

[ThePenitentOne]

Thanks for the recommended readings- I will definitely track down The Alien Beast Within. I might check out the Cult of the Spiral Dawn; just finished Fehervari's Requiem Infernal; it wasn't bad. I'd read him again.

 

One of my stealers is a character that has been with me for a long time- I've played the character in 2 or 3 campaigns now, and there's definitely a place for him in the new campaign. The old Citadel Journal / Tim Huckleberry Codex had a Young Patriarch- better in Hand to Hand and faster, but only a level 2 psyker. I played a campaign where he went 4 games as a stealer, 4 as a young patriarch and then became a full grown patriarch for the remainder of the campaign. I gave him a name to distinguish him from my other stealers. I called him Ch'trl- I was into the whole "clicks and whistles" thing at the time.

 

Ch'trl will be one of the stealers who escapes from a space hulk when the rift drops out of realspace.

 

I can't control whether he earns the right to become Patriarch; to do that, he has to infect the most gangers in a kill team battle. Once each stealer has fought a battle, the one who creates the most brood brothers becomes patriarch. If there's a tie, they have to fight another round until a winner emerges.This is a bit different than the actual fluff; I think GW says it's the first of the brood to infect a host who evolves as opposed to the one who infects the most- I just thought the latter made for a more interesting game.

 

I'm kinda beyond clicks and whistles now. I mean, the character will always be Ch'trl to me. But I think I'm going to go with the sensory footprint in the mind concept. It won't be the whole story that gets narrated from Ch'trl's point of view; the narrative has to jump from faction to faction. But certainly the escape from the space hulk will be seen through the eyes of a stealer (not a Hulk actually; going for something roughly the size of the Truehawk from Kill Team Rogue Trader).

 

The gangs are going to be interesting too. It's an agriworld, so they're all grimdark farmers. In the campaign, newly created brood brothers can join the cult immediately or become sleeper agents by continuing with their regular lives. There are random event tables for the Thresher Houses to create scenarios that cultists can exploit. For example, there are trade deals with guilders, territory upgrades, harvest festivals, ground breaking ceremonies, arranged marriages and a few others. The marriages are interesting, because Thresher law decrees that Threshers must marry other Threshers, but obviously they marry outside their House. This often means travel opportunities between settlements, and it may end up being the only way for the cult to infiltrate Aegis City itself.

 

Another interesting by product of this marriage custom is that those who choose to marry mere civilians rather than other Threshers are outcasts who are often driven to lives of crime. They and their offspring are collectively refered to as the Bastards, and they form a loose criminal syndicate. Infecting the Bastards to gain control of this syndicate unlocks a lot of special intel and missions for the cultists.

 

In the campaign, their is also a nascent Slaaneshi Cult competing with the stealers for the greatest number of recruits. Obviously, a campaign needs many factions in order to maintain interest and longevity, but I think it would complicate the novel to include their story, and take it to a level that strains credibility.

 

One thing I have to be careful about is the whole "show not tell" concept. I've put in a serious amount of work (245 individual territories, and three different types of civillian territories with populations that breed, age, and die in the non-combat phases of the campaign), and I just want to explain everything... Not very entertaining as a novel I'm afraid. Meta threads like this help me keep it out of the story.

 

I don't know if other GW authors base their work on actual gameplay, but that's what I want to try. I don't want someone to read something and think "That would never happen in the actual game," and writing what actually happens on the tabletop is one way to make sure that never happens.

 

Thanks again for the feedback. I won't be posting any novel sections til November (obviously), but I will post campaign information once we actually start playing. The battle reports and House rules will give you hints about what will happen in the novel.

[NTaW]

I don't know if it helps but there are sections of The Devastation of Baal written from the perspective of a Lictor. I know it's not quite what you're on to here but it's an interesting read if nothing else.

[ThePenitentOne]

A lictor would be cool too; I thought about having one joinf the genestealers that make planetfall...

 

I had to think about the hive fleet that spawned these stealers, and my idea was that they would be a small splinter of a fleet that was mostly scattered and destroyed by the rift. As such, they rely more heavily on their vanguard organisms. A lictor and a small brood seemed like a cool kill team.

[Lord_Caerolion]

Given how most of 40k tends to have telepathic communication based on almost dream-logic rather than "hearing a voice in your head", I'd imagine the Genestealer-telepathy works at least somewhat similarly, if not impacted on the fact of the utterly different thought-processes of the genestealers and humans. Personally, I imagine it along the lines that a Cultist getting an order from the Patriarch to commence the attack might get a suddenly remember the time he saw a grox pulled down by hungry canids, and get an overwhelming feeling of anger, and the sensation that the Patriarch is right there with him.

 

As for the Genestealers themselves, nothing will ever beat the portrayal of the Tyranids in Devastation of Baal, as mentioned above. Essentially, we're incorrect in thinking of Tyranids as a race of separate organisms, as they really do all operate as constituent parts of a greater whole. A Tyranid Warrior is no more a separate creature from the rest of its brood than our heart is a different organism than our brain. They are utterly part of the Great Devourer, and while the vanguard organisms may have more adaptability in how they respond to situations, they are still an inseparable part of a larger whole.

 

As such, I don't believe they really have much concept of individuality, at least as we understand it, but rather somewhat akin to the way we can recognise our right and left hands as different things. A particular genestealer could potentially have a "bond" to a favoured Cultist, but without any affection, merely a recognition of greater ability or use, much in the way the Hive Mind could recognise a particular genus of 'gaunt operating above expected capacity in certain situations and thus desiring to replicate the particular strain/species.