Book Idea - The Secret Histories of Mankind

[b1soul]

I really like the idea of 40K "source books" written from an in-universe perspective

 

I'm also a fan of speculating about 40K's distant past. It seems the best way to get a taste of the DAoT, Age of Strife, and Unification Wars is perhaps through a secret history compiled by servants of Malcador during the Great Crusade or a radical Inquisitor drawing upon earlier secondary sources.

 

I feel like this could keep a lot of stuff ambiguous and uncertain while giving some juicy details (which may or may not be accurate) about pre-Imperial human history.

 

Would this appeal the fraters here...or would it still be "revealing to much" despite the in-universe framing technique?

[Ryltar Thamior]

Worked out alright for the (semi-Hesiodic) journal of Keeper Cripias in the 3rd ed rulebook, didn't it ? 

[MARK0SIAN]

I think the unification wars would be great to tell in this way as they’re in living memory for Malcador’s historians if it was compiled during the crusade. Anything before that would probably be revealing too much for me personally, I like that basically nothing is known about it.

 

On a side note though, I do think a few mini, light hearted accounts of things from our age or earlier that they’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted could add a bit of amusement. For example when Arkhan Land creates his robotic simian companion based on extinct monkeys and insists the tail must obviously have been a weapon rather than for clinging onto trees.

[WrathOfTheLion]

I think a set of tales, fables and stoties that are scattered about the DAoT time period and limited in scope would be very cool. Not enough to get an actual picture of what it was or to build it up as a world, but esoteric snippets, small glimpses.

[b1soul]

On reflection, might make more sense for any "Secret History" to be the work of a radical sect within the Ordo Chronos, based on multiple (sometimes inconsistent) tertiary sources citing or claiming to cite an ancient Malcadorian historical encyclopaedia (which would itself be a legendary secondary source).

 

You could get into a lot of juicy detail while keeping a high level of uncertainty and speculation.

 

Seems like it would be the perfect vehicle to explore anything DAoT or Strife related.

[N1SB]

I think it's a really fun idea, and I felt this sort of framing device works best with 30k and 40k.  Now, having thought about it, I actually kept coming back to whose voice to attribute these...I wouldn't say histories, I wouldn't even say stories, but perhaps parables to.

 

I was listening to what you guys said: ambiguity, Hesiodic, living memory of Malcador's time and probably misunderstood, esoteric snippets (this was the light bulb moment for me, something with maybe a philosophical bent on it).  It reminded me of something else.

 

Atlantis, this underwater fantasy realm across different media, was described (and possibly made up) by the great philosopher Plato...who attributed that information to another dude (who was also probably made up by Plato).  And Plato wasn't really trying to give a history lesson, he was using Atlantis as a case study for governance.

 

In trying to imagine who the "speaker" would be, one person kept coming up, but regardless he should have these qualities:

 

• He would have to be within living memory of those times
• He would have to be an authoritative voice
• He would also have to be allowed to speak freely, and to be recorded for reference
• He should be a deep thinker to know how to relate that information to current situation 
• He should have some connection to readers, like you guys

 

I'm not trying to be controversial, I don't think this should be controversial but I'm just being very cautious, so I'll put who I think qualified above all others:

 

I think it should be Roboute Guilliman, referring back to what a Remembrancer or Malcador told him, in trying to teach other leaders, from Space Marine Chapter Masters to governors of the 500 Worlds, via stories.  Yeah, it would be some scribe recording what he said at some function, but he's being Plato.

 

Teaching via stories is an old management trick, so of course Guilliman would use it.  He's trying to tell his subordinates a little something-something on how to do big things, like how to manage their Chapters on making sure Trueborn and Primaris Marines to get along, via some anecdote about the Unification Wars or something.

 

The benefits are many-fold.  The biggest of which is, these parables aren't simply exposition; they're entertaining, educational, not just about past events but on what it's like to try to run the Imperium.  But they're not just about those eras past, it also tells you a lot about Guilliman's way of thinking by how he shares this information.

 

A very close runner-up: Bjorn Fell-Handed.  In many ways he's even better because he WAS a Great Wolf but he's technically retired.  He doesn't want to override the Space Wolf leadership, but he exerts his influence by storytelling, which makes especially more sense with the Space Wolves' oral tradition.

 

And the type of parables they could tell might be about the Men of Iron during the Dark Age of Technology, the implied message is you shouldn't rely on technology too much, therefore you shouldn't take the ideas of Techpriests like me too seriously.  But that's what I thought while reading what you said.

[ThePenitentOne]

As a sisters player, the Age of Apostasy is very appealing to me. I've always wanted to run games from that era, and I've always wanted more source material to work with.

[Rik Lightstar]

I'd love to see this idea as

 

"The Perpetual Diaries" specifically Ol Persson to start with. In the Heresy books he makes lots of references to having existed right back to the early Classical History if not further.

 

BUT, he also often chooses to live secluded lives until he's dragged back into things, so he could offer snapshots of things while also having an incomplete view.

 

Rik

[b1soul]

Oll was around 45K years old around the time of the Heresy, placing his birth around 15,000BC and making him older than the Emperor, who IIRC was born around 7000-8000BC in Anatolia.

 

This means Oll would've probably been a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer (possibly one of the last mammoth hunters) whose people were subject to the whims of the seasons, changing climate and animal migrations...while the Emperor was most likely born into a Neolithic farming community, i.e. people who had developed the earliest technologies and techniques to shape their environment to serve them. This could explain their fundamentally different outlooks. In many ways, the Emperor and Magnus were very similar. Same hubris, just different technique and level of knowledge.

 

I remember Oll kept resetting his memory every mortal lifetime, to prevent himself from going insane. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

With all that said, I'm about to go on a flight of fancy here...

 

A possible framing device could be that at some point, Oll started to keep a long-term diary at least for certain stretches of his immortal life-span (perhaps after digital technology was developed in the late 20th century), and while he rarely goes back and reads, he keeps adding to "his log", and transferring the contents to new hardware as he lives out his perpetual life. Sort of his way of not completely losing his past/identity.

 

By the time he arrived on Calth, he had been using some type of DAoT device for this purpose over several long millennia. After a while on Calth, he decided to settle down and reset his memory again, but this time the memory reset was so strong that he had a hard time remembering the purpose of the device on him. The Battle of Calth ensued and the device was left behind. Being a piece of hardware DAoT explorators would have used to record data in hostile environments, Oll's "diary" survived the Battle of Calth and even the Underground War, but was badly damaged.

 

Some way or another, the device falls into the hands of the proto-Inqisition during or not long after the Scouring. They manage to salvage/copy only fragments of data from the device and the device itself mysteriously disappears after a few decades. The data fragments are studied and preserved by the Ordo Chronos...but over several millennia post-Heresy, some data is still lost or corrupted. An enterprising inquisitor then comes along and takes it upon himself to piece together and learn as much as he can from the remaining fragments...

[N1SB]

As a sisters player, the Age of Apostasy is very appealing to me. I've always wanted to run games from that era, and I've always wanted more source material to work with.

 

 

Just to compare notes, we might've had a similar idea.  We wanted to do something like Forgeworld's Horus Heresy Black Books, but for the Age of Apostasy.  However, because instead of having Primarchs and their Legions it was about Sebastion Thor and his disciples, we'd actually use the skirmish Kill Team rules.  Now that we have Crusade, we think that Patrol-level 500 pt games.

 

And in relation to this thread, we thought of the fluff of a 40k-era Preacher doing a sermon about Sebastion Thor...with hilarious consequences.

 

For example, let's say we were talking about a game scenario in an area with a lot of cover, so we set that on an agrarian planet.  We'd have a Preacher talk about how Thor plucked a fruit from the tree to teach his disciples something about the bounties the God-Emperor provided, something very relatable.  However, the gag is...this Preacher was preaching on a hive world.  His audience has never seen a tree.  Even the idea of plucking something is foreign to them, like this Preacher would have to compare it to unplugging food from this mythical things called trees.  Your typical hive worlder would think of such stories as descriptions of paradise, "What?  Food just...grew out of the ground?  And people could eat them without having to work in the manufactorum?"

 

But in short, I agree with you.

 

 

I remember Oll kept resetting his memory every mortal lifetime, to prevent himself from going insane. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

With all that said, I'm about to go on a flight of fancy here...

 

A possible framing device could be that at some point, Oll started to keep a long-term diary at least for certain stretches of his immortal life-span (perhaps after digital technology was developed in the late 20th century), and while he rarely goes back and reads, he keeps adding to "his log", and transferring the contents to new hardware as he lives out his perpetual life. Sort of his way of not completely losing his past/identity.

 

 

Oh man, you reminded me of this great thing I bet a lot of our American Fratres here read: The Sirens of Titan (yes, as in the Saturn moon where the Grey Knights come from).  Even if you don't know it, if you played the game Bioshock: Infinite it is quite influenced by that novel imho.

 

In this sci-fi novel, there's this court-martialed soldier on Mars who's been mind-wiped; he's forgotten everything but his name, basic vocabulary and his potty-training.  He's to execute another prisoner, who tells him to look behind a barracks for a hidden cache, right before he kills him.

 

He goes there, looks in the hiding spot, and finds a long, multi-page letter.  He discovers he could still read when he looked at the top and find the letter was addressed to him.  And the writer of this letter was trying to teach him all the things he needs to survive in this weird Martian military.  The letter tells him whom to trust, like who his best friend is.  There's also funny stories of how the two of them got drunk and did something insubordinate.  The letter also gives him encouragement and motivation, whoever wrote this letter clearly believes in him and this soldier is afraid that he might let the writer down.

 

At the end of the letter, he looks at the signature, and it's his own name.  He had written a letter to himself in preparation for a mind-wipe.

 

(Also, the best friend the letter described was, of course, the person he executed, but he didn't recognise him obviously.)

 

Anyway, in the way it could be a diary, it could be an epistolary novel.  I actually didn't know or remember Oll Persson resetting his memory.

[Robbienw]

Oll refers to many things from antiquity, modern times, the age of technology, etc. He definitely doesn’t reset his memory.

[b1soul]

I don't mean total amnesia wiping his slate clean. 

 

I can't recall where exactly I read this...but I have the distinct impression Oll's memory is very selective in that he only remembers slices of the past (e.g. Verdun). He obviously knows who he is and recalls the broad strokes of human history he's lived through, but he's forgotten (or buried) a lot of his lives or at least a lot of details about his many past lives.  

 

If no one else can confirm this, I'll have to go digging through BL, probably starting with Know No Fear and Perpetual. It's probably more accurate to say he habitually buries his memories of his past lives...come to think of it, "memory reset" definitely isn't the best way to describe it. 

Edited March 27, 2021 by b1soul

[Rik Lightstar]

@B1Soul I couldn't remember how old he'd said so just referenced the oldest things I could remember him talking about.

 

But yeah he's hella old, and with his selective memory wipes and self imposed isolations he makes a great narrator for an intentionally patchy history.

 

Rik

[Ryltar Thamior]

 

As a sisters player, the Age of Apostasy is very appealing to me. I've always wanted to run games from that era, and I've always wanted more source material to work with.

 

 

Just to compare notes, we might've had a similar idea.  We wanted to do something like Forgeworld's Horus Heresy Black Books, but for the Age of Apostasy.  However, because instead of having Primarchs and their Legions it was about Sebastion Thor and his disciples, we'd actually use the skirmish Kill Team rules.  Now that we have Crusade, we think that Patrol-level 500 pt games.

 

And in relation to this thread, we thought of the fluff of a 40k-era Preacher doing a sermon about Sebastion Thor...with hilarious consequences.

 

For example, let's say we were talking about a game scenario in an area with a lot of cover, so we set that on an agrarian planet.  We'd have a Preacher talk about how Thor plucked a fruit from the tree to teach his disciples something about the bounties the God-Emperor provided, something very relatable.  However, the gag is...this Preacher was preaching on a hive world.  His audience has never seen a tree.  Even the idea of plucking something is foreign to them, like this Preacher would have to compare it to unplugging food from this mythical things called trees.  Your typical hive worlder would think of such stories as descriptions of paradise, "What?  Food just...grew out of the ground?  And people could eat them without having to work in the manufactorum?"

 

But in short, I agree with you.

 

 

 

I am *here* for this !

[LameBeard]

In the short story Oll Person remembers being an Argonaut (ie Greek myth) but when Grammaticus meets him he’s forgotten his wife was from his previous life. His memory is not perfect.

 

I like these ideas when we see distorted history like this - ie maybe we see new perspectives of our own myths once we allow for the warp and the Emperor’s hand, but I also like the dramatic irony of in-setting characters getting our history garbled, like Shakespire (sic) and finding his third and final play.

 

So I think that’s the key with this project - showing clearly but not clumsily the fallibility and prejudices of our historian. That preserves the ambiguity we need.

Edited March 30, 2021 by LameBeard

[MegaVolt87]

I would cap it at dark age of technology/ slightly before that happened. If it winds up too far back, IRL bleeds too much into the setting. Passing mention to IRL history is more than sufficient like we have now. I think other perpetuals should have more run ins with the Sigilite (?) order that Malcador is apart of, kinda like Assassin's creed for earlier times. Conflict, then a stalemate + negotiated ceasefire so the current lore doesn't need to change with the back filling. More stuff like the last church etc. 

[b1soul]

Started off liking the idea of an inquisitor basing a forbidden history on old works referencing an even more ancient masterwork by Malcador's people

 

...but drawing on Rik's idea, I'm now really leaning toward the idea of an inquisitor piecing together fragments surviving from a strange ("likely fabricated") log composed in the odd voice of a human who couldn't have lived as long as implied by the log entries. Must be some kind of hoax and yet some of the sensitive information within could not have been known by some amateur hoaxer.

 

I think the latter idea is something Dan Abnett could pull off perfectly. He is the Perpetual guy, and Oll's irregular memory would be a perfect vehicle for Dan to further world-build

 

...and agreed, think the focus should be DAoT, particularly a period straddling the line between DAoT and Strife

Edited March 31, 2021 by b1soul