[Narrative] Of Legacies and Inspirations

 If I have a fault, and I'm only speculating about this possibility, it's that I make things more complex than they need to be. I don't think complexity equals depth - I'm not a muppet - it's just that I tend to jump onto ideas and worry at them until what was a simple shape is now a pile of soggy rags and it's not going to go back into that simple shape it was before.

Case in point: the background for my Necrons. I wanted to hook in the background from my original army, the handful of games I played with Garbutt and Shiny, because their armies are still referencing those engagements. To cut a long story short, a Commander of the Da'Ieldi T'au had himself filled with mindshackle scarabs, and a Captain of the Hawk Lords was blasted down by Necrons and the Relic he'd been trying to retrieve made off with. At that moment, Night Fighting kicked in for the last round, as it did in sixth edition, and to me, this suggested the sun had been turned off.

All of a sudden that Relic had a name - the Mourning Sun - and it had a purpose. I'd written up my Necrons as coming from a battered planetoid of junk, a Tomb World missing the rocks in which it's normally encased, held together by spit and prayers. Their plan was to plug the Mourning Sun into their depleted power matrix, point it at the planetary star, and slurrrrrp. Unicron style, re-energise the architecture, proceed across the stars.

The army was never played again, because I sold them shortly before leaving London. Obviously, narratively, this means something happened to them. Perhaps the Mourning Sun didn't do what it said on the tin - it created what the Imperium now calls the Sphera Tenebris, an artificial black hole that consumed the Necrons. The Mourning Sun, however, is still out there...

I discovered this lot while looking for a linkable version of the Neph track above.
Sounds a bit Chelsea Wolfe, but from the other hemisphere.
I know what I'll be listening to for the weekend...
(Also, video contains strobes/flashing)

Here are the Facts that I wanted to work with, the material truths of my gaming that I wanted the army's narrative to reflect.*

• My original Necron army is gone gone gone - none of those models are still with me.
• Garbutt's Astartes have been hunting the Necrons for a century, based on that previous battle and an incident from our Dawn of War gaming.
• Said Astartes have a vendetta against my original Overlord, so it'd be nice to get her into the story somehow.
• Said Dawn of War gaming usually involves me spawning the Essence of the Nightbringer and unleashing the ravenous void god within (we should all unleash the ravenous void god within, it's good for our mental health). 

Let the Mourning Sun equal a shard of the Nightbringer, contained in a tesseract of unusual design; let the fate of Sphera Tenebris equal the wakening of that shard, charged up on star juice and lashing out at its "captors". 

Let us say that the decade passing between then and now in real time is equivalent to the century that passed in-universe between the Fall of Cadia and the Indomitus Crusade (before someone in Nottingham decided to chicken out on that). 

Let us say that the Mourning Sun has drifted in space for a century, and is now stirring again, as the void within... hungers.

 

Now. Let us say also that Tekeshi, Overlord of Xiberia, is at least partially intact. Head and spine, maybe.

 

Nothing wrong with wearing your influences on your sleeve, and I always envisioned Tekeshi as being from that GLaDOS, SHODAN, Borg Queen school of... villainy. It's not just a kink thing, though; the idea of a head in a tesseract, something which could be mistaken for a C'tan shard and then discovered to the disappointment of everyone involved? That's a good beat. I'm looking forward to an "Oh. It's you" in conversation with Captain Kaine one day.

What does that leave us with, in terms of hooks and eyes? We have a C'tan shard up for grabs, and we have a character from my original army who endures in custody, imprisoned by Triarchal mandate for destroying her original tomb world in hubris. We have a through line to my original Necron army. What we still need is some characters... but we'll come to those in due course.

* I've always been a very "emergent narrative" kind of player - writing the thirty thousand word screed before you play a single game is setting yourself up to be contradicted by reality the moment it starts happening to you.