In the nightmare future of the 41st millennium, mankind teeters upon the brink of extinction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by ravaging aliens and threatened from within by malevolent creatures and heretic rebels. Only the strength of the Immortal Emperor of Terra stand between humanity and its annihilation. Mortally wounded by the traitorous Warmaster Horus, the first Space Marine Primarch to devote himself to the foul Chaos Gods, the Emperor has reigned on the life-preserving Golden Throne, neither alive nor dead, for ten thousand years, sustained by the soul-sacrifice of countless millions. His penetrating mind tears through the void of space, powering the Astronomicon alongside a choir of ten thousand psykers, allowing the starships of man to harness the energies of the warp and travel faster than light.

Dedicated to his service are the incorruptible Adeptus Custodes, the Golden Throne Guard, who watch over the God-Emperor's physical shell. To ensure the Emperor's continuing lucidity and to preserve their own minds from the dark energies of the warp, the Custodes have begun reciting from memory the great Liber Militaris, chronicling 10,000 years of humanity's campaigns against aliens, demons, traitors, and heretics. In between passages, they consult with one another, endeavor to discern the ineffable will of the Emperor, and take part in the high politics that only the Custodes and the High Lords of Terra know.

During recitation from the Liber Militaris, place one gem (d6) on the table to represent each character mentioned. Whenever a character you control shoots another character, 1) make sure your opponent's gem is within range (24" for standard bolters) and line of sight and 2) roll your gem and try to get under your character's Ballistic Skill (BS). If the attack is successful, the player in charge of the defending character should roll their gem. Normal Space Marines have a 3+ armor save, but remember that Terminator armor saves on a 2+ and has a 5+ invulnerable save vs. things that ignore armor. If your opponent fails their save, add that die to your pool and narrate the defending character's gruesome demise.

At the end of each story, split the dice you've won between the following three categories:

DEATH OOO (Don't get this; it means the Emperor strikes you dead.)
WARP OOOOO (Don't get this either; it means the warp is driving you insane.)
POLITICS OOOOOOO (Pursue this; it's your status within the realm of high politics; if you get all 7 dots, you "win.")

P.S. I will be eternally grateful if anyone comes up with an equipment list for the Adeptus Custodes. Y'know, so we can describe what they are wearing before we begin play. I want a chainsword, a powerfist, and a lascannon.

:-O

Now I have one more reason to get 1001 Nights!

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf
Space Wolves Chapter
Adeptus Astartes

Seth, you're in luck because the Space Wolves would definitely appear in this hack, being the guys assigned to annihilate the Thousand Sons during the Heresy.

I love that you're using the dice as minis, or even if you just use minis in a game of 1001 nights. This is looking really cool.

HOLYCRAPSOAWESOME!!!!

Just finished playing this with Dev, Nathan Paoletta, and Adam Flynn. I played The Grand Apothecary of the Emperor's Liver. Horrible things happened to all our meta-characters and our story-characters died like flies. I'll let Dev take first shot at writing the session up, but I'm definitely psyched to play again, preferably with more different types of models and slightly more differentiated combat rules.

I also thought it was superfun. I'm gonna be gone @ Dreamation, and I wanna post my character, even though Dev will have the full synthesis of the game, I'm sure.

Direc Chamfor, High Commissar of the Imperial Guard

Sight: I see only the most appropriate manner of your death.
Taste: The finest food in the universe is ashes in my mouth.
Hearing: I constantly hear betrayal. (Warped to "I hear only betrayal")
Touch: My skin is dark and smooth as metal.
Smell: I can sniff out the merest hint of insubordination. (Warped to "My nose is constantly full of the stench of insubordination")

HERESY: Space Marines are unnatural mutants, and only pure humans should be allowed to serve the Emperor.

I envy Albraxas (Jon's Apothecary of the Liver) his ability to preserve life instead of destroy it.
I envy Trent Nor (Dev's Blood Angels Hero) his track record (we had established that he has sent literally billions of souls to the Emperor - with his own hands!)
I envy Amasian (Adam's Electro-Archivist) his solitude among silent data.

When the game ended, I was still alive, but I had taken 4 boxes of Warp (which replaces Ambition, kinda), and none of Heresy (which replaces Freedom, kinda). Everyone else filled up their Death track, and we decided that the Commissars draconian security measures (caused in part by his deteriorating sanity due to the Warp he'd taken) let to him finally executing everyone else in the name of the Emperors safety.

It was superfun and bloody as hell and very, very 40K. I would totally paint up some specific models just for this game. We were hurting for lack of demonspawn and Tyranids.

Oh! Dev, I dunno if you caught this, but we were tossing around ideas for re-imagining the Senses so that they would have more impact in scenes. The list we came up with was: Rank, Deeds, Equipment, Genetics and Mutation. I think they need to stay as being things you can broadly interpret (so, like, Rank could be "I was once a Sergeant in the Imperial Guard" or "I hate my commander" or "I always seek promotion" or whatever).

Yeah, I think that my concern that the stories would be all over the place and chaotic was unfounded. While all our stories were about the fall of the Thousand Sons, it seemed like that was not necessary. We could have had random Tyranid attacks and it would have worked just fine. It's just a question of how many minis you want to have on hand for the game. Limiting the stories to specific kinds of characters would be one way of only having to prepare a couple of army types. I would definitely have loved to be able to drop a big mini with multiple wounds on the table, like a Carnifex or Demon Prince.

Hopefully Adam Flynn will drop in and comment too. His characterization and storytelling ability was, as always, super impressive. It was definitely a loss when he had to hand off the lead genestealer to me in his story, since I had no idea what direction he was trying to take it in. That alone led us to improvise some rules for narrator characters, to be used in future sessions.

Parts of the inner stories that stood out for me:

• In my story, about a small world on the edge of the Eye of Terror, right when it first appeared like a scar in the sky... Adam's psyker captain bravely leading a dozen Imperial psykers, all riding in a Land Raider APC, into the dark side of the planet, to send a psykic beacon to the Emperor, informing him about the Eye. The Emperor, in return, had the entire population killed.


• In Dev's story, about a Chaplain who had come to convert a pair of as-yet undecided Thousand Sons commanders back to the worship of the Emperor... There were two brothers who commanded this unit and I was the one who had been critically injured and was actually a Dreadnaught. It was very Fullmetal Alchemist. And I dove in front of my brother when an Imperial assassin attempted to snipe him from afar. I survived, but the chaplain, thinking I was attacking him, shot me as well, blowing me up.


• In Nathan's story, about yet another Imperial assassin attempting to kill a Thousand Sons commander who had already turned to Chaos... I played the assassin and was unable to talk my way past the two Terminators (hilariously played by Dev and Adam), who would only allow someone's "smoking remains" to come before the commander. I then became determined to cut off my own limbs, except for one, so that my "smoking remains" might be brought before the commander, but eventually instead borrowed the armor of a Baron and snuck in that way. I was slightly disappointed, but the story was still pretty awesome. Dev was terrific as the Baron.


• In Adam's story, about three Imperial agents meeting with a genestealer aboard a space hulk, acquiring crucial information... Nathan's evil female gene-demon seduced my marine off to his doom (our first non-shooting death, I think), but he returned in a horribly mutated form and attempted to push Dev's character off a balcony (we actually used a lot of scenery in this story, which made it way better, I think). Every character in this story ended up dead, giving us a lot of gems to roll in an attempt to avoid our dark fates. Still, as Nathan said, his outer character was the only one to ultimately survive.

Yeah, this hack made me want to buy 40K minis more than any 40K game I've ever watched or played in. Part of it was that the characters actually had personalities and we got to revel in all the absurd 40K fluff. Also, it was a small-scale skirmish game, basically. We got to play out a bunch of little small-scale conflicts with, at most, a half-dozen minis involved in each one. If we threw in some very light tactics and differentiation between the combat abilities of individual pieces (to give a little more individual character to them), it would actually be fairly rewarding as a rules lite miniature skirmish game, not to mention the roleplaying and storytelling aspects.

The other (meta)characters:

Albraxas, Grand Apothecary of the Liver (Jon)
I can heal anything except my warp-mutated eyes.
Though merely an apothecary, I obey only the voice of the Emperor.
I carry the acrid, vinegar smell of the Lord's bowels.
I drink machine oil, for my insides are rotten.
I stroke my long, slimy beard incessantly.
Envy: Trentnor: His blood is pure & delicious.
Envy: Chamfor: He sports a hat made from a wild snow tiger killed by his own hands. I desire it.
Envy: Amasian: I envy him because he knows secrets that have destroyed worlds.
Heresy: The emperor is dead.

Trentnor, Exalted Blood Angels Hero (Dev)
I smell of saffron and roses.
The ashes of dead comrades lay on my tongue.
I've ruined billions of souls in my grasp.
One eye is a penetrating blue; the other is grey-green, and look towards the past.
I hear heresies.
Envy: Albraxis: His wisdom.
Envy: Chamfort: His status.
Envy: Amasian: His vocabulary.
Heresey: The telos of the space marine is to exterminate all life.

Amasian, Electro-Archivist (Adam)
Veiled by the unsettling tang of ozone.
My account glorifies that which exalts the emperor.
Chained to the tome, slave to the pen.
I am sallow and pale like parchment.
My words are the history of the future!
Envy: Albraxis: That he may touch the flesh of the emperor himself.
Envy: Trentnor: The glory and passion of battle.
Envy: Chamfor: That by his word, men die.
Heresy: My hubris commands that fact will be bent to shape my vision.

It was definitely a lot of fun. I can't decide if I enjoyed the meta-character interactions in the council room more, or jumping between constantly dying characters in the narratives. I profited greatly from going last in the game, as Dev, Jon, and Nathan provided some awesome examples to base my story on.

Just to highlight a couple of thoughts I had during and post-play:

-During the meta-play (e.g. council meetings of the High lords) the stories were actually given the pre-text of anecdotes told by the narrator to convince the council of a course of action. It worked well as context but I struggled to shape my story into something that matched the point I was trying to prove. The random nature of death for the characters in the narrative meant that I couldn't be certain how the story would play out. I wonder if the "pre-text" should just be discarded for the future or the course of action the narrator was pushing for only decided after the story completes (i.e. assign meaning to the story retroactively).


-Something I'm divided about is whether the stories should be "History" or "Moralistic Fairy-Tale".

With history, any cast of characters or subject matter is potentially viable, but there are fewer guidelines for group agreement about what should happen (e.g. players assigned characters in the narrative may be unsure what to do).

But in the case of a scifi "Aesop Fable" I think it presents players with a more easily grasped concept - I think we all have almost instinctual moral sense about how such a tale usually plays out. Add in the idea of strong archetypes (e.g. The Psycher, The Chaplain, The Blood-Angel, The Demon, The Genestealer, The Commander, The Mutant, etc), which we can play to or subvert in the tale, and it seems a convenient short-hand to get everyone playing on the same page. But this is inherently limiting choice. Even more damning to my theory, the play at the table didn't entirely bear this out (I think the other players struggled most for guidance during my "fairy-tale" as opposed to the more historical stories Dev, Jon, and Nathan told).


-I really want the meta-character traits to figure more significantly in the game mechanically. We had all this cool description about these wacky characters and no way to actualize it through play. I'm thinking that the Senses should be important when assigning narrative characters and possibly figure into how the narrative character's actions play out. Maybe this is an inappropriate change from "1001 Nights" but it seems to me to be an untapped opportunity. Like maybe these tales are so old that there is some disagreement on the exact events - providing the opportunity for the Senses of the meta-characters to affect the narrative characters (e.g. giving a better die roll threshold in appropriate circumstance perhaps).


However, those are just my initial reactions on a single play of the game. I definitely had fun with it in it's current form so I'm certain that radical change is not called for.

I think I'll let Jared handle the Necron implementation. And I have no idea about the Tau, really. I'm just a 40K dabbler. I'm sure the Kroot tell stories of their past battles, though.

You're totally right about the meta-framing possibilities. I was also thinking recently about unit differentiation, and I was thinking that we could simplify the 40K minis rules based on the general unit organization types: HQ + Retinue, Elites, Troops, Fast Attack, Heavy Support, and Armor. Each of those types of units could have their own slightly different rules for movement, shooting, etc., but you wouldn't have to use all the special rules for all the different types of units that exist in 40K. I mean, if you're gonna do that, you might as well just play 40K. In fact, HQ and Armor could just be modifiers that you place on the other types of units, so you could have HQ + Fast Attack, for a commander in a Speeder or Armor + Heavy Support for some Imperial Guard artillery tank.

Posted By: Andrew KenrickPerhaps when in hibernation in their tombs they dream of past glories, whilst in the present they struggle to keep them whole and not descend into madness and become mindless machines.

Someone has to make a game about this. It doesn't have to be this one, but damn.

Nathan told me about this at Dreamation - now I want to come play Warhammer1K1 with you. Cool!

I've been trying to type up the basic rules for what we did, plus all the ideas that emerged afterwards, into a little PDF booklet, but then I got sick and haven't been able to finish it, because my files are at work. But! I'll finish them soon, post them, and keep updating them base on comments and future play experiences.

There's a little flavour story, in a sidebar somewhere, about the Tau. IIRC, they repulse a chaos incursion on some planet and kill the demon-possessed chaos champion in charge of it all. But, because of their cosmic naivety, they think they've killed Nurgle (or some other chaos god, I've forgotten).

Which makes me think, at least for players sufficiently steeped in W40K lore, that the stories the Tau tell could have an extra meta-level to them - where the stories don't mean what the tellers think they do.

Wow, it's crazy to think that game was almost 2 years ago now. Still very memorable...

I still have some notes jotted down in an InDesign file, but no, the PDF version never materialized, like so many other one-shot projects. I'd be up for trying to consolidate our various notes and thoughts together, distilling them from this thread and elsewhere, but we'd have to find other folks willing to help make that happen.

I read over this thread (a damn find thread it was!) and I don't think I have other content I can had - there should be enough from the stuff here to figure out the hack, I think. I'd love to see more WH1k1.