re: Weird Fiction in Role-Playing Games

I was trying not to talk too much about Warhammer (which I could do all day), but now you've invited me to expand on one of my points, so here goes.

I didn't mean to downplay the weird elements in 40k. They are definitely there, and sometimes can be quite prominent. I meant more that it's not primarily a weird setting, so much as it is a (grimdark) sci-fi setting with some weird elements. So I consider the weird elements an "undercurrent": there are lots of novels and game books with nothing weird (in the sense of weird fiction) in them at all. And, while things like Chaos gods, C'tan and Genestealers might seem weird in-universe, from the audience's perspective, it's hard to read 40k fiction as weird fiction because at some point most things are explained (even if the explanations don't always make sense or have been contradicted over the many, many years).

But, weird in 40k fiction can be done well, and you've hit on two really good examples. I haven't read the Genestealer Cults codex (I've drifted away from the games over the last decade), but the star god cult has always been part of their background. I love the way they're depicted as worshipping and paving the way for a deity that will devour them and their world, whether they realise it or not (which is usually a point of ambiguity). It's a good blend of Doomsday cult meets Cthulhu cult, peopled by actual human-alien hybrids. The devotion the cultists have to their mutated offspring is also very creepy. In fact, one of my favourite 40k short stories - Elucidium by Simon Spurrier - is told from the perspective of a Genestealer cultist. I'd recommend it for Elder Sign, but I think the anthology it's in has been out of print for a long time now.

Again, I only know the Necrons from their earlier incarnations (I get the impression they have changed quite significantly). Their codex for the 3rd edition of the game is basically what happens when you put Old Ones in 40k though. Basically, the Necrons were an ancient race of aliens at war with an even more ancient race of aliens called the Slann who had god-like superior technology (including having created most of the life in the galaxy). In order to beat their enemies, the Necrons discovered they could awaken entities they worshipped as star gods (more ancient aliens, the C'tan) who were non-corporeal beings who fed on stars. To do so, they showed the C'tan they could gain sustenance from living beings instead (and they find out they can eat each other too). Just as they were on the verge of victory, a plague emerged that was wiping out the prey of the C'tan, so they decided to go into hibernation along with their Necron servants (who, by the way, they had tricked into an eternity of servitude as mindless automatons). The premise in the codex is that both the C'tan and Necrons are waking up, which is obviously bad. There are some really good very short fiction pieces in the codex that evoke a strong Lovecraftian feel. I haven't really done it justice with this short summary.

@liamorourke11

"Not to spoil the plot, but I think Xenos is the book where they find R'Yleth and promptly destroy it with orbital bombardment."

So, actually follow Ripley's advice from Aliens and nuke it from orbit.

https://tenor.com/view/alien-sygourney-weaver-i-say-we-take-off-and-nuke-the-entire-site-from-orbit-its-the-only-way-to-be-sure-movie-quotes-gif-11314084

Pretty much, but to be fair that's more or less the Imperium's response to everything.

I gave these books a listen again a few months ago and my opinion of them greatly changed. Toby Longworth, who reads them, is great. He's a reader who I've started to seek out for audiobooks, but the books themselves are just not great.

Eisenhorn is pretty much a superhero who can do whatever the plot demands he do. Elderly close combat expert? Yup. Crack shot? Yup. Invulnerable to everything? Just about. Inexplicably wealthy and powerful? Yeah that too.

I think that the first time around I was so happy to see that the books weren't just about space marines punching each other that I was willing to overlook most things, but damn. Just damn.

I also get it that the three(ish) books are supposed to be about the tragedy of Eisenhorn's downfall, but it's just not done all that well. By the end he's disgraced, ruined in mind and body, and whatever else, but he's also still just as much of a superhero as he was in the first book. So I guess maybe it's not all that bad? Plus he gets an awesome demon friend.

If you like wilderness survival with horror, I have to recommend Alma Katsu's The Hunger. It's a novelization of the Donner Party trip.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/30285766-the-hunger

If that reply was to me, I do not. It might have stayed in my parents' attic when I went to college. In which case, it got tossed when my parents sold their house a couple years ago. I guess my brother could still have it somewhere, but I doubt it.

I haven't played any RPGs since the early 90's.

That's the fate of almost all RPG books, I think. When I left for the Army, I have all my books to Brent so that the worst-case scenario would be that they'd end up at the proper used book store. He still has them.

Warhammer 40k is the only Warhammer setting that I'm really familiar with and it can be a really hard setting to get your head around. They're drawing from almost 40 years worth of development and things have been changed, retconned, and developed a lot over that time. The setting steals things from all kinds of other settings and genres and mashes them together in bizarre ways. Space marines are giant superhuman warriors, some of them are kind of like standard SF marines, but some others are basically Teutonic knights, and one group is pretty much vampires. There's a group of cultists who worship the star gods just like in Mythos stuff, but those star gods are really aliens and some of them are the kind of aliens that eat all biological matter on a planet and some of them are basically the aliens from Aliens. At one point there was a character called something like Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau and the most well known ork character in the game was probably named after Margaret Thatcher.

Black Library, the publishing arm of the company that makes Warhammer, also churns out books at an astonishing rate and has a huge stable of authors of varying quality.

I've read only a very few of the books, but my impression is that generally anything involving space marines as main characters is mostly going to be about them punching each other, which I've found incredibly dull and mostly seem to exist to please the kind of people who make pew pew noises while playing Warhammer.

Much more interesting are the books that follow more minor characters who don't have corresponding miniatures and whose stories don't involve shooting aliens or other space marines as the primary plot. Dan Abnett has written a series of books about two inquisitor characters that are basically mystery stories where the main characters are more or less secret agents. One of those characters is a guy who has to live in a floating life support chair because an airplane crashed on him.

I forgot all about Eclipse Phase. I have the first edition book and love the setting, but it feels like one of those games that's great to read but a nightmare to try to actually play. IIRC the second editon should be coming out soon. You're right about it sharing a lot with Altered Carbon, which is also getting an RPG soon.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between Coriolis and Eclipse Phase other than the portals, but the portals in Coriolis are purely used to facilitate space travel between different star systems. They're a lot like the portals in Mass Effect except way more unreliable and janky. There's also a lot that's not really developed or described well in the Coriolis core book. The dark between the stars gets a few mentions, but really just to say that people think it's evil and spooky. Similarly the timeline is kind of vague. I think they did this intentionally so they could develop it more in future books.

There are a couple of podcasts that have done actual play sessions of Coriolis, but Mud and Blood is the only one I've listened to all the way through.

I meant to mention Trail of Cthulhu in my previous comment. I'm biased because I'm not really a fan of Ken and Robins games. They have some neat ideas, but mechanically I think they're kind of garbage. I've got a copy of Trail of Cthulhu on my bookshelf and the core mechanic of the Gumshoe system seems to exist to solve the problem of "what happens when the game master just isn't very good, or is lazy". What I mean by that is that I don't think any game should ever have a situation where the PCs can't move ahead because they didn't find some part of the story. It's the GM's job to keep the story moving and make sure that the players do have what they need to progress the story. There shouldn't have to be an entire system built around that.

I'm 100% with you here. Also, I laughed out loud at "Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau." I really hope I don't run into him in a dark... Nar Shaddaa... crime scene... ski lodge?? Maybe I can give Dan Abnett a try soon. I appreciate the recommendation and will keep my eyes out. I bought "Bubblegumshoe" for my daughters, then read it, then gave it away to Goodwill. I agree that Gumshoe seems like a conceit. A decent GM can easily keep the plot moving as long as any characters survive, and the cynical mechanic of "social combat" really discouraged me. I've written a few RPG's myself (after years of side-work, I just broke $200 net income! Next stop, Monte Carlo!!), and, honestly, the best thing mechanics can do is to get out of the way of the story (and the second best is to reduce the need for suspension of disbelief). Lasers and Feelings (and all of its remixes) are a perfect example of this. They provide just enough mechanics (one stat, one die) to let the story slide along non-deterministically without any major snags, then gracefully bow out of the spotlight and let the players run the play. Jousting with words can be done with minimal imposition of game mechanics, and all the players can easily have a great time fencing with either phrases or steel. I feel like the Gumshoe/Trail of Cthulhu mechanics are unnecessary for even decent Keepers. The stories are still good, of course, but mechanically force-feeding them should never be required if the players and GM are genuinely interested in the plot. Call of Cthulhu succeeded despite its mechanics, not because of them, and doubling-down on the meta-gaming does not add anything to the sense of peril and reluctant discovery that the players should all be experiencing. (Meanwhile, the mechanics should not "be the way" they should "be out of the way.") I'd argue a couple of good actual play podcasts that show this are "The Lovecraft Tapes" and "The Old Ways Podcast" -- both are great CoC narrations with light mechanics. Regarding Eclipse Phase, in my opinion it is gorgeous, but, I agree, the mechanics are, at best, daunting. It reminds me (is it bad that I say "fondly"?) of the wonderful but mathematically challenging Universe RPG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_%28role-playing_game%29 ) . But, frankly, it is fairly easy to use the built-in (especially the more recent) EP character building rules to create characters, then port them, right away, to your favorite (and, hopefully, simpler) rule system! Doing that might take a few hours, but the result will be some conversion mechanics that you can use for almost everything else in the game. Once that's done (don't convert everything, just establish some simplistic rules for doing so), the setting opens up like a treasure chest! The Eclipse Phase authors have worked out every condition to single-percent resolution, but, while they deserve props for all that work, the players need never know this in order to have a good time. Cutting up the odds into chunks of 16.7% each converts everything to a d6 roll. Doing that (or, really, anything even vaguely similar) kicks the mechanics into the background where they belong, then the wonder, dread, menace, and bounteousness of the setting can come rolling in unimpeded.