by Motormouth Jamie
Pleasure to be with you all again, Legionnaires! This is Motormouth of the Black Pants Legion, your favourite provider of TTRPG knowledge and tidbits, and today I am being a little self-indulgent. Yes, more than usual. Today, we are talking not about trends in the game production industry or critiquing the games design of others; instead, we are talking about my own work. Two projects I have been working on for a long time that our good editors at the Legionnaire have asked me to tell you about.
So, today, I am here to talk about space elves and space cops. Today I am talking about Dancing in the Ashes, a game of cavorting during the end times, and Disco Imperium, where crime is bad and departmental politics is worse. Yes, they are both Warhammer products, we know what you like.
Dancing in the Ashes – Corsairs of the Grim Dark Future
I have been running Warhammer 40K TTRPGs since I was a young teenager. The first game I ever ran was Rogue Trader, a little clumsily but such is the way, and even then, I had a player that wanted to play an Eldar. I was happy to oblige, I am a lover of all thing’s elf, yet Rogue Trader had only rules for the Dark Kin. This was a time before easy access to homebrew sharing resources, and the player did not desire to play an obligate psychopath, so we decided against it.
I adore the Eldar. Craftworlders, Drukhari, Exodites, Harlequins, they scratch my itch for long ears and magical powers, but it is the Anhrathe, the Corsairs, that truly hold my heart in their untrustworthy hands. I hold they are the only morally neutral, and thus morally superior, faction in setting, wanting nothing more than to indulge in adventure away from the strict confines and organised cruelty of their origins, even taking up the cause against Chaos if the need is great. I wanted to play as them, run games with a Coterie, and no options were available to me back then.
Then Wrath and Glory – or WanG as we call it with tongue in cheek – came out. You could play Eldar! Corsairs even! And humans. And Orks. And Space Marines… Many people have pointed out that this plurality does not serve gameplay and narrative balance well, and it was obviously Imperium-centric, because of course it was. We Xenos players never get to have anything from 40k without the corpse-worshippers getting their equal-to-greater-attention releases. It would not do. I needed something greater. More granular. More focused.
So, I began my homebrewing. I used Dark Heresy 2nd Edition as the core, the most polished of the systems available to me in-setting, and used its mechanics as a base. I crafted multiple Origins within the Aeldari cultures, from Asuryani to Exodite. Reinvented the Organisation and Role system to instead allow players and their characters to walk the Paths, turning character creation into a lifepath system. I scoured the previous additions of the table top game all the way back to Rogue Trader to find inspiration for weapons and vehicles. This would be the way to play an Eldar of any sort.
And I went overboard. Dark Eldar hire mercenaries from other species, after all, and surely the Anhrathe would do so too! So, of course, I had to write rules for those too. Renegade humans, kin/squats, Tau, Kroot, I made rules for all! Then their own Paths, and new gear, and vehicles, and… This is probably causing others who dabble in creative projects to cringe. Putting too much into a single work. Much to cut out when it came time to edit the work.
Disco Imperium – No Truce With The Heretic
I imagine that if you are reading this than you are at least aware of Magistratum Mundanus, the fantastic 40k police procedural first released on the BPL podcast and then onto YouTube. If you were not aware, lucky you, you have an eighteen-episode playlist of Dark Heresy actual play content to watch! They even released a handbook for playing as dutiful and truly competent members of Watch Station Gamma 17. It’s a fun read even if you don’t care for the mechanics involved.
It is an inspiring and hilarious show to listen to. Coincidently, it was around the same time I was listening in that I read the novel Bloodlines by Chris Wraight, of the Warhammer Crime series. A book set on the hive world of Varangantua following the Probator Agusto Zidarov, an enforcer, as he tries to juggle investigating the disappearance of a merchant scion while juggling his worsening home life, corporate and office politics, and his addiction to street food. It is, in my opinion, one of the best novels Black Library have released in decades, peak cyberpunk fiction, and if you take anything from this article, it should be that you should read that book.
These two inspirations mixed in my brain-meats like the most virulent of alchemy. I wanted to run a game like Magistratum Mundanus but with the grit and cyberpunk flair of Bloodlines. Dark Heresy was a great base for it already, as the podcast showed, so I got to work. Months went by with my delving into niche lore of 40k, trying to look past the Judge Dread wannabes of the Arbites to the gritty, street level enforcers of the grim dark future. There were Adeptus politics to explore, internal organisational structures, the perspectives of the common victim of Imperial life.
Disco Imperium was the result. Named for Disco Elysium, a game where you play as washed out, pseudo-schizophrenic madman with too strong opinions on politics, Disco Imperium is a game of having to deal with the fact that you have an impossible job: trying to enforce order in the inherently disorderly structures of Imperial society. Sure, the Enforcers are the outright stated police force by the local government but every crime has somebody else with invested interest.
The Corpo-Guilds send their Slatejacks to meddle with a case that would affect their bottom lines; the Mechanicus’ Astynomia points out that the technology used and damaged makes it their responsibility; a freak from the Psykana Prefectory points out the suspect had a psychic assignment rank one step above baseline and so they are hunting him too! Such bureaucratic headaches are what led to the invention of the Multi-Adeptus Disciplinary Force, the MADF or “MAD-men” as the local media and populous love to call them.
On the plus side, your squad – the players – will have a very diverse array of skills to help you investigate complex crimes. Everything else is a negative. Everybody wants to meddle in your affairs. Corruption is rife. It is down to you, enforcers, on how you manage to deal with the stress, how you can go home at the end of the work day and manage the stress of your work. Don’t let it catch up to you. You’ve got people that rely on you, after all. This is your job, you have dependents, and you’ve gotta just make it through this next case without breaking.
Disco Imperium is finished. Mostly. The mechanics are polished and done but I have no documents to share with you other than a spreadsheet of rules. You can play it with those rules but you will have to wait for Dancing in the Ashes to finish before I begin work on Disco Imperium’s PDF. I assure you, it will be worth the wait, and I am always open to answer questions. If you can’t find me in Discord, please do send in some fan-mail, I’ll be sure to answer you there.
Much love to all you players and games masters out there. I hope your games are fulfilling and your scheduling holds true.
A vile creature from the dark and dank lands of the old world — England — Motormouth is one of the BPLs foremost consumers of table top systems, voracious in appetite for overpriced paper and ink.
