For Yule, I have taken receipt of a printer / scanner.
I have recently joined the "Inquisimunda" forum on
Ammo Bunker and been inspired to share my pictures which have grown from that ferment.
In fact I made a
topic to post my doodlings, but I felt I would edit them and repost them here for sake of record.
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I have a vague outline for a place which was in the very early stages of
what would eventually become a Hive World, but on being cut off from
the Imperium ended up regressing into a Knight World level of
technology. Parts are almost medieval, with a huge central city and
ruins and remnants of semi autonomous refineries/factories scattered
throught the world. Left to develop/devolve by itself for millenia,
heretical technology and beliefs have blossomed even in the apparent
absence of Chaotic influence.
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"Arbite Bannerman"
This fellow - I have attempted to thumbnail at least a dozen times, and
draw full A4 at least once and it just doesn't want to manifest.
My
idea for the remnants of Arbites and law enforcement on this planet is
that they have split up and regionalised - becoming more and more
medieval the further away they are from the Capital and other large
towns and cities.
Ironically, the higher ranks want to emulate
nobility - and look as individual and lavish as possible, looking more
like Warhammer fantasy Empire generals than soldiers, with feathers in
their caps and colloquial technology such as duelling flintlock pistols.
I
liked the idea that recruits would be given the most useful weapons and
armour because they were not "fashionable" so you might have scrawny
kids with big ancient arbite helmets wobbling on their heads as the
mascot of a group, like a drummer boy.
I figured that it in the
most rustic areas they might have recruited a fellow who had never seen a
gun fired in his life. He might have a family heirloom of a shotgun
that had only ever been used as an improvised club. One of my
thumbnails had this fellow staring dumbfounded at a bullet/shell given
to him as a reward by his superior, completely confused as to what he
was to do with it.
Another idea was for some kind of boltgun to
be the symbol of an Arbite leader, but for the bolter shells to be so
rare that it was a purely ceremonial object. A "white elephant", it
could not be relinquished or disgarded, despite being a huge lump of
useless metal. Essentially some servant would be required to constantly
carry this thing wherever the leader went, perhaps strapped to his
back, as a symbol of office - in fact, maybe nothing else would be
acceptable as a symbol of office to all the peasants in the outermost
places. If you turned up with an "official seal" they'd think it was
suspicious and easy to copy - but some huge lump of intricately detailed
metal - well you'd have to be the real thing with that as a sign of
office!
This fellow is veering towards medieval, with his metal
helmet, shotgun that could be club or firearm, and the fur of some dead
beast cloaked over his shoulders. Banners flutter in the wind, showing
symbols of the weighing scales - one of the few signs surviving that
these forces think of themselves as Arbites.
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"Lanternman"
The usual trope in mainstream 40k stuff is fire and flame, promethium, burning the heretics etc. etc.
But
I rather like the idea of citizens worshipping light rather than simply
flame - light including electrical light. Venerating it almost as a
lost technology.
This fellow is a Lantern Man, one of a great variety of penitents or semi religious nomads/tramps.
They
provide illumination and navigation for caravans of traders, pilgrims
or monster hunters as they move between settlements or through tunnels,
having no real home, relying on the generosity of their wards for food
and shelter.
His lamppost and battery backpack are hierlooms,
passed down from father to son, with almost no knowledge surviving on
how they work. Probably only a fraction of the mass of the backpack
actually generates the power for the lights, with slung together
technology having built up like sediment over the centuries. A forest of
different power adapter wires dangles from... somewhere, allowing him
to plug it into local power generators when he stops to rest. Whether
this actually helps or whether there's a gram of radioactive material
with a half life of 10,000 years ticking away inside - who knows? Every
Lantern Man is different!
A variety of replacement lightbulbs adorn his belt, a bit like other characters would have spare ammo clips or grenades!
He
clutches The First Bulb, a burnt out power unit turned into a relic of
significance for Lantern Men, a bit like rosary beads, allegedly the
very first bulb that one of his great gr. gr. etc. grandfathers would
have begun the tradition with.
For his weapon, I imagined an
ancient, completely broken Power Maul, which is now simply a club with
some phosphorescent material inside it to make it mimic the appearance
of its former glory!
His weapon has a cable tied around his arm - this is
inspired by the way that Black Templars are chained to their bolt
weapons - I like the idea that he can never relinquish his "guiding
light" and therefore his responsibility in guiding travellers in the
darkness.
He is bald with perhaps whisps of hair - with various burn marks over
his skin and scalp. He is a man constantly strapped to a lot of
electric power and I imagine that the urge to tinker and explore the
heirloom means that he is covered with scars with a lot of burnt off
body hair! His forearm and hand have a remnant of some metal on
them with half legible numbers on. Along with the equipment, the idea
is that the shreds of some ancient imperial adept uniform have survived
down the long years, the origin of the Lantern Man probably being some
splinter group of some very menial Imperial techs who only knew how to
change light bulbs in the City.
The larger insect hunting moths
is some genetically modified dragonfly, fearsome to look at but much
venerated by the populace as one of the surviving bioforms from the
initial colonisation/terraforming, designed to make marshlands habitable
with a voracious appetite for mosquito and other pest type creatures.
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"Lanternman with Marrow Seekers"
One thing I like about all the vignettes you get in Warhammer rulebooks
over the years are the little servitors / grots / cherubs etc. that snap
at each other in the margins. Mercifully, this seems to have survived
at least until 40k 6th edition and in the themed art on the GW webstore.
Here,
it felt natural to add some ratlike creature on the tilting, damaged
lamp on the right. So I added a whiptail, a kind of rat sized lizard
creature, not really vermin but an ill tempered spiny creature in any
case. It's raising it's hackles at the perch of a dragonfly to the
left. If you want to eat moths for dinner, a Lantern Man's totem is a
good place to sit!
I figure these gentlemen are Marrow Seekers,
moving across a mostly dried up lake bed (like the Aral Sea), trying to
find the remnants of what are, to the eye of a 40k player, Eldar
wraithbone constructs. These are brittle, porous and ground into a
power source which is used alongside the scant Promethium which is
occasionally wrung from dilapidated, semi-automated sources.
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"Preacher of the Spire"
There are many fragments of Imperial Ecclesiarchy left on this world,
whose energies have been turned to strange things in the virtual absence
of the light of Holy Terra.
One such faith goes by diverse names
but is called in official channels the Church of the City Unattained,
but also goes by Faith of the Spire among lay people. Different
splinter sects of this movement regularly roam the planet, making
pilgrimages to places they believe are the foundations of a mythical
paradise city they were cheated out of when the planet was isolated from
the Imperium.
The Capital city has many grand pillars and
attempted excavations that have since been built through under and over.
These great cisterns, caverns, pipes, tunnels, vast pillars and
girders were the beginnings of the long process of turning the world
over into a productive Hive world.
The Faith believes that these
decayed fragments are an eternal reminder of the failure of the people
of the world to live up to the Emperor's standards. They are forever
chipping away at these remnants and turning them into holy "relics" even
though the vast majority of them are sewer maintenance parts from the
foundations. They have no real mental image of what a Spire or a Hive
even consists of, but they venerate the Imperial Eagle in their masks
and iconography as they see it on the ancient bulkheads that survive.
I imagined the the flying buttresses and eagle heads from the Imperial
Sector kits would be a big motif for this cult. They would wear masks
which were just that kind of aquila pointing forwards or maybe blank art
deco masks like the Sigmarites have from AoS.
I would imagine their cloaks are dyed differing shades of blue/green in mimicry of the Verdigris they would see on old ruins.
The
holiest artefacts wouldn't just be torn up bits of pipes and plascrete
but rather, working or legible bits and bobs from thousands of years
ago. This fellow is attempting to read some huge bound manuscript which
in reality is probably a detailed treatise on waste water management
rather than the one true path to the Lost City.
Mummified
servitors that have been torn from the walls of ancient tunnels are
sometimes turned into "living saint" type reliquaries.
This Faith
is seen as something of a pest by the authorities as they travel around
the feudal areas encouraging the peasants to build bizarre, aimless
towers to appease the Emperor and encourage him to return and finish
building his Spires. This has the result that there are areas of the
planet littered with strange follies and earthworks in primitive
imitation of what the Administratum began to accomplish.
---
"Sin-Eater"
I figured this chap to be a hanger on with groups like the Faith of
the Spire. He has sworn a vow of silence and communicates through the
countless strips of parchment and seals which make up his clothes.
He
makes his living taking food / drink or some small coin to write down
the prayers and names of those living and dead who will never get to
live in the promised Spire. Essentially, he mourns the living and the
dead who never had the chance to live in the promised land of the Spire
Unattained. He will also take some of your sins for you as an
indulgence... Lighten your soul as well as your coin purse, of course.
My
thoughts were that yes, he has a little airbrush type quill with an ink
reserve and a compressor on it. He has candles for wax seals aplenty.
His backpack would have all sorts of seal stamps and spare candles,
perhaps even a canister just full of hot wax and a little spigot to pour
it out as it's needed. His collar and shoulders are covered with the
latest promises, but his entire coat is composed of the oldest ones
woven into it to replace wear and tear. After years of travelling and
sin eating his coat is entirely made of cured leather, vellum and
parchment. He carries a coin box on his waist a bit like a Boxing Day
collection box.
His staff top is probably an ancient servo skull
whose grav motors gave out centuries ago, with a scroll stuffed into
it's mouth, a good symbol for a sin eater.
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