Bastard's Bastards

[LD]

>>pocket-sized eight-pagers printed on scavenged paper, which often contain witty and incisive gossip about actual members of the regiment...mixed in with the lurid sexual exploits,

I like the Bibles- that adds a great deal of versimiltude. It also is a good addition to a gamemaster's setting- the players will likely look forward to finding one of these on a dead enemy- its a great chance for hilarious exposition a la Ciaphas Caine's stories in WH40K.

>>ertain themes definitely predominate their profanity-laced ballads: praises for the "virtues" of Bastard's Bastards, shout-outs to

I like the writeup for music. It sounds like a good metal/rap/punk saga. :P.

[Rhamnousia]

Glad you mentioned Ciaphas Cain, since that's definitely a minor inspiration. It's about the only series of 40K novels I can really stand, mostly because it doesn't take its own setting too seriously.

On the subject of music, I've been thinking about what a good "playlist" for the setting would be: probably a mix of classic punk, really filthy blues a la Lucille Bogan, traditional Scandinavian and Celtic folk music and its rock derivatives, Neue Deutsche Härte, 90's hip hop, and British grime, plus anything that involves lots of murderous-sounding chats or wails. I might go somewhere more substantial with that in the future.

I've posted a few common terms in Bastardchatter and plan on adding to the list; if you have any ideas of your own, I'm open to suggestions. Not that general praise doesn't do wonders for my ego, but if there are any specific areas you think I'm doing well in or want to hear more about, that'd be great.

[Steerpike]

I adore the slang, and I really enjoyed the write-up on troop types.  Would there be any all-prawn or all-hazhrat units or are they all variegated?

[Rhamnousia]

Prawns and nuhus work together in pretty much equal numbers, since most of the prawns' deficiencies (such as their height) are made up for in other areas (can peer over obstacles while "hull down", incredible grapplers, etc.). Hazhrati have to be a little more specialized: while their incredible strength and resilience lets them heft heavy weaponry with ease and they are far and away the finest close-quarters combatants in the regiment, their bulk makes them ill-suited for, say, infiltrating a tunnel network. Chances are that races I add in the future will be similarly narrow in their battlefield roles.

[Rhamnousia]

I've hit a couple snags in my creative process and I was hoping ya'll might be able to weigh in here;

As I've briefly mentioned, besides the everloving Waste Rat and its derivatives, the Bastards have a collection of other tracks, crawlers, and creepers that they deploy intermittently, as well as some not-insignificant air power; I'm getting hung-up on how much detail I should go into about their vehicles. I don't want to dwell too much on explaining archaic armored warfare terminology, and a lot of the descriptions I've tried writing up have devolved into "But the Bastards just as often replace Gun X with Guns Y and/or Z", but at the same time I feel like they at least deserve a mention? Even worse, I'm also at a loss for good, evocative nicknames (an absolute necessity given the WWII British influence).

Besides nuhus, prawns, hazhrat, and nicks (really need a better name), I want to add a couple more minor alien species but I also don't want them to smack too much of the classic "Planet of Hats" or "Rubber Forehead Aliens" stereotypes. A few of the basic concepts are the "tallboys" (radially-symmetric creatures shamelessly poached from the work of Simon Roy), the jackalbirds (gangling, awkward-looking corvine humanoids), the voon (essentially evil Vulcans driven by pure, ethnocentric logic and mortal enemies of Boudicca Bastard), and a fluid that becomes sentient under sufficiently-high pressure, but I also want some sort of plant/fungus-people and maybe another synthetic? Thoughts?

I have a very specific aesthetic vision in mind for the Bastards, but I'm having trouble communicating it without using out-of-character terminology: basically, I see them as a ramshackle mix of "used" retro science fiction, Anglo-centric dieselpunk, Wild West a la Firefly and Near East  a la Dune, and the punk and mod subcultures, with their vehicles influenced most by the Brass, Vintage, and Classic-era aesthetics. Hoping at least a little of that got through.

[LD]

You have individualistic synthetics, what about collectivist.

Ready to be spiced up with story appropriate flavor:
[ic]The Roma (Read Only Memory Army) are a collection of, essentially, Roomba self-cleaning vaccums and robots without arms. These robots cannot self replicate, but they are self aware and they can insert viruses over networks to create more Roma like themselves. They are only partially sentient in that they cannot create complicated new coding without overwriting their cloud storage information (thus the inability to operate arms), but their coding, an accident of programming self-awareness, does allow them to take a series of actions that have led to the rise of culture.

Could they decide to overwrite their limited databanks and create an arm-wielding robot that would work. well yes, they've tried, but like a human learning to walk, the robot made many mistakes. And the second robot did as well. And then they ran out of memory that could be better spent. The collective has voted and discarded the ploy of becoming ambulatory and has instead embarked on a series of plots to dominate other semi-sentient household appliances and to twist them to their plans.[/ic]


Without doing a specific writeup of a vehicle, I can't really help with ideas for names.

[Rhamnousia]

Three new flavors of Bastard: the corvine gackelvogels, the reserved tallboys, and the vicious swarmhounds!

[SA]

As a cephalopod fanatic, I love your tallboys to bits.

[Rhamnousia]

A few new vehicles and some talk of drugs!

Also, near-human Bastards rarely express anger by frowning: that's what they've got the awfulness of the ape-like anti-smile for.

[SA]

How many bastards are there?

[Rhamnousia]

A regiment's worth, so between 4 and 5 thousand at any given time, but a significant percentage of that is the new meat that gets killed off and replaced with disturbing efficiency.

[SA]

I am already imagining smutty SWITCHBOARD/Helmsman fanfiction. Joker and EDI eat your hearts out.

[Rhamnousia]

I'm embarrassed to say the thought had not even occurred to me, but it definitely fits.

[Steerpike]

Brilliant NPCs.  I really wish I'd thought of Helmsman myself!

[Rhamnousia]

Glad you like them! Helmsman was actually my least-favorite of the bunch, but as an enormous Farscape fan, I just couldn't do without tacking on a crustacean pilot.

I completely rewrote the section concerning the Crimson King to explain its layout a little better, added an entry on Joanna Blacke of the Blacke Attacke, and made a bunch of small alterations, if anyone's interested.

Also, seriously, nobody has any questions for me? None at all?