I was wondering how you could make Battle Tech woke.  You've already got female mech warriors and the mech aren't gendered.  But yup, removing the Rommel tank from the distant future is appaerntly political.

So any new universes to invest? I haven't been able to find any to my tastes so I've been working on my own. I need decent concept art tho because that seems to get more attention than just prose writing or lore dumps

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 21, 2024, 03:59:41 PMSo any new universes to invest? I haven't been able to find any to my tastes so I've been working on my own. I need decent concept art tho because that seems to get more attention than just prose writing or lore dumps

Unless you have about 100 US for each art piece I recommend "A.I." "Art".

We need 2 things:

An Open Source/CC By/Public Domain ruleset (meaning the very expression of the rules)

Equally open settings.

There are alternatives out there but it just ammounts to the proliferation of standards as everyone wants to do their own thing.  Getting people to sign on generally takes a popular enough setting or ruleset.  Over in the rpg world you've got the OGL and the Cephus engine but not much for open settings.

On that end it'd be better if people didn't try to copy the big names too. I can appreciate OnePageRules' attempt to give 40k a newer, easier ruleset. I think it's smart since they can rely on the popularity of the 40k lore. Otherwise people are just gonna say, "I already like 40k I don't need a setting clone."

Wargames Vault has a huge selection of indie-level wargames if that interests anyone. Plenty of neat rules and settings waiting to be played on there.

Most of my settings are pastiches of TSR's discarded settings like Bug Hunters, Dark•Matter and Star*Drive. None of the big settings are even remotely as interesting imo.

E.g.:

Bug Hunters: you play as replicants deployed by the colonial authorities to fumigate giant killer bugs and killer robots leftover from an ancient war.

Conspiracy Thriller: you play as investigators employed by the government or an NGO to investigate aliens, cryptids, and conspiracies a la The X-Files. Something something dark matter is the meta-origin of paranormal activity.

Space Opera: you play as a national of one of thirteen stellar nations leftover from a galactic war. The galaxy is human dominated, with aliens as client states rather than independent nations like in typical scifi. Roswell Grays that serve Cthulhu are invading the frontier btw.

Mech Crusade: Basically The Expanse, but with mechs. Or Jovian Chronicles, I guess

I can go on for a while.

But honestly I'm just sick of lazy 40k ripoffs

Quote from: 1stLevelWizard on April 21, 2024, 05:49:49 PMOn that end it'd be better if people didn't try to copy the big names too. I can appreciate OnePageRules' attempt to give 40k a newer, easier ruleset. I think it's smart since they can rely on the popularity of the 40k lore. Otherwise people are just gonna say, "I already like 40k I don't need a setting clone."

I haven't done a huge dive into Grimdark Future lore, but I suspect that OPR is mostly expecting people to just play OPR 40k with their existing miniatures and they can just ignore the current GW terribleness.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 21, 2024, 09:38:44 PM

Quote from: 1stLevelWizard on April 21, 2024, 05:49:49 PMOn that end it'd be better if people didn't try to copy the big names too. I can appreciate OnePageRules' attempt to give 40k a newer, easier ruleset. I think it's smart since they can rely on the popularity of the 40k lore. Otherwise people are just gonna say, "I already like 40k I don't need a setting clone."

I haven't done a huge dive into Grimdark Future lore, but I suspect that OPR is mostly expecting people to just play OPR 40k with their existing miniatures and they can just ignore the current GW terribleness.

There's not much of it and what exists is an excuse to explain why everyone can fight or ally with everyone else.

For example, the Alien Hives (tyranids) and Robots (necrons) are explained as developing individuality just like humans.

I feel this makes for a very bland and boring setting because it reduces the armies to shallow aesthetics. It's like having a setting based on the Cold War, but both sides have identical values so there's no logical reason for them to be opposed.

It's very strange

Personally the Necrons were better as souless husks but I will admit the Tesseract Vault is an impressive model.

I wonder, sometimes, why 40k resonates so deeply for so many.  There was a lot of fantastic art. Art that was visceral and disturbing.  It's much smoother and cleaner now.  But still quite evokative.

Quote from: David Johansen on April 22, 2024, 10:00:07 AMPersonally the Necrons were better as souless husks but I will admit the Tesseract Vault is an impressive model.

I wonder, sometimes, why 40k resonates so deeply for so many.  There was a lot of fantastic art. Art that was visceral and disturbing.  It's much smoother and cleaner now.  But still quite evokative.

I think it's less that the setting resonates with people and more due to a combination of lack of options and the network effect. It's easy to say that it resonates deeply with a lot of people when there is no point of comparison with anything else.

It's like saying the MCU resonates deeply with a lot of people since you have no other cinematic universe to compare with, since all of the others that tried self-destructed.

Truth is, people are shallow, ignorant and latch on to what is currently popular. Media literacy is in the toilet. Nerd fandoms are consumed by ancient rotting monopolies.

But, inevitably, corpos cannot stay relevant forever. Times change. IPs are bought up by executives who have no idea what made them interesting in the first place and end up either killing them prematurely or rendering them unrecognizable.

Hopefully this controversy will convince more people to make new IPs and break the chains of the creative monopolies. We need more creators like Eric July.

I get what you're saying, but I think there are a considerable number of people that enjoy 40k because they genuinely enjoy it. When I first found out about it I thought it was cool how different it was to a lot of the other sci-fi worlds at the time. I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars and 40k was so radically different. The lore was fairly deep too, and I just enjoyed it for what it was.

I think it's unfair to say that it's only popular because there's no other options. Today that might be true, but it wasn't always. However, I won't ignore that there are plenty of people who think of wargaming and the only thing they think of is Warhammer 40k. Same goes for D&D: I love D&D, but I know it's not the only RPG out there.

Agree that we need more creatives though. I don't wanna see 40k go away, but I would like to see some more competition.

40k is popular for some of the same reasons as D&D 5e:
- it's promoted by a corporation with resources. You can get the stuff in a lot of retail outlets.
-it has a critical mass of players. I can get a game of either really easily.
- it has multimedia/merchandising as well.

I have tried OPR but it's too bland for me. The current 40k rules aren't a game I enjoy either.

I can enjoy the setting by taking the bits I like and discarding the stuff I don't. Working on some house rules so that I actually enjoy putting my toys on the table.

Exactly. I don't think competition can exist until these monopolistic companies go out of business.

In terms of alternates over the years we've had Mutant Chronicles Warzone, Vor, Void, Kryomek, Dark Age, Warmachine depending on how you want to look at it, Malifeux, Infinity, Warpath/Deadzone and probably half a dozen others I can't recall / didn't buy.  They've all got their weaknesses.  Then there's all the knockoff companies like Empress, Scibor, Puppet's War, and so many others.

Of those, Warpath / Deadzone is probably the best supported at this point and Mantic's been really on and off again on that.  And Mantic's art and aesthetic don't seem to resonate for people.