Things NOT going in my backstory...

Here's something I posted on the BoLS forum concerning ideas to move the 40K fluff on a little bit. It's now buried under a pile of trollbait, so here it is saved for posterity...

1) The Emperor is revealed to be the Hive Mind, and the Tyranids are a failed attempt to create an army that could be sent into the Warp to defeat Chaos once and for all.

2) Necrons are reprogrammed by the Tau to become allies.

3) The Eldar die out until there's only one Craftworld left, and all their units are now 0-1 choices to fit the new fluff.

4) Groups of unhinged people all over the Imperium start banding together to exchange pictures of cats with funny captions on. These are called LOLcults.

5) Slaanesh mates with Tzeentch to create a new Chaos God that can't decide if it is coming or going.

To write or not to write

My backstory is underway, now I have to decide whether I want to write any short stories about it. Writing background is different to fiction, it's more like a historical document than a story. I always liked the way that Games Workshop mixed the two styles in the older Codexes, it was a very effective way of bringing the players into the universe. Now they restrict it to White Dwarf, which makes sense - you want the Codex to be a reference book, not a page-turner, and I'd rather have Codexes be 100% useful, rather than have a big chunk of it a read-once affair. We have the Black Library for the really good fiction.

The problem is, I haven't written fiction for a long time (unless you count tax returns). There's cobwebs in that bit of my brain.

Maybe I should write under the pseudonym Dan AbNot, just in case. :)

Naming

Now I've decided to do some background for my armies, I have to come up with some names - the system itself, the planets, the Tyranid splinter, the Space Marine Chapter (are there ANY combinations of cool words that haven't been taken?), plus all the key characters in the conflict.

I refuse to use a random name generator (I remember writing one as part of a Traveler character generation program many years ago). Hopefully, once I get the basic style down, they'll start flowing.

Background story

You know, it might be fun for me to create a backstory for my armies.

I like the idea of having a reason for all these armies to be together and fighting. It will make campaigns easier to create, and it will also be cool to be able to create scenery to a "theme".

So I've decided to set my corner of the 40K universe in a single system. It will certainly have its own Space Marine Chapter, and a splinter fleet of Kraken-esque Tyranids on the way. The Orks will have come from a roaming space hulk (or they could be mercenaries). I have very good reasons for Tau and Necrons to be here too, but I'll let that be a surprise...

Yes, the world does want another unprimed picture

Well, I had the picture just sitting there, so I thought I may as well upload it.

This is my Mawloc before I start adding Mechrite Red to it.