Inter-Kabal Writing

Hey guys so I've been lurking over the Dark City and I've really loved the fluff that people have been writing, it's been wonderful stuff. But I think we as a community could make it better. Our Kabals and background are all in their own little bubbles, but what if we worked together to write each other's Kabals into a grand interconnected story?

I've done this in D&D of having multiple parties run in the same world and their actions affect each other and one group may hear about the exploits of another or that groups exploits actually change the world and in turn some of the things that the other parties can experience because their actions shaped the world.

Now I don't know exactly what we would do as we could do Inter-Kabal roleplay, we could write each other's Kabals (with said Archon's permission of course ) into each other's backstories and work on things like trade or relations between kabals, heck if we wanted we could have a Dark Eldar raid (or crusade if we wanna do something righteous ) written out and have epic storylines or events going on.

So I'm asking you all, the people of the Dark City are you interested in doing any of this? To make our Kabal's part of a living and breathing Commoragh? If your interested in participating, or want to help coordinate and plan this PLEASE do so as this could be something that makes this forum special.

Hey Rhivan.

I think this is a great idea and I am certainly interested in taking part. I m all up for not pointing my guns at fellow Archons for a while to dish out pain to the cattle races. I will lend a hand coordinating if you like. Seems like it could end up as a pretty big project!

... with plenty of scheming of course.

Haha, I like the idea of this.

Firstly, we will need to agree on a central location. The Dark City is spread over unknown number of webway realms, with unknown space in each realm.

Should this be contained within a sub-realm, a level of the Dark City (lower, middle, high Commaragh), or perhapse a single tower?

Maybe we are all inhabiting a single tower, and are attempting to out-do eachother on our realspace raids? Something to that effect?

I am sure you have an idea in mind

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Firstly, we will need to agree on a central location. The Dark City is spread over unknown number of webway realms, with unknown space in each realm.

I agree with you on the central location, the ideas I have CURRENTLY are either
1.) All of us being within the same sub-realm
2.) There is a general area of Commoragh that features a bit of High, Low, and Middle Commoragh that way I don't restrict people's options in making Kabals within this structure or ruling out Kabals entirely for not fitting in
3.) We're all in Commoragh (This is a no brainer but allows for the most freedom, personally I favor the other two options)

Note: I didn't think of the tower because this system is for Kabal's to RP together and possibly tie our backstories together, so individual Kabal's could indeed do that but I feel that puts unnecessary restrictions on the people entering. What I do plan though is having several locations that could be hot spots for Dark Eldar either with Trade, entertainment ect. Heck Kabals could even offer those services if people are interested in making Pleasure Kabals or have business in that kind of industry

Remember Dark Eldar are a decadent people, and a creative people, so Merchants, Artists, will exist, people who create fine cuisine will be a thing (One question that's so commonly ignored in fantasy and sci-fi settings What do they eat?) just because Dark Eldar go on pirate raids does not mean that every other industry doesn't exist, does your Kabal have any hands in one of them?

Now I don't know the specifics of what everyone is interested in (For instance let's say Cavash's Kabal wants to have some of my Nightsworn in his backstory for whatever reason and the two of us work that out, or if we would like some kind of RP going on within the Dark City in the RP section with our Kabals, this will take some heavy planning) or if people would be interested in some kind of giant raid the Kabals take a part in or some kind of city spanning event that's planned. We could do all of these things I'd just like to make sure people are interested in them.

I need to know what people are interested in doing, and have people help plan this to make it as best as it can be.

One thing I probably need to do is contact some of the people with Kabal lore already in place and see if they're interested in joining. If anyone has any questions post in this thread or message me and we can work things out, this is in it's infancy and we need people to get this going.

@rhivan, lets try to keep this basic to start, then expand if it works. Nothing worse than spending days/weeks designing the perfect system only to have it fall apart from lack of participation

I think the tower idea is a good place to start, mainly because of its size. We have no clue how large these towers are, or what their dimensions are. Its possible that an entire planet could fit on a single floor of a tower (we are talking about realms within realms within realms after all).

I assume there would be some sort of point system, to see who is "winning"? I remember back in the day, we used to keep track of our CC kills, and bring them back to the Dark City as slaves. Something along those lines?

I am interested in absolutely anything. However, the limiting factor is what is doable?

So it should be something that is fairly simple to implement, but interesting. I say it should be fairly simple because this could easily become a highly complex and very draining thing if we are fully trying to plot/conspire against each other while working with each other to achieve a goal. In a normal RP it may not bee too difficult, but if we are functioning as whole kabals then there would be a lot of element to keep track of.

I am not fussy about what kind of geographical constraints are implemented. I can work with anything and am pretty flexible. For a first outing something like having smaller DEldar organisations gathered together to raid a world might be interesting. It would force us to work together and rely on each other and work together to achieve a common goal. It would be a pretty fun community based thing. There could be different goals and objectives for everybody to achieve.

But then this opens up more questions. How would such a thing work? An impartial GM would be needed, and would success be based off of dice rolls? Would this be more of an RP or more of a community story-telling event?

To reitterate: I am happy to do anything. I think working towards a common goal at first would be good. It would let us get to know each other's kabals and become familiar with how everything is working without including fierce rivalry straight away. Afterall, DE do tend to put differences aside when going on grand mon-keigh netting outings.

Also, I would like to suggest that anybody taking part writes up some basic fluff for their kabal and has it posted for others to get a feel for what they are like. Like character write-ups in online RPs. I think that would be beneficial.

So my initial idea that sparked all of this was literally writing Kabals together backstory wise and then it led to the path of the more RP esque ideas. So as for locations I personally favor a small subrealm or a section in a subrealm that way people can write their Kabals freely. If we want to use the tower (and possibly expand later) I'm not against it.

I think the best way to start this is to do as Cavash said and plan some kind of raid. That way we can have kabals meet for the first time and we can test the waters of how this works. We will need a DM to pull this off. For the first time I'm willing to DM this and have my Kabal host the raid or something along those lines.

As personally I don't know how we'll plan the raid, I'm willing to leave that up to everyone and I'll try to look into the systems. (You guys are free to look into this as well and feel free to tell me which system your most comfortable with)

I have some fluff written somewhere that I can send you for a sub-realm. The sub-realm was written for the purpose of being an impartial meeting place for other Kabals. It could work for the purpose of a first meeting place to plan the staging of a raid.

I will probe and see if I can find anything useful for a system.

Yeah I think this could be very fun

If it winds up being too complicated doing the story of a whole Kabal, I've just had an idea.

Why not make it a bit of an origins story? Every Archon/Succubus/Haemi has to start somewhere. Perhaps the Archons of our kabals began their climb to the top serving in the same Kabal, with the DM posing as the Archon of that early Kabal (organising realspace raids, sending his troops to assassinate rivals etc.).

Begin with your character as a lowly Hellion, or Kabalite, or Wych in the employ of the DM, and then plot your rise to the powerful Archon who leads your kabal to this day.

It'd be a neat way of adding in a bit of backstory to your warlord

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Why not make it a bit of an origins story? Every Archon/Succubus/Haemi has to start somewhere. Perhaps the Archons of our kabals began their climb to the top serving in the same Kabal, with the DM posing as the Archon of that early Kabal (organising realspace raids, sending his troops to assassinate rivals etc.).

That is certainly a good idea. I would be up for that, even though it is a more conventional style of RP. I do enjoy stabbing backs and climbing the ladder, though...

I have found an RPG wiki that contains a number of RP systems that are under the creative commons license, meaning they're free for anybody to use I will have a proper look through the in the morning to see if any seem suitable. https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems

There are also two other RP systems a friend of mine has told me would be fairly fitting for this situation. Neither of them a free though. They are called Fiasco (a GMless RP that is based around factions) and Reign

Well, if we're choosing to do the origin stories idea I've got which character I'll use I'll leave it a secret as there's the tiniest bit of a twist to it

@Cavash @Ynneadwraith @Fisheyes So if you've looked at the systems Cavash has linked which is your favorite?

I have absolutely no experience with this so I'll leave it to the experts!

Never done one either, but The Simple Game System (TSGS) looks good. 3 documents, longest is 6 pages.

Anyone else want to comment?

Just read that and it seems good to me. Simple, easily adapted to a Dark Eldar setting, and I can already see a couple of cool ideas

As for who's GM, how about a rotation so everyone gets a go at playing their character and coming up with scenarios...

I would be fine with a rotation. Maybe we advance the story twice each week? I know RL sometimes gets in the way, but if we had a rule of "Post by Tuesday/Thursday or get left behind" sort of thing it would keep things progressing?

Any other thoughts?

Simple Games System works for me, I'm usually free Tuesdays and Thursdays so either one works for me.

Yep happy with that how're we gonna do the dice rolls? We are on a backstabby Dark Eldar forum after all

Shall I have a bit of a brainstorm for the abilities/skills we can use? I'll think up an intro for it as a first round if you guys want too

One person (the GM who sets up the games?) should roll for everyone. It should definately be one person rolling for everyone, that way it will be equally biased.

I dont think anyone would lie about dice rolls. I mean, as the True Kin we assault, pillage, torture, and inflict pain for fun, but FAKE DICE RESULTS?! That would be low.

@Ynneadwraith, can you please get the ball rolling on that? I would love a place to start.

Hah Dark Eldar might be thieving, malicious, evil sons of b*tches, but there are still standards

Sure thing. When I'm bored at work tomorrow I'll cook up a little narrative intro

Well I look forward to what you cook up, any ideas on the characters everybody is going to be using? Are we using the Archons of our Kabals? (Or leaders of the organizations?)

As a bit of a teaser, the idea I've got is a bit of an origins story

The character I've picked winds up as an HQ in one of my armies, but they'll start out as a lowly grunt...

Edit: although I am open to suggestions

I was thinking it could be a good origen story of the kabal/coven, following the leader(s) rise. No reason that it needs to be the same character throughout. Some times the warlords failures are too much for his cronies, and that lhamean beside him wants a promotion.

Hmmm, interesting. I suppose the survival of your character is down to your choices and the luck of the dice. Or their nefarious deals with the neighbourhood haemonculus...

My idea is that the story would follow prominent characters in each of our armies from their early day, all the way through their various trials and tribulations to the heads of their various kabals.

What's the name of your kabal? We could start it there

I'll post up an intro in a sec, see what people think if we want something different just let me know

Leaving the plot to one side for a second, I've done some thinking about abilities and skills.

In the examples in the PDF, there's 9 abilities and 22 skills.

http://tower.newcenturycomputers.net/download.cgi/TheSimpleGameSystem-R2.pdf

So far I've thought of these for abilities and their corresponding disabilities:

Strong - Weak
Tough - Frail
Dextrous - Fumbling
Agile - Clumsy
Cunning - Foolish
Manipulative - Honourable

Thought it would be fluffy to have 'honourable' as a disability in Dark Eldar culture

Any other fluffy ideas? Need 3 more maybe 'cut-throat' and 'merciful'?

Then, for skills these are the ones I've come up with:

Weapons Skill (nod to 40k rules)
Ballistic Skill (same)
Dodge (defensive buff)
Pilot (for vehicles)
Fleshcrafting (medic equivalent, later stages you could make your own Wracks or somesuch)
Alchemy (anything from poisons to explosives)
Mercantalism (buying/selling etc.)
Persuasion (what it says on the tin)
Knowledge - specific (ported from the PDF)
Disguise (Mandrake NPCs would be good at this)
Arcane (anything from eldritch technology to Mandrakes powers to latent psychic abilities)
Navigation (for traversing the skeins of the webway)
Perception (again, ported from the PDF)

Need 9 more any ideas?

I've gone for the more 'civilian' life in Commorragh, as opposed to the 'only war' 40k slant on things. Is that what people want?