#grimdarkness

CHAPTER SERF is a tabletop roleplaying game and adventure, set in Warhammer 40K, where you play those hooded peasant weirdos you sometimes spot in the backgrounds of the art.

Full PDF downloadable >>>HERE<<< Printer-friendly version >>>HERE<<< A5-booklet format version >>>HERE<<< (thank you @tubilak!)

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Here's the pitch:

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CHAPTER SERF is a game about candles.

As a fan of Warhammer 40K, I think about Space Marines a lot. Space Marines are:

Feudal aristocrats, with all the uncaring impunities that affords;

Literal grandsons of God, with monastic habits;

Genetically engineered super soldiers;

Children, kidnapped and brainwashed before puberty.

These are not well-adjusted, fully-developed persons. When do they ever get the opportunity?

What would it be like, to serve such persons? To run their supply chains? Keep their households? Satisfy their desires? Clean up their messes?

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In artwork and cinematics; on miniature bases and in bitz boxes; described in comics and novels, Space Marine architecture is replete with candles. 

So many candles.

A Space Marine doesn’t think about where candles come from, or what candles cost. (They think about war and xenos and traitors, stuff like that.)

A Space Marine wants candles—so there should and must be candles.

CHAPTER SERF is a game about getting an emotionally-arrested, casually-genocidal bossman demigod—to whom it would be sacrilege to say no—the candles they want.

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I keep trying to write fan TTRPGs for 40K.

The first was Paper Route, also set on a giant flying cathedral of a spaceship. I never finished it. It was called "Paper Route" because the ship was cargo hauler, transporting a planet's worth of office paper. There were orks with origami guns, and paper-wasp tyranids, and eldar scooped up alongside a whole forest.

Where my mind was at with Paper Route was: "40K should be funny."

The second 40K TTRPG thing I made was for Kieron Gillen / Rowan Rook & Decard's DIE RPG. It was an adventure called "POWERSWORD PURGATORY"---a bunch of 30-year-olds, former regulars at ye-olde-FLGS, get Jumanji-ed into POWERSWORD (ie: not-Warhammer 40K) for one last hurrah.

With "POWERSWORD" I was trying to work through how I felt about the fandom, and 40K's place in culture now. Its drift from Thatcher-era DIY nihilism to corporate-IP neatness; its earnest embrace of "xenophobia is justified actually" power fantasies.

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CHAPTER SERF is my third attempt. And my strongest, maybe?

Because it isn't a piss-take. There are jokes in it, of course. It wouldn't be 40K without jokes. But I am taking the Warhammer 40K setting seriously. I'm not being meta, nor winking at the reader.

I finally have something genuine to say, through all that grimdark set-dressing---about the weight of inhuman institutions crushing ordinary humanity, and what we make of the scraps soul left us:

Forcing a mother to betray her own son; Saving a labourer from lobotomising servitorhood; Arranging the funeral of a Space Marine's discarded lover;

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Design-wise, I am most pleased with CHAPTER SERF's favour mechanic.

The Imperium of Man is an extremely feudal network of bickering fiefdoms, each with iron monopolies on different facets of far-future life.

It made sense to me, to link what stuff you can have with how much factions like you. Buddy with the Mechanicus and you get access to fancy bionics and lightning guns. Piss off the astropaths? No psychic powers for you.

This is essentially a gear list married to a faction / major NPC relationship map. I like it because it removes the need for players to worry about dollars and cents---a thing that makes no sense in most 40K TTRPG framings.

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I hope people find CHAPTER SERF a fun idea. I am pretty proud of it! I particularly enjoyed writing the various vocations / professions---thinking up what sort of servants Space Marines would want / need.

I started making some sketches for it, but I can't really spare the time to make all the art that I need---so the PDF is text, only, I'm afraid.

I did the layout myself, in Google Slides, which I know is the least efficient way to do things---but hey! If that isn't 40K I don't know what is.

even the most comparatively underpowered factions like imperial guardsmen have their ubermen that are really the only people we care about or follow most of the time-- like the Cadian Shock Troopers (basically ‘Army Strong’ fantasy ramped up to 11), or the Catachan Jungle Fighters (Everyone Is Death Jungle Rambo).

The rest of the setting’s logic basically accepts that unless you have psychic powers, infinite government authority, are a space marine, are a cyborg or have tons of robots, or are rich + own your own space ships you’re basically hopelessly fucked. And even then it will kill you just so you don’t get any ideas.

So the grimdarkness contains this weird doublethink, a kind of dual consciousness or narrative. 

That one one hand, the world is fundamentally apathetic to your experience and you’re not actually in control, and that practically anything could negate what agency you pathetically thought you had and kill you, or worse. The only way it won’t be like this forever is if conditions deteriorate even more.

but on the other hand, everybody important fits into a neat little box, genre, or fantasy niche where they thrive and the rules of the niche can never be negated. No one can tell you that, no, Preposterous Rambo actually dies, instantly and hopelessly. Because he’s Preposterous Rambo. He has the magic feather of being too cool to be subject to universal despair.

Grimdark fiction universes, if there are any people still alive in it that we care about, can’t actually be too grim or too dark such that even Really Cool People have no agency. Because that would mean nobody doing anything at all in the galaxy would succeed, which means there’s no point caring or trying to accomplish anything at all in that universe.