Hobby: The Sons of Salanar Legionnaire

 

Around the beginning of 10th Edition, we (Grey Mountain Gaming) started discussing a 'Jornath' style campaign featuring Chaos as an antagonist. One of the issues that has haunted Jornath has been that Ork players in the campaign must be prepared to fight against any one of dozens of the games many Imperial factions while in turn the Imperial players could prepare to fight whatever the Ork codex's best units were. Game Masters for Jornath have tried to get around this in a number of different ways, from highly focused narrative lists and scenarios, to skewed or asymmetric objective scoring in event modules or even custom units and house erratas at different times. The hope would be that Chaos v Imperial would allow for a better, simplier to plan campaign that would give an easier footprint for people to also grow their own characters and heroic rivalries with. 

That campaign, known as 'Havaris' has been in full swing for several years now, but as has been mentioned several times on this blog, Im *very* behind on posting.  As a part of the kickoff for Havaris, and for the conclusion of 9th edition, we worked on one off models for renegade warbands that all the members of the club wanted to add to Vahland's history and lore. The first of these are the Sons of Salanar, submitted by Chris 'The Fabricator', who are a fleet based renegade warband aligned with the god of change Tzeentch. We went with a yellow and silver scheme here, which was rare to see in chaos a primary color we dont have too much across the club's armies. 

The Sons of Salanar will get their own lore post with properly thematic photos in time. 

Thank you for reading!

-Your favorite madman-

Rennaissance of Flesh: The Gallean Moons

                        

GALLEAN MOONS

The Gallean Moons were a fundamental terraforming tool used prolifically throughout the 2nd Age of Solar Expansion. The ‘Moons’ are in fact large scale stations, built out from autonomous seed ships which form the core of the station, by docking together in orbit of a world. The seed ships of a Gallean Moon then get to work deploying simple drones and other machines to build out vital components of the station, starting with fabricating processing and refinery bays to allow for the station's autonomous hive to steadily grow the moon into a cavernous megastructure which can serve to efficiently terraform the Solar systems moons and planets as well as hold a fledgling population of colonists, who can steadily adapt to the slightly modified environmental conditions of their new home as the Gallean Moon steadily processes the atmospheric gases, magnetic field, crust density and all the other essentials to support Terran (Earth) life on a new world. For some worlds in the solar system this process went faster than others. Mars for instance was terraformed by several Gallean Moons in only two generations, while Venus never proved fully hospitable to Humans.

As Humanity began to spread across the Solar System at an exponential pace under the demanding and hungry expectations of incredibly powerful NatComs. Other more elegant options for Terraforming began to present themselves, leaving the eerie megastructures of the Gallean Moons to gradually fall into disrepair, a testament to early Human Interplanetary Colonization.

In the modern day, the Gallean Moons sit off the shoulders of several worlds and ‘true’ moons, their surfaces scarred by centuries of stellar radiation and the impact of small particles bouncing off the miles of hull plating. Many still have thousands of miles long atmospheric exchange umbilicals linking their drifting bulks to the eddies of their world’s atmosphere, causing them to list slowly about like vast buoys.

 

While in the past the Gallean Moons’ supported cities full of colonists eager to one day tread on the surface of a newly terraformed world. Many of the Gallean Moons now play host to outlaws, communities of the poor, diseased or otherwise rejected by society, along with much worse. Biomancers, Talosii Deathclades and all manner of others use the deepest recesses of these decaying stations as bases of operation for their own goals. Authorities occasionally sweep through such stations when they are able depending on resources to hand or to the potential threat offered by such stations, but the prospect of committing enough military or navy assets to clearing an entire moon sized structure of pirates, political dissidents or hostile gangs can be daunting for most organizations.

For the populations of many worlds which host a Gallean Moon there are a great deal of cultural myths about the structures, the Stormriders and Terrestrial cultures of Venus for instance have many religious practices and stories based on the Gallean Moon in orbit above their world which they name ‘The Forked Moon’, for its many surface scars. One particularly interesting myth held is that of the Red Man or ‘Crimson Warrior’ which is said to be the harbinger of the Kironikanmen, or ‘Period of Redress’ when Venus will finally be fully terraformed, its people unified and elevated from their long centuries of hardship. Those who have ventured far into the Forked Moon’s inner depths will know that this myth’s origin is likely based on a now non-functional Eidolon Class Warmech, its towering chassis now forms the heart of a heavily protected shrine in the bowls of the crumbling station, built by Stormrider Clans who bartered enough to salvage a ship off of Venus’ surface.

                                              

-Thanks for Reading!-

Your Favorite Madman

Life: Carver's Gap, North Carolina.

 

In a bit of a departure for this blog, I wanted to start showing some of the other things outside of tabletop gaming that I get up to. I think all of my interests play into one another, reading, hiking, cooking and gaming can all influence each other in interesting ways and I think that part of being a mature person is experiencing as much as you can. 

I'm blessed to have many friends and a close family, as well as be able to play with "toy soldiers" as much as I do, and get to share my little stories with people. I think I try to incorporate the themes from stories I read, and the places that I go into tabletop narratives like Jornath. It makes things 'feel' right to me from a story telling perspective. 

Anyway, Sophie and I went up to Carver's Gap as a part of a wider bit of galavanting through western North Carolina. I had never been to this trail, which was relatively short to the top of the ridge, only about 20 minutes.  But we arrived right at golden hour and it was a truely lovely experience. 

The top of the ridgeline, which is apart of the Appalachian Trial, allows for views from Tennessee, to Virginia and other spans of the mountains through North Carolina. 

I always get inspired to write stories or scenarios when I go on hikes, especially to new and interesting places like this. 

At the top of the ridge we had a Charcuterie board that we purchased from Little Switzerland, a small community in the North Carolina Mountains with a little resort, that we carried up in our pack. It was a special sort of dinner, and was really very good. 

As we continued along the ridge, we made the decision to start heading back to the trailhead around 20 minutes or so before nightfall. Right around that time a stormfront starting rolling in along with wind. Which made for a really exciting walk, back across the exposed highland and down into the switchbacks through the pine forests at the ridge's base. A really spooky and fantastical sort of feeling, which certainly got me in the mindset to paint some undead. 

I hope you enjoyed this break from the normal tabletop games and walls of lore, I think posts like this are easier to get out and keep me in the habit of making updates to the blog without getting bogged down in writing fiction for the battle reports. 

Thank you for reading!

-Your Favorite Madman-