Entry 2: The Shape of Things

A Call of the Void Journal

The first thing I did with Call of the Void was ask how did the universe get to where it was? Not every universe asks this question and some provide answers that are not completely satisfying. I initially wanted to do my take on 40k so it started as a sort of inverse of the setting. A way for me to keep the general idea but be different at the same time.

The initial idea was that mankind would be united by someone and then they went off into the stars. With the idea being there was an earth empire that fractured and became a confederacy and a bunch of factions. Then I was going to make the confederacy try to keep humanity together by diplomacy and force.

The problem was that none of this really made much sense. Let me slow things down a little and go into detail so you can better understand what I am getting at. So the setting starts with mankind a hundred or so years in the future being united by some futurist tech bro type. The idea being that he would use wealth from the tech sector to take over regions of the planet and hire mercs and manufacture robots to fight for him. Basically, how can someone with a crap ton of money take over the world? Influence, tech, deals, and threats.

The reason why he wants to do all this is that he wants mankind to spread among the stars as our birthright. You may notice the similarities to 40k here are so broad strokes they could be missed if I hadn’t said anything. So after humanity goes off into the stars eventually the earth empire falls apart. Now I gave this idea no thought and just went with the fallen empire trope cause it’s easy. Then the remnants form into the confederacy.

This is where not thinking really bit me in the ass. Cause now you might be asking how we go from one to the other. Problem was I didn’t have an explanation. I just kept going instead. So now we have the confederacy and they are a military dictatorship that wants to keep mankind together for, reasons. No, I hadn’t figured out a why yet. Then we have a series of smaller factions that split off from humanity and were doing their own thing. Where did these guys come from? Long term colonization efforts from before the collapse of the empire. Don’t worry I will explain later.

So the confederacy cannot win wars against these factions and instead uses diplomacy to make treaties to keep the peace. Of course this makes no sense as the confederacy has more man and materials than any one faction. Also the other factions are small compared to the confederacy. So I just explained it as the confederacy were incompetent and couldn’t get the win. Of course that is unsatisfying and generally stupid. The idea was that an alien race warned mankind of the danger of other hostile races and the confederacy wanted to keep the peace for when they found the hostile aliens.

This doesn’t really work when some of the factions of humans are evil and would not keep to any agreement. I was stuck trying to make something that made sense while adapting ideas from another property. It wasn’t working, but I was too damn stubborn to admit it. Thankfully after a month or so of thinking I realized that and switched gears. Before going over what changed let me talk about how I tried to adapt the various factions.

The Imperium was easy. I just made it into the confederacy. They were closer to Halo and lacked all the other human factions. So no mechanicus, space marines, sisters of battle, or anything. I also made some changes like no immortal god emperor. The guard were given Coilguns instead of lasers. Little changes like that.

Then I made the Omni Ascendancy who were a direct Mechanicus inspiration. Again changes were made but I will refrain from explaining how right now as many of the things I would say here will be true when I talk about the faction later.

After them I made The Union of Light as a Sister of Battle analogue. I tried making them a female only faction just like the sisters, but had to scrap the idea. I had to make three different origin stories for them and I liked none of them. First I went with cosmic space radiation affecting birth rates increasing the number of women. That didn’t work cause biology would make this impossible. The population would die out due to a lack of men. I also felt this would make no one happy as now people would be thinking about dynamics between the sexes instead of the story. So I scrapped the all female idea and just made them male and female.

Then I created the Circle of Chains. This is where my thinking took a sharp nose dive for the early draft. Cause they were meant to be Chaos and the Dark Eldar all rolled into one. Problem is my setting doesn’t have actual supernatural gods like 40k does. Which means almost nothing of either faction would translate over. What made matters worse was I had a lizard species that was just the dark eldar and at this point I was just spiraling with a huge mess.

Not helping things was my attempt at creating the space marines with the Helix Technocracy. See the idea was a scientific expedition was obsessed with genetic manipulation. So much so they wanted to create god-like beings who could run society perfectly for them. Yes, they were inspired by the Primarchs. The issue I ran into was how to make them space marines in ways that mattered and I just felt like it was all too generic.

Now for the shit round up. A quick rapid fire of all the factions that I didn’t think through. The chaos and regular dwarves. Space dwarves but one is cruel and the other not. The not necrons who are just really Egyptian or something. This one gave me a migraine trying to figure out. Then the not cybrans of the melded directorate. Points if you know the reference for that one. And the totally not Jedi order who have space mind powers.

Having taken a step back I now have fixed all of these factions and added more. So in the next entry I will talk about the general timeline and what changed. Then in the entries after that. I will go into detail about each faction on it’s own to give an idea of how they are now.