SPACE INQUISITORS

Two things.

1) Another article on Glitch. It's really endearing to hear the optimism in the developer's voice, but it really bugs me that somebody would hire 42 people, make a game that nobody seemed to really want to play, and then just shut down because, surprise, it didn't make money. It reminds me of another endeavor by a man with a lot of passion and next to no actual knowledge of how to make things work (38 Studios, the game company founded by a baseball player) and surprise, it didn't do so hot. Anyways.

2) After rereading Eisenhorn, the oddly well written 40k book about a member of the Inquisition, I went ahead and wrote up a quick Mini-6 based game about Inquisitors in Space. If 40k is the Decline of the (Space) Roman Empire, Space Inquisitors is set during the Pax Romana- the Republic of Man is expanding its borders, exterminating or working alongside what alien lifeforms are out there, and there is no silly grimdark. Regular grimness, maybe, and plenty of regular darkness (no flashlights in space), but no grimdark.

Also no Space Marines, god, no, never Space Marines. Genetically enhanced super-soldiers, maybe. Dudes in big powered suits, sure. But not 9 foot tall immortal perfect warriors, never. Ever. No enormous guns, either. What I'm interested in, basically, is the comings and goings (and doings) of a mixture of secret police and religious fanatics. In short, I'm looking for guys that are a lot like this:

I don't know if a suit and tie is really the best attire to go running around chasing aliens in

Reasonably attired men with or without large firearms, doing reasonable things (investigating literal illegal aliens, I presume), driving cars, and basically having a really interesting version of a regular detective. In space. You'll notice these men, while capable of achieving greatness, are not wearing spiky suits, or jetpacks, nor are they scowling at nothing in particular just to show how jaded they are. They aren't wielding flamethrowers strapped to their heads. They aren't eight feet tall. They don't wear their enormous powered armor suits everywhere they go. They don't have augmented skulls, or tentacled faces or full body scars or mohawks or chainsaw swords or whatever else this guy has :

I think I mentioned the chainsaw sword but I'd really like to mention it again

Because the base setting of 40k is actually kind of interesting. The way that the developers, in an effort to hide that they have no idea what they're talking about and haven't thought any further than "it'd be cool if these guys had chainsaw swords and were 9 feet tall in red gaudy armor" resort to "yeah well it's really cool and also it's the future we don't have to explain anything" until they do attempt to give you some technobabble as to why it all works is really stupid- BUT (and this is a huge but) the stories of things that aren't blatantly stupid are cool enough.

Like the stories of the Imperial Guard, all the places they've been and done. Could you imaging being deployed six planets over to fight some hideous aliens you'd never heard of with a two hundred year old laser rifle? Or of defending an entire planet against meaty monsters that fly through space? Or against sentient and very angry dinosaurs?

Or the stories of the Inquisition; all while the unintentionally silly Space Marines fight the obviously intentionally silly Orks on a scale that borders on absurdity for nearly no reason whatsoever using methods that were outdated in our time or things that just don't make sense (large cumbersome melee weapons, "power fists", bolter rifles, tanks that are crappier than our modern day tanks, grav cycles), the Inquisition is dealing with a mankind that hasn't fundamentally changed since we first came to be, trying to make sure that nothing is disturbing the glorious Republic's status quo and destabilizing it into thousand year long wars against ourselves. That's the good stuff, right there. That's how you have an actual story.


But I digress. Heavily. I'm making a game about religiously fanatic secret police for an intergalactic Republic and there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. Hear me? Nothing!