Creating a Setting

The cast of our Inquisitor game is coming into focus more each day. We have puritanical defenders of mankind, pirates with little care beyond their next raid, and those who lost themselves in forbidden lore. The creation of a character is exciting and rewarding. With the hours spent modeling and painting them, there's an attachment and ease of development that surprised me. 

Creating a setting is a very different challenge. The area a single inquisitorial conclave covers is staggering and figuring out where to start is difficult. I found starting from the macroscopic and working my way down made the most sense.

I needed to figure out what this story should be about. Every story has a fundamental conflict at its core, otherwise there wouldn't be anything worth talking about. While the driving force behind any storytelling is optimally going to be our warbands, having something in the background to provide context lends a bit of direction, purpose, and theme. The obvious threats of Chaos, Tyranid/Genestealer Cult invasion, or Ork WAAAGH! are difficult to ignore; each offer something interesting to explore with cool opportunities for player involvement. They didn't feel right for inquisitor, though. These overwhelmingly powerful forces. The threat they present is what keeps humanity united and submissive. The conflict almost always moves toward open war at a scale that this project is doing its best to move away from. What fun would having all of our warbands putting their differences aside actually be? Can you really interact with an Ork? Would an inquisitor even bother? 

Inquisitor is at its best when its about humanity. Deliberately scaling back the conflict gives people the opportunity to do what they're best at: being shitty to each other. There's more nuance there, more subterfuge. When the enemies are your peers, things go from a boil to a slow simmer. It also puts the relationships characters create with one another at center stage. The Imperium is structured in a way that pretty much promotes infighting in the absence of a large threat. The Ecclesiarchy, Inquisition, and Adeptus Mechanicus are all autonomous organizations with wildly differing agendas that intersect. Their philosophies are at times completely at odds even within their ranks. The tug of war between these entities would make for the best context. 

Great, theme was taken care of and now we needed a space for everything to play out within. The first place to start narrowing from was the Segmentums. To eliminate the temptation of involving any sizable Chaos elements, the segmentums containing the Eye of Terror and Maelstorm were tossed out. They have too much canon development and there's no way to ignore the impending feeling of doom fleets of 10,000 year old genetically engineered madmen who consort with horrors we cannot comprehend inspires. Fortunately for us, systems in Segmentum Tempestus are a good distance away from both tears in reality. It also has a much lower density of high profile worlds, fleets, and events. Its strong Ecclesiarchy presence played right into out theme, too. Perfect! Our empty sector had a home and filling it is where the real work begins. 

This is a mock-up of the Cetis Sector, home to our Conclave. The name was a placeholder, but has been used enough that it has stuck.

Each sub-sector is a host to multiple star systems. Each star system potentially has multiple inhabited worlds. Each of those has a purpose, a cast of characters, a story. That's more than any one of us can do on our own. Ideally, each sub-sector will be a sandbox for a player to create their own worlds, personas, and plot for everyone else to interact with culminating in a series of scenarios when we meet. This division of labor has the beneficial side effect of preventing one poor soul from being dedicated GM, leaving their warband on the sidelines.

I've been working on Sub-sector Cetis; home to the seat of the conclave among other things. Another time, I'll go over some of the major features of the sector (and my sub-sector) that will shape things. This is certainly long enough already.

Thanks for reading!