Dezmond said:

Compare it to the relatively recent Fifteen Hours, where the protagonist spends his last hours bleeding out in no-man's land on a world that has been under attack from the Orks for decades... his triumph is that he survived longer than the 'fifteen hours' stated as the average time for a new soldier to survive in that war zone.

Dezmond said:

So you don't consider irredeemable corruption to be an issue? Or the fact that Eisenhorn is crippled and barely able to walk (and even then, only with hastily-fitted augmetic braces) by the end of the novels? He's much worse off by the end of the trilogy than he started. Indeed, his "low point" in the first novel is eclipsed by the systematic destruction of everything he holds dear in the third novel.

Neither he, nor any of those around him, came out unscathed as a result of his exploits. Not even Cherubael was in a good place at the end - bound and utterly subjugated to Eisenhorn's will, no longer able to taunt or manipulate or do as it pleased, or even tap into the majority of its power.

+++++So you don't consider irredeemable corruption to be an issue?+++++

Hells no. More an excuse to own a cool deamon sword and grow some stylish horns. AND still be a goody. All positive really. Slike being a vampire. Sleep all day, party all night, live forever, eat anyone who pisses you off...

+++++systematic destruction of everything he holds dear in the third novel.systematic destruction of everything he holds dear in the third novel.+++++

Which happens in the first third of the book doesn't it? By the end he is taking revenge.

Nice to know they do still do some miserable stuff in 15 hours though. I really only read the Marine novels.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Fifteen Hours is a wierd book. By no means imaginative, well written or moving, but yet, over a year later I still think about it and remember it fondly.

Some of the novels end quite well for the protagonists. All the Cain novels end with him happily alive, drinkng tanna and occasionally boinking Amberly Vail. The worlds he is visiting usually do not fair so well.

The story of the farmer on the primitive world in Bringers of Death does not come close to a happy ending. He slaves and toils for years to win his world from the ork invaders, leading a resitance movement from scratch. Loses his home, family and friends. And when the Imperium finally arrives what do they do? Give him a medal? Hell no, they toss his psychic ass on a black ship.

+++++The worlds he is visiting usually do not fair so well.+++++

Remember - NPCs don't count.

Dezmond said:

Actually they do.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Indeed. NPCs are people too.

Plus, with a novel, all characters (by dint of not having players attached) are NPCs...

Peacekeeper_b said:

Well, it's a little old school. but there was Inquisitor (here are parts 2 and 3 for good measure, and the extra bitz). To be fair, not a feature film, just short subject.

Vespers said:

So we're just giving out links to copyrighted material now? Really?

Movies

Dune: Fantastic sci-fi if a little dated (even the recent remake & sequels are worth it imho)

Blade Runner: Grim & Gritty vision of the future, great for Hive adventures

Outland: A lone uncorrupted cop on a mining station struggling to maintain some semblance of honour, dignity & shotgun wielding goodness.

Outpost: a recent Modern Horror Soldier flick, essentially a group of Imp/Guard mercs get picked off by Nurglish or possibly Khornate soldiers

Strangedays: again another grim version of the future, and a stark warning for Scum characters who mess things up..

Sin Eater: an interesting spin on the whole theological/psychic tales of terror, corruption and the Price of it all.

Mad Max: Ok, more for the visuals of Tina Turner with Big Hair and fast cars, loud explosions and boomerang death scenes.

Books (well, authors..)

William Gibson, Jeff Somers, R.Scott Baker

Comics

(Not read any for a few years now so couldnt comment)

Yesterday I saw Hardware: M.A.R.K-13, and all I can say is, " G'****!" That's going to serve as my 40K inspiration for a while. If you can find the uncut version, watch it. There was also a painted comic in Heavy Metal a few years ago entitled "Sha" that has served as a model for a lot of hive world shenanigans in my games. It has psychics, curses, daemons, and pseudo-religious game shows.

Kage2020 said:

Shudder - I was sorely disappointed in that book. Really irritating they couldn't translate the chapter headings and left them in French, Latin, German, etc.

Luddite said:

'You said Nightwatch twice.'

'We like Nightwatch.'

(I don't think Blazing Saddles would be an inspirational film)

Perhaps I didn't see Daywatch soon enough after NW but I just didn't get it. A little entertaining, but just strange and disjointed.

My input -

Armor by John Steakley. Perhaps a little too Starship Troopers/Battletech but still a good read.

Invisibles - comics by Grant Morrison. Very odd in a cool sort of way. But what would you expect from a chaote?

Fist of the Northstar

Fistful of Dollars - Where he paints the town red?

Dagon - Even if it is a lovestory.

Bio of a Space Tyrant series

The Film when Clint paints the town red is I think High Plains Drifter?

13th Warrior might work (I do love that film)

Dark City -could work really well

Deep Rising

Ravenous - very cool film

Rashid ad Din Sinan said:

That is High Plains Drifter

City of the lost children is cool....its got mutants (conjoined twin), gangers, tech priests, a big smokey hive, psycho scientists meddling in things they shouldnt, and child abductions. Plus its a cool film anyway, although the english dubbed version is a little over cheesy at times! anyone seen the french version?

Books

Well, ground floor required reading is of course Frank Herbert's Dune series. Pretty much the blueprint for 40k, and in my opinion a darn good read.

Goerge MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series is also very good, having inspired Alex stewart (Sandy Mitchell) in writing Commissar Ciaphas Cain.

Micheal Moorcock's work (pretty much anoything he's written) is a good place to start. The character Jerry Cornelius is excellent (althought he langueage in the JC books is VERY strong). The Elric novels are a good exploration of Chaos...

Anything Alan Moore has ever written is a must. The man is simply a visionary without parallel.

For something a little harder edged, William Gibson's work (for me particularly the short story, Johnny Mnemonic, and his novels Neuromancer and the Difference Engine) are very good.

Anything by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, or Mary Shelley is useful.

Verne's **** Sand, a captain at Fifteen is jolly good and raises questions of slavery that might be useful for 40k.

Well's The Island of Doctor Moreau is pure Heretek Magos Biologis stuff. Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul is a great novel that deals with themes similar to 40k's 'know your place'.

Shelley's The Last Man is a great apocalyptic novel too.

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels are a good source too, and i'd particularly recommend The Valley of Fear as an interesting take (via a Pinkerton Man type) on the Arbites, or possibly the Inquisition. I'd also recommend his short story The Disintegration Machine...again a good Heretek model.

Of course, for possible alternate visions of 40k society, Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's A Brave New World are essential, but you should already have read these...if not, go read them both right now...

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series is a great take on a unique and interesting hive world.

Of course the Call of Cthulhu mythos books are a great source of inspiration. For me, the most enjoyable was At the Mountains of Madness.

Luddite said:

Shadow over Innsmouth could also work for Chaos or mutant infiltration.

snufkin said:

As it happens, I've only seen La Cite des Enfants Perdus in french, but that's mainly because I make it a point of principle to watch the OVA where possible (with subs if need be), with the exception of certain anime. Speaking of, I'd recommend Trigun, Akira, Patlabor, Appleseed and possibly Dominion Tank Police (although that last is somewhat ridiculous, especially the inflatable landmines shaped like giant genitalia). Akira is definitely one you don't want to watch dubbed, as each successive retranslation and dub bowdlerises the original more and more.

I would also like to recommend Starship Troopers (the book, not the films, series or comics), and the First Foundation trilogy. Also (albeit to a far lesser degree) the Deathstalker series

The Instrumentality of Man stories from Cordwainer Smith.

He has "Lords of the Instrumentality" that are a good inspriation for the Lords of Terra.

For a sample, the following is the start of "Under Old Earth"

"There were the Douglas-Oyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives—even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives—against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.

This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.

Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries—opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins."