The Subsector Project

  All right, let’s boogie. I whipped this little number up in GIMP, but it might as well have been Microsoft Paint.

  I’m sure I’m going to be embarrassed by this at some point in the future, but let’s just work from here out, no? None of this is set in stone, we just have to start somewhere, so it might as well be here, a very literal structural beginning for the format of our worldbuilding.

If I were writing a single story, meant to be enjoyed then discarded, I wouldn’t bother making a map like this. It’s the theater of the mind, you just gotta think about it to make it real in your brain, and any visual I was to give you would be extra. However, we’re doing this to be a living, breathing world in which many stories can exist and intertwine with one another. That means we need to take a little care as we’re setting this place up.

How did you come up with the names and relative positions of these locations?

It was almost totally random, I just wrote down a bunch of place names I thought sounded interesting.

Does that not run counter to your assertion that we need to “take a little care” in setting this place up?

Sure. I’m a notorious hypocrite.

I jest, but for real, most of these were totally random, artifacts of abandoned stories from years ago- a couple generated off of a sci fi name generator -whatever felt right in the moment. Sometimes worldbuilding is like jazz, you just gotta go with the flow.

Then I smacked them onto a map, and started brainstorming.

For me, it is important to have your stories inform the world, and have your world inform the stories. Places inform people, people inform places. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Bring them together, and you’re cooking with story, baby!

  The first thing I did was draw in the nebulae- or what I imagined would make sense to be nebulae/impassible areas of The Warp. Something that looks like a wall, at least. I figure we’ll leave it a little nebulous for now, eh? Then I tossed in the Ca’Bellus cluster’s boundaries, and a little dot for each of the names I decided would be planets. When you’re creating a landscape, you want to have areas of tight, enclosed spaces, and larger zones of free wheeling “anything goes” so to speak. You want plains, and you want caves for the different types of stories they allow. The Nobus Expanse is a plain, the area around Clydrome Proxima is a cave. We don’t have to know why, we just have to have a little something to see, and let our imaginations run wild from there!

Let’s take a quick aside and think about what this almost-random assortment of shapes can tell us about the sorts of stories we’re going to be looking at.

Bemu is isolated from these other systems. Perhaps it’s a graveyard, or an agriworld? I used a smaller brush when I put a dot next to it, so that must mean it’s less important, no? Let’s roll with that. Let’s say it’s an isolated agriworld, separated from both the worlds of the Ca’bellus Cluster, and the worlds to the “south” of it.

Sure, Bemuians can go to Nabrik’s World, but apart from that, they don’t have a straight “line of sight” to anywhere. I liken that to a ship at sea, as The Warp is often characterized, being separated from the safety of a lighthouse. Bemu is a small boat, surrounded by dark waters. They may be fine if no waves or rocks happen upon them, but they’re one catastrophe from being upended.

Clydrome Proxima is very interesting to me due to the circular shape of the nebula around it. What would it be like to live on a planet surrounded by the shining energies of the heavens? I’d wager that would impact how society functions on that world fairly heavily. Maybe the elite of the world would even be entranced by such a spectacle? How about we say that they’ve built tall towers for observing the skies, and that the society operates nocturnally to serve their whims? That’s a very interesting world to me!

Caomer, after which the subsector is named, was probably the largest hive world in the place. I wasn’t originally going to do that “naming the subsector after a world” thing, but the idea of having a planet labeled as (Burned) came to me suddenly, and I couldn’t resist. If a planet is “burned”, am I going to make it an unimportant planet? No! So it’s the seat of power for the whole subsector!

Obviously, you can’t rule from a burned planet, so we end up with a government in exile sort of vibe. That’s interesting. I’ve never read a story about a government in exile in Warhammer 40k. Plenty of Space Marines having their planets destroyed, or being exiled, but how does a subsector governor maintain authority while not having somewhere to live? Perhaps we make Ca’bellus as a whole embattled, and force said governor to make their camp somewhere else.

Next up, I drew these trade lanes. Or, like, lanes that ships can sail The Warp easily. Warp eddies, we’ll call them.

All roads lead to Hemlock, it appears, so that’s where we’ll make our exiled government live. I think we can build a little irony in here.

Hemlock is not a planet itself, but a moon orbiting a gas giant. A little brother to its host planet, a little brother strategically to Caomer. An afterthought suddenly thrust into the limelight by an as-yet unnamed disaster which befell the subsector’s seat of power. We’ll give it a bit more interesting backstory in the future, but I think that’s compelling to start.

Ederon (Citadel 933) is the gateway to the next sector- let’s call it Gothic. That would leave us in the Segmentum Obscurus, perfect for a less-traveled area of space. Because it’s right on the edge, let’s make it an arsenal world, primarily covered in deep, nameless, caustic seas bashing the rocks of fortresses carved into its bedrock. It is a good resource for passing ships seeking to rearm while maneuvering in or out of the subsector. Surreptitiously, maybe we can say it also boasts its own Watch Fortress of the Deathwatch. What for? A great question, something we’ll have to answer at some point…

Ketti Trinity is a rare semi-inhabited trinary star system. If there’s one thing I know from physics, it’s that three stars makes for unpredictable orbital patterns. I envision it as a rollercoaster, three systems-worth of dozens of planets, asteroids, moons, and other orbiting ejecta constantly smashing together! That would mean that rare materials and metallic chunks would be easy to grab, and also for pirates to snatch! Unfortunately, this also means that the facilities in the Ketti Trinity system need to be exported to neighboring systems such as Hemlock, Ypinny, or Tonvatis VII for processing.

Hazoul Anchorage I can’t imagine as anything but a gas station, or a floating drydock. It’s the first point of repair for those seeking to cross the Nobus Expanse, which is empty (for reasons we don’t have to explain). The long warp travel through Nobus makes Hazoul Anchorage a world where one can find everything, anything, the best and worst that the subsector has to offer, a shantytown built up against the side of said gas station, just for fun.

Tonvatis VII is a forgeworld, because of course we need a forgeworld. It’s close enough to Nobus to make it a common stop for those leaving or entering the Caomer Subsector, but I imagine it as sort of a “backup” so to speak. Perhaps Vulkansrest was the original industrial heart of the subsector, but the Mechanicus had to move to Tonvatis to escape whatever happened up in the Ca’bellus Cluster? That would make it a world on the edge, forced to continue the output of a much larger manufacturing center, and dangerously close to the edge of both the subsector, and the cluster which consumed its fellow forgeworld. Neat!

Ypinny is a strategically important hive world orbiting close to its volatile star. This tidally-locked orbit necessitates giant walls across the whole equator directing solar energy upwards into the night. Half of the world being blasted by the sun is totally uninhabited. The half on the eternal night side is populated by those who can survive in the icy flats, harvesting promethium precursors from underground vents. I imagine giant cities right behind the walls on the equator, a ring-shaped metropolis home to billions, the poor crushed beneath the rich who bear down on them in the Emperor’s name.

Placid is a hilarious name, and I imagine the planet as being quite the opposite to what such a name would suggest. The last major world before the Ca’bellus Cluster, and previously served as a wealthy gateway to the east. Once-prosperous, the world has descended into a war footing, constantly on-edge, and boasting a heavily-militarized feudal population. This is the militarized slog of the sector, trench warfare and massive fronts to fight traitors who seek to expand the archenemy’s hold. And hey, while we’re at it, let’s say a notable governor was once commander of a large subsector fleet, consumed by a warp rift known as Pedrot’s Revenge, now roiling north of Placid to keep the traitors coming nonstop. That’s kinda fun.

Nabrik’s World, as we mentioned, is pretty close to Bemu, but is also one of those caves we mentioned before. I think of it as much more isolated, perhaps a rough mining world with little in the way of breathable atmosphere, forcing its population underground. It also serves as the gatekeeper between a pair of nebulae, so I imagine that it is suddenly thrust into the limelight, as it’s strategically important, and it finds its population ballooned by guard regiments fighting Orks, or Nids, or something fun like that.

I want to leave a little bit of space creatively for the planets of the Ca’bellus Cluster. I’m not going to go too deep into the remaining three worlds until we decide what happened to Caomer, and why. I’ll have a think on that, but I’m leaning towards something Chaos-y and horrifying. Turning the population to glass who can feel their bodies being consumed by slow-moving Chaos oozes, or something like that. We can leave it a little ambiguous for now. We’ll have to think about that another time.

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  You see how easy it can be to get the basics of worldbuilding on paper? This took a few hours and a desire to build a baseline, but already I’m brimming with ideas! I tossed out a quick story set on Bemu, along with a scenario to signify their isolation from the rest of the subsector. My first thought is that it will be an Orky space hulk crashing randomly and unexpectedly into the world, but we can go a few directions with that.

Either way, we’re going to make sure we’re serving an overarching theme, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to put together!

More to come.