I want to try and adapt the Splicers from Palladium Fantasy's RPG megaverse as an army for 40K, but I'm striking blanks on pulling it off even just on a lore level - anyone interested in talking it through?As to what Splicers are... Well, link below for more details, but it's basically Guyver vs. Terminator. A mad AI takes over a human colony world with her robotic legions, and humanity is forced to turn to biotech powered armor, genetically engineered battle-beasts and even gene-modded warrior slaves in order to fight back.https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/SplicersSo, yeah, I can easily see how to justify the Splicers' existence as a faction - Dark Age colony world that never got touched by the Great Crusade, they ended their own Iron Rebellion by blowing up their planet and moving onto biotech colony ships, and now they're migrating around the galaxy and having to deal with all the usual loonies. It's figuring out how to actually convert them into tabletop units and characters that I'm stuck on...
So, what defines the Splicers as a faction? Well, biotech. Biotech armor - "Host Armor" gets all the glory as the most powerful form of it, but there's also "organic armor", which is basically biotech carapace armor to HA's power armor - is ubiquitous. Bio-engineered animals fill most of the roles filled by vehicles in a traditional human army. Packmasters use their Gorehounds to maim, kill and rend enemies. War Mounts range from zippy flyers to aerial transports to land transports to living artillery pieces and beyond. Mantis Cannons are literally giant bugs engineered to carry heavy artillery on their backs.Then there's the genetically engineered mutates. Biotics are the expendable mutant slave warriors. Scarecrows are juiced-up on alien jism and turned into super-fast killing machines that can rip giant robots apart with their bare hands. Metamorphs can literally turn into various monsters to fill specific battlefield roles. Pic relevant; that thing was HUMAN.But that means figuring out how to give the Splicers a unique "gimmick" on the battlefield compared to orks, space marines, imperial guard and tyranids... Any ideas?
Two things I DO know about the army's future mechanics, although we can probably leave off the specifics of crunch for the moment...There needs to be some kind of army-wide mechanic for regeneration. It's kind of the Splicers' signature that if you give them even a brief respite, they can heal up and hit you even harder.While a certain degree of "screw you" for tanks, vehicles, walkers, Mechanicus and Necron adversaries is appropriate, they can't be too cheesy. It's fun to give the army a mod to basically nullify Mechanicus radiation guns once. After that, it's just cheap.
One big problem I can see with making this army a thing... in the RPG, Splicer PCs are insanely customizable with their bio-armor or their gene-mods. Obviously, in a war-game, you can't go quite THAT nuts, but just how modular should your Splicer forces be?Is it even possible to have customizable "generic" Biotics in the army, or should it be exclusively restricted to templates like the Widow, Gorillephant, Fury, Dryad, Gemini, etc? Or, hell, is there room to have both generic Biotics and templated Biotics in the same force?
You're making humanoid Tyranids with the various Splicers taking the place of the synapse creatures as control nodes, while lacking the overall coordination of the Hive Mind.
>>97109509Pretty much. You could probably go for GSC with some kitbashing or greenstuffing, or mainline Tyranids with a much larger degree of modification.
>>97109509They're not really, though? They're more like Space Marines with organic powered armor and using bio-engineered monsters in lieu of vehicles, would be how I'd describe them. They don't have ... well, a lot of the cultural quirks that I'd assign to tyranids or genestealer cults, personally.I mean, Packmasters and Mantis Bombadiers kind of work that way, but the bulk of the army is still basically guys in armor with guns. It's just the armor and the guns are biotech.
>>97109676You've forgotten that the Tyranid Warrior is the base form of the 'Nids (like your Splicers), and that every other creature is a modification of that pattern to fit a specific role.So you're going for the equivalent of a Tyranid army that focuses on elite troops and large monster/vehicle types rather than the usual hordes of small creatures that overwhelm their opponents through sheer numbers.
>>97110990Huh. Yeah, I guess I can see your point when you put it that way. Still thought it'd be fun to try and give them a unique mechanical and lore basis...Alright, well, I guess... how would you represent a Gemini? Just a Carnifex reskin? In the RPG, they're armed with a prehensile tail, an Omega Blaster, organic rockets, bio-energy expulsion vents (basically bio-plasma), and any combination of 2 of these 4 weapons: bore cannon, spore discharger, bone blade, flame breath. It also has a biological force field.
