The Dark Roots of Precinct Omega

There's a handful of folks who know the true, dark origins of Precinct Omega and I thought it might be fun to tell the (honestly, rather dull) story in the context of something much more interesting.

Precinct Omega began in the deserts of Oman in late 2001, when I had some precious downtime and rare access to the internet (courtesy of a central satellite link) and used it to see what people were doing with the new (3rd) edition of Warhammer 40,000 and found myself in the Adeptus Arbites Yahoo! Group, chatting about both the (minimal) lore of the organisation and toying with rules for them as a 40k faction (outline rules had recently been published in the Citadel Journal).

(This group eventually merged with the Inquisitor forum, the Conclave, which is still active on Discord, and its members were directly responsible for "Inq28" which is still a thing today and which gave birth to Turnip28 among other things - like Horizon Wars!)

As part of this, I wrote fiction about the "internal affairs" section of the Arbites that I called "Precinct Omega" and, upon returning home to the UK, created a Geocities site called Precinct Omega, which was the first incarnation of what you see today. I went on to adopt "precinctomega" as a username in pretty much every hobby-related space I ever entered and now it's the limited company and game design/publishing business that you help support through Patreon!

All of that is leading up to the fact that I treated myself to a Christmas present to myself, this year:

 I am aware, of course, that this is not a new GW release by any means, but you'll also most likely be aware that Games Workshop and I have a... complicated relationship; in the sense that I like to hate-stalk them and they don't know that I exist. So as a general rule, I try to avoid giving them money. But whilst shopping before Christmas, I happened upon this box in my local independent wargaming store and decided that it was time for a brief return to the Dark Millennium.

It is tempting - given that GW seem to have released all the rules and supporting content for Kill Team in their digital app, which is pretty interesting - to jump into playing some Kill Team. And I'm not going to say I won't ever do that. But that's not my major priority here.

This is really three things.

First, it's a chance to indulge my own sense of nostalgia to have a squad of Arbitrators that were very much my first step into independent game design work.

Second, it's an opportunity to critique what GW is doing with their plastic kits, these days, why I think they're doing it and how it's both good and bad for the hobby.

Finally, it's a pathway to re-opening my work on Zero Dark Millennium, re-visiting the grimdark version of the Zero Dark rules and possibly polishing them up for an actual public release (given that I've probably put enough clear water between GW and my own setting to avoid being sued).

The hobby side of this won't be quick, because other stuff take priority. But as I often find myself twiddling my thumbs waiting for something to dry or set or whatever, this will be my intermediate project for 2025.