>>58264906
What we know of the training of the psykers is that the he Schola Psykana oversees it.

I would put forth that this institution came about in the days that Prospero was at it's height. It had just been rescued from predation and damnation by the arrival of the great crusade. Up until that point the Imperium had been relying on local efforts and letting it be up to each individual world to do as their traditions dictate, their citizens education being their own concern. After they discovered Prospero and it's fuck huge archives and libraries. Also it's strange hermetic traditions.

This coupled with a recent bout of psychic training institute infiltration and corruptions saw the Emperor reluctantly laying down the law on the subject. There needed to be some degree of standard checking and enforcing. Prospero's record for safety and accomplishment is the standard that all should be honestly attempting if not actually attaining. To that end the wisest and most patient of the old masters of The City of Light were commissioned to go forth into an ignorant galaxy and share their teachings with the locals and teach them that they might teach others. And this they absolutely did, however the hermetic traditions of the Prosperans often resulted in them absorbing the traditions of the locals and what usually emerged was a hybrid of methods and so the locals often saw it as outsiders coming to them to learn. And maybe it was. Many letters and transcribed documents were sent to the City of Light and it libraries swelled with accumulated wisdom from the stars as it's scholars examined all this new stuff and found where they overlapped with each other and their own philosophies and rituals and closer and closer they circled to the Well of Knowledge in their souls and the jealousy and, dare it be imagined, fear of Tzneetch grew. The ire of the Cosmic Sorcerer was long in the building and slow to arrive but when it did it was delivered with another's hand.

>>58265864
It is unknown if the Rubric was ever potentially functional or if the very core of the principle upon which it was built were already corrupted from the outset, false knowledge planted as a very long joke. What ever the cause it can only be speculated and strongly suspected that Tzneetch was responsible for that world befalling an unknowable fate.

But it wasn't a total victory for Chaos. Unlike the followers of Tzneetch the lore masters of Prospero did not hoard their secrets but shared their finding freely with all who would listen (and at least pretend to be interested) and as all the simple wisdoms of the galaxy flowed into the City of Light the truths it forged flowed out. The loss of Prospero was still a significant blow to the Imperium but it was not the crippling it could have been and from it the Schola Psykana, and by extension the Black Ships, were formalized and longer lasting blow was dealt to Chaos and it struck them where they were most vulnerable; in the hearts and souls of mortals.

File: 1518445887147.jpg (86 KB, 1024x980)

86 KB JPG

bump

File: Grand Marshal Arrotyr.jpg (1.3 MB, 2925x2397)

1.3 MB JPG

Arrotyr likes to hunt psykers and vampires almost as much as he likes burning slaaneshis.

>>58264906
>no dogs allowed

>>58265864
The social debate of whether or not Prosperine traditions run the very real risk of letting the birdman in (especially among the anti-psyker parts of the population) sounds like an interesting societal debate for the years in which Prospero was still around.

>>58269359
Wen Taskmaster?

>>58270970
Working on it, I've given him some backstory as a minor cousin of the royal house of the Old Eldar Empire that gets involved with the cabal of seers that want to make a god of art and joy. Where as they are all decadent and degenerate beyond some of the worst historical excesses, they are fairly dignified and refined relative to the cruelest parts of the Old Empire, and do have the sense of noblesse oblige that was said to have surrounded the early conception of Slaanesh. The noble-eldar that would after the fall become the Taskmaster is one of the circle's important ways into favor with the Eldar imperial family, and palace connections he can offer allow them to gain the patronage of the royal house. During this period of intrigue and positioning the project was already growing libertine, but the introduction of the royal family and court's influence immediately turn the whole thing into a massive grotesque party. With its powerful backers and mass cultural appeal to the Eldar in that era the cult was relatively quick to consolidate power, with the royal house using the spread of the new faith and growing warp energy to subdue longtime uncooperative elements or drive them away. At the same time the circle structured and exalted the bases practices of the Eldar upper class under their arcane hedonism, and guided the riotous 'enjoyment' of them masses to best form their god.

Tensions and intrigues are already coming to a head as the singularity is reached in the warp. Slaanesh is already being seen in hallucinations, dreams, flickering in the smoky halls of palace, among bodies in the flesh pits of Shaa-Dome. Around this time something gives, climax is reached, and the Eye of Terror opens. Shaa-Dome and most of the Eldar's webway megastructures fall into the Warp, Arrotyr arrives in time to fall in with them, and the Eldar king and much of the royal family die first as the imperial eldar palace is ground zero, when all hell breaks loose.

>>58272050
I've not decided what in specific initiates the fall, be it the death (snuff) of the king, some final rite initiated by the circle of seers, or even just some last line crossed. Most of the Eldar present were quickly used and consumed by the young god, particular among them many of the inner circle, royalty, and partakers in the festivities of its birth. The Taskmaster was one of the ones that wasn't, and in one of the first lulls in Slaanesh's happy birthday he met his god/dess and they conversed. It became clear that the Taskmaster was totally and maniacally devoted to Slaanesh, not as an ideal of pleasure or fulfilment of fantasy, or as a pitiful Eldar god, but as the god he helped shape and structure. The Taskmaster had always been involved for the sake of this interest, the creation of a being beyond just immortal, the beauty of transcendence attained, that had driven him, and now he would serve its whims as the clear perfect purpose. The young God/dess was flassered, and Slaanesh felt this exaltation ringing within its own nature, and took the taskmaster into its service as the festivities resumed. Slaanesh's attention was soon caught by Khorne, and the Taskmaster was bid to take the celebration to Arrotyr, who was burning his way into the shellworld, and goes with the blessing and might of his worshipful Prince of Pleasure.

Thats the story I hope to complete, so far I only have a bit of the court intrigue written out how I would like, but I did think of a name for the Taskmaster pre-fall, being Iygonesh Orvass, pronounced egonesh. I'm not sure if he killed the king, if Slaanesh itself killed the king, or if the king just got it in the orgies. Also not sure if Iygonesh should have even encountered Eldrad, Vect, or the Indigo Crow prior to the fall, and what that should be if so. I think he should have already met and disliked Arrotyr before they were enemies but nothing ever came of it, and also the Crow would have been involved pre-fall.

File: Basically this as a problem.jpg (992 KB, 1038x1420)

992 KB JPG

>>58272050
Did we ever decide what the Old Eldar Empire’s government was like right before the Fall? I remember there were some suggestions that by the time of the Fall it had essentially become a kratocracy, controlled mostly by their HOLY SHIT tier psykers and their families who ruled by virtue of having the biggest psychic stick to beat people with. Unfortunately all this did was make the Fall worse, because you had a dictatorship who thought they could do no wrong and ended up providing high calorie snacks to She Who Thirsts.

On the other hand we have made frequent reference to the Old Empire’s aristocracy regarding the Taskmaster, Commorragh, etc. It’s kind of hard to see how the soft power you’d get with Commorragh-style aristocrats alongside the hard power of “I has the most psychic powers. Give me what I want or I will punch you with mind bullets”. Maybe it’s like a situation where you have multiple types of power, with “young money” aristocrats, and more entrenched families who didn’t have the raw power but did have a colossal powerbase that they could draw from.

If we have to choose between the two, I would vote for leaning more towards the aristocracy side, since that fits better with our already established fluff for Commorragh, Asurmen, the Taskmaster stuff mentioned above, etc.

>>58272388
I think you just gave Slaanesh a yandere Renfield. We're all going to die.

I like the idea that Arrotyr and Iygonesh knew each other in passing before the Fall, disliked each other, but nothing ever came from it. Iygonesh would have probably only known of Arrotyr as a brute due to him being Eldar Quaritch and generally being off securing the borders of the Old Empire in quasi-exile. Arrotyr might have been confronted by Iygonesh at some courtly social function for a banal reason and dismissed him as a fop.

>>58272388
My suggestion would be he didn't know Eldrad. Eldrad seems to have been a commoner and we can't have Eldrad connected to literally everyone in history, no matter what the conspiracy theorists say. Vect might have been encountered but would have been written off as a servant.

Don't know about the Crow. There was a suggestion that Eldrad knew who the Crow was prior to the Fall, though given the guise the Crow met him in it may have been his just killed one of Eldrad's friends and stole his face. It would be much more likely for Eldrad to know the Crow than any of the other three, given how much he was into psykery.

>>58272513
>>58272549
On the other hand, the Crow hanging around the royal family due to them being "major patrons of the psychic and sorcerous arts" valuable to his master would make sense. Also the crow's weird nature and status would actually predate the Fall of the Eldar, and he was probably a cult figure in the Old Eldar Empire as the emissary of Tzeentch. Iygonesh might have dropped in on a lecture given by the Crow in the palace gardens while a guest at some point before the Fall, but I agree that Eldrad should not be connected to everyone. I like the idea that the Crow was just impersonating Eldrad's friend instead of them having a friendly relationship, but when I first read that I pictured the Indigo Crow stealing the Eldar's face and impersonating him from the first meeting, which is both an odd misinterpretation of the meaning and very Tzeentchian.

File: 3679102529_5518e62b17.jpg (40 KB, 480x500)

40 KB JPG

Housekeeping question, did we decide to keep the World's Finest style thing where Eldrad and Oscar earned each others' respect, Eldrad when he set things up to make it seem like he was three steps ahead of everyone else when they first met, Oscar when he stepped into the Warp at the beginning of the Raid and the Warp actually took a step back.

>>58272690
Slaanesh also apparently impersonated Lileath to get the drop on the other eldar gods. Chaos seems to like taking people's faces.

I think that the amount of psychic ability of the old ruling elite would not have been the only deciding factor on rulership. Cunning would have been more important. Psychic isn't much help if your tea has arsenic in it.

>>58274516
I'd imagine the two went hand-in-hand a fair bit, especially in fields like divination.

If the Eldar Empire was an Empire then it probably had an emperor, though maybe a different title. Probably claims, maybe with some legitimacy, to be descended from Ulthenash (but so could many by that point).

Although it's distinctly possible that the other greater houses were pulling the strings with him just being a figurehead.

>>58270970
Prospero philosophy is all about taking notes and all about comparing them to other people's notes.

It was a planet of hybrid faiths when it came to religion, back in the good old days. All of the monotheistic religions existed, to them, on a spectrum of tradition rather than as absolutes. This made them very eager to listen to preachers but that those preachers typically had to come from outside. Few prosperans would become ordained priests as they wouldn't be able to totally exclude the traditions and beliefs of the faiths.

In a similar way polytheistic Prosperan groups pick and mix gods to the constant frustration of outside preachers.

Sometimes a monotheistic god would end up as the top god in a chimera pantheon and other such oddities. The Prosperans were a strange bunch, even by the lax standards of psykers. The knew of Chaos, how could they not? They knew it was a cancer in the warp that would infect the minds of the citizenry as surely as those extra-dimensional wasps. The only good defense was immunization via educating people about the danger and exposing the rot before them in all it's putrid wretchedness.

In addition to every serious text ever published about psykery they also collected theological texts and housed the greatest collection of holy scriptures in the known galaxy before the Rubric Event.

In effect it was a planet of theology nerds and wizards.

>>58269393
Would still possibly be a thing. Russ and Magnus managed to come to an understanding but they had stubborn underlings.

How close would Prospero's ties with the Eldar have been? I presume pretty close, but are there any specific craftworlds, factions, etc. they would have been especially friendly with?

>>58269393
>no dogs allowed
This is the grimmest darkness

>>58279671
Of the five major Craftworlds, Ulthwé seems the most likely. Ulthwé is all about the psykery, though they have more of a survivalist mindset. They might have gotten in with Saim-Hann if Russ set them up, Saim-Hann aren't scholars but they're relatively pro-human and have the quest for enlightenment as part of their culture (and their name).

The Eldar might have seen the Prosperans as a bunch of annoying fans. Yes, they were among the most cultured of the human groups they had encountered along with places like Colchis and Cadia, they actually engaged in the psychic arts than dismissed them as witchcraft to be feared and had come up with some pretty interesting workarounds for their human failings (e.g., Prosperine quartz), but they were also incredibly naive and eager to learn about everything. They would just not stop asking questions about the most mundane things.

Of course, it probably varied by individual. Some eldar would just love a group that let them culturally posture and was actually interested in how things worked beyond "space magic, got it". Others would just want to be left to their own business.

>>58272050
sounds like it will be a good read

>>58276745
>Probably claims, maybe with some legitimacy, to be descended from Ulthenash (but so could many by that point).
>Although it's distinctly possible that the other greater houses were pulling the strings with him just being a figurehead.

This sounds exactly like what the Eldar would do if they ever tried to form an empire. A nominal ruler, and then a bunch of noble houses who are the real power behind the throne constantly jockeying for power. Whether the Eldar Emperor was actually in control or merely a puppet to the great houses depended on how competent the given Emperor was.

This fits with what we've said of the psychology of Eldar. Eldar generally don't want to be in power, they want to be allowed to do their own thing. When they do take power, they typically do so out of duty or because they think the side benefits will allow them to further their personal interests. That's why so many Craftworlds or Exodite worlds are run by councils of elders, seers, or autarchs, it allows
for decision making with minimal burden of responsibility. Same reason why the eldar are fine being advisers but not leaders in the Administratum or on Colchis. It gives them influence without putting them in the position of having to personally make hard decisions.

The idea of taking power for the sake of having power is an unusual concept to them. That's not to say it never happens, the Crones and Dark Eldar show many examples of that, but it is atypical.

>>58283183 (cont.)
Indeed, the idea of wanting power for its own sake seems to be an extremely human concept among the sapient races of the galaxy. It may go back to our evolutionary history, primates (especially chimps) are infamous for being control freaks who seek to dominate each other.

As an example, just look at how the various races would react to a person in a position of authority telling them not to fall for Chaos’ typical trick of offering power because it’s not worth it. Most would look at you if you had just said the most obvious thing in the world. Eldar are typically more interested in personal benefits than abstract power. Kinebrach are kind of the same way, they want to be left to their own business, to the point that they would rather arm their allies with superior weaponry than fight wars themselves. The Tau would assume that the people in power have good reasons for saying such a thing, as that is typically their default reaction. Tarellians are kind of on the same wavelength as humans, but aren’t as power hungry. Orks would be bored by offers of abstract power because it doesn’t directly tie in with their ideas of fightin’ and winnin’ (indeed, they make fun of humies in canon for this).

Humans, on the other hand, are immediately suspicious of any authority (because they think they are trying to have power over them), and you have to really hammer it in that this kind of power is not worth the cost. Even then you have people who disregard the warnings and go seeking out Chaos anyway. Many of whom have good intentions for wanting power (as in “with this power I can make the world a better place”), and then get corrupted to hell and back because Chaos is, well, Chaos.

>>58283648
The race that comes closest to humans in this regard are the Necrons, and even then their psychology is slightly different, showing an extreme tendency towards stubbornness that goes beyond even humans.

That’s not to say there are not individuals in these species that aren’t power hungry (there are quite a few, ranging from pre-Tau’va Tau warlords to Asdrubael Vect), but it doesn’t seem to be a species wide fatal flaw like it is for humans (comparable to Eldar arrogance, perfectionism, and desire for sensation or Tau naivete). Even Oscar, who is one of the least control freaky humans out there (which is also part of the reason he is so successful as Emperor) falls into this trap. Remember his reaction to Horus’ proposal of a decentralized star confederacy? He doesn’t want to be in power, but he thinks everything has to be centralized under somebody (preferably not him) to survive.

That said, this trait, like the flaws of all species, have both good and bad aspects. E.g., the Necrons’ stubbornness gives them a bad habit of spite and led to most of the fuckups in the War in Heaven, but it also makes them extremely determined to go the distance when they put their mind to something. The Tau’s naivete means they have to second guess a lot of their actions, but it also means they have an easier time bringing out the best in people. The Eldar are arrogant and perfectionist, but that comes from them being good at what they do because they hold themselves to such high standards. Humanity’s control freak habits mean they have a tendency to be power-hungry, but it also means they jump at the chance to take charge and get things organized. The trick is tempering that so you end up with “super organizer” instead of “space Stalin”. And there is still a lot of overlap in psychology between the species.

tl;dr: bunch of philosophy about different species psychology and their fatal flaws. Move along, nothing to see here.

>>58283183
A figurehead Emperor of a powerful psychic line using the cult of Slaanesh and it’s psychic emanations as a tool to secure power from noble houses that had been running things for a time, but having the cult overtake him, subsume him, and then the whole empire seems like a cool way to go with things.

Also, Taskmaster Iygonesg seems like he would be pretty active in shaping and aware of Slaanesh’s warp presence, and as the one that arranges the provision of whores, blow, and loot for the Prince of Pleasure he is presumably closely stunned to its whims. His relationship with his god is an interesting one.

>>58283897
Isn't that the general concept behind the Taskmaster? The generally Slaaneshi populace of Shaa-Dome is so wrapped up in drugs, sex, and rock and roll that Slaanesh needs someone to whip them in order to get shit done, otherwise they'd never get organized. Makes sense they would be close to their god.

>>58278608
They also reconciled really late in life. I can definitely see some of the Ksons and Wolves not liking each other even though their primarchs reconciled.

Did we ever figure out how the Wolves view the Grey Knights? It was mentioned that they might be suspicious, but others pointed out the Wolves would probably view them more favorably since they were trained in the "Magnus tested, Russ approved" method. The Grey Knights and the Wolves were shown to respect each other by the...Fourth War of Armageddon? The one where Joros sacrificed himself. But that was millennia later.

The suggestion for the Battle of the Fang said invoking the Grey Knights and Magnus was the nuclear option, but that might just as well be due to swallowing their pride and asking for outside help from anyone as well as calling in the Grey Knights to do anything is the nuclear option short of Exterminatus. But I don't know if we accepted that or not, we mostly talked about if it was, it was probably Skyrar, and what he was like.

File: 1519674382698.jpg (85 KB, 675x450)

85 KB JPG

>>58289403
How do the Imperial Fists and Iron Warriors think of each other?

>>58290759
Perturabo and Dorn got along pretty well together, so I imagine the legions would as well.

>>58290822
We know that the Salamanders and the Marines Malevolent despise each other but are there any other rivalries?

>>58291330
Fulgrimfag seems to alude to one between the Blood Angels and the Terra's Children, because both legions liked a mix of deep striking, high skill combat and artful, discreet diplomacy, but had very different views on honor, subterfuge, and fashion. I think he also mentions some kind of rivalry between Fulgrim and Guilliman as infrastructure heavy generalists, but it seems more like that would just be in Fulgrim's mind.

>>58291778
It's possible that Fulgrim saw everything as competition. His drive was to be the best at everything and as such had to be constantly trying to be better than them.

>>58291330
Not as many as in Vanilla. The Space Marines are, with a few exceptions, extensions of their homeworld's military rather than powers in and of themselves. If they have a persistent rivalry it is because the culture from which they sprang does. Mordia and Praetoria for example and by extension the Guardians of the Covenant and The Dragon Lords respectively. Why do they dislike one another? Because they always have way out of living memory. Possibly it started over settlement claims over some planets in Wilderness Space back in the days of the rebuilding and Mordia got the best pick of the new homes and the Praetorians were salty as fuck over it and then Queen Eadið annexed those worlds in all but name centuries later and then the Mordians were all salty about that and centuries of other lesser and oft imagined slights.

They would never go to war about it but if regiments of either cultural group are posted near each other it invariably generates a work for the commissars. Ever seen a commissar try and separate brawling Space Marines? That's why they are allowed to carry shock mauls, it's about the only thing that get's their attention.

>>58290759
>>58290822
They seem to have a rivalry, but it's more of a friendly "anything you can do I can do better" one than anything else. Notably, the answer to the question of who won Dorn and Perty's regular strategy depends on if you ask the Iron Warriors or Imperial Fists.

>>58291778
There was some with Guilliman, for who the Ultramarines were the "average Joe" legion compared to the "overachieving Rennaissance men" of Terra's Children. But basically >>58292190

>>58291330
In addition to the ones mentioned above, I'd imagine the Dark Angels and Space Wolves hate each other, even more than in canon. Russ and Lion got along a lot worse here than in canon and never reconciled.

>>58276745
Prince Yriel also claims such ancestry as an excuse to introduce himself as Prince so it's possible that Yriel was related in some way to the old Eldar Emperor. Or he's taking the piss.

>>58264906

>Nobledark

What the fuck is this gay shit. 40k is supposed to be edgy and over the top. Go play star wars.

>>58272513
That pic is something similar to how I imagine the confrontation between The Warlord and Narthan Dume of the Panpacific Empire went down.

Dume trying to claim the moral high ground with rhetoric and then getting repeatedly kicked until he learned to stay down. Then dragged off to Khangba Marwu to await trail and execution. The removal of Narthan Dume saw his lieutenants sign on with Ursh and the two much reduced empires merge. Warlord also wanted to send the Despot of Ursh to that prison for the same reason, Law must be seen to prevail over even the worst tyrants. Lorgar deemed carting him across half a continent too dangerous and decapitated him.

>>58294091
fuck you leatherman

Did we ever decide on how many Sisters of Battle there would be in this AU?

>>58295677
About 100 million. Ten times the number of marines as a minimum.

File: The Four Gods are smiling(...).png (274 KB, 497x373)

274 KB PNG

>>58295046
I always saw the execution of the Despot as something the Warlord ordered. Old Earth was not a nice place to grow up and the idea of putting someone on trial before executing them would have been considered lenient in most parts of the world. Canon Emperor mostly kept Dume and the Despot around to pick their heads for knowledge. Dume might have had things worth keeping but anyone who knew the Despot knew he was a madman (and Chaos corrupted, but no one knew that at the time) and wasn't exactly the tech expert of Ursh.

Lorgar got picked because he was a generally pleasant guy who had no grudge against Ursh like Khan, Corax, Magnus, Vulkan, Curze, etc. So when he swung the sword there was no sense of pleasure in retribution or revenge. Just an unpleasant job getting done. Khan was said to have had to be talked down for this very reason. Khan he insisted he get revenge, Warlord said if he did that meant for all his rhetoric he would be no different than the Despot, Khan backed down because the Warlord hit a sore spot.

It was still, in the Warlord's eyes, the triumph of law over barbarism. The Despot hadn't been unceremoniously shot like an aninal. He had been put on trial, found guilty, and then sentenced to capital punishment. The system had its way and the people of Earth had found the Despot wanting. Which is more than could be said for his legions of victims.

>>58295046
Khangba Marwu would have to be somewhere other than Himalazia. In this AU nobody had been to that land and returned until Red Magnus fled there after setting fire to the previous Despot.

When Oscar visited after the Earth Unification but by then whatever had been there was gone and had been gone for a few years.

>>58264906
So are the Chilliad still alive by 999M41 or is it only speculation?

>>58297524
Seeing as the Sol system is well on its way to being so densely populated with wonderous things it would count as one big capital province of imperial splendor, its entirely possible that they're still somewhere in the vast and expanding arcologies of Old Earth.

>>58299248
meant for this>>58298811

>>58296834
Would Dume have been kept around or would his crimes have outweighed his potential usefulness?

File: Black smoker hydrothermal vent.jpg (489 KB, 700x507)

489 KB JPG

>>58295046
>>58298811
This reminds me of a suggestion I had for the other regiment of the Old Hundred that has any fluff, the Lucifer Blacks.

Humans in general have a tendency to survive in places where they aren’t intended to go. Such is the case of the Lucifer Blacks, one of the original regiments of the Old Hundred, the original one hundred regiments that were not disbanded at the end of the Unification Wars and would serve as the basis for the Imperial Army. The Lucifer Blacks were one of the last people on Old Earth to be discovered by the outside world, living deep underwater in pre-Strife underwater habitats at the bottom of Old Earth’s Great Ocean (also known as the Pacific) in a region controlled by the Pan-Pacific Empire. It is thought that these habitats were originally meant as simple habitats or research stations during the Dark Age of Technology. However, by the time of the Age of Strife the Lucifer Blacks were cut off from the rest of the world until their rediscovery by the horrendous contraptions of the Pan-Pacific Empire. This lifestyle in the inky darkness, surviving off of mesopelagic fish and geothermal power from hydrothermal vents, is what gave the regiment their name.

File: Fear is the mindkiller etc.jpg (87 KB, 800x1000)

87 KB JPG

>>58301306
Living underwater in an environment where literally one wrong seal could mean the difference between life and death tended to foster an extremely calm and measured attitude in people. To the Lucifer Blacks, a crisis was the absolute worst time to panic, panic is what led to rash decisions and rash decisions are what got you killed. This led the regiment to be infamously known for their ability to be calm and think clearly under fire, as well as a very dark and (ironically) dry sense of humor. Additionally, living nearly 4000 meters below sea level in conditions where most light was artificial tended to make one very good at fighting in the dark. The Lucifer Blacks often used this to their advantage in battle, using smoke grenades and other implements to approximate the low-light conditions in which they had the advantage over their foes.

However, at the same time the Lucifer Blacks were not the most numerous people. When one lives in such a hostile, enclosed environment, the primary constraint on population size was not food or materials, but simply living space due to the number of habs present. When the Lucifer Blacks were first discovered and subjugated by Narthan Dume, Dume decided that one of the best ways to use the highly disciplined, but not very numerous Lucifer Blacks were as elite shock troops. The calm, detached nature of the Lucifer Blacks in high-stress combat situations made them especially hard to break. The fact that the Lucifer Blacks preferred to fight in the hermetically sealed all-black bodysuits they typically wore for extra-habitat activities only added to their intimidation factor.

File: Geez what a shithole.png (1.74 MB, 1440x900)

1.74 MB PNG

>>58301328
When the Pan-Pacific Empire fell and the tyranny of Narthan Dume finally toppled, the Lucifer Blacks were one of the first regiments of the Pan-Pacific Empire to pledge their loyalty to the Warlord. The Warlord was somewhat suspicious of the Lucifer Blacks at first, but as with the Assassins of the Salt Wastes he wasn’t fool enough to deny himself potentially useful resources. And the Lucifer Blacks more than delivered on their promises of loyalty, even serving in a secondary role alongside the Night Lords during the Vhnori Resurgence as the two fought against the attempted resurgence of the Pan-Pacific Empire.

Eventually, in return for their exemplary service, the Warlord, now the Steward, granted the Lucifer Blacks settlement rights on extrasolar worlds. The Lucifer Blacks mostly chose to settle on Ocean Worlds that approximated their old home. Even today many people on Ocean Worlds have distant Lucifer Black Ancestry. As part of the Old Hundred, the Lucifer Blacks also still exist on Earth, living in the same oceanic trenches as their forefathers, though ten thousand years of gentrification and integration into Old Earth’s infrastructure mean that the modern Lucifer Blacks have lost a lot of their original culture and aren’t as incredibly stoic and tough-as-nails as their forefathers. Imperial nobles often like to have Lucifer Black bodyguards when they can’t get someone like a member of Terra’s Children, though in reality having a Lucifer Black bodyguard usually amounts to little more than a display of prestige.

>>58301028
Dume one could make the argument that the Warlord could have (begrudgingly) considered him useful enough to be kept around. He was considered "half-mad, half-genius", after all.

The whole Pan-Pacific Empire seems like it was run by Sparks with all the biotechnology, mad scientist tyrants, and the like.

Though right now we have almost no fluff on Dume's personality or history like we do the Despot. That would be a good thing to work on if anyone has ideas.

>>58301381
Hot fucking damn, that needs adding to the page.

>>58301453
Prokhor Zakharov sort of figure for Dume maybe?

>>58301028
Who's Dume again?

>>58303234
The half-mad, half-genius ruler of the Pan-Pacific Empire, the place that Curze came from in Nobledark, seemed to focus a lot on ghoulish biotechnology in both timelines, and only lost out on the "shittiest place to live on Old Earth" competition because it was up against Ursh.

File: Copyright law in the far (...).jpg (91 KB, 1152x720)

91 KB JPG

Speaking of the days of the Unification Wars, looking up the Unification Wars on Lexicanum, it says that the Ethnarch of the Caucasus Wastes (which in canon was the last place the Imperium conquered, the place where the Thunder Warriors got "retired" at, and the one that had the A.I. under it the Salamanders took out) had what were basically cheap-knockoff Thunder Warriors called Ur-Khasis.

That might have made things interesting. If they lasted long enough to be the last place conquered (the question is how given the route of conquest), then they could have watched the Imperium long enough and taken enough notes to make their own knock-off Thunder Warriors like Fulgrim did with the Astartes. Thunder Warriors not being dependent on geneseed would have made it a lot easier to do so.

On the other hand in this timeline the Warlord probably had to get Vulkan to restrain Arik from doing something stupid and going to Mount Ararat after he found out the Ethnarchy stole his designs.

>>58304662
I figure he might have been pumped for all he was worth in the early days of the AdBio, and if he got very lucky found some way to leave earth in the solar unification. In all likelihood he died, and by the Imperium's order, before their influence was much beyond earth orbit.

>>58307665
Here the Thunder Warriors were retired when the Earth Unification was finished. They were given the option of either staying on with the new Legions for another tour, taking a training job to make the new Astartes suck less or try to have a normal as possible life with a pension and an apparent somewhere with a nice climate.

Last place in this AU conquered was Ursh up in North West Russia. After that there was just Hy Brasil just minding their own business and the Liechtenstein Vault refusing to open the door.

>>58307665
In Vanilla there was a Nordyc chieftain who fell to the Ruinous Powers with only the best intentions. He became a priest king of a great nation but shit started to get real twisted. In western Calbi there is a large swathe of uninhabitable land.

Possibly in this AU the chief was corrupted by a Chaos Influenced A.I. as thid would also explain where he got the high tech things from that he had in Vanilla.

In this AU the Merikan army encountered him and his nation when they were annexing Canada. Then they nuked the place. Refugees, most of the population were not Chaos, fleeing to Skand, swelling it's population and giving the Nordyc tribs access to a lot more soldiers that they loan to Franj in it's war with the Jermanics. And then a few years later the Skand / Franj war.

>>58310182
Priest-King of Maulland Sen of the Maulland Sen Confederacy?

That could work. According to the Lexicanim he was just someone trying to survive and do the best he could for his people and Chaos took advantage of that by imitating his gods and guiding him down darker paths.

In this AU he would have been on Warlord's shit list. After the merging of Uralia and Clan Terrawatt the unified Skand (and the Nord Afrik Conclaves) was the next to join what would become the Imperium. King Thengir the Cripple would have know what was on his western border at least to an extent and would have had no reason to withhold the information from Malcador.

Then Merika got there first and nuked the place. Oscar would only have found out about there having been a corrupted A.I. there after Merika joined the Imperium and he got access to the decades old records.

Maulland would have seen the A.I. as some sort of techno-oracle. Clearly a made thing but made in a time when humans were like demi-gods and an intermediary between his lowly self and his gods. Maulland's gods would have originally been the same gods as the ones worshiped by most of Skand (Thengir and Russ included) with only regular tribal differences separating them. He would have assumed that the gods the A.I. (Khamrians?) had found were his own. Eventually he would come to the ephiphany that there were only 4 main deities and a host of lesser subordinate deities. He would know that they were real because he performed miracles with their authority and after that shit would have snowballed quickly.

Out of all the wars Merika perpetrated this was one Oscar never had a problem with them for although he would have been happier if they had refrained from irradiating the place to a degree that won't see it inhabitable for centuries.

This raises the question; How did the other old nations view psykers?

>>58301453
A Geniocracy completely devoid of any morality or concerns of ethical conduct. The islands of Pacifica were used as a human farm for test subjects for example. They had monsters aplenty but didn't dabble in Warptastic fuckery until the desperation of the end and their union with the remnants of Ursh.

>>58309179
I really like the idea of a bunch of Thunder Warriors trying to adapt to civilian life.

>>58294033
I don't think that the Ultras were the "average Jo" Legion. They ad their flavour. It was dull but reliable, we have a contingency for that, unimaginative empire building procedure setters.

>>58310842
How based on old Nordyc pantheon is the Fenrisian beliefs?

>>58313425
By Fulgrim's standards they were (so take that with a huge grain of salt). Fulgrim wanted the best of the best of the best, and expected them to be erudite and cultured as well as good fighters. He had incredibly high standards and as a result there weren't a lot of Terra's Children, even before the Iron Cage. Guilliman, by contrast, took everyone (he recruited from all over Old Earth, unlike many primarchs who tended to recruit from their home country until the Imperium brought more worlds into the fold) and raised them to their individual potential rather than force them to fit some abstract ideal. He also made use of quite a few baseline auxillaries like the Raven Guard, Fulgrimfag described the Ultras looking like an Astartes UN peacekeeping force between the colors and the makeup of its forces.

Part of the reason the Ultramarines were as large as they were was a lot of Terra's Children aspirants who realized they couldn't measure up to Fulgrim's ridiculous standards and transferred to the less strenuous Ultras. Which probably didn't help any perception Fulgrim had of them being the "Joe average" legion. But again this is Fulgrim. He saw almost everyone as a rival.

>>58314284
Very. The Fenrisians basically just took Leman Russ' myths, gods, and heroes and bolted them onto their pantheon. They might have treated it like how the Norse treated the Aesir and Vanir. Leman, Bjorn, and the like would probably have shared the stories on their down time. Fenrisian culture has a lot of Nordyc influence, and probably preserves some of the closest you get to the comparable original Old Earth culture with the possible exception of the Pastoral Worlds. The original Fenrisians seemed to see Leman as this cool heroic figure who came from the stars and offered to make them stronger warriors. He never mentioned the side effects.

>>58314421
They probably also attribute him to bringing wolves to their world and love him for that. It's a high-speed bear that's also your friend and protector, Russ be blessed for bringing these wonderful creatures with him.

They never realized the connection.

>>58310842
Well apparently Fulgrim picked up the veneration of the holy human form that kept him from going too far into transhumanism from his upbringing in Merika, and they seem pretty technology focused and hated Ursh which was Chaos and psyker central, so they might have been pretty hostile to psykers, and assumed they were always like the horrible sorcerer priests of Ursh.

>>58310842
It would be somewhat ironic and interesting if the AI in Maulland claimed it was one of the golden oracles made for humanity to read the will of their god machines, seeing as Oscar was finally present on the planet.

>>58314421
Do we have anything on hoe Khan got his people to move planet?

>>58317261
It was mentioned with the whole thing with the Pastoral Worlds (trying to work on writing it up as a codex entry). Jaghatai saw that Old Earth was becoming urbanized and decided to spread the Khanate out via colony worlds if he wanted to have any hope of keeping his culture alive. This decision proved eerily prescient, though not in the way Jaghatai would have wanted.

He expected everything being paved over with apartment complexes, not some super-ork burning the planet to the ground and the Imperium having Perturabo rebuild the whole thing from scratch. There's still green space on Old Earth post-Perturabo but it's all pre-planned wilderness and farmland. It's about as wild and untamed as Central Park is to New York City. No way for the nomads to maintain their way of life.

File: What has Leman Russ ever (...).jpg (19 KB, 500x200)

19 KB JPG

>>58309179
>>58310182
Yeah, I think based on the order of consolidation there is little reason for the Caucasus Wastes to remain independent so late (especially since they were next to/in Achaemenidia). We mentioned the A.I. under the Caucasus was still around, the first pass through the area missed it due to it being deep underground and having little contact with humanity. The Salamanders ended up killing it like in canon, which was Vulkan's first big claim to fame. The reaction of the rest of the Imperium was "we had that time bomb sitting under our feet the whole time?"

>>58311762
Strayllya was also the dumping ground for most of the Pan-Pacific's experiments. Which again suggests biotech (or at least something you couldn't shut off). And the Vhnori resurgence was 100% biotech madness.

>>58315329
"What has Leman Russ ever done for us?"
"He gave us wolves"
"Wolves, oh right"
"And the troll population isn't as bad anymore"
"He brought technology. Space travel. Can you imagine going back to how our great-great grandfathers used to live? Banging rocks together and thinking iron was the be-all end of the world?"
"And public order. The tribes don't fight as much anymore"
"Alright, but aside from the wolves and the fewer trolls and the public order and the space travel, what has Leman Russ ever done for us?"
"Brought peace?"
"Peace? Oh shut up."

Yes I realize this joke was done before

>>58319985
Could have been that Jaghatai Khan encountered Chogoris in his early career as head of the Legions. The planet has one big super continent that is set up in a manner that ~80% of it is one big grassland. And it's uninhabited.

He hasn't been blind to the changing nature of Old Earth as he has been away and has been in regular contact with his folks back home via written letters and such. At some point in the Great Crusade he finds himself visiting home again for the first time in quite a few years and as the Khan of Khans he call a meeting of the people to discuss their future as a people. Before them are two paths, assimilation into the changing world or leaving this world and go to this new one that he's just discovered. He can use his authority as Primarch to get them first and exclusive rights on settlement if he can get the paper work through before anyone else, a fact made easier by only him and his crew knowing where the planet was for the moment.

The overwhelmingly vast majority decide that yes, the world he described does sound like a vast improvement on where things here are going.

And that was the "glorious" claiming of Chogoris by the Khanate. Periodically new Khanate colonies get set up and new chapters are raised up in the manner of Jaghatai's White Scars.

>>58321225
This sounds pretty much like what would have happened and a good addition to the bit on the Pastoral Worlds (mind if I borrow it?). Add to that the fact that most of these worlds would have been of little use for more than livestock farming. Chogoris has some nice mountains, canyons, and the like naturally in canon but it's still a lot more flat grassland than Earth ever had.

The only thing to add from the old blurb is that while Chogoris was uninhabited when Jaghatai found it, it wasn't always so. Because canon!Jaghatai never crashed on Chogoris, there was nothing to stop the Palatine from getting increasingly worse about Chaos worship until they went full Ursh. They got lucky in that the resulting Chaos incursion "only" depopulated the planet instead of ruining it forever. The Khanate knew someone was there before them but could find nothing but ruins.

Never visited these threads before.
How have y'all treated the Mechanicus?

>>58323002
They're actually pretty similar to the canon Mechanicus, with the main changes in their general character coming from the red priests of Mars needing to cut their deals with a version of the Imperium that isn't an irrational parody of itself. Thus they are only slightly more reasonable, and would claim eminent domain on your planet so they can set up a resource extraction operation there and employ your people as indentured labor there, instead of servitorizing the entire population and doing the same thing. Because the Imperium has a handful of other advanced civilizations under its umbrella, including Old Earth itself, Mars has a bit more pressure to innovate and roll out newly recovered designs at a semi-reasonable pace, and heterodoxy that gets you declared heretek in the mechanicus doesn't necessarily get you thrown out of the Imperium, and you might easily find an aristocratic patron.

There's also the Adeptus Biologicus, formed out of the various bioengineering assets used by the Warlord in the unification era to design his super soldiers and added onto the mechanicus years later much to their protestation.

>>58323002
>>58324701
There are also still a number of different sects within the Mechanicus, which is one of the ways in which the setting keeps the intra-faith conflicts of canon without it boiling over and saturating the entire setting. The different sects of tech-priests have their own customs but are all theoretically subservient to the Fabricator-General of the Olympus Mons Brotherhood, who is in effect the mecha-pope (as in canon) and decides what is and isn't tech-heresy, which sometimes causes conflicts. To outsiders this looks silly, because they're quibbling over details in how to worship the Omnissiah. And then you realize no, this is very serious, the Mechanicus make most of the things and the AdMech getting in a pissing match is a very bad thing.

Technical advancement is still very slow. The speed at which Mechanicus do things has been compared to the rate glaciers grow. Thing is the Mechanicus control ~90% of the manufacturing and are still the guys you go to for tech support so they make a lot of the rules.

The biggest difference I'd say is that they're "jerks with hearts of gold" instead of "pure asshole". The AdMech are still known as salty, easily pissed off assholes with an entitlement complex (though nice tech-priests do exist, like the Fab-General who signed the Treaty of Mars) and a brutal society who will still do anything to get their hands on STCs. However, they have good intentions (they want to be the unparalleled experts of knowledge in the universe so they can give back to the unenlightened little people [read: everyone else, patronizing and domineering but at least good in theory]), and the higher-ups who know how things work have a very logical reason for being terrified of inventing Void Dragon says hello.

Was trying to add some stuff from the old threads to the main page. Was going to add this to the Ciaphas Cain section but wanted to make sure it was okay first.

"Surprisingly, nearly everyone seems to be aware of the truth of Ciaphas Cain’s so-called cowardice except Cain himself. It is very hard for an outsider to keep a secret on a Craftworld full of psykers. Many of the youth of Biel-Tan who have had a glimpse into Cain’s mind are at first confused. The Imperium and the Craftworld elders described the Imperial diplomat was a great warrior, but this does not seem to be the mind of a great warrior. However, upon further reflection, many have had an epiphany over this apparent disconnect. Although Biel-Tan may be the most aggressive and warlike Craftworld, it’s unblooded youth are as afraid of death and war as anyone else. Yet here is this human, who despite accomplishing numerous heroic deeds and staring death in the face several times, is still just as terrified about the possibility of dying as the rest of them. Despite this when duty calls he still saddles up and heads out anyway. Cain is brave because of his fear, not in spite of it, and the fact that such a distinguished figure can still be afraid is a comforting thought to the untested youth of Biel-Tan. Some Biel-Tan youngbloods go so far as to say Ulthwé can go stuff all that rhetoric about the underhanded Creed being an autarch of humanity. It’s Cain, if anyone, who should be considered a human autarch."

Basically writing out what was said in the previous threads about how everyone who knows Cain personally (including Amberly Vail and the reader) seems to be in on the joke about Cain's cowardice except Cain, especially since Biel-Tan is full of psykers. The Biel-Tan youth act the same around him because they assume he's self-aware about the whole thing, rather than him constantly panicking about being a coward living a lie surrounding by very tall, very aggressive eldar.

>>58327370 (cont.)
Additionally, while it was previously suggested that Biel-Tan claims Cain is a human autarch the same way Ulthwe claims Creed is one, it makes sense that it would be the younger, more naive members of Biel-Tan who are claiming this rather than the older eldar who probably see Cain as decorated but not impressive. It also makes sense that the autarch council would use Cain's reputation and personality as an exercise in drumming some self-awareness into the heads of the overzealous youth, like they have in the past with letting Cain take the fall for trying to calm the populace of Biel-Tan down.

It also keeps up the theme of "life keeps throwing Ciaphas Cain out of the frying pan and into the fire" that is key to any good Cain story.

>>58327487
Seems to fit the overall theme, so long as Cain never finds out that they know and the rest of the human population remains in the dark.

How is the Fall of the Eldar handled in Nobledark? I get that they're written to be more diplomatic/less autistic in their dealings with the Imperium/Tau, but given that the Dark Eldar are still a significant force, it would seem that the Eldar fall occupies roughly the same place in Nobledark lore as in vanilla 40k.

>>58329027
The Fall itself is very much the same. Eldar murderfuck a god into existence their empire tumbles down a hole in the sky.

>>58329027
The Fall happened much the same as Vanilla with some hints that at least some of the eldar knew what would happen and welcomed it.

The Tau (except Farsight and his Enclave) and most Craftworld and Exodite eldar have signed on as semi-autonomous member states of the Imperium.

Dark Eldar were much the same. Vect ascended to power and united them early in imperial history, forging his meritocratic hell hole of a city with no gods or kings or morality.

Chaos Eldar were the ones who welcomed the new deity Slaanesh. They are the main driving force behind the Black Crusades and Chaos ever getting it's shit together. Recently Lady Malys, Deamon-Queen of all Chaos, and Vect have gotten married. This has somehow made the Dark Eldar worse.

Tau hate the Dark Eldar in general with a burning passion and Duke Traevelliath Sliscus in particular with the incandescent heat of a thousand suns. All through their history as an interstellar player any moment of weakness has been greeted with Dark Eldar raids. And always the instigator of these raids and their worst tormentor is Duke Sliscus. Modern Tau don't go in for bounty hunting as a rule, seeing it as barbaric and reprehensible behaviour practiced by the heathen Tau of ancient days. Aun'Va has put a price on Sliscus enough to buy your own inhabitable planet because fuck Sliscus.

>>58327487
It is good so long as the general human population are kept in the dark about his motives. He has to remain HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! after all.

So what would be the population of Old Earth at 999M41?

>>58321225
What would they have made of the ruins there?

>>58333537
They would see it, after investigation, as the eventual fate of Old Earth under Ursh. Self destructive fire that confuses itself.

>>58332202
It would be in the hundreds of billions, possibly even over a trillion as it is the early stages of a shell world.

>>58320263
Would there have been a repeat of the Skand wars when things get unified?

Also do the Space Wolves use suppressing tribal violence as a training exercise or is that beneath them? How much are the Space Wolves involved in the lives of their people?

>>58334628
If there'a any lingering issues, it may have played a part in the Mystery of the Missing Head of Doomrider if we decide to go down that route. Wiping out all sentient life on a planet is a good way to stop a Chaos invasion in its tracks, but there's always the potential ghosts of the past to be drawn on.

>>58337779
The whole “war for the sake of war to keep the bloodlines stronk” is strongly frowned on in this timeline, not least by Russ and Khan themselves. The reasoning goes that the galaxy is already enough of a shithole without people adding to it. Better to turn their energy to surviving their fucking awful planet or outwards at the rest of the universe. Galaxy is full of shit to kill and get killed by, no point in fighting each other. If you want strong, proven warriors, go fight some Orks. There are literally millions of Orks. The Imperium can’t see a future in which there are no longer Orks.

That said, this doesn’t mean everything is lollipops and daisies. Fenris is a very rough place to live and its people are very hot-blooded. Formalized dueling over grievances is common. The High King and High Priest/Fylkir have actually killed each other in the past in duels over disputes, though it hasn’t happened in centuries.

There’s also the fact that this all assumes people are following the rules. That’s one of the sources of darkness in this timeline. These descriptions of how nobledark!Imperial society works are all predicated on the assumption that people follow the rules. But consider real life. If we lived in a perfect world, there would be no murder, no theft, no crime, because everyone would follow the rules. But we don’t, because there is corruption (regular corruption, even without the effects of Chaos cults and the like) and crime and the fact that some people are just plain awful.

Nobledark doesn’t mean that the awful behavior you see in canon is gone. It just means that it’s harder to spot, and the lunatics have to worry about the banhammer coming down from above instead of acting overtly because they running the asylum. If people were perfect the Sororitas wouldn’t have a job.

The monsters in the dark are often much less worse than the monsters that live among us, because they don’t look like monsters.

>>58337779
>>58338698 (same)
As to how much the Space Wolves are involved in the lives of people, the answer is very. The Astartes (or in this case Canis Helix soldiers) aren’t seen as monastic demi-gods who occasionally swoop down from the sky to take people in this timeline. They’re part of the Imperial Army, and theoretically at some level they are under Administratum authority. But it’s a really high level. As an Amerifag, the best comparison on how much the Astartes and IG are linked I can think of would be like looking at the U.S. Army and the USMC. Both are ground troops, but they belong to different branches of the military and are linked only at the highest levels (and they have rivalries because of it, the Sororitas and the Astartes have a particularly nasty one).

Fenris has a technology base comparable to most Imperial Worlds, it’s just that Fenris is Fenris and even with higher living standards the planet still has extreme winters, extreme volcanism, and is infested with trolls and grizzly-sized “wolves” that look like they walked out of the prehistory of Old Earth. Asaheim is as much a city as it is a military base.

Space Marines (and similar variants) interact with baseline humans a lot more, to the point of having relationships and families. They’re generally seen as augmented humans rather than demigods due to the nature of the setting. Sanguinius, Vulkan, Russ, and Khan all had families and genetic children. Rynn’s World has a history of political marriage between the Chapter Master of the Crimson Fists and the ruler of the planet. Lukas the Trickster’s exploits with women, even post-augmentation, are legendary. The Salamanders visit their non-augmented relatives on their off-hours (they’re probably not the only ones, but they’re known for it).

>>58338994 (cont.)
Astartes generally aren’t allowed to have direct political control over any planet with the exception of their homeworld, which is treated more like a military base. The Chapter Master of the Crimson Fists doesn't rule Rynn's World but his wife does, Salamanders aren't allowed on the Nocturne Triumvirate (but having a Salamander relative helps in political prestige), the Fenrisian Worlds don't have to answer to the High King but they do answer to the non-augmented High Priest Ulfrik the Slayer, who the High King has the ear of. Ultramarines have almost no say over how the worlds of Ultramar are governed except Macragge itself (which is the nominal capital of Ultramar, and even there they don't have total say). You have to have some say over how your own home operates in order to properly set up it's defenses.

Lugft Huron disregarding this and going full Big Boss and turning the Badab Sector into Space Cambodia is what brought the wrath of the Emperor down on him. The Emperor is very concerned about the idea of an artificial creation of humanity like him, and therefore by extension the Astartes, lording it over the rest of humanity like transhuman demigods.

To clarify with the "artificial creation" statement, it's highly debatable as to whether Oscar is some kind of super A.I. or just an extremely augmented custom-made human. It's possible that both are true, the lines between man and machine were blurry to the point of nonexistence at the end of the Age of Strife (at the very least he has DNA). Yes, he wasn't born naturally, but so was Ferrus Manus, and Oscar never called him inhuman. The Emperor believes in the "not a real boy" side of the argument. Most of the Imperium calls bullshit, he's human enough in the only way that matters. Thor told him as much to his face at the end of the Imperial Civil War. Malcador even backtracked at the end of his life when he realized his parenting had given his adopted son crippling self-esteem issues.

bump

>>58339209
Ulfrik is unaugmented?

>>58343029
I think we had it where in this timeline where Ulfrik is the very tough but not augmented nominal head of Fenrisian paganism.

He was said to not a big fan of the Disciples of Kurnous. Not just because he doesn't like Eldar, but because when the Disciples show up they tend to do so unannounced and without even alerting Fenris' defense systems (usually getting in via one of the Wolves giving them the codes or just plain sneaking in for the challenge of it).

File: Welcome to Mongolia hope (...).jpg (206 KB, 960x540)

206 KB JPG

Hah! Finally got the Pastoral World section done!

After the Unification of Old Earth many nations across the Imperium found themselves having to rebuild their government from scratch after having thrown off the chains of their old oppressors. The people of the steppes had the additional difficulty in creating a centralized government in a land where there had been none since. Jaghatai had been elected Khan of all the nomad tribes east of the Kashgar Pass, but he did not command the allegiance of all the steppe nomads. As the Khanate extended its influence west into places that had once been known as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Khanate found itself in contact with nomad tribes which it had not heard from for decades. As the Imperium’s influence grew, these tribes gradually flocked to Jaghatai’s banner. They realized that out of all the high-ranking figures in the Imperium, the Khan spoke for them, and confederating with the Khanate was the best way to preserve their way of life.

File: Silk Road.jpg (72 KB, 1000x394)

72 KB JPG

>>58345827
One of these nomads from the western steppes was Temir Baltubekov, better known by his nickname of “the Iron Scribe”. Despite being a nomad Temir showed an aptitude for administration, and Jaghatai took advantage of his ability to organize things. Most people today think of the Iron Scribe as figure of steely resolve and indomitable will, able to do ten times the work of other men. The people who actually knew him remember him as an exasperated, overworked man who found himself having to do the day-to-day minutia and logistics of running a country that Jaghatai had no ability for. Jaghatai was a capable leader, but he was a doer who preferred to inspire people and lead from the front rather than sit around making commandments. Jaghatai’s idea of building infrastructure was to physically go and put a building together with his own two hands rather than sign the decrees to make it possible. As a result, the Iron Scribe was a key figure in turning the Khanate into an actual country, and when Jaghatai stepped down from control of the Khanate to avoid a conflict of interest he named the Iron Scribe his successor as ruler of the Khanate.

File: This is how I Jaghatai Khan.gif (1.49 MB, 360x202)

1.49 MB GIF

>>58345859
As the Great Crusade spread across the stars, the Khan came across numerous worlds that reminded him of his old homeland. At the same time, Jaghatai was not blind to all the changes happening on Old Earth, hearing of what was happening from his friends in the other legions and letters from his extended family. However, when he returned to Old Earth early in the Great Crusade to bury his wife Kasha, Jaghatai saw the writing on the wall. Old Earth was becoming hyper-urbanized, and soon there would be no room for his kind of people.
Seeing the future that lie before him, the Khan decided to call a kurultai of the Khanate to discuss their future as a nation and a people.

At the kurultai, Jaghatai told the assembled leaders of the Khanate that there were two paths that lie before them. One was assimilation, to completely lose their identity in the changing world that would have no place for their people. The other option was migration. The Khanate didn’t have to abandon their ancestral homelands, let them be the urbanized, administrative hub of the Khanate if need be, but it could spread out, establish colonies all across the galaxy so that something of their culture could survive. As primarch, Jaghatai could get them first and exclusive rights on settlement if he can get the paperwork through before anyone else, a fact made easier by only him and his crew knowing where the planet was for the moment. Hearing Jaghatai’s vision, the overwhelmingly vast majority of the Khanate decide that yes, the future he described does sound like a vast improvement over the way things here are going.

>>58345879
Having the approval of his people, the Khan (or rather, Jaghatai and Temir, given the Khan’s “talent” for paperwork) set into motion his plan to earmark a number of worlds for the expansion of the Khanate. It helped that many of these worlds were not useful for much other than livestock herding. Most of these planets were either uninhabited, or inhabited by feudal or feral worlders that easily assimilated into the Khanate's way of life, much like Skandian culture and the inhabitants of Fenris. These worlds would form the core of what would come to be known as the Pastoral Worlds. Not all Pastoral Worlds are former Khanate colonies (Solomon is a good example of one that is not), but many are, and even the ones that do not can relate to the other Pastoral Worlds through their shared history of livestock farming to the point that the Pastoral Worlds form a distinct socio-ethnic unit within the Imperium similar to the Fenrisian Colonies.

>>58345944
Among the planets claimed by the Khanate was Chogoris, the future home of the White Scars chapter. However, when Jaghatai and the White Scars first discovered at the planet, they found it was completely depopulated. The planet had obviously been inhabited in the past, as indicated by the abundance of abandoned ruins across its surface less than a few centuries old, but something must have happened since then to its original inhabitants. Some historians suspect Chogoris' original inhabitants had become involved with the Ruinous Powers, which ended up wiping out the planet's native population. Upon hearing these suspicions Jaghatai remarked that this was exactly why the Khanate was better off for having broken free of Ursh, and his only regret was that he hadn’t done it sooner. Ursh was a self-destructive fire that would have consumed itself. Nevertheless, Chogoris was perfect for the Khanate's needs, being virtually a large-scale version of the lands of the Khanate back on Old Earth. Chogoris became one of the most successful of the Pastoral Worlds, the closest thing they have to a cultural hub, and today is what most people think of when one thinks of Pastoral Worlds.

Jaghatai’s vision proved eerily prescient, though not in the way he had expected. He had expected the steppes and the mountains that he had once called home to be swallowed up by skyscrapers over the course of a millennium. He hadn’t expected them to be burned to their bedrock by the Warboss of Warbosses within a few hundred years after he called for his pilgrimage to the stars. Yes, Old Earth was rewilded after the War of the Beast, but it was tamed wilderness, in the manner of parks and farmland. Livestock were present, but they were raised in pens, not herded on the open range. It was no place for a steppe nomad. After the War of the Beast, and the Khanate being absorbed into the Imperium, the Iron Scribe found a position in the Administratum.

File: Orkhon inscriptions.jpg (125 KB, 1920x1080)

125 KB JPG

>>58345976
He was a minor figure, at best, in the organization’s history, but Pastoral Worlders love to bring him up when talking about their people’s achievements.

Today, the old Khanate is only distantly remembered by the people of the pastoral worlds, mostly in the sense of a semi-mythological lost homeland. People from pastoral worlds like to come to Old Earth to see the remnants of the old Khanate as a sort of cultural pilgrimage. One of the few things that remains of the Khanate on Old Earth is an obelisk inscribed with a message that the Iron Scribe had sent to Jaghatai during the Unification of Sol. In it, the Scribe requests that Jaghatai always remember who he was and where he came from, even as he sought to build a brighter future for his people in the stars. Jaghatai apparently found the words of the message so profound that he ordered it carved onto an obelisk for posterity. This obelisk was discovered amidst the rolling irradiated wastelands of the Old Khanate, a miraculous salvage from the horrors of the War of the Beast. Today, it sits in a quiet, open plaza in a park between two hives of Old Earth, the closest place one could get on the planet to its old home. This "Last Piece of the Khanate" is considered a relic of paramount historical importance to the people of the Pastoral Worlds, and is often the centerpiece of any pilgrimages Pastoral Worlders make to Old Earth.

>>58345991
Good stuff, adds a nice bit of flavor to the setting.

Not to foist something onto you, but how do you feel about finishing Dorn? You're one of the few veteran writefags remaining in this thread, and he's one of the last major gaps in the fluff.

Welp, I'm back with OC for the first time in a while. It's not Angron (yet), but it's something. I was inspired by the what-if pieces done a couple threads ago, and wanted to explore a similar scenario myself. As always, feedback is more than welcome.


“It is an esoteric art, young seer, one that is not often explored by practitioners of our Path. And admittedly, in times like these it is more practical to gaze into the future to find the sword stroke that will cut down the foe. But still, there is a great value in what we do, for the road not taken has much to teach us.

“Now, expand your mind as you have done before. Feel the infinite strands of time and causality spiraling forth from this point. Good. Now, instead of reaching forward, reach back. It will feel strange, but try to find a point in the past, and focus. It may be faint, but give it time… Ah, I see you feel it. Different, aren’t they? Those are the ashen echoes of what could have been. Pick one, and follow it for a while. Immerse yourself in it. Let yourself fall into the mists of what never was and never will be. Part the veil and look inside this world of lost possibility. What do you see?”

---

>>58348270
The throne room was bathed in warm light from the setting sun that filtered through the stained glass windows, long shadows thrown carelessly against ornate walls. It was modestly sized but handsomely furnished, fitting for the humble, diligent Planetary Governor who ruled there, but today it had a different occupant.

The Grand Vizier stood at his usual spot behind the borrowed throne, arms crossed behind his back, as he watched the last of the courtiers and petitioners trickle from the hall. The Emperor raised his hand in a benevolent wave as his subjects left, some of them still with looks of slack-jawed awe or religious rapture on their faces as they turned to look one last time upon their immortal ruler. A pair of golden-armored Custodes closed the great doors with a final clang, and the room was empty. The Emperor let out a long sigh and rose, making his way towards the private exit behind the throne. The Grand Vizier fell in beside him, matching his stride without a word. The Emperor would speak when he wanted.

The pair proceeded through the door to the hallway that led to the residential wing of the palace that the governor had lent to them, and after a moment of companionable silence, the Emperor spoke. “Any news since our briefing this morning?”

“Nothing requiring your attention, Your Majesty.”

The Emperor raised an amused eyebrow. “Your Majesty? Using titles today, are we?”

“You saw how these provincial types were falling over themselves to call you by the most elaborate titles possible. They love the pomp and glamor, so we may as well humor them while we’re here.”

“Very well then, my Grand Vizier. What did you think of Lord Farwell and his proposal?”

“An earnest man, and his plans for increasing agricultural production here were sound, though perhaps accepting them would anger the Melisians.”

>>58348289
“Let them be angry then. They may fume and fuss, but they will not cross the throne in such times. We cannot have the entire hive world of Kado so dependent on Melis for supplies, and an expansion here would do much to bolster the stability of the agricultural base in the subsector.”

The Vizier smiled wryly. “They may not see it that way, but I agree: their objections will not have much force given their economic ties and the fact they have more tractors than lasguns.”

They continued down the hall and out into a small courtyard, where two serving girls were idly gossiping, leaning against a column. They turned at the sound of footsteps and froze wide-eyed as the Emperor and the Vizier approached. They managed to dip down into shaky curtsies and squeak out a stammered greeting.

The Emperor smiled gently at them, the expression radiant on his sculpted features. The serving girls flushed an alarming shade of red, and one of them seemed to be hyperventilating. The Vizier rolled his eyes.

“If you would be so kind, inform the good butler that we will be having our dinner in the garden pavilion today,” said the Emperor. The serving girls nodded frantically but did not move. “You may go now,” the Emperor prompted gently. The pair blinked, the spell broken, and fled in the direction of the kitchens. The Vizier shook his head, and the Emperor shrugged helplessly.

As they made they way towards the garden, the Emperor turned again to the Vizier. “What of Biel-Tan? The last report indicated the Court of the Young King was in a frenzy. Will a visit be necessary?”

“No, Your Majesty. I only just received word. It seems the good Ambassador Cain has managed to slow the situation somewhat, and given the pause it looks like the cooler heads of the Court will prevail. We will continue to monitor the situation, but it seems unlikely we will have a rampaging Bahzhakhain waking sleeping Tomb Worlds.”

>>58348311
“Whatever we’re paying that man, it’s not enough.”

“A true hero of the Imperium.”

They pushed open an elaborate wrought iron gate, and then they were in the garden. The Governor’s wife was something of a gardener, and in the carefully cultivated beds and trellises were plants and flowers from a hundred different worlds. Flowering shrubs, elegantly pruned trees, crawling vines, and overhead four-winged dragonets and Elysian swallows flitted about the branches.

The Emperor stood a moment, looking across the garden. “The First Lady has an eye for landscaping. A marvelous garden, is it not?”

“That it is, Your Majesty.”

“Please, no more titles when we are alone here. I’ve had my fill of that today.”

With that the Emperor stretched, reaching towards the sky, and in a burst of white unfolded his wings. Huge they were, pure as driven snow, and even now having seen them for ten thousand years, they were a beautiful sight to the Vizier. “As you say, Sanguinius.”

Sanguinius patted him on the shoulder. “Come, Oscar. Dinner awaits us.”

They walked down the path to the pavilion at the center of the garden and passed by the pride of the First Lady: a small collection of plants saved from the destruction of Old Earth, crowned by a single rosebush. They seated themselves at the table in the pavilion, and soon the butler and a host of servants came down the path, pushing carts loaded with food and drink.

The golden man and Man of Gold reviewed dataslates and holopads as they ate, never taking their eyes from the information at hand even as they worked on the food, reviewing reports, approving orders and laws, ceaselessly manning the wheels of government that endlessly churned to keep the vast machine of the Imperium in motion. Finally, the last course was cleared away, and Sanguinius set down his holopad and took a sip of tea. Oscar paused, stylus hovering over his holopad.

>>58348341
Sanguinius sighed. “Just ten minutes. Let me at least enjoy the sunset.”

Oscar nodded, and looked of towards the horizon together.

“Should we spar again, later tonight?” asked Oscar.

Sanguinius groaned. “You’ll be the death of me. Tapping into the Warp always makes me queasy, and I’ve already been locked in the throne room all day listening to complaints about the price of grox.”

Oscar chuckled. “I could use the night off as well. Your control of lightning yesterday nearly bested me. Your powers may very well match my own soon.”

“Hopefully not for a while yet, I’d rather you be the one to freeze battlefleets with your mind. But I did notice the same thing, likely due to the increase in Imperial Cult activity that the Synod reported.”

At that, Oscar opened his mouth, but the words caught in his throat. Sanguinius looked at him. “You have a question.”

He hesitated. “About the Imperial Cult… I’m not quite sure how to put it.”

The angel smiled. “A topic of conversation we haven’t breached after ten thousand years of friendship? Now I have to hear it, if only for a break in the monotony.”

Oscar looked his friend in the eyes. “Why do you let them worship you?”

He saw a glimmer of surprise. Sanguinius looked up, brow furrowed ever so slightly. When he looked back down at Oscar, his smile had become sad. “Because that is what they need of their Emperor. Of me.”

“It is a falsehood. They call you a god when you are only a man.”

“I know, Oscar. I more than anyone know of my own frailties and failings. But that is not what need. The common man is not like you, the truth is not so sacrosanct a thing to them. They need a hero, a savior, one they can emulate, one so perfect and invincible that they can believe in him with all their heart so they can go on for just one more day in this galaxy of pain. They need a god.” Sanguinius looked off towards the sunset. His eyes were distant.

>>58348368
“When you placed that crown on my head, Sanguinius the man died. In his place you created the Emperor, embodiment of the Imperium, vessel for the hopes and dreams of quadrillions of souls, the immortal Angel that would save them all. Never have I forced them down this path, Oscar. They pray and worship and hope, and I in turn take their pain and expectations and longing upon myself. All for the sake of the lie that anchors them, that keeps the Imperium turning: The Emperor Protects. Even when I have failed so many of them, they still believe: The Emperor Protects.”

Oscar was silent for a moment. “Do you resent me?”

“Never, Oscar. Someone has to be that beacon for them, and better it is me than anyone else.”

“You do not bear this burden alone, Sanguinius.”

“I know. I have you, and Lady Isha, and many others, and truly without all your help I never would have made it to today.”

“Yes, I do recall a certain large Ork I helped you with,” said Oscar drily.

“But I have thought about it.” Sanguinius twisted a long strand of his golden hair with a finger. “For all our power, the fate of the Imperium will not lie in our hands.”

“Oh?”

“A great many people – you included, I think – believe that it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that hold the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness, love, and courage. And if the Church gives them that strength, is it not worthy? If the guardsmen in his trench fights a little harder for his fellows, if the clerk at his desk pushes through and finishes one more report, if the tired mother finds the strength to hold and read to her children, then all of this will have been worth it, and that is where we will find our salvation. Not in me, or you, but in the strength of the people and in each individual citizen, whether it be man, Eldar, Tau, Demiurge, or others.”

>>58348395
“So you say.” Oscar poured an amber liquor into two glasses, a favorite of the locals, the bottle glugging softly. He slid one to Sanguinius.

“You’re unconvinced.” Sanguinius laughed. “This conversation got quite heavy, didn’t it? I’m no good at this ‘god’ business, it seems. Ask your wife about it, she’s had millennia more experience than I.” They both sipped at their cups. “How is she these days?”

“Overworked, just like us. Splitting her attention between the Warp and realspace is tiring, and the needs of the faithful are many in times like these. She is well enough, though.”

“Once again, my heartfelt thanks to the Mother Goddess of the Imperium, especially for her help with the plague at Monarchia. Even the Word Bearers were at a loss, and without her direct intervention we likely would have lost the planet to Nurgle.”

Oscar smiled faintly, a hint of pride on his lips. “I will convey this, she will be pleased to hear it.”

“A shame she could not have joined us for this trip. She would like it here.”

“That she would. But enough about us.” Oscar peered at Sanguinius closely. “What about you?”

The angel sighed. “Not this conversation again.”

“You know I’m right.”

“Let me recount your arguments: An Empress would be of great symbolic and functional importance to the Imperium. A woman of talent would be able to take on duties of government we currently administer, relieving our workload and allowing the Traveling Court to spread its reach. She could also increase our influence by presenting a different face from us, two towering demigods, and represent the Imperium separately on her own missions. It would also help Imperial morale, giving the citizens a great event and moment of joy to celebrate. And finally, as consort, she would be to… address my needs, both emotional and otherwise. Does that all sound about right?”

“Masterfully argued, Your Majesty, I am utterly convinced.”

>>58348410
Sanguinius shook his head, unable to contain a smile. “You would be, but I am not so easily swayed.” He gave the liquor in his glass a swirl. “They say a man is lucky if he can find true love once. I already have, so to find it twice is to ask too much of this universe. I’ve already had my happy ending.”

“It was worth a try.” They sat a moment in silence, appreciating the sunset. “Do you still think of her?”

“Every day,” said Sanguinius, his eyes distant again. “When I lost her and Belisarius in the same month, I thought the light had gone out of my life, and so it has, to a degree. That part of me is done.” He finished his drink with a gulp. “I said the day you placed the crown on my head was the day Sanguinius died, and the Emperor was born. That was a lie, of sorts. The day Sanguinius truly died is the day I lost them. Now, our dream is all that is left to me.”

“You have heard reports from the Blood Angels, I am sure, of the Lady in Red?” said Oscar quietly.

“Of course.”

“If it truly is Lady Cyrene, why has she not shown herself to you in your visions?”

“If we assume it is truly her, then she has her reasons. Cyrene was always independent and willful in her own way, and I loved that about her. I trust that what she doing is right. And if fate deems that we will not meet again in this world, we will meet again in the next.”

Oscar followed suit and finished his own drink. The sun was only a slight arc above the horizon now, midnight blue descending and jealously pushing out the last few hues of pastel pink and yellow. “We should be going soon,” said Oscar. “There is still work to be done.”

>>58348431
Sanguinius nodded. “I will meet you in the study soon. I just need to be out here for a little while longer.”

Oscar rose from the table and headed down the path to the palace. Before he turned the corner, he looked back at the pavilion. Sanguinius was silhouetted against the setting sun, wreathed in a corona of light, and for a moment, he was a duality: he looked utterly magnificent, every inch the Emperor and god the people claimed him to be, and utterly alone, an all-too-human man crushed by the weight of his crown.

Oscar felt a stab of pity, and regret for what he had done. He turned and left, grateful to his friend that it was not him.

FIN

>>58345991
Good shit. This definitely needs to be put on the page.

>>58348270
Yey, my "what-if" stories actually did something.

Does this mean we need a non-canon "what-if" section on the writepage?

>>58348270

I legit let out a tear.

File: DOOM RIDER.png (1.33 MB, 1280x1024)

1.33 MB PNG

>>58337792
>Mystery of the Missing Head of Doomrider
???

>>58348270
If Angron has half as much effort put into it as this it gonna be good,

How many Grey Knights are there at the moment?

Also who should be the Grand Master?

File: Cocaine can bloom.jpg (143 KB, 1023x761)

143 KB JPG

>>58355611
We have it at about 3000 as of 999.M41 due to being ground down by the events of the last two millennia. Numbers once peaked at 7500. Ideal numbers are higher than 3000, and people are starting to worry how much longer the order can operate with this level of attrition.

>>58351642
In the last thread, a suggestion was thrown out that Doomrider was a traitor White Scar who ascended to Daemon Princedom. So he's high on their hit list.

Why not go after Urkrathos you ask? Because the fucker is behind one of the biggest fleets on the planet. Doomrider, on the other hand, is parading around by his lonesome as if taunting people.

The suggestion continued that Kor'sarro Khan rose to prominence when he was the one to finally "kill" Doomrider during a Great Hunt (or at least the highest ranking person to survive). Cut his head off, sewed the yappity bastard's lips shut, and then buried it in a hole for good measure.

The Scars thought it was over and done with. Then in the waning days of the 41st millennium sightings of Doomrider pop up (maybe first as a headless horseman, and then with head). The White Scars dig up the hole. The head is gone.

File: 1442502329976.jpg (910 KB, 1300x913)

910 KB JPG

Anval Thawn of the Grey Knights was born to perfectly normal parents in one of the Sunless Cities deep in the crust of Old Earth called Kal Darihm, down in the deeps and just above the lightless seas and the geothermal shafts and surrounded on all sides by the winding tunnels of night eternal where no man lived. Here his father provided for his family as a humble and honest fisherman of the strange pale fish that were found so deep. He attended the local branch of the Rhetor Imperia, Paragon Cuthbert’s School For Good Citizens, which was present in the outskirts of south Kal Darihm at that time.

He received a simple but well-rounded education. He learned a little of history both recent and ancient, he learned a little of geography both local and galactic, he learned a little High Gothic in a sort of rough and ready way and then went to be a fisherman like his father as was expected. In a fair and just universe that would have been his life, a life on the water doing honest work for honest pay knowing nothing of war or the horrors beyond name and number. But the galaxy is not just and the galaxy has no notion of fairness.

On his fifteenth birthday, three years after finishing his formal education, a pale-grasper of unusual size plucked him from his father’s boat swiftly and with barely time to scream but rather than sure death in the briny deeps in the maw of a great Cephalopod he rose from the darkness like a missile bathed in light and bolted across the surface of the sea like it was sound rock of the tunnels. Tests confirmed it, Anval of the family Thawn was a psyker. His mother and father and brother and sister held him close that night as they knew that they would not see him again for a long time if at all, he held witch-fire in his heart and the Sisters of Silence were ever efficient in their duties.

>>58358677
Sure enough in the early hours a knock of armoured fist on their door was heard. Father Thawn opened the door to the sister in her brass-trimmed robes and with tears in their eyes the family was divided and Anval was taken to the Schola Psykana and the distant land of the surface. It took some time for melancholy to pass as he had left behind all he knew and it took longer for the agoraphobia to subside as he had never seen sky or sun or moon before and was quite expecting to fall from the face of the Earth with no cave ceiling above him.

He studied hard in the hallowed halls of the Schola Psykana and although his tutors felt within him a great roaring furnace of potential ability they couldn’t teach him of any way to harness it beyond simple telekinesis and a little light illusion. None of their techniques worked but then the primary purpose of the Schola Psykana was to make people safe for their own good and the good of the people and with this they did succeed. The whispers of things to dark and terrible to contemplate found no purchase in his mind and soul and were ever frustrated. By age seventeen Anval was brought to the attention of other eyes. His stature was sturdy and his limbs strong, he had great stamina and had maintained his physique from his fishing days through his further education.

It was bitter sweet when he returned home again for proud though his family was of him his new journey would take him to the fabled halls of Titan. On Titan he was torn apart and remade in the image of the legends of ancient days, a Grey Knight and a warrior without peer. The training was hard, but he rose to the challenge of it and surgical modifications were brutal but he endured them and the flesh of the artificial organs took root in his own.

>>58359424
Anval of the family Thawn returned home only a few times, though he wrote often. He was not the same person he had been when he left and with each passing year in the service of the Imperium he grew more distant from them and had seen things out in the wars on distant worlds and stranger places that he did not wish to see. He outlived his family by many generations and in the end it seemed he met his doom on the bones of the craftworld Malan'tai. The craftworld was being disassembled carefully as none would dwell in so sorrowful a place but much was still to be had for salvage and such value had attracted the damned and forsaken. The battle was short and intense and almost a defeat but the neverborn and their fallen eldar pets were dispatched. Of the casualties was Brother Thawn who fell with the spear of N'Kari, Keeper of Secrets. With great solemnity his body and the bodies of his fallen brothers were taken back to Titan to be laid to rest in the fields of the dead beneath the dense and dark atmosphere.

It was then that the legend of Thawn really began to get told. Just before the procession made it to the airlocks the almost interred Brother-Knight pushed the stone slab from his sarcophagus and sat upright, removing the linen shroud from his confused features. Commotion was an understatement. It was determined, after extensive testing to ensure freedom from corruption, that he mustn’t have been dead when they laid him out to rest. The Apothecaries emphatically denied this. He was dead as Pius, a spear in his chest the size of a small tree punched a hole right through his chest and took most of the contents of the ribcage with it. His resurrection was not the work of mundane recovery.

>>58360011
Whatever the cause he was given a clean bill of health and returned to service after another six months of testing. Seventy years of the Long War later and he was longitudinally bisected from collar to hip by an orkish worshiper of Khorne. On the way back to Titan his comrades were more than a bit startled to see him sit down in the ship’s mess hall for a bite to eat and a cup of tea with nothing more untoward than confused memories of the last few hours. He was tested again and again, after some time, returned to service.

In his three thousand year career Anval Thawn has been;

Crushed by a Gargant - full recovery in just under 48 hours

Decapitated by a Fallen Champion of Slaanesh, flesh melted from the head and the skull taken as a trophy - head reappeared on shoulders in less than a month

Atomised by necron gauss flayer - awoke in his bunk on Titan seven weeks later

Direct hit from a nuclear warhead, body unrecoverable - was next seen walking on to the bridge of the ship that he had departed from earlier that day.

Mobbed and torn apart by Meatweaver constructs - Reappeared in the Titan dockyard nearly a year later. Longest absence on record.

Burned to the bones by Defiler in 12th Black Crusade - Appeared in a nearby forest naked less than an hour later and started sprinting towards the Defiler to get even.

>>58360240
And many other terrible fates. There is no describable pattern to manner of death to time spent dead or any reliability on where he will return. As to why he returns at all? Some say it's his natural immense psychic talent finding an outlet. Some say he has been chosen by the eldar's future god of the dead to be it's herald, reaching backwards through time to bless him. Some say it's a prank by Chaos to drive him to despair and show him that there is no hope, not even in death. If it is a prank of Chaos it's backfired hideously. Thawn has had thousands of years to see the beauty of the Imperium he fights and dies for and if he must die he will die a thousand times a thousand and a thousand more again.

He has been around long enough now to see the shape of things and note the number of prophesies reaching fruition. He has seen the face of the enemy and it is getting worried. The Imperium marches to Judgment Day and what the gods maybe don't appreciate is that they are just as much on trial.

FIN
>Any good?

>>58360353

A bit more on the death - revive - OH CRAP! reaction of, well, everybody would be a bit better - for sheer schadenfreud

>>58360353
>>58360887

>Appeared in a nearby forest naked less than an hour later and started sprinting towards the Defiler to get even

This one would make a particularly amusing write-up!

>>58360353
A couple points of continuity.

The Sisters of Silence aren't around anymore. They died to a man in the opening salvo of the War of the Beast. Someone else is crewing the Black Ships now.

I am not sure if the Grey Knights were involved in Malan'tai in this timeline. Malan'tai was not a fan of humans, and when the eldar realized the battle against the tyranids was going to end up being pyrrhic due to the Infinity Circuit being lost, they set it on a course for a nearby star as a final "screw you" to the 'nids.

However, this is not too big of a deal. You could literally just change Sisters of Silence to "Black Ships" and change Malan'tai to something else. There have to have been other Craftworlds that have been lost. We have ideas for how Kher-Ys and Malan’tai were lost but there must have been others that left a carcass.

On the other hand, it was very well written. I like the description of life on Old Earth in the "current" era. It really drives home how much has changed since the days of the primarchs. The Dark Souls-esque “death montage” was also funny.

Also, I loved this line:

>He was dead as Pius

I talked to a friend knowledgeable about space stuff to figure out how much would be left of the Phalanx after Pius' pulled his stunt for the Ork diplomat thing, and it turns out once you hit anywhere near relativistic velocities he would have been completely vaporized.

Bump in hopes of adding more substantial content later

>>58363789
The Sisters of Silence weren't refounded?

>>58363789
I will address these errors before it goes on the page unless there are objections to it going on the page.

Also maybe more deaths.

>>58362438
I think I'll take a stab at it. Should have something in a day or two.

On an unrelated note, what's the status of phosphex in this timeline?

>>58367473
more deaths would be a fun list

>>58367473
I think th deaths could use a bit more consequence, since right now it sounds like he just wakes up without much memory of what happened and keeps on going and everything is just peachy. In canon 40k even for Perpetuals dying is super traumatic, Curze drove Vulkan insane by killing him in fucked up ways over and over, and that’s a goddamn Primarch. I was partial to the suggestion that is sort of a reverse of your situation: he remembers his deaths but no one else does, so everyone else thinks he keeps on barely surviving horrible injuries whereas he’s slowly falling apart from the trauma. At the very least it should be clear that is condition is much more curse than boon.

>>58367594
Why would phosphex be different at all?

File: maxresdefault.jpg (37 KB, 1280x720)

37 KB JPG

>>58368177
Being more explicit in how he remembers all his traumatic deaths in addition to the "changed" tineline would be a good thing. I'd imagine even though he survives it wouldn't be very pleasant.

It could be some kind of perception filter going on. No one remembers at first that Thawn was dead, possibly including Thawn himself, but then it hits someone that "wait a minute, didn't I see you die?: and it all comes flooding back. Leaving open the disturbing possibilty that Thawn has died a lot more than anyone remembers.

>>58367131
Nope, dead as doornails. Don't remember anything about them being refounded but if they were they would have been completely different because there's no direct continiation of legacy.

It kind of reminds me of something I realized when I found out the Fabricator-General (presumably the Crusade-Era one that people got along with) was killed in the Beheading. At first I thought "oh no, I liked that guy", but then I realized his death had more impact specifically because of that.

The fact that people or things like the Sisters, Phalanx, and Fabricator-General were all killed or destroyed during the War of the Beast really drives home the point of just how bad the conflict was. Sanguinius and Pius die but then we know they were going to die just from this being a 40k AU. With the others it ironically has more impact to people who know 40k, since these are recognizable figures who don't seem "predestined" to die.

It's the same as when the tyranids are said to have eaten other galaxies we just kind of wave it off, but when the potential for them to have eaten Andromeda came up it (regardless of whether or not the Crones were lying) it had much more of an emotional impact.

>>58371894
So long as they keep the name then all is well and someone psyker resistant needs to man the Black Ships.

>>58369923
I'm in favour of it being more traumatic but I'm not sure about the perception filter.

Do the Raven Guard and their progeny have any preference in where they recruit from?

File: 1283714808043.jpg (91 KB, 550x909)

91 KB JPG

>>58371894
I think the list of mentioned Fabricator-Generals in this Vanilla goes:

Kelbor-Hal (Great Crusade)

Zagreus Kane

Kubik

Gastaph Hediatrix

Uixot

Oud Oudia Raskian (current)

There could be ones between them and at 6 they would have been having a reign (considering Kelbor-Hal died in the HH after picking the wrong side) of about 2,000 years each.

In this AU it has been mentioned that one Fabricator General, the head of the Olympus Mons Brotherhood, was ruthless and forcibly subjugated the other orders and those that would not kneel were either disposed of if they fought or driven into exile. He intentionally hid knowledge of Chaos from his subjects mirroring Vanilla Emp's policy. Then a whole load of his followers were seduced by the whispers of the Great Adversary at the worst possible time, the soil of mars ran red with blood, Void Dragon nearly gets out of it's cell and shit nearly went as bad as it could go.

Zagreus Kane terminates him. The Creed of the Omnissiah does not encourage weakness or the destruction of knowledge. By withholding knowledge of Chaos (a clear and real enemy of all that is holy) he had weakened Mars, the Imperium and the entire human species. Kane takes that shit over and spreads the knowledge of Chaos to the rest of the Mechanicus from the lowest factory worker to the highest Magi. Kane was, even by normal people standards, actually a really nice person bar the whole "bloodiest internal purge in Mechanicus history" thing.

Of Kubik, Gastaph Hediatrix, Uixot and any others between them and the current Oud Oudia Raskian we have decided nothing beyond Raskian's predecessor being a hard man. Also that growing your successor in a tube has become standard or at least accepted practice for the really high ups. We do not know what Mars and the Mechanicus were doing in the Imperial Civil War for example. Were they also doing a circular firing squad impersonation?

File: 1513471559624.png (22 KB, 800x800)

22 KB PNG

How available/common are cybernetics in the common population?

>>58378580
Kelbor-Hal 9000 was around at least long enough into solar unification to make a flying spear in the contest of smiths under Olympus Mons, and his ego and ruthless power politics fit the mentions of the Fabricator General in the early stories with Horus and the unification of mars. Would it actually make sense for him to go nuts and his followers to make a schism in the very mars Hal unified prior to the War of the Beast? Some point before the actual siege of Old Earth might make sense, and Kelbor-Hal might have let the madness brewing on mars boil over during the channeling of the Beast and Crones to the final confrontation at sol. Zagreus Kane’s faction would have lead the crackdown and purge of Hal’s elements on mars in a bloody wartime regime change. He probably would have been backed by the Iron Hands and ultimately the Empty Throne, as well as the various orders and adepts closely aligned with earth like the proto-biologicus.

>>58378580
There was also the Fabricator-General who signed the Treaty of Mars, who may or may not be Kelbor-Hal. He was mentioned to be pretty nice compared to the usual perception of the AdMech and was said to be Arkhan Land-like, to the point that the Steward liked him. Whereas Mars saw the rise of the Imperium as a threat that blockaded them and threatened to destroy them, this Fabricator-General saw it as an opportunity. Use the momentum from the Great Crusade to reunite with all the old Forge Worlds and use the Imperium’s crusade as a way to turn over every rock in the search for STC documents. He was charming enough to convince the Steward to make the AdMech the Imperium’s primary tech supplier AND allow them to keep a lot of their old ways (looking at you, Skitarii) and get first dibs on any STC remnants that were discovered.

We still have the issue of one Fabricator-General being killed in the Beheading and one being deposed and...recycled by Zagreus Kane in the Schism of Mars that was never resolved.

There was a suggestion that the Imperial Civil War-era Fabricator-General was deliberately sitting on his hands doing nothing because he knew the Forge Worlds were split in their leanings and openly siding with either Thor or Vandire would result in another Schism of Mars; Ferrus went behind his back and smuggled a large number of Vandire dissidents out of Sol, under the grounds that they were “efficient” servants of the Imperial good and to kill them would be unproductive and illogical.

The only thing is in canon Gastaph Hediatrix (the canon Age of Apostasy-era Fabricator-General) was noted to be one of the few who gave a damn about the world outside of the Mechanicum, being one of those who led the charge to overthrow Vandire in canon.

Wonder if there have ever been any female Fabricator-Generals. The Mechanicum cares more about your degree of augmentation than gender after all, and it’d be hard to tell by the time you hit full mecha-illithid.

>>58376626
I don't think it's ever been mentioned. Raven Guard in this timeline are well-known for their preference for mixed Astartes/human forces, and given Corax' background it's likely he would recruit from rebels as well as his home country, but it would be unlikely by the time the Great Crusade was over there would be enough rebellions against tyrants to recruit from (aside from anti-Imperial ones).

Looking through the old fluff, it looks like Night Lords do recruit from more than just mind-wiped criminals and orphans of war. Vostroyan underhives are said to be another place they recruit from, so it suggests the chapter can recruit "normally" even if they have preferences.

Also consider in this AU moving between legions and chapters is possible. It doesn't always happen (Vlka Fenryka aren't going to give up Njal Stormcaller to the Ksons just because he's a psyker, for example), but people who really don't fit in have been known to transfer.

>>58381028
Probably about as common as canon. Maybe moreso for the lower classes because the primary factor making life so shitty on many worlds (especially Hive Worlds) isn't neo-feudalism but not enough resources to go around due to the escalating Long War.

>>58381946
>>58382191
>Crusade-era Fabricator General

If this is the case then it may have very well been that Arkhan Land was the one who treated with the Imperium, but not as the Fabricator-General but his ambassador.

Kelbor-Hal was a savvy enough politician to come up with the idea to turn the Mechanicum's current problem into a solution, but he might have also been savvy enough to know that the Mechanicum would get more if the Steward treated with the eager, earnest Arkhan Land than the more ruthless Kelbor-Hal. All he had to do was make sure he gave Land a list of "this is what we want, this is what we're willing to compromise on, this is what we're not willing to do" and let Land figure out everything in-between.

>>58382191
Not like any outsider would be able to tell the gender of a high-ranking Mechanicus official.

>>58371894
To clarify, according to the Nobledark wiki page the Phalanx was only heavily damaged. Post-WotB it was refitted and stands guard in the Sol System.

>>58373918
Is handling nascent psykers another part of the Adepta Sororitas' responsibilities now, or is this a duty of a separate part of the Imperium? Also, does the armor the Securitas use have any relation to the power armor Sisters Of Silence used?

>>58381946
I think earlier discussion indicated that the Schism happened some time after the War of the Beast but I think before the First Black Crusade.

It could be that there were 3 Fabricator Generals in quick succession in the Unification era due to them all being very old men.

1st was the ruthless tyrant who unified Mars.

2nd was Land who signed the Mars Earth treaty

3rd was Hall who was removed by Kane for aforementioned reasons just after WotB.

>>58388446
I prefer the combination of Hal and the unifier of mars, with Land as diplomat to the voidborn and imperium meant to cushion the true tone of the regime during negotiations. This would actually be much like the Imperium sending Ferrus, Fulgrim, and Horus to negotiate the actual treaty with Mars, instead of sending Lorgar, Sanguinous, and Guilliman (who much better represented the outlook of the Steward and Old Earth) to put the ir most effective foot forward with their new partner and neighbor. It also helps stress the negotiated nature of the relationship between mars and earth, and the political struggle for positioning and prestige that also characterizes it.

>>58385403
We had a debate over whether the Phalanx was still around in M41, or if it was the ship Ollie used to ram Ullanor. It never really got resolved and was left open.

Physics comes down kind of hard on the "completely lost" side. Anything travelling at that speed, adamantium or not, would be completely vaporized on impact. If the Phalanx was still around it wasn't the ship user to ram Ullanor.

>>58386529
>>58388446
>>58388987
If we have Kelbor-Hal be the first and only Fabricator-General, should we change the victims of the Beheading to another High Lord then?

>>58391766
The Attack Planet was assaulted by Space Marine boarding specialists and anyone else that could be scraped together at a moment's notice. They boarded Ullanor and activated it's warp engines. It comes to rest in another star system down the warp currents and renamed Armageddon. Of the boarding teams no trace was recovered.

Beast had already teleported to an attack moon trailing in the planet's wake. Moon is on a course to land right on top of the Imperial Palace and make all the atlases inaccurate.

Ollanius Pius slams his ship into it at extreme speed, knocking it off course and saving Old Earth but totally obliterating his ship and all on it. Beast manages to make it to a drop pod just in time or given how buffed he was he might have jumped and landed without needing a vehicle.

>>58394880
Which one would you suggest?

I'm thinking Administratum or Inquisition.

So hey newfag to these threads and sorry if this has already been written down somewhere, I tried to look I swear.

Is the imperium still as fucked in this as in the normal lore? Is it still the bland as fuck "chaos is going to win in the end no matter what" or is there actually some distant hope of a happy ending in this?

>>58398011
There is indeed a distant hope of victory. But, you know, between the Necrons, the Tyranids, the Orks, Chaos... there's a lot of ways to die and only a few ways to win.

>>58398011
There is hope.

The time of the Impossible Child as mentioned in the Starchild Prophesies is fast approaching.

The Laughing God, Isha, Eldrad and others have been orchestrating events and stacking the decks in preparation for Judgment Day.

The eldar god of the dead is dragging itself into existence.

The Bloody Handed God is fully awakening and waits for his chariot and his sword.

The Void Dragon has a priesthood and a prophet and knows his bonds will soon be loosened.

The shit storm to end all shit storms is brewing and the Imperium is getting a kicking like never before but if it can survive Judgment Day then Chaos will be the one getting the kicking and the gods of Chaos will know what it is to be hunted. The Imperium just has to survive a little longer.

>>58398172
>>58398316
That's good to hear, even if there's never gonna be any stories written about humanity unfucking itself and getting good like the original plan was although I'd love to read that it's just nice to know there's not already an ending set in stone, that really killed the normal version of the lore for me

>>58398011
Yes. One of the big selling points of this setting is that all four+Orks of the major powers have an equal chance of fucking over the other three. There's no "something something infinite universes Chaos always wins". Thing is most of the other sides winning are just as bad. Chaos is pretty obvious, they could kill the Emperor and Isha and turn the rest of the galaxy into a playground for Crones and daemons.

Necrons can get their pylon system up and kill the Imperium, tyranids, and Chaos Gods in one fell swoop. The Silent King makes these statements that at first glance seem arrogant and self-aggrandizing until you realize he's actually has a firm, matter-of-fact view of the Star Empire's capabilities and is actually capable of putting his money where his mouth is.

Tyranids can OM NOM NOM everything between here and Earth/Shaa-Dome, overrunning both the Imperium and the Star Empire and simultaneously starving and drowning out the Chaos Gods via the Hive Mind.

Orks can be brutally kunnin' and backstab Chaos at the right moment when everyone else is exhausted, leading to the dominance of the WAAAGH!

Imperium has it worst. They don't have a clear plan to victory like the others. Their plan is to set these three apocalyptic forces against each other and let them cancel each other out, but it's still going to end up being the Thirty Years War in space because the other factions have to cross the Imperium to get to each other. Casualties are expected to be high in a best case scenario. They have options that could potentially turn the tide and finally let them take the fight to Chaos (Starchild, Void Dragon), but Starchild is a vague prophecy and only a select few know the Void Dragon even exists. Even then it's not a guarantee that these would turn out well for the Imperium. Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

>>58398932
Check the last thread. There were two completely non-canon stories about a potential future where the Imperium survives.

>>58399959
And if all else fails, if every forbidden weapon is taken from the secret storage facilities on Mars and Earth, if the Ganymede Vaults are plundered of the things no sane man would dare use, if all hope is lost, if even a fool's hope is too much to hope for there is always the unthinkable Plan B of the Ordo Desolatus.

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Forces#The_Ark_Ship

>>58391766
Lets say the Phalanx's neutronium keel structure survived the impact mostly intact and shot out the other side tumbling into interstellar space in the segmentum solar, and was later salvaged.

File: 1342474740083.jpg (255 KB, 530x700)

255 KB JPG

>>58382363
So Land is Hal's right hand man with the Imperium?

In vanilla it was Hal that turned to Chaos, in this one he suppressed knowledge of Chaos. Either way he get's removed by Kane. Presumably Land is either killed by Hal or manages to run fast enough and serves under Kane.

Land, Kane and Hal are all Olympus Mons Brotherhood. The OMB aren't ever going to do anything that could risk their order loosing the position of Fabricator General to another order, essentially creating a dynasty that has survived for the entirety of Imperial History.

File: LCB_DOMESTIC_VIOLENCE.gif (18 KB, 120x160)

18 KB GIF

>>58401432
It has already been mentioned that it still patrols Sol System.

This could be interpreted as that they salvaged enough of it to rebuild it as an orbital dockyard of some sort that could be orbiting either the moon the earth or the sun.

Either way it is active in some capacity in 999M41.

>>58395459
Having Pius go out kamikazing a lesser Rokk rather than Ullanor seems like a really bad idea, because it diminishes the impact of Pius’ sacrifice. It’s like the mention a long time ago of how it would be silly to have Pius, a Terminator, and a Custodian sacrifice themselves one after the other to save the Steward.

If the Imperium can successfully board Ullanor and wrest control of it from all the Orks, include the Beast, then drive it to the place where Armageddon is now, then why is an attack from a lesser Rokk such a threat? All they need to do is send another boarding team (a smaller one even, since there are fewer Orks) and do it again.

If the issue is having the Beast killed by Pius’ actions, having the Phalanx or whatever ship we decide Pius is on smash into Ullanor isn’t going to vaporize the planet. It’s just going to give it one hell of a wallop. It’s the ship doing the ramming that’s going to feel the real pain.

If we want to still have the Phalanx around in M41 all we need to do is have Pius be on a different ship. The Phalanx just gets you more bang for your buck as its sacrifice takes a major piece off the table (and gives an event of a significant enough magnitude to explain why losing it was considered the best option), explains why it wasn’t around blasting fools during the Siege, and adds to the “oh shit” factor of the Siege of Terra.

>>58395459
>>58401432
>>58401524
>>58391766
>>58401609
Guy working on the ork diplomat story. This was what I had on the reaction to the Beheading and Pius' sacrifice so far (at this rate I'll have the whole thing posted here).

Oscar, last of the Men of Gold, Warlord of Earth, Steward of the Imperium, was not having the best week. To be honest, things hadn’t been going well for quite some time, what with the whole galaxy-spanning war going on, but the last week or so was particularly bad.

First, there was the treachery of Grandmaster Drakan Vangorich, who in addition to being a master of the arts of assassination, it seemed, had a terrible sense of timing. One would think that one would wait until after all human life wasn’t under threat of being wiped out by Orks and corrupted Eldar from the Eye of Terror to spring their attempt to assassinate and replace the High Lords of Terra with their own puppet council. The Steward had found it necessary to leave the war room to personally deal with that. Four High Lords and numerous high ranking figures of the Administratum were dead at a time which the Imperium could ill-afford their loss. The loss of the Fabricator-General was a particularly devastating blow. Oscar had liked the previous Fabricator-General, who had been remarkably open to cooperation since the Unification of Sol, whereas his likely replacement, Kelbor-Hal, was a bit flaky. At least it was better than the other possible option for Fabricator-General, Zagreus Kane, who had the personality of steel wool.

>>58401669
Then, the Orks had decided to one-up Vangorich by teleporting an Attack Planet in-between Earth and Mars. The Imperium knew the Orks were coming, they had been blazing a path through the Segmentum Solar and had been expected to arrive on Sol’s doorstep any day now, but to teleport past the fleets blockading the way to the Imperium’s heart and just appear in the Sol System was something no one had expected. To the Imperium’s credit, between Perturabo, Dorn, and a thousand other siege tacticians, the Sol System was one of the most heavily defended systems in the Milky Way, and as soon as the leering iron skull had appeared in the sky it was immediately fired upon by the Sol system’s defense network along with some of the best ships of Battlefleet Solar and the Phalanx itself. Nevertheless, the Attack Planet was undeterred by the assault, shrugging off point defense systems and Nova cannon blasts as if they were mosquito bites. Nothing even seemed to slow it down as the Attack Planet advanced on Earth, and as the two planets got dangerously close to each other’s Roche Limits the Imperium realized with some horror that the Orks meant to ram the Attack Planet into Earth.

The situation had seemed hopeless until the Phalanx swooped in and rammed itself into the Attack Planet that had once been Ullanor at a fraction of the speed of light, creating a bright flash which for a moment even outshone Sol. Everyone had seen that. Oscar could have sworn he felt that, even though he knew no vibrations could be transmitted through space. After that, the hollowed out planet shot through the Sol system like a billiard ball before finally teleporting out of the system somewhere around Pluto.

>>58401680
Someone, apparently a man based on the voxcast that had gone out from the Phalanx just before the insane stunt, had commandeered the 30 kilometer ship and ordered a mass exodus before taking a skeleton crew of the bare minimum of people necessary to pilot the Phalanx and ramming it into the Attack Planet, though no one knew exactly who.

Oscar stopped. The man had singly-handedly saved Earth and the entire Imperium, and no one even knew his name.

It would be child’s play to figure out who it was, of course, assuming they weren’t all killed by Orks first. They had his voice on record, giving the order to pick up the survivors right before the Phalanx rammed itself into the Attack Planet. Still, the fact that no one on Earth seemed to know who they owed their lives to was a sobering thought. He would have liked to think that single act had killed the Beast and saved the Imperium, but reports indicated that a significant number of lesser Rokks and Ork ships had survived the loss of the Attack Planet and were currently regrouping for another push somewhere in the Oort cloud. Estimates said they would be ready to make another push for Earth in a matter of months.

>>58401706 (same)
The mention of the Beheading happening so soon was just filler. We could change it to "month" or "year" if we wanted to, I just put it in as a placeholder.

The Fabricator-General thing was also based on the confusion we had regarding who died when and the issue of the double deaths. Kane's personality was based on the description of him being "harsh but fair", which I took to mean he seemed a cold taskmaster but was also very rewarding to those who impressed him (kind of like a less perfectionist Lofwyr). Since we've decided to pare down the number of Fabricator-Generals and Kane's personality might be different this can be rewritten.

Oscar's view of the Beheading is also colored by what he knows. There have been suggestions that Vangorich had other reasons to do what he did but at this point Oscar doesn't know or have time to care.

File: Ram the Blade Ship.jpg (268 KB, 3840x2160)

268 KB JPG

>>58401835 (same)
As for Pius: In a previous thread it was suggested that no one by M41 remembers his name. That seemed kind of odd given that this is the guy who in canon is considered the patron saint of the Imperial Guard and known by millions.

So I decided to split the difference. Everyone knows who Pius is, but they only know he was the guy who rammed Ullanor. Nobody in M41 remembers who he was as a person despite the Imperial Guard and Navy still fighting to this day over whether he was "one of theirs".

Pius' sacrifice also highlights some of the themes of nobledark. Pius isn't some well-known figure. He's just an ordinary guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. In the face of imminent death, he realized what had to be done to save everyone and did it. With one single action he changed history, and yet despite his heroism no one caught his name in the chaos. They had to figure out who it was in retrospect based on his vox message to pick up the lifeboats. There wasn't even enough of a body to bury, his atoms scattered across Sol. Taking out Ullanor didn't stop the invasion but it did take out the Beast's trump card. Everyone on Earth owes him their lives yet no one knew who he was before his big moment.

Bump>>58401669
>>58401680
>>58401706
>>58401835
>>58402049
Really well-thought, nicely done. Not sure if there's any canon conflicts, but the story itself is a nice addition.

>>58404509
Not done yet. Still have to finish the introduction and one of the transitions then post the actual thing. I just posted the bit about the Beheading and Pius' sacrifice since that's what we were talking about.

As I noted the irony is I'm probably going to end up posting it here piecemeal before I can get the final version done.

>>58382298
Also don't forget that the current Chapter Master of the Night Lords is actually very stable. He's just a really good actor.

bump

>>58402049
My only concern is that would one of the 5 Big Bastards have been able to accelerate to relativistic speed and would it have actually have deflected the planet without the planet breaking apart.

If we are going to keep with the idea of Puis ramming his ship into the Ullanor and that saving the day then it could have been that he smashed the Phalanx into the planet's warp engines causing them to trigger and they all get dropped into the warp. A few years later the Armageddon (presumably not called that at the time) system is discovered to have a new planet. Some searching later and they find the derelict Phalanx drifting through space not far away.

Did we save that little write up about Lady Celestine's favorite bodyguard?

>>58411996
With the Armageddon fluff we have the Orks hitting the big red teleporter button on the planet when the impact hit and it looks like things were FUBAR. A bunch of other Rokks and ships were launched when everyone abandoned planet and that's how the Beast got to Earth. In the canon Beast Arises series, accurate teleporters and gravity weapons seem like the advanced Orks' weapon of choice, like Webway usage and monomolecular filament are for Eldar or "skimming" and Plasma are for Tau. The fact that the Beast Arises Orks can make accurate teleporters is actually a plot point, and it's how they get Ullanor to the Sol System. One minute nothing then suddenly an Earth-sized Ork Death Star is floating near Earth.

Could rework it so Ullanor doesn't go flying. I know we have it smushed but I'm not sure if that would send it rocketing around like that. Put it in there for a reason, which would become obvious if I had the whole thing done. Hopefully it will be within the next day or two, and then people can critique the story in its whole and I can fix it that way.

>>58411996
Oops, think I misread. All Imperial ships in canon can accelerate to relativistic speeds via plasma drives. It's how they get around between the planets of a system once they pass the Mandeville Point.

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Plas

As for Ullanor, we've mentioned before that Attack Planets are fractal orky. They're much tougher than they look and can take a lot of punishment. Also planets are pretty tough. Looking it up a 100 foot meteor traveling at 0.99c would blow a hole in the crust but leave the planet mostly intact, while a projectile going at ludicrous speed (0.99999c or closer) would blow up the planet due to the way acceleration works.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/

So it depends on how fast Ollie gets his ship going.

>>58413158
How fast Olly gets his ship going depends on how much warning he gets. If we are going to maintain that the Seige of Earth was a perpetual, self feeding train wreck then Armageddon would have to be at a stand still when it sets off from between earth and Mars. The first half of the War for Sol would be the time it takes Armageddon to get to the point when it's gravity passively fucks up Earth simply by being there. One anon mentioned previously that the whole affair probably did fuck up Earth on some fundamental level. Tectonically Old Earth is pretty fucking dead, it's why everything is stale enough to turn into a shellworld.

2nd half of the War for Sol would be the point from Olly slamming a neutronium prow into Armageddon's face and more conventional war being fought.

All the time for the 1st and 2nd halfs of the war there is a constant inflow of Orks, Chaos and Eldar of the two shit flavours on the magnitude that would be a substantial threat to a normal world on their own. This was not a skirmish or a brawl, this was two galactic societies pouring their everything into a single point and seeing who dies first.

>>58407493
Has the Bright Blue Cockatoo been doing anything recently?

>>58415891
Screwing around with samples of warpstone taken from the mad moon of the impossible world that circles the unlight star, stair to oblivion, that Tzeentch claimed in the bounty of treasures of Malal when he was usurped.

>>58415891
After his big gambit to make a more volatile galaxy and situation in the Great Game in the name of Tzeentch by kicking Nurgle’s door down and stealing his waifu only kinda worked and mostly blew up in his face the Pink Pidgeon mostly withdrew from OEE politics and chaos faction intrigue to work on esoteric sorcery and diogenesis projects for Tzeentch. There’s also the fact that the failure of the Crow’s plans in Tzeentch’s service are often the successes of the Shapshifter’s plans to subvert its master, and vice versa.

>>58416676
Was anything truly decided about the world that isn't and the unlight star?

>>58415891
>>58417086
Also probably screwing around with the forces of the other three Chaos Gods when he gets the chance. As long as he doesn't get too obvious and sabotage Chaos efforts as a whole he can do a lot. Chaos Gods have mostly agreed to set aside their differences to focus on crushing the mortals, but it's hard to keep that up over 10k years and in practice all that means is they try to stab each other in the back when they think the other three aren't looking some of the time instead of trying to stab each other in the face all of the time. They learned their lesson on that one when their constant in-fighting allowed the mortals to escape with the biggest prize in millennia because the Chaos Gods were too busy trying to one-up each other to notice.

>>58417988
I think all we had is Tyrant Star has something to do with Malal, orbited by a planet of Warpstone, which the Crow stole some from at great cost and Malal is REEE-ing over it (but then again, when does he not?)

Would warpstone be the same thing as fulgurite? Both are basically Warp energy taking on a crystalline physical form.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there was the implication that the world that isn't might have been the original Old One homeworld. Not that it matters much anymore, Old Ones were so widespread they had little to no center of power.

>>58356643
Would it not be more likely that Doomrider was an eldar? They are Slaanesh's favorite toy.

>>58419466
If it is the Old One homeworld it should never be known, only speculated

>>58421150
We do need more Crone Eldar daemon princes. You'd think there would be a lot more of them, especially since ascending to Daemon Princedom is the goal for most Crone Eldar. So far we've only had suggestions for one Eldar Daemon Prince/ss in the form of Dechala the Denied One. Canon 40k is infamous for having exactly one non-human daemon prince, Be'lakor (who technically isn't even a Daemon Prince in this timeline, but is so close he might as well be). If you count Fantasy there is also Dechala as well as N'kari (who is a human in 40k but a High Elf in Fantasy).

Though if Doomrider was a Crone Eldar he wouldn't be riding around on a motorcycle. He'd be riding around on a jetbike and it would be a lot more likely that it would be Saim-Hann who wants his head on a stick.

>>58422307

Oh, we can combine them both into some montrosity~

>>58417988
I kind of think having firm facts about the thing would partially defeat the point.

>>58422299
>>58425248
Agreed. Rampant speculation, but nothing more than theories.

Heck, it's probably not known to many people. The only people who might be able to actually answer the question of whether or not it is the Old Ones' homeworld or something else are Be'lakor, Tzeentch, Malal, and maybe Nurgle, and none of them are going to be volunteering answers anytime soon.

>>58422307
Technically the Verminlords are all Skaven Daemon Princes.

>>58422307
It's, he can ride what he wants. It's not like anyone can stop him.

>>58413028
It could be that it appeared close enough to already be fucking up Earth with it's gravity. Impact would have been inevitable as the worlds attract one another.


The biggest deep sea trench on Armageddon is rhe site of Pius' grave.

The time of proximity and a bunch of what would normally be considered Exterminatus grade weapons launched are what killed geological activity on Earth.

>>58425714
Has anyone else ever been to that place?

>>58429279
Potentially. There were thought to be people there once who inhabited it as there are ruins of some quite impressive cities and large scale earthworks visible through telescope.

There have been people batshit crazy enough to go there in the past, only Turquoise Tern has ever been batshit enough to make it back out again.

It was also rumoured to be a prison of an early Greater Deamon back from the days when there was only Malal and Tzneetch and they were not yet hideous in form and nature.

As they were both not bad entities/people at that time and they saw fit to imprison the thing 2 things can be assumed; firstly that it was a total cunt and secondly that they couldn't easily destroy or control it.

In terms of attitude it would probably fit right in with the current crop of warp ecology. In terms of power levels it's hard to say as the gods were a lot smaller then. It was probably a very big fish back in the primeval era, possibly not so big now but possibly big enough. Either way the gods have a vested interest in not having people prod the tyrant star too much, which makes Orange Osprey loopy even by the standards of Tzneetch;s regular band of idiotic geniuses.

The warp-stone shiv he managed to bring back is an object crated in another era when the laws regarding the warp at the most fundamental level were different. It is an object that can't actually exist in the current universe, it's why it hurts to look at it for both deamons and mortals.

>>58408684
Chapter Master Jago Sevatarion is an artist. He can paint an atrocity out of whole cloth and stock footage that will have children and adults alike screeming in terror for generations to come. He has made a name for himself from stories and dark legend the likes of which the mere mention of has rebellions disbanding and fleeing to the hills in fear. He is the monster mothers tell their children about to get them to eat their vegetables and the tales shared quietly by underhivers around lonely camp fires.

And it's mostly bullshit. Compared to Curz his reign has been nearly bloodless. When he does have to do something horrendous, rather than just faking it up in his garage, he capitalizes the shit out of it and milks it for everything he can get so that he won't have to do it again for a good long while. He has committed what would charitably be called war crimes and accurately would be considered "holy fuck what the shitnuggets is wrong with you?" but they are a tenth of what is on official records.

Things that he absolutely has done is:
>Public executions/mindwipes/servitorization without painkillers and with the condemned fully aware;
>Public Execution of the families of rebellion leaders and accomplices
>Abduction of children and wives of rebels and traitors
>Cannibalism (he ate the head of a secessionist demagogue on live television)

The dependents of rebellion leaders, assuming they are investigated and found innocent, are taken weeping and screaming to the ships of the Night Lords where they and everyone believes they will be used either as food or sex slaves. In reality many of them become chapter serfs and the ones that can't be trusted are transferred to private businesses and enter an agreed upon term of indentured service. Typically doing paperwork but always a long, long way away.

>>58431159
When large groups of citizens are rounded up and butchered in the underhive to make the rest of the denizens sit up and listen they are more often than not gene-stealer cultists.

Curze was a monster because for every city that was put to the flame and it's people butchered a continent would stop fighting and surrender. For every impaled corpse a thousand could be saved.

Jago Sevatarion has refined this to the point where for ever impaled a thousand can be saved and nobody will ever know that there never was a stake. In another, better, age maybe Jago Sevatarion would have made gory horror films and been adored by the masses. Now he does almost the same things and is feared by them and he can't say some of it isn't fun.

The chapter are divided between believing he is a disgrace and insult to the teachings of The Nighthaunter and believing that he is the best thing to ever happen to the chapter, certainly the most hilarious.

>>58414636
If we are going with Olly ramming the planet Armageddon then we still need a reason and method of it getting to where it is now whilst keeping the Phalanx intact to still be active in 999M41.

Unless either Phalanx is changed to have died then or it was a different ship.

Which still laves us with how did Armageddon end up light years away?

Easiest way is to give Olly a less prestigious ship and have his death cause the planets warp engines to trigger, but without the Gellar field.

Planet drops into the warp, everyone dies because no Gellar field and planet just follows the currents for the next few years before dropping back out where it is now.

>>58432719
T E L E P O R T. The Mekboyz panicked and hit the Big Red Button when the klaxons went off and the planet got knocked off course when Olly slammed into it. The Armageddon fluff on the wiki says this outright.

"Enough of the teleporter system survived for just long enough for the Mekboyz to hit the big red button and teleport the Attack Planet one last time."

>>58433757
It appears I have some reading to do

>>58428592
I'd expect geological activity to be amplified, really.

>>58422307
It could be a Steed of Slaanesh that just looks like a bike.

>>58435057
Something something deep alterations to plate tectonics from giant tractor beams that were used to hold onto earth and join its orbit. When the orks used their gravity manipulation to grab the planet they didn’t bother to keep the insides following normally.

>>58435948
I’m picturing those extreme bondage setups with gimps strapped into the structure of a bike as seats and handlebars, and Juggernaut Star’s damnation bike from KSBD.

>>58435057
One of the theories for mars being geologically dead is that it got orbited by something big spinning in the opposite direction to the planet. The result being the core stopping.

File: Rocks are not free.jpg (347 KB, 1173x1454)

347 KB JPG

>>58428592
>>58435057
>>58436262
>>58428592
>>58435057
>>58436262
Looking up some things, if an Attack Planet suddenly teleported into existence midway between Mars and Earth for a few weeks there probably wouldn’t be immediate damage to Earth (take this with grain of salt, am not physicist). The big worry is if the two planets hit each other’s Roche Limits, at which point their gravitational fields tear each other apart and we’re left with a cloud of dust. At that point there’s no saving either of them, they are both goners. Pius must have hit Ullanor long before it hit the Danger Zone.

The primary damage would be long-term, from planets being pushed out of their orbits and from being disrupted by Ullanor’s gravity. Tides would shift, planetary orbits would shit, Earth might get pushed closer or further from the sun over the course of years. However, this is 40k. Stabilizing the orbit of planets in a system is child’s play, especially when it can be done over long periods of time by throwing rocks around. But if it did get close enough to cause geological disruptions, it does seem it would make the planet more geologically active rather than less.

Earth also doesn’t have to be dead tectonically to start making a shellworld. On most of the major continental landmasses you have about 35 km of crust to work with before you hit the molten part. In the TauTona gold mine in South Africa, the temperature is “only” 55° C at 3.9 km below the surface (still lethal, but not full-on Dwarf Fortress). Assuming magical future technology that can more effectively maintain at great depths, they could probably get that going a lot further down.

If Earth’s tectonic activity stopped the bigger issue would be the magnetosphere disappearing and everyone dying from space cancer.

>>58437731 (same)
But of course Old Earth isn’t the only shellworld (or proto-shellworld, as it might be). Shaa-Dome was a shell-world that went almost all the way down to the core even before it got stuck in a land where the laws of physics are kindly told to sod off and the core was replaced by Slaanesh’s Brass Palace. So the Old Eldar Empire must have had some way of maintaining a magnetosphere on a shellworld (which fits with their "bullshit" level of technology). And it’s possible to walk outside on Mars despite the Age of Strife happening (though it's not comfortable), and Venus was terraformed to some degree, so DaoT humanity at the least had the capability of restarting a planet's magnetic field.

>tractor beams
Tractor beams and gravity manipulation do happen to be hallmarks of advanced Ork tech (yes I know what I said).

I do like the idea of Earth being royally fucked up by the appearance of Ullanor and the Imperium deciding to make lemonade out of lemons, regardless of what physics says.

>>58437533
Didn't know that. Forget what I said then.

>>58437802
It could have been the result of other exotic weapons that did a lot of damage.

>>58439176
>could have been the result of other exotic weapons
Hence the mention of massive gravity whips and field projectors we’ve already pointed to as primary weapons for advanced Orks, which they presumably would have turned on earth on a massive scale as they closed the orbital distance between worlds.

>>58412405
No, it needs to go on the Notes page.

>>58325143
Remember that one time it took the Mechanicus an entire WotB and an Imperial Civil War before realizing then allowing Las-Carbines to have attachable stocks.

>>58443608
remember that one time Kelbor Hal was gonna order the siege of the only neutronium factory in the galaxy because they received Oscar's envoys more happily than they received his?

>>58444108
Remember that time the Inquisition wanted the AdMech to make high UV intensity lasguns, but the AdMech kept refusing and saying all their reasons were bullshit until the Inquisition dropped the act and said they wanted them to kill C'tan vampires, at which point the AdMech tripped over themselves to make them?

And the whole fiasco with Veyna where they relocated the population of the planet and then sold the populace the rights to work on their own planet back to them?

>siege the only Neutronium factory
He tried to out-spite Savlar. That borders on outright suicide-by-stupidity.

Thread archived.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/58264906/

Also as a housekeeping note do the alternate timelines go up and is Anval Thawn ready to go up or were there any edits from what was mentioned in thread?

>>58442908
Was it last thread or thread before?

>>58431204
Also don't forget he's from Nostramo, best known for it's export of Judges and Lawmasters.

>>58437731
>On the magnetosphere

After The Beast fucked everything up, Perty was recalled to Old Earth and the Rebuilding began.

The majority of the survivors of The Beast were sheltered in bunkers and other highly fortified enclaves like the Lichtenstein Vaults, the cellars of the Imperial Palace, the Halls of the Astronomican and the old Age of Strife fortifications. This saved most of the survivors from getting all of the cancer immediately.

The Imperium is good at Void Shields. Once shit was getting scraped back together and the majority of the leftover orks had been hunted down a shit load of Void Shield generators are installed and set to maximum extension. At such a range they aren't any sort of help against weaponry but they all overlap and it produces an effect like an artificial magnetosphere. Solar wind does not strip the atmosphere away and people can get out of the shelters without having to wear protective equipment and start rebuilding. This is the stage at when the Warsmith Council unanimously vote Perty out of the Legion.

Under Perty's instruction all the rebuilt cities have to have void shields. In war for obvious reason but originally for more environmental reasons.

By 999M41 there is enough electro magnetic crap generated by the layers of hive cities and the orbital facilities that all by themselves they deflect solar rays as a side effect of their day to day activity.

>>58446268
Probably needs some edits to Thawn. More deaths and greater psychological impact of his serial mortality.

>>58449646
Old Earth in canon was notable for having military grade DaoT void shields as opposed to the civilian crap everyone else (up to and including titans) is using.

>>58451922
Well that works easier. In the aftermath they *very carefully* fiddled with the DaoT shield settings until they managed to set up a magnetic radiation shield.

Perhaps even Uxor Honen Mu, last of the Geno-Chiliad Soldiers on Old Earth, helped. She and her people had been living in the Persepotropolis DoaT vaults since early in the AoS so she would have at least been familiar with the warning symbols.

What's with tyranids in this rewrite? Don't wan to lurk, please give me a summary.

>>58453311
Tyranids are mostly the same. As an out of context group with little previous association with most of the major players there aren’t many opportunities for their history changing. Additionally tyranid “society” is little more than one big hive mind focused entirely around eating, so much of what can be said about them in either timeline revolves around the types of warrior strains they can bring into play, which have mostly already been fleshed out by canon.

Swarmlord has gotten a powerboost as the avatar of the Hive Mind as a whole. Weaker than Malys, Isha, or Emperor but could potentially go toe to toe with them if enough backup is present. Even one-on-one it wouldn't be a complete curbstomp in Malys/Oscar/Isha's favor like it would for almost anything else though odds are still against Swarmlord. Though Swarmlord is little more than a custom meat-suit for a bubble of consciousness in Hive Mind soup that the Hive Mind pulls out when it has to think it's way around a blockade to the all you-can-eat buffet.

Major changes to tyranid history are as follows.

First contact with tyranids was in M36 in the form of Genestealers. Led to the so-called “Genestealer Wars” which got so far as genestealer cults popping up on Old Earth (which was covered up by the Inquisition to prevent a panic). The current level of genestealer infestation in M41 isn’t even considered peak genestealer. The Imperium hunted most of the genestealers down and thought the crisis was over.

Hahahaha no.

>>58453671
Late M37 the first actual tyranid fleets show up in the form of Behemoth. Notable for producing Boaz “200% Ahab” Kryptman after Kryptman’s homeworld of Tyran gets munched. Kryptman Line strategy ends up bleeding Behemoth enough that its back is broken in a later engagement. No battle of Ultramar (yet).

Kraken shows up ~900.M38. Does a lot of damage, forces Iyanden out of isolationism, destroys Malan'tai, wrecks Tarellian space.

Leviathan shows up shortly after in M39 in a one-two punch. Leviathan makes a weird U-turn to NOPE around an unknown Dyson Sphere-like object no one noticed before and ends up hitting the galactic plane from below. Kryptman throws genestealers into Octarius to cripple it.

Main Hive Fleet, initially misidentified as "Hive Fleet Jormungandr (though Bjorn prefers "Hive Fleet Fimbulwinter") starts showing up a few centuries ago. Battle of Ultramar happens, Swarmlord appears for the first time, and Swarmlord beats Marneus Calgar into a coma with it's bare hands. Only gotten worse since then, on some planets on the eastern fringe as of 999.M41 tyranids are so numerous their ships blot out the stars.

>>58453746
Tyranids are notable in that no one saw them coming. Not humanity, not the Eldar, not Chaos, not even the Necrons. Completely out of context problem.

Zoats exist. They are the final "fuck you" of a species eaten by the 'nids, who modified themselves to pop out of the tyranids like parasitic wasps and sabotage the Hive Fleets as much as possible. Work with Imperium though are not Imperial, as they care about nothing beyond fucking over 'nids and will do anything to stop them (like, say, waking up a Tomb World early to stop a splinter fleet). They may or may not be descended from the original organism that made the tyranids, though no one, not even them, knows.

Fenris, Catachan, and the like aren't inhabited by regressed tyranid organisms. Rather, tyranids have been using Ymgarl genehounds to steal the best adaptations from the Milky Way galaxy in preparation for their arrival.

Tyranids may or may not have eaten Andromeda, and all we're seeing is ghost light. Thing is, this information comes from Chaos, who isn't exactly reliable.

Tyranids are basically predators writ large in a galactic ecosystem. The Imperium, who are kind of Enlightenment/Napoleonic era with their views, sees them as the ultimate "beasts in the dark woods". Necrons, who are closer to Victorian era in sentiment, are a bit more prosaic. To them tyranids are a natural phenomenon, dangerous but annoying and understandable.

>>58453865
The reason tyranids send out the Hive Fleets is they aren't only customer on the block. Back in the old days the Old Ones kept the galaxy safe from the big stuff so their experimental terraria (that's our planets by the way) didn't get eaten. Tyranids and other comparable shit like carnivorous galaxies may be the natural state of the universe outside of the Milky Way.

This works in the Milky Way's favor too. The tyranids may be the metaphorical spider sticking their head in a hole looking for prey, but what they don't realize is this hole has a scorpion in it. They've never dealt with a universe dominated by corrupted, overpowered warp constructs and inedible teleporting metal skellingtons before.

The Hive Fleet is now in a precarious position. They have to commit to the fight in the Milky Way to regain their lost biomass, but it's a fight that could go badly for them. It's not that the tyranids are going to lost because HFY, but more that we're going to give them indigestion and a gut infection going down, leaving the Hive Fleet sickened and paralyzed enough that the Enslavers will come in and finish the crippled Hive Mind off. Leaving no one the winner of the War in Heaven 2.0.

>>58444222
Are there any characters of note in Vanilla from Savlar?

>>58454032
Thank you for such elaborative response.
So it seems you still tie tyranids psychic phenomena to immaterium? Not the separate thing altogether like in latest editions?

>>58455427
Yeah. The hivemind is a warp based superorganism much like a chaos god, but it and its material extensions (tyranid strains) are adapted to hunting over intergalactic distances. The Hivemind is the swarm of locust to the Ruinous Powers' big gnarly spiders.

>>58429920
Looking through the old threads it seems that the deamon on the world that never was was The Horned Rat.

I'm strangely happy about that.

>>58458531
Yes, that is the case. Originally the world-that-never-was was implied to be the Old World, dragged through the end times and out the far end of counter-existence through the Un-star. That kinda fell by the wayside as things developed, particularly cause it was just Malal-esque canon/not-canon metamagic, but the Horned Rat and the world being the origin point of the Slaan-Hai/Sload/Old Ones were retained.

>>58459093
Horned Rat could have been intentionally artificially created by the Old Ones by hacking of a chunk of Malal and a chunk of Tzneetch, putting them in a blender and pouring the result into a sapient shaped cast. It wasn't even for a reason, this was well before the War in Heaven though what they learned from the experiment did lay the groundwork for making the other gods many thousands of years later.

And what did the Old Ones do with the Horned Rat afterwards? Nothing. After making the fucking monstrosity they lost all interest in it and let it go. It was the Big Bird and Malal who put it in it's current state some time after the death of the Old Ones, trapping it in the temple(?) it was made in, causing the planet to fold in on itself by the contradictory nature of the entity and reappearing as a photo negative version of existence.

Malal was destruction as Tzneetch was creation, the Horned Rat is anti-creation.

File: think smirk.png (32 KB, 620x622)

32 KB PNG

Are guardsmen allowed to keep pin-ups of their eldar commanders?

>>58460044
>Anti-creation
I’d almost say inverse-creation, what with the resemblance between Skaven and Tolkien orcs in how their genius gets squandered on ugly, horrible, destructive, wasteful, but wonderfully complex and technically advanced things, in contrast to the magic perfect aesthetic artifice of Elves, much like Eldar/high elves.

Having the Horned Rat as another Old One prototype also leads to an interesting situation with the formation of Nurgle. Instead of the Horned Rat infringing on Nurgle’s themes an imagery, Nurgle is the Old Ones’ second go at making a god that strikes a balance between Tzeentch and Malal, and one that eventually succumbs to similar design flaws as the prototype.

>>58461224

If the commanders don't catch them doing something... ill-advised with it, or if they allow/is amused by it. Other than that, well, no firing squad or BLAM, that's for sure... but prepare for latrine duty for a month/charge headfirst into the next wave alone/become his/her personal butler.

>>58461247
Nurgle actually seemed to work rather well at first. He was the jolly groundkeeper/museum curator that was like a cross between Hagrid and Santa Claus, keeping things stable and preserving the memory of those things lost.

It's just that when the War in Heaven happened and Khorne went on a rampage, Nurgle's in-box filled up to the max and he snapped from trying to save all the things being destroyed by the War in Heaven and became a horder. Tzeentch going nuts as well didn't help.

Now he's a bipolar nutjob waiting for the end of the universe between that and losing Isha.

>>58461247
Another thing with the Horned Rat as god-crafting prototype, it leads to an interesting dynamic with Be'lakor. He's noted to be round for the conception of Khorne and to have worked on that project, but to have gone into hiding before the War in Heaven got too hot, presumably when it became clear to him that the warp gods were outstripping his own pseudo-daemon prince power and becoming unmanageable. Presumably Be'lakor was also around for the making of Nurgle, and before that the Horned Rat, all prior to his massive resentment for the gods surpassing him. Not only would the old lizard wizard have knowledge of the Horned Rat that might go beyond what is known to the other ruinous powers (though Tzeentch clearly knows some of its nature, and Malal has quite possibly told Khorne his part to spite Tzeentch) but Be'lakor would have reason to think that he would have some measure of power over the neglected proto-god as he believes he should, and might think that the Rat could be an asset to his court in the formless wastes. This might be totally wrong on Be'lakor's part, but he might even consider helping the Horned Rat get a place in the Warp should it ever escape the impossible world, with the hope of working his will through it as another font of warp power.

File: Don't you shake the damn (...).jpg (5 KB, 300x168)

5 KB JPG

>>58464789
Be'lakor might even predate Tzeentch and Malal. Be'lakor was the first Old One to attempt to achieve apotheosis, but merely reached daemon prince level compared to the half mortal, half god lizard wizards the rest of the species ascended into. As someone pointed out, he's basically evil amphibian Neil Armstrong. It may be the Old Ones had to reach lizard wizard power before they could start reliably bending the Warp to their whim.

It should be noted that in this timeline Tzeentch seems to have a real mean streak. He refers to himself as the Eldest of the Gods specifically to tick off Be'lakor and Khorne. But what about Malal you say? Tzeentch and Malal were concieved as a paired set, wouldn't he also be the Eldest? That is also true. Tzeentch seems to be denying that Malal ever existed (or at least "doesn't count") in order to aggrivate that nihlistic rabble-rouser even more. Tzeentch may be a sadistic asshole in general, but he seems to have a real axe to grind with Be'lakor. Makes you wonder if Be'lakor treated proto-Tzeentch poorly back before the Necrontyr knew what fire was.

>>58465495
I can see Be'lakor being shit to the gods prior to them getting their sweet gainz. They weren't Old Ones and as such were by definition lesser.

Also Tzneetch might not class Malal as a god anymore as he is not an independent entity and only a ghost of what he was.

File: howling_banshee_by_flick_(...).jpg (182 KB, 1001x797)

182 KB JPG

>>58461224
Begs the question of why their commanders are the subject of a pinup.

>>58450453
I'm working on it I swear

File: Warhammer-40000-фэндомы-L(...).jpg (55 KB, 472x614)

55 KB JPG

>>58468119
Because they were drunk and thought it would be funny. Eldar have been known to make some bafflingly bad decisions in the past.

>>58467614
Be'lakor is just an all-around prick. He has a massive inferiority complex which he takes out on everyone around him by being a jerk to anyone he has power over. He's smart enough that he was well-respected back in the days of the Old Ones despite the power gap, and he was the only Old One to be smart enough to excuse themselves for a bathroom break when he realized what was about to happen, but all that does is give him more options for being a jerk.

>>58470680
Is Be'Lakor taking part in the 13th Black Crusade or is he still under the heap of rocks the where the Tarellians left him?

>>58435948
It would fit with the headless horseman thing it had going.

>>58471946
Taking part. Dumping him under a heap of rocks would have just banished him.

Indeed, that whole fiasco would have taken place in ~880.M38 (probably not exactly then), because Be'lakor in revenge steered Kraken just a hair off course so it would go rampaging through Tarellian space.

>>58469819
They also don't give a fuck after the first thousand years. It's hard to give a fuck about mayfly social taboos when you predate interstellar regimes.

>>58470680
Be'lakor would probably have been one of the most dedicated enemies of the cabal over their shared eons of existence. He and Gahet would hate each other with a passion having worked against each other for millions of years with countless grievances inflicted in both directions, but above all the times they've thwarted each other, beyond their massive philosophical differences, their hatred would be a personal matter. Gahet could probably best sum it up with the sad observation that besides the Gods themselves, his ultimate foes, his only constant companion in the journey down eons of galactic history was Be'lakor, and Be'lakor is a colossal dick.

>>58474892
Would Gahet have ever met the eldar gods?

>>58264906
God, I love majoring in Pyromancy. Made being a welder so much fun.

>>58470680
I was going over the notes page, and the section on the Mon-Keigh notes that the Old Ones set the Krork on them to test their new assault trooper species out on their old one, and were delighted when the cannibal gourmand species was messily devoured after their defeat by the green fist of Whaaagh. I don't think every dickish thing the Old Ones did should come down to Be'lakor's horrible personality, but that sort of xenocidal spite seems to be something he picked up from his contemporaries or rubbed off on them.

I remember around the time the origin of Khorne was posted it was proposed that before and during the War in Heaven Be'lakor was essentially the director of Old One research and development, and someone compared him to Gendo. He was the go-to guy for knowledge on apotheosis and warp gods, even after the gods of sorcery technically surpassed him in power, and it was possibly his idea to use highly psychic uplifted warrior species to amass huge amounts of warp energy to make a war god. Had the War in Heaven gone as the prime Lizard Wizard had planned Be'lakor would have contrived a way to consolidate the collective psychic power of the Old Ones under his will and curtail the independence of the warp gods, which he objected to long before they so outmatched him.

>>58477752
Oh yes, definitely. Be'lakor was an asshole even by Old One standards but he was far from an anomaly of his species. Even without Be'lakor the Old Ones still did a large number of morally dubious things, including letting the Mon-Keigh run rampant, leaving the Necrontyr to suffer in the hopes that it would make them evolve faster, turning the proto-Orks in to the Krork, and trying to create the "ultimate war god" out of bits and pieces of Khaine, Gork and Mork, etc.

Indeed, the fact that Be'lakor was an expert on Warp constructs was probably how he realized things were going to go south and decided to step out.

As mentioned before, there probably were some benevolent Old Ones, but the species as a whole seem kind of morally ambiguous and as the War in Heaven drew on it would be the assholes who would have a much louder voice.

>>58475807
Probably not. Before the Fall the Eldar Gods were strictly not allowed to interact directly with the mortal realm per decree of Asuryan. Afterwards only Isha, Cegorach, and Khaine survived. Most of the eldar gods would probably have tried to kill Gahet if they knew what he was.

Of course, how well that law was enforced varies. Cegorach probably realized that Asuryan's decree to stay out of the mortal realms meant that he just had to not get caught, seeing as how we mentioned he got involved in the hedonism until he realized it was turning from harmless fun into something worse.

Isha was the good girl who followed Asuryan's decree to the letter, no matter what happened. Which is why she's so furious at Asuryan as the All-Mother now. It was Asuryan's stupid decree that kept her from stepping in and setting her children straight.

>>58478073
There might have been some degree of ambiguity as to if the decree included the Webway or not, or at least Ceggers could creatively interpret it as such and half the Old Empire was built in the webway. Asuryan was authoritative and direct so the loophole might not have occurred to him. So long as Ceggers kept quiet and discreet he could continue to party with the mortals.

Also we all know the gods find it difficult to see through the webway.

Are commissars any different? They're not always the "xD BLAM HERESY" stereotype in canon, I assume that's the same in this setting, but maybe reserving executions for the most dire of situations?

>>58481152
From previous discussions, the Commissariat is much more of a mixed bag now. The majority of Commissars are the more hands-off type that follow canon Ciaphis Cain's teachings, reserving executions for mercy kills, obvious cowardice/incompetence, and insurrectionism involving beseeching the glory of Chaos, and serve as a Imperial Army liaison between local law enforcement/Inquisition elements, as well as advising Astra Militarum's officers with varying degrees of tactical expertise.

Of course, not all Commissars are this way, with some being the stereotypical "xD blam for heresy" archetype, but these tend to end up courtmartialed and appropriately disciplined for wasting the Imperium's currency before they can do too much damage, or quietly fragged by their own Guardsmen.

Basically, if you're in the Guard and you get word that you're getting a new Commissar, it's a coin flip on which type you'll get, so it's best to hide any moonshine and maintain your uniform and weapons before they arrive.

>>58483861
Gaunt was said to be more the image exemplary commissar in this timeline than "BLAM! for heresy". However at the same time Gaunt was an extraordinary individual, and commissars are very mortal.

Also the in-universe reasoning for their "more effective on their own troops than the enemy" bolt pistols is to give a clean mercy kill to a Guardsman who is stuck in the clutches of a Chaos Spawn or something. "Don't let them take you alive" is rule 1 when fighting Crone Eldar or Dark Eldar.

>>58477752
>>58478073
There's also the implication too in canon that the eight-pointed star symbol of Chaos might be the appropriated symbol of the Old Ones. There's a reason activated Blackstone Fortresses look the way they do. It has been suggested in canon that the Old Ones might have blown up inhabited worlds without warning using the Fortresses to slow the Necron advance, and the trillions of souls who died horribly and turned the Realm of Souls into a hellhole only remember the eight-pointed star that suddenly appeared in their sky as the only harbinger of their suffering.

With Tzeentch, Khorne, and Nurgle originally being Old One creations and the Blackstone Fortresses confirmed as Old One creations in this timeline that makes this idea even more likely. Like the Necrons, Chaos is essentially their legacy, and the monument to all their sins.

What are some good examples of Arrotyr being a dick?

>>58485089
I don't think we have a lot of good individual examples of dickery from Arrotyr. In general, Arrotyr has been noted to be less reliable than Luther, because during a Black Crusade Luther can be mostly relied upon to be a team player until his paranoia gets the better of him whereas Arrotyr has a good chance of completely disregarding orders and running off to piss napalm on some random planet. He's also in a constant battle at Shaa-Dome, between his warfleet anchored in orbit and the Slaaneshis who control the planet's interior. The outer layers of the shellworld tend to go back and forth between who tends to be winning at the moment.

The Crones in general have been noted as needing more escapades and achievements. Other than Malys the only specific post-Raid accomplishments of note have been Nimina and the Conservators ambushing Isha on that Feudal World. We need more events that show why the Imperium is so afraid of these individuals specifically, as well as more fights with each other (Chaos fights itself just as much as it does everyone else after all).

>>58483880
What world eldar think of human food?

bump

>>58485967
Was the ambush ever added to the page?

>>58490528
It was added to the Notes page

>>58477247
It makes you wonder what sort of life that psykers have in this AU. Presumably they can get married and have families, which is one reason why the population of Old Earth is becoming more and more witch.

>>58494118
"Prosperine orange" is probably an common skin color on Old Earth.

I would assume given the 6000 years of admixture between the refugees and the rest of Old Earth's population you have a lot of people who have at least one old Prosperine tradition from their great-great grandparents, even though they don't look Prosperine.

>>58494974
Prosperans were orange?

>>58495356
I assume something more like the color of a really, really bad sunburn or tan. I can't find anything in canon to suggest that anyone found anything unusual about the infant canon!Magnus when he first crashed on Prospero. People seemed to start calling him things like the Crimson King when the Crusade showed up at Prospero.

Though looking it up Amon is a native Prosperan who has official artwork. He looks pretty tan, but not really that orangish.

>>58487486
That would probably depend on both the quality of the food and the culture. Indian or the more aggressive mexican dishes would probably overwhelm their delicate senses, but a really well-prepared jap or french meal might be enjoyable.

File: 1520942643028m.jpg (88 KB, 1024x979)

88 KB JPG

>>58495917
I like the idea that they look sunburnt. Given the isolation, time and possible genetic tweaking in the DaoT there would be odd characteristics become prominent.

>>58498154
They may not even be able to taste Mexican food. Spicy mexican dishes usually taste that way due to capsaicin in chile peppers, which is specifically tailored to cause Earth mammals pain. Birds and other animals can't taste it. Depending on how biologically similar they are, eldar, tau, tarellians, kinebrach, etc. could be downing ghost peppers with few side effects.

>>58500854
perhaps... but wouldn't that also apply to things like onions and rosemary? combinations that are delightful to us might come across as "delightful" as banana and garlic to them.

I think to maintain sanity, we should assume that the other species in the setting have at least loosely similar senses of taste and smell, capsaicin notwithstanding.

>>58474326
the taboos would be as mayfly as the eldar, since it's their social structure...

though they would probably realize over time that [insert taboo] wasn't really all that bad compared to [insert newer taboo], and their culture would move "forward" (or maybe backward) as a result of that

>>58501064
There probably are areas of overlap and non-overlap for every species. Tarellians might rave over some types of meat products that.humans consider "meh". Modern Tau mostly eat seafood for protein and haven't eaten red meat since the days of Aun'O Da. On the other hand being descended from semi-herbivores Tau probably love certain spices that taste terrible to humans. At least some types of Eldar alcohol canonically give humans indigestion.

Eldar are probably not lactose intolerant, given that they have breasts. And because they've engineered themselves to survive on a lot of things.

Typically, meat is meat is meat. Unless you're talking about organisms that put toxins in their flesh like tyranids meat is essentially the same. It's plants that tend to give you the nasty surprise. Of course in space things can always be reversed on you.

I think we mentioned somewhere that Orkoid is a popular addition to field rations in the event that supplies are low. Ork in canon is said to taste like mushroom-braised ham.

On the other hand everyone in the universe seems to have largely compatibly biochemistry. This is probably the Old Ones' fault

>>58503141
They probably would give a shit about eldar taboos, simply because by their standards its over a comparable timescale and the whole "back in my time this is the way things worked" effect.

What are Blood Axes like in this AU? Sorry for asking, but I’d like to learn.

>>58505004
There probably are. It's been pointed out that it would be blatantly illegal to supply arms to foreign mercenaries, especially since the Imperium does not allow free trade across it's borders, and especially to Orks, who are officially enemies of the Imperium and will likely turn those weapons back on whoever they got them from. However, at the same time, it was pointed out that there are always going to be someone mad, stupid or desperate enough to do it, which sums up corsair captains, rogue traders, and radical inquisitors, respectively. Or some nowhere agri-world who are so far on the fringe they can't rely on the Imperial military for help and so obscure they think they won't get in trouble for it.

We never really figured out how the Ork clans came about, especially since in canon it was the Beast who established them.

bump

>>58506212
I would guess that the Beast established them here as well, although they might be somewhat different.

>>58506212
It could be that they were the philosophies of the prominent Beast era warbosses.

>>58509867
For a second I thought you said philosophers, and went "wot".

Bamp

>>58513519
Could have been by orkish standards, especially in the post Beast uncertainty caused by Chaos making them question whay it means to be orky.

To that end the founders of the main ork clans arise, getting back to the roots of the WAAAAGH!!!!!! and the nature of orkiness.

Zogwort, serial reincarnator that he is, was there.

Say, how are abhumans treated here? I seem to remember stuff like the Afriel Strain, Beastmen etc- are they still viewed as unnatural by the Imperium? Or are they allowed upward mobility, and if so, how much?

>>58519068
Horus and arguably Sanguinius were abhuman and so is the current head of the Imperial Navy. It sees to be that if they have human levels of intelligence they get human rights.

Ogryn and Beastmen are split into two broad categories; Nova and Primeval. Primeval are the degenerate subhuman animals we know from Vanilla. They aren't usually treated cruelly but they aren't human.

Nova Beastmen and Ogryn are the result of thousands of years of Adeptus Biologicus uplift projects. The Beastmen are of human intelligence but have to live lives of strict discipline as their emotions if left unchecked will take over and return them to barbarity and the muck they crawled out of.

Nova Ogryn are big jovial bastards only slightly beneath human intelligence, B.O.N.E. treatment raises them up to the standard but prohibitive cost reserve it for officers only.

Ratlings are still recovering from their near extermination of the 12th Black Crusade. For all that they look like silly little people they have been hardened by war and are claiming a steep blood price.

On the whole the Imperium operates on benevolent indifference.

>>58519068
Abhumans that are near human baseline mental competence and up are afforded all the respect and dignity of regular humans as far as overarching Imperial government is concerned, and the Voidborn are particularly influential. Beastmen and Ogryn have been subject to AdBio reengineering for the whole time of their inclusion in the Imperium, and this has been pretty successful, but they don't really live as part of broader human culture.

>>58519412
>>58519436
Basically this. Nova Beastmen are of human-level intelligence like Felinids, Ratlings, and Voidborn, but have a bigger stigma mostly because of where they came from and their reputation of losing it in certain situations. It doesn't help that their societies tend to produce dour individuals that are only marginally cheerier than Kriegers.

Hubworlders (also known as Squats, but only if you're lookin' for a grudgin') are notably not abhumans, but just another survivor civilization whose members live in high gravity. Hubworlder voidsmen look normal, though they still act like socialist space cowboys. AdMech got them classified as abhumans out of petty vengeance when the Hubworlders wouldn't bend over and submit to the supremacy of Mars.

>>58521205
Keep in mind that everyone is cheerier than Krieg.

It is the only planet in the Imperium and beyond that Ceggers couldn't party on.

File: 1383680262135.jpg (421 KB, 1600x1112)

421 KB JPG

>>58519068
I don't think we've done anything on the Afriel Strain yet. Should we?

>>58524238
I think it'd be cool, especially if the nu-Afriel genetic engineering attempts to include the DNA of xeno heroes as well.

For lack of prominent canon characters from Savlar, I figure we should flesh out Chem-Chan into something or other, it would be fun to see what we would do with a planet of techno-barbarians to the Nth degree brought into polite galactic society.

Just an idea I was thinking about.

Today the world of Djerba in the Segmentum Solar is not particularly notable. But it’s Crusade-era history is well-known. Like many worlds during the Age of Strife, the original population included a significant number of people who were touched by the Warp, which increasing manifested itself as the Age of Strife went on. Unfortunately, like many worlds during the Age of Strife, including Barbarus, the psykers on Djerba went mad with power and set themselves up as god-kings over the common people. On Djerba, these psykers called themselves Cognoscynths.

The psychic abilities of the people of Djerba primarily manifested as a form of mind control. Cognoscynths could invade and control the mind of an ordinary person on a whim, rewriting memories, suppressing morality and self-preservation, and forcing any who could not surpass their willpower and psychic might to be their slaves. Before long, although the surface of Djerba was nominally made up of numerous warring nation-states, the leadership of these nations were little more than puppets to the Cognoscynths. The Cognoscynths erected their City of Sight above Djerba, from which they controlled the people below like marionettes on strings. They forced the people below them to go to war for their amusement, laughing as man slaughtered man at their whim.

According to legend, the Imperium sent three emissaries to the Cognoscynths. The first was the Scholar, a giant clad in red, who came bearing words of warning. He had come to Djerba hearing rumors of a society where outcasts such as he could co-exist in peace with normal men without fear of persecution. What he saw disheartened him. Here was a society which embodies the worst nightmare of the most closed-minded and hateful of mankind, who feared the witch and hated the psyker.

>>58527416
The Cognoscynths psychically commanded him to bow. The Scholar said no. In that moment, the Cognoscynths realized that they were to the man before them as hills were before a mountain. With rage burning in his one eye, the Scholar said he would give the Cognoscynths one warning. Dismantle their oppressive society and free the ordinary men and women they had enslaved, or face the consequences. For if they did not he would to return with his liege, and his liege was not as forgiving as he.

The second was the Shepherd, clad in gold, who brought words of doom. The Cognoscynths had ignored the warning of the Scholar, and had not changed their ways since he had left. The Shepherd was the Scholar’s liege, and came before the Cognoscynths much as the Scholar had. He said that he had seen the world the Cognoscynths had wrought. The Cognoscynths had been judged, and found wanting. Once more, the Cognoscynths were enraged at being judged by an outsider, and attempted to psychically compel him to bow. Whereas the Scholar had been a mountain, the Shepherd was like a monolith of adamantium, only gold instead of grey.

Their prodigious psychic powers failing them, the Cognoscynths turned to words. They scoffed at the idea of the Shepherd bringing judgement upon them. For all of his power, the Shepherd was just one man. Even if he brought the Scholar, the two did not have the power to command them on their own. The Cognoscynths were each powerful psykers, who could command armies of their own. Whereas any army the Shepard could bring would fall under the control of their powers and turn on their fellows. What could the Shepard do to them?

>>58527459
“I will bring your empire down with a single soldier,” said the Shepherd, then left.

The third Emissary was the Slayer, clad only in black. She brought no words, only death. Where she walked, men went mad, the witch-touched tearing their eyes out and clawing at their skin whereas the mundane became ill and collapsed from severe vertigo. None could seemingly touch her. Even the Cognoscynths were not immune. The Slayer only killed two-thirds of the Cognoscynths, by the time she turned her attention to the remainder they were already dead, the last choking on his own blood.

The people of Djerba were freed both in body and mind, and with freed fists celebrated their liberators. But to this day, the Imperium still remembers the lesson of the Cognoscynths, even if only as a cautionary tale, as best exemplified by the colors of Djerba. Red, gold, and black.

>>58527523
Great work, I really love the fable style of this, and its great to see the iron fist in the velvet glove that characterizes the Imperium here

>>58527523
I like it and it and the fairy tale style it is in. It is nice to see Jenetia Krole doing what she does best.

>>58527523
Was Cognoscynths a planet that existed in Vanilla?

>>58534006
They were a part of vanilla Old Earth history, but their addition made no sense. It was said they had been super-psykers who had been pulling the strings behind humanity for thousands of years through mind control during the Dark Age of Technology before the canon Emperor led a revolt against them, but there is no "thousands of years" for them to have been working since psykers only started showing up right before the Age of Strife.

They were also OP as fuck, psykers who didn't need to worry about Perils and were all sociopathic. They are only mentioned in one novel, and honestly it is easier to rewrite them as petty god-kings who went mad with power during the Age of Strife on some non-Earth planet than try to shove them into either timeline.

Housekeeping question, should I just put Anval Thawn up as is for now with an editor's note so it doesn't get lost?

>>58538485
May as well. It can be edited later on the page.

>>58535819
Were there any other major (relatively) interstellar human empires in the AoS.

>>58525655
I think experiments to hybridize human and xeno are frowned on even in this AU. It's not for reasons that they are an abomination to the pure human form so much as it is the legal and ethical dilemmas that it could bring, to say nothing of the quality of life for such an organism, for no other reason than curiosity.

More recently it is doubly frowned on because nobody wants another Legienstrasse. Or at least the others who were part of that experiment.

Afriel Children, if they exist at all in this AU, would be very much the result of the Adeptus Biologicus.

Maybe the Afriel Soldiers could be the AdBio's equivalent of the Skitarii.

>>58505004
There was an attempt to breed domesticated orks. Probably from Bloodaxe stock.

It didn't end in success.

Has anything been said yet of the many and strange exploits of Lukas the Trickster?

>>58541221
There were quite a few that had space travel and had carved out their own interstellar empires. Ultramar, Interex, Inwit, and the Hubworld League to name a few.

A bunch of Olamic Quietude or Ursh-tiet humans getting the same idea as the Imperium and launching a campaign of manifest destiny from the galactic east or northeast and hitting the Imperium right in the middle of the Crusade was one of Guilliman's biggest fears. That or a xenos empire doing the same thing, especially after the Slaugth with their empire centered around Rangda.

bump in passing

>>58547469
What do we have on the progress of the Great Crusade?

>>58551725
It took w lot longer in thie AU due to the increased use of diplomacy over brute force.

>>58551725
Took about 300-500 years, probably closer to the low end (will have to dredge threads for exact number), rather than 200 as in canon, because the Steward wanted whole and functional worlds brought into the Imperium than broken slaves.

Proposal for the Raid made by the Eldar in the later part of Crusade, probably halfway or two-thirds of the way through, the point when the Imperium was a power worth noting. Imperium had run into a lot of Chaos corrupted societies (not that they knew) and the similarities between their gods and the gods of Ursh, the Tyrant of Gredbriton, and at least one group fought on the moons of the gas giants were becoming noticeable and starting to pile up. Daemons probably assumed to be warp beings rather than symptoms of a greater problem, especially as there were a lot more non-aligned ones around.

Tipping point comes when Horus and Sanguinius meet the Interex, who tell them that the Warp isn't just hostile it's actively malicious and has a brain behind it. Or rather four. Steward goes to Eldar for confirmation (more specifically Eldrad), who confirms it all and floats the idea of the Raid. Steward went to Eldar because they were the best outside source on Warp knowledge he knew of and besides a few scuffles over territory (which the later histories would say "didn't count") were mostly non-hostile.

Rangdan Xenocides and some other events have been chronicled.

Six years before the WotB Imperium picks a fight with the Ullanor Ork Empire, who were getting dangerously close to Brain Boy territory. Horus tricks Warboss Urlakk Urg into broadcasting his location (insulting him until he went "fight me IRL m8") then nukes the site from orbit. Unfortunately he missed a spot, Urg survives, and finds out there are four other individuals with a bone to pick with the Imperium and want to back him.

>>58553431
At some point towards the end of the Great Crusade Malcador dies of old age. He died happy. A dozen worlds a day it seemed were signing on to the Imperium, the alliance with the eldar was strong, Old Earth was becoming a paradise and everything was great.

Beast would not arise for some years yet.

Malcador spent his twilight years less active. He had done his part and was very old. His hobby in those last years was trying to convince the dwellers of the Lichtenstein Vault to open the door and come out onto the sunshine, they had been down there since the Age of Strife started.

>>58546764
It is known that he has a daughter with Jubblowski and that it wasn't by prearranged appointment. The daughter, as yet unnamed, is a prominent skald of the Fang.

>>58556449
Njal Stormcaller is in a romantic relationship with the head Skald with the intention of marrying her in the spring of 001M42 it is not the source of the rivalry between the two of them but it is a sore point.

-11hp emergency bump

So, theme for next thread?

New thread. Let this one fall off the board.

>>58563280
>>58563280