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>>60898868
Eh, I think it's a bit early to doomsay just yet. We just get a bit slow in-between bouts of writefaggotry.
Plus the fact that there seems an abnormal amount of new threads constantly popping up these past few days, none of which seem to last long. Nobledark just seems to get caught up in those currents when most of us are either working or asleep.

On the note of just getting stuff out there, here's something I was working on expanding on an idea I saw in one of the really old threads about a Crone who was basically "evil eldar Khornate Bjorn".

Riastrad - Crone Eldar follower of Khorne. Kind of like Kharn in the ways that Arrotyr isn't. Born after the Fall, was a hotblooded Khornate who lived for battle until it fatally wounded him. That would have been the end of him if a Meatweaver named Scathach in a fit of curiosity ripped out his soul and jammed it in a kitbashed wraithguard shell.

Scathatch was pleased with the results. Riastrad wasn't. He lived for the sensations of battle, and now as a wraithguard he can't feel much of anything. His wraithbone shell is ritually scarified with a thousand ruinous glyphs carved into its surface, and his form is draped with the flayed, blood-soaked hides of his foes. He wears no armor and dual wields scimitars (he did before as a Khornate berserker), throwing himself into battle with no regard for safety because he is desperate to feel something, anything again. Killing people is the only thing that comes close. Dude's nuts. My headcanon is Riastrad might be the Crone mentioned by Leithon in "Once More Unto the Breach".

Riastrad is surrounded by his own band of Khornate acolytes. He is not their leader in any traditional sense, and indeed most of the time he does not deign to acknowledge their existence except if they get in his way. Instead, they tend to follow Riastrad like a hunter does a hound. After all, he knows where the best slaughter is.

It is not possible to buy Riastrad's loyalty, but much like the Orks it is possible to entice him to a specific field of battle with promises of worthy foes and slaughter.

In TT terms he's a Khornate-flavored duelist who acts as a buff for a Khornate-flavored killteam, but he's always going to play second fiddle to Arrotyr and the other Chosen of the Gods and doesn't synergize well in a larger army.

>>60899079
Also, for editing purposes, is the stuff we had for the Battle of Ulthwe and the Battle of the Fang/Skyrar's motivation good enough for the wiki?

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>>60899079
So the Cronedar version of Baldur? I can dig it. I imagine it would be terrifying to have that wraithguard tearing through your lines, howling in what sounds to the average grunt like a demonic warcry, but is actually just Riastrad's frustrated screams at being so close to the sensations he loved, dancing along his fingertips with the blood of his enemies, but never quite making their way through.
It's scarier for those used to interacting with wraithguards who are used to them being creepily-silent, yet here's this faggot running around wailing and screeching like a banshee- literally, the way Wraithguard suits warp voices makes his screams have an ethereal sound to them.

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Also, I'm currently attempting to write up a sort of battle-report for a "minor" confrontation between Imperial and Chaos voidships, as a sort of exercise in showing what such fights can look like. It's a bit of a different writing-style to what I'm used to, but hopefully it will turn out all right.

I hope you guys keep going. I haven't personally been a part of this for about a year and a half, but it's inspirational to see it surviving here.

>>60899686
Hopefully it’s just the normal fluctuations in activity taking their toll. There still seems to be plenty of interest in the setting, it’s just a bit slower than it used to be.

>>60898868
>Anyway, perhaps it's time we have another last call for stories and stuff for Nobledark Imperium.
This AU won't die, it will just go dormant.

Saying that because I've been lurking since the thread that spawned all of this. Hopefully, I will write something, someday, for this universe. Who knows.

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>>60899936
Another good point. There’s been times where we had “Is this the end?” Threads before, and we still stuck around or came back.

>>60899084
I liked the Skyrar motivation. It was insane but kind of understandable how he got there

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>>60898868
>very first sentence on the wiki is plagiarized from GRRM

>>60899079
Cool character concept, and I can even pick up on hints of Slaaneshi cultural influence over the Crones in his outlook, despite him being a dedicated Khornate.

>>60898868
I'm still gonna finish my stuff, I've been really busy moving and learning to drive

Are we keeping the link between Gahet and Malcador's expedition to Cthonia?

>>60898868
>>60898938

Yeah, I think, or at least hope, that we just hit a weird hiccup. (I've been away for a few days... suspect I'm not the only one.)

>>60900930
I'd say yes. Some anon in a previous thread did maths and came to the conclusion that The Ring had a surface area of 73,000+ Earths on the sun facing side. Malcador finding the facility that housed Oscar and being able to get in and not trigger all of the automated defences is astronomically unlikely. So either Big Bird was fucking with him or he got the information from The Hydra (who have always been interested in The Ring) via Alpharius/Omegon who got it from John Grammaticus as an agent of the Cabal who obtained it from Gahet who spent time on The Ring when it was inhabited and briefly worked (as part of the cleaning staff) at the Men of Gold forge.

And why was Gahet going to start sticking his dick into the powder keg that was Old Earth politics? Because he didn't want Ursh to win. He assumed Malcador would just come back with some bio-sculpting technical information. He didn't expect him to come back with a functioning Man of Gold. If he though there was a realistic possibility that there was a Man of Gold still intact in that old factory he would probably have destroyed the place given the things they did in the Iron War.

But it all ended up happy. Grammaticus monitored the situation and kept Gahet informed and everyone was satisfied that this "Oscar" was not only sane but actually quite friendly.

>>60899079
I like it. It shows that even the Khorne eldar are still thrill seekers.

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Has anything been done with The Masque

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/The_Masque

Has it still been kicked out of the court room in this one? If so was it for the same reason?

>>60900603
It is? I don't think anyone ever noticed, it was something an anon suggested a real long time ago.

>>60900603
It can't be argued not to be in the style of 40k then.

I swear I am writing something with Praetoria and the Civil War, it's just work keeps getting in the way

>>60901396
It's also probable that Gahet and Oscar never met. It's probable that Oscar never knew where Malcador's information came from.

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What had we decided on typical naval doctrine for the Imperium? I seem to recall more of a focus on long-range fire rather than the Macrocannon broadsiding of the canon Imperium, but I could be wrong on that.

>>60906155
It is longer range because the Demiurg gave ion beam cannons. The AdMech went over the blueprints and sanctified it all and the Navy got a fuck awesome buff.

They still get up close and personal when it's boarding action time.

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>>60906355
Alright, I found the two main threads where void-battles were discussed: Thread 57 discussion is mainly around pic-related, and the aesthetics of Imperial ships, with tactics being very similar to canon only with less ramming and better internal systems and support weaponry. Thread 63 has discussion on the numbers involved in void-battles, as well as the role of puny Escort-class vessels within the Imperium at large.

There's also the fact that in this setting, technology didn't reach the same peaks as canon, but it similarly didn't fall as far because no Horus Heresy. Weapon systems that canon-Imperium has seen degrade in effectiveness or range would be still working at a higher standard, not to mention the more diverse array of weapons available.

>>60906155
I can try to find the discussion of weapon doctrines in the old threads.

>>60906673
>There's also the fact that in this setting, technology didn't reach the same peaks as canon
I'm not sure where that's been stated, honestly our version of the DaOT seems just as, if not more advanced. We haven't really discussed any of the horrible weapons from the Iron War or squirreled away on Mars, but I think the assumption is that the rare archeotech death rays are still just as potent, and were even more so when directed by the Iron Minds.

>>60907161
Oh no, I wasn't referring to the DaOT, I'm talking about the Imperium proper. In Canon, the Imperium made a lot of progress that was then lost as a result of the Horus Heresy; the Wiki for Nobledark states that Nobledark's Imperium didn't reach quite the same heights, but also hasn't fallen as far. An example given is that while in Canon jetbikes are museum pieces if they've survived, in Nobledark they're still around and getting produced, if still being expensive and reserved for elite units like the Astartes.

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Another thing to consider might be the presence of Xenos voidships. The Imperium absorbed anywhere from dozens to hundreds of Xenos species, and several of those likely had void-vessels of some description. Certainly no battleships or cruisers, with maybe enough light cruisers to be counted on one hand between the lot of them, but certainly there must be Xenos who have produced Escort-class warships either before or since their integration to the Imperium.
It might be interesting to see how just a few Escorts who happen to have energy weapons or more exotic designs influence the course of an engagement. As for why the Xenos would expend the for-them massive undertaking of producing a few such ships, it would be both a matter of prestige and a way of paying the Imperial Tithe- Subsectors that are capable of self-policing free up a few desperately-overextended Imperial ships, and act as welcome force-multipliers in the face of incoming threats.

>>60904982
It's probable Malcador didn't know where it came from either beyond The Hydra. He would have trusted it because he had prior and good dealings with The Hydra before even if he wasn't or was part of it.

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Good news is that the initial prelude/set-up should be ready for posting sometime later today, bad news is that work is going to keep me away almost all day tomorrow, which will delay writing up the actual battle part.
I swear I'm working on it, it's just work being a hassle that's slowing me down.

>>60910189
The space-battle writefaggotry, I mean. Dunno how I forgot to mention which one I was, seeing as there's a couple different writefaggotries getting written right now.

>>60899187
>MC MR DADDY

>>60904982
I think we said they definitely did not meet. Eldrad interacted more with the Cabal, and when Oscar found out another group had been monkeying around with humanity behind his back he was pissed.

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All right, here's the 'premise' bit. I'm going for a more clipped, matter-of-fact sort of style, like an official report, so hopefully it's not too dry.

BATTLE REPORT: BATTLE OF TELIS GRANDIOS

Location: The world of Telis Grandios, within the Chanath Sub-Sector.
a major hub for voidships within the Chanathian sub-sector, by virtue of a functioning Orbital Tether and position within favorable Warp currents. The native Chanath Xenos of Telis profited greatly from this position of economic importance, even going so far as to endeavor to produce their own warships. successfully constructed the "Resplendent Piety;" a Frigate of comparable build to that of Sword-class, only equipped with a spinal-mounted kinetic rail-gun of Xenos design, at the expense of half a Sword's laser batteries and survivability. Construction of a second ship underway at the time of attack.

Chaos fleets were reported to have launched attacks against multiple nearby subsectors, with the wave of attacks progressing towards the Chanathian Sub-sector. Reports suggest deliberate targeting of worlds with Orbital capabilities, potentially to soften the sector for a larger offensive. Telis Grandios deemed a likely target, and after consideration of potentially-available forces, declared of sufficient strategic importance for an attempt to be made at holding the world, and orders sent out for all Imperial vessels within range to attempt to regroup at and defend Telis Grandios. Two Imperial battlegroups arrive in the Telis system prior to attack. Rear-Admiral Sprague of Battlegroup Samar assumes operational command of both battlegroups as well as the assorted vessels responding to the call.

>>60902766
Nothing's been done yet. If you have a good idea go for it we need more fluff for daemons. From what it sounds like it could be that the Masque was the one who tried to cheer up Slaanesh after they missed catching Isha in the Raid.

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>>60911204
Comprehensive list of Imperial forces in-system at time of attack
Battlegroup Samar. Commanded by Rear-Admiral Sprague.
-Monarch-class Cruiser "Enduring Conviction" (addendum: originally Dominator-class, Nova Cannon still functional.)
-Dauntless-class Light Cruiser "Stalwart Companion"
-Sword-class Frigate "Ardent Prayer."
Battlegroup Vohan- commanded by Lord-Captain Johnstein.
-Endeavor-class Light Cruiser "Spirit of Law"
-Sword-class Frigate "Frank Exchange"
-Firestorm-class Frigate "Legal Repercussion"
-Cobra-class Destroyer "I Am Alfalfa"
-Cobra-class Destroyer "Pill Dispenser"
Other assorted vessels
-Telis-class Frigate "Resplendent Piety"
-Havoc-class Destroyer "Major Minor"
-Claymore-classe Corvette "Try Me"
-Cobra-class Destroyer "Seven to One"

Under the orders of Rear-Admiral Sprague, the "Resplendent Piety" and "Try Me" join Battlegroup Samar, while "Major Minor" and "Seven to One" join Battlegroup Vohan. Imperial forces coalesce into a defensive formation around the Orbital platform.

04:36 local time: "Stalwart Companion" reports incoming warp signatures. Probes are launched, while "Spirit of Law" and "Stalwart Companion" begin approach towards the incoming signatures in standard intercept formation with escort screen. "Enduring Conviction" scrambles Starhawk and Fury squadrons, and advances behind with her escorts to provide support.

Probes reach detected ship signatures. Vessels are confirmed as Chaos-vessels, and identified as Hades-class Heavy Cruiser "Manifest Ecstasy," Murder-class Cruisers "Despair Horizon" and "Vileblood," and Hellbringer-class Light Cruisers "Free Candy" and "Jackson's Neverland."

(Author's note: The "Enduring Conviction" is basically a Dominator-class that got the Dictator treatment, while still maintaining her Nova Cannon. A bit of a liberty I'm taking, since there isn't an official class like that, but hopefully it's not too much.)

>>60912479
Also, as I review the ship-types for Chaos, I'm reminded that in canon 40k, Chaos fleets are built to prioritize long-range engagements, due to primarily using Crusade-era ships with the implied better tech/weapons. Considering how we have the Imperium focusing on ranged engagements and avoiding ramming, rather than their canon design focus on ramming and close-range broadsides, should Chaos fleets be more prone to closing to close-range instead? Khornate vessels at least would be prone to charging in for ramming and boarding actions, since sitting back and sniping is pretty much the anathema to Khorne's opinion on proper fighting. Shooting while you close the distance is fine, but hanging back and not trying to get your blades bloody doesn't seem like something he'd approve of.

>>60912695
I think the guy who wrote Broadsides had Chaos ships be the ironclads to the Imperial frigate, mostly because the Crones got to keep all that nice old Empire military technology. At least the stuff that still works after being corroded in the Warp.

There might be some variation like specialized sniper ships given the Eldar preference for overwhelming force that would been present prior to the fall.

>>60912885
Broadsides? That sounds like something I'd like to have for reference. Do you know which page on the wiki has it, or is it in one of the older threads?
In any case, that sounds like the same general idea that I had for how Chaos fleets would function. I might want to change the names of the ship-classes for Chaos, or we can just pretend that the ship-classes are actually different in this universe.

The important thing for me is that it's clear the Imperial fleet is basically a support-cruiser and two light cruisers (plus a bunch of small Escorts) versus three Line-ship Cruisers and two Light Cruisers.

>>60912885
Nevermind, I found it. Didn't realize there was fanfiction based on this project.
>>60912479
All right, with the general changes in design philosophy (Chaos ships being the Ironclads to the Imperium's Frigates, rather than the ranged snipers to the Imperium's brawlers), I'm going to invent/alter some Ship-classes for Chaos, and what those classes do.

Hades-class Heavy Cruiser: Still a veritable wall of guns, but instead of long-range energy weapons she's basically been fitted with as much armor and as many guns as her crew can fit on her, plus a Hangar bay for launching Swiftdeaths or Doomfires. Of course, she's got energy weapons too, but it's more because they fit and hit hard than a deliberate design philosophy. These ships are generally intended to break through enemy lines, soaking up fire and returning it with interest as she rams and launches boarding crews of daemons onto everything in range.
Murder-Class Cruisers- the standard Lineships of Chaos, or at least the human forces of Chaos. Still inferior to Lunar-class Cruisers, but built slightly tankier and with more Macrobatteries, at the cost of being relatively slower. Literally Murder once they get close enough, and very dangerous versus bigger ships which can't outpace them. Also have Lances, though they're more for softening targets up as they close than dedicated long-range fire.
Hellbringer-class Light Cruiser- largely unchanged. They're intended as raiders, and thus benefit from a long-range loadout that is very dangerous even against ships larger than they. The tradeoff is that they're fragile, and more suited to attacks of opportunity and support fire than actual line combat.

Any thoughts/criticisms/suggestions?

>>60914548
Broadsides and GeGe are canon, at least in a broad sense (i.e., minus the overt Jojo references from the first chapter and the like compared to the later, less parodic ones). The person who did both is also a contributor to the project, though we haven't heard from them in a while. They're kind of in a hazy grey area.

>>60914548
If theres a strategic installation like an orbital tether at stake there would probably be at least a few Crone ships present even if the chaos force is mostly human. Probably a 'literally-who' commander or patron's personal vessel and a few escorts.

We haven't actually discussed Crone ships much, but they're either very old and filled with exotic pre-fall Old Empire military tech and ridiculously full of daemons riding along in the ghastbone superstructure as a possession medium, most of these held by Arrotyr's Khornate faction, or fairly new, designed and built by the biggest and most enduring Slaaneshi cluster-fuck in the galaxy with the resources of most of a shell world, with shipyards that pump out truly excessive weapons nearly as fast as the pleasure cult pumps out disposable bastards to crew them. The general idea has been Crone have the actual military hardware from the Old Empire, whereas the Craftworlds and Commoragh have up-armored riot gear and glitzy luxury vehicles repurposed for piracy respectively.

>>60915354
I see. Reading material for later then. Though a quick skim of Broadside gives the impression that it's more focused on the internal workings of the ships and pilots of fighters, while this scenario I'm writing is more focused on the broader tactical view.
>>60915703
An excellent point about Crone ships. Perhaps the lead Void-ship should be a Cronedar variant of the Eldar Shadow-class Cruiser, being both bigger and carrying more guns than what the puny Craftworlders can manage. The one bright spot for those facing it is that the sheer excess of it's weapons battery is so power-intensive that it has a long reload time, but considering how fast and maneuverable the ship is and how one volley from it's weapon battery is often enough to strip void-shields and inflict devastating damage, it's of small comfort, especially when it's getting backed up by two Murder-Class brawlers and two Hellbringers- which could be essentially generic ships lost to the warp that then got refitted into raiders with whatever the Cronedar were willing to provide, making them more of a catch-all than a specific class. Of course, they're still crewed by traitor humans, but the price of getting their ships outfitted with the most useless scraps the Cronedar have laying around glorious Cronedar technology is typically subservience, favors, and a sizeable cut of all profits/slaves/plunder.
Then again, very few Cronedar Admirals are going to put themselves at risk by joining the scout fleet.

>>60915703
You might even get Nurglite ships that shoot torpedoes that rot ships from the inside out or Tzeentchian ships that are liable to turn you into a bowl petunias and/or sperm whale (joking about that last one).

>>60916198
Do we have a new quote in the making?

"There are no shortage of eager idiot in Shaa-Dome"
- Lady Malys or the Taskmaster, probably

>>60916461
"The most beautiful part of desperation is how easily it causes fools to mistake exploitation for generosity."
-unnamed Cronedar Admiral

In any case, work tomorrow is going to get in the way of me continuing this combat report (which is annoying, considering I only found out about it after I’d geared up to start writing it), so I’ll be counting on you guys to keep the thread up until I get back.

>>60912479

>-Cobra-class Destroyer "I Am Alfalfa"

*SNRK*

Was that named by a member of the Hydra?

>>60916657
Since the situation seems to be Slaaneshi cultists on Slaaneshi warships it could easily be a line from the Taskmaster. I remember Fulgrimfag's idea for the Taskmaster's character being something along the lines of an insignificant nephew from the ruling clan of the Old Empire that idly got involved in the god of joy project and was their inroad with the royal family. He was also described by someone else as being the Renfield to Slaanesh's Dracula after the fall, and while a significant portion of the inner circle of the early cult of Slaanesh and the Eldar aristocrats just wanted Slaanesh to use and consume them for pleasure or empower them to do the same to others, the Taskmaster is happiest to be the greatest and most slavish servant of his god, arranging all the orgies and binges and feasts for the revelers.

Also being a pre-fall Eldar he actually predates his god, and it was suggested he is personal part in Slaanesh's conception, particularly in seeking to fulfill a desire for a superior a god to serve instead of Slaanesh being a means to a lesser debauched fantasy, was how he survived and thrived so close to the epicenter of the birth when pretty much everyone else became mindbroken snacks almost immediately. In total, he sounds like just the guy to take immense pleasure in the workings of the Slaaneshi military-industrial complex.

>>60912479
Someone had fun coming up with those names

>>60919059
Sometimes Shadow-wars are comparable to games of Chicken, with the challenge being getting the other guy to blink/react while keeping your own composure. A head tilted a bit too quickly at a normal ship report can be a dead giveaway for those who know what to look for.
Though I suppose it’s still a fair question; was it Hydra who christened it, or one of their enemies? And do they have operatives aboard?

>>60908263
The obvious exception to this being the Demiurg who seem to only have XBAWKS HUEJ! ships of varying design.

>>60919226
>immense pleasure in the workings of the Slaaneshi military-industrial complex

Possible one of the most disturbing double entendres one can think of.

>>60921701
Tau also have their ships, and since they don't have the AdMech hovering over them they can trick them out more with ion cannons.

Tarellians probably have warships but being a confederacy their space power is a bit limited.

Nicassar do but dhows aren't meant for super shooty combat IIRC.

>>60921843

Nicassar are fuel hyper-efficent small transport, like blimps but less chance of blowing up. Slow and doesn't carry much tho.

Did the bit on salvage rights get saved?

>>60922812
Which thread was it in?

>>60922812
I don't actually remember that, closest thing I recall was the Sons of Anteus cutting an ancient cruiser out of a space hulk to be their home base

>>60922812
Do you mean salvage rights regarding Space Hulks? I seem to remember a discussion on that subject, though I can’t remember the exact thread.

>>60924793
That was the one. I can't remember which thread it was. I just found it interesting

>>60920637
Or it just singles out history buffs. The existence of Alpharius wasn't a secret.

>>60926965
The existence of Alpharius maybe, but the phrase “I am Alpharius” is likely not common knowledge, since the people who tend to hear it are the ones either targeted by or involved with the shadow-organizations.
Remember, the exact details and majority of information on him and his organization got [redacted]. Historians who go digging for that info tend to either disappear or get dragged into the game themselves, usually at (rarely literal) gunpoint.
It’s kind of like if you were to research the history of the founder of the CIA back during the Red Scare when there was a legit spy war going on; one day there’s a knock on your door, and there’s three men in suits asking politely to have a word with you before inviting themselves in, at which point you realize two of them have way too much muscle for anyone who has to wear a suit to work.

>>60920637
I'm happy to see more stuff involving the dynamics of shadow-wars, but a a shadow war against the Hydra is akin to the idea of a gang war between the upper west side literally whos and a meme version of the CIA. The Hydra is associated with the very most inner circles of the Imperial Court, just below the royal family itself, its number included the brighter (and more reliable) Primarchs, select High Lords throughout history, and it originated as Terrawatt clan loremasters and experts stewarding knowledge and history through Old Night, and who became Oscar's tutors and advisors during Unification. Going against the Hydra, and the Alpha and Omega legions that are the implements of its will, in a shadow war means going against the emperor, not just politically, but at a level of direct conflict with Oscar and his personal endeavors.

Speaking of which, would Vandire have been at this level of access and influence prior to his coronation? If Oscar earnestly meant to put him on the throne as emperor it almost seems like a given, and it was probably in this capacity where he demonstrated his excellence. having been part of the Hydra, with its long standing GaBHD and Chtonian obsessions, would also have made it clear to Vandire that even if Oscar disagreed the powers that stood behind the golden throne were much more intent on the Golden Man's rule than his. He might even have still seen Oscar as a friend until he really started losing it, instead blaming the Hydra that would depose him and force Oscar onto the throne for their own designs.

>>60928174
Looking into the enigma of the Alpha legion seems as good a way to get pulled into the great game as seeking out the knowledge of the workings of Men of Gold. Even if the Hydra doesn't take notice, some interesting times club within the Illuminate order might, and their assets are only a hair less spooky and official.

I was looking and it doesn't seem like the Mon-keigh or Krork/proto-Krork made it into the historical species section

>>60928253
First off, I imagine that exact scenario is a pretty good idea of the typical Hydra operation in the current day- just like established gangs with actual ties in the criminal underworld have to deal with punk teenagers and drop-outs with big britches and too much testosterone calling themselves a “gang” and infringing on their turf, Hydra has to deal with various small-scale shadow-orgs based on Trader Houses with plans for Pyramid schemes on a multi-system level, or a self-envisioned “next Vandire,” or planetary governors convinced that it’s not really Sedition or Treason because they’re still loyal, they’re just making extra-sure that things are running the way they “should,” and everybody skimps on the Tithe in order to hang onto the most useful bits, because their personal gain will benefit the Imperium in long run, it’s just that nobody would understand...
Humans are constantly seeking new heights to reach. This unfortunately includes heights of stupidity.
Then there are the Xenos organizations like the Cabal; obstensibly allies, but it’s good to keep an eye on your friends and what they’re doing, just in case.
Then there’s the really dangerous stuff like the Illuminate Order, which dates back to the Dark Ages (as in the medieval dark ages), or at least some accounts claim such.
Then there’s the weird stuff, like that time a bunch of planetary governors ended up doing an uncannily good job of coordinating together, and after a surprisingly difficult shadow-campaign against them it turned out they were all Genestealers, hence the unreal ability to respond to things happening to a different member. That was a messy cleanup, especially since it really freaked out those higher up the chain of command who are thinking of the implications.

>>60928253
As for Vandire, I could definitely see him being a savant at the shadow games- which contributed to his ability to really fuck things up when he finally lost it.
In the time since then, surviving supporters of Vandire keep popping up, or at least sleeper groups established to go live centuries after Vandire himself is dead. It’s one of the most annoying parts of cleaning up after a paranoid but competent dictator- just because the measures he set up don’t make sense doesn’t mean they don’t work, and he’s hidden them all over the fucking place. It’s like cleaning up the house after a Home Alone movie; there’s booby traps in the stupidest places with the most convoluted triggering mechanisms that somehow work perfectly, and every time you think you’ve gotten them all youstub your toe and trigger another.

>>60930203
The recent decision/conclusion in the thread that the Cabal were the ones that tipped off the Hydra when it was just a group of Terrawatt clan technologists about where on the Cthonian Ring to look for Man of Gold related stuff that wasn't destroyed or perverted in the Iron War definitely adds an interesting slant to the relationship between the organizations early on, especially before and during unification. In canon the Terrawatt clan's Theologiteks are supposedly descended from the same DaOT practices as the Mechanicus are, and the name of the order immediately suggests a technological understanding of deities. Past threads have suggested that Earth and Mars were the homes of Sol's Man of Gold and Iron Mind respectively, as the system would have certainly had both, and that they both destroyed each other or were otherwise dispatched before the system got totally fucked. The Theologiteks had been expert Men of Stone and Iron that had worked under the Golden Man before the Iron war, and its survivors preserved the information they held from the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion in the place they bunkered down in as old night fell. When the actual Hydra organization formed might have been later, long after the original demigod technicians had died, when the small nation they formed began to observe an end to the storms of Slaanesh's birth. The Cabal had been around for millions of years, and though they were also hit by the Fall of the Eldar the Hydra was probably just a planet bound pawn to them. While they probably didn't underestimate the importance of politics in the remnants of what had been the galaxy's second strongest recent power, they didn't expect or hope to start a new age of human (re)expansion.

>>60931557
So when Malcador comes back with a live, uncorrupted, mostly functional Man of Gold instead of just scrounged designs, tech, ect. the Cabal is stunned and nervous. They'd be afraid they just created an exponentially bigger problem than Ursh, and know they'd get smacked hard if they tried to reach the Hydra and their prized new Golden Man now that they're back in Uralia. Then the Hydra decides its time for the Terrawatt clan to unify Earth and Sol with the Man of Gold taking point while the Theologiteks churn out as much advanced tech as possible. Soon they have fleets of ships, Mars is also unified and they're cooperating, and Eldrad FUCKING Ulthran is making insane propositions to them as they build up steam to start stomping around the galaxy. The humans and the Man of Gold thankfully aren't chaos tainted, but they're busily contacting an expanding sphere of forgeworlds and regressed civilizations, apparently intent on another great and bountiful empire for themselves and the Eldar exiles they'd taken up with, and also jabbing the Chaos Gods with a pointy stick with their insane raid in the depths of the warp. After an impressive imitation of their namesake, the Hydra has become the major player in post-Old Eldar Empire galactic politics. The Cabal must now contend with its many heads, as Survivor Civilizations and their resources and precious Human Dominion relics flock to the Imperial banner and the ineffectual Craftworlders that fled their own corrupted empire gain the means towards a new one.

>>60930203
>>AL punk wannabes
When you put it that way it sounds hilarious.

>>60930748
That definitely sounds like a good idea, and it fits with both what we have here and in canon. Everyone's main fear was Vandire somehow singling them out through the huge underground network he had (like in canon, where he used the cherubs to spy on everyone). The Sisters of the Blazing Sun (is that what we said their original name was, I wasn't sure beyond it was a solar religion) of San Leor were just another cell of thugs he could call on in a Shadow War-type situation.

And we have said that there is a Vandire partisan group ("Sons of the First Emperor" or something) that's a constant thorn in the side of the Arbites and Sisters.

>>60928429
It's in the notes, I think it still has to be written up in a more formal codex entry.

>>60899187
Never even caught the similarities. Though to be fair the lack of sensation was part of the description back in thread 10, I think a reference to the typical Khornate condition and Chaos Dreadnaughts. Plus the whole "even the Khornate Crones have a Slaaneshi aftertaste to them" that others have mentioned.

Though thinking about it, if Riastrad was the guy who Leithon and Bjorn went after, that means he managed to walk away from a fight with the two of them.

>>60919226
I just had an idea for one of the Taskmaster's weapons: a gun that destroys souls completely. An ultimate punishment for Slaaneshi croneworlders who severely fuck up; Not only does it kill instantly and painlessly, it also means they can't be reincarnated and don't even get eaten by their god. More a tool of discipline than war; maybe it doesn't even work on non- Slaaneshi because the Taskmaster has no authority over souls belonging to other gods. And a badge of rank, a symbol of the near- absolute trust Slaanesh has invested in him.

>>60934939
>and don't even get eaten by their god

That seems awfully out of character for Slaanesh, though.

>>60935002
Well, my personal vision of the Taskmaster is as an outwardly very un- Slaaneshi figure, a servant of a god of excess whose duty is to enforce discipline. The man who does the double- entry bookkeeping while everyone else is having an orgy. Virtually expressionless face, plain grey suit. And, because the task is vital, he's given all the tools and authorities needed to carry it out... which includes a final censure. And for people for whom pain is pleasure and death holds no fear, there's only a limited number of ways to do that.

Besides, it would probably be used very rarely, reserved for only the most disgraceful of the disgraced.

>>60935002
Remember, Slaanesh is more reasonable in this universe. Though originally a god only of excess, she has come to understand substance and variety in sensation rather than just volume.
In addition, the fact that Isha is now essentially cutting off her Craftworlder-coke, Slaanesh as come to know the pain of deprivation and denial. Seeing that rare and mouth-burningly spicy fear inspired in others gets her dick wet. So long as it isn't used too often, of course; she enjoys the taste of those feeling that sensation, but still doesn't like losing souls.
The times when it is actually used are probably made into a big spectacle, similar to an execution except with the crowd going at each other, and is one of the few events that can see an entire group of Cronedar gasp in genuine shock and horror. The weapon doesn't even have the decency to be loud and flashy; it's more like the target just gently dissipates, like a reflection in fog. Any other race might find it almost-humane as an execution tool; for the Cronedar it's the worst fate imaginable.

>>60935597
Also soul stones. Just put them in there and leave them there forever.

>>60933334
Also mildly supported by the actual AL because it always draws attention away from what they are really doing.

>>60931934
Gahet and Eldrad FUCKING Ulthuan seem to have a very much love and hate relationship. On the one hand Gahet loves him because no other person bar himself had done as much in that age to fuck Chaos up. On the other hand he was bonkers and did a lot of shit to fuck up his own plans like raiding Hell itself . Who even does that? Who the fuck wakes up in the morning and says to themselves "today I'm going to invade Hell, break and enter the abode of a literal god and steal their most prized possession"? Eldrad, that's who. Good luck planning around that.

>>60937058
Are the ports of Commorragh regularly frequented by other species or is it too dangerous and they take their business to the outposts?

>>60921843
Nicassar ships also make traveling training schools for psykers born into the Tau Empire.

>>60935002
Slaanesh in this timeline is able to put off instant gratification if it means that there will be more later. Like how demons view Crone Eldar. Why bother killing them now since their souls are going to go to you anyway and they are going to kill a whole bunch of people for you in the interim.

>>60942329
Also the souls are only getting more depraved and flavourful with each passing atrocity.

>>60933334
People in the military talk about Insurgents and cartel fighters who learned about things like cover and gunfighting from movies, like one instance where a guy popped up, took a few shots, then ducked back down giggling like he'd gotten away with it- disregarding that what he'd decided to duck behind was a COUCH. Or how common it is for some cartel member to come out spraying their gun on full-auto, then freezing when it clicks on empty, apparently not having considered the need to reload.

I am now imagining AL operatives talking about these punks in the same manner, only with more badly-misinformed Vostroyan disguises and villainous monologuing inside Official offices that anyone with brains would realize are probably heavily bugged.

>>60942352
She resurrects her favourites to get even more flavour.

The exception being Lady Malys who gets resurrected because they don't want her in the Realm of Chaos longer than absolutely necessary.

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>>60942828
"So get this, we tracked down the little bastard, and it turns out his false identity was just his name backwards."
"Seriously?"
"I know, right? Wasn't too hard to find him when we figured that out."

All right, so I'm doing some short summaries of the vidyas through a Nobledark filter. There was a writeup (or writeups) in the first few threads, but most of those were written very early on, before most Nobledark fluff had been written and clarified. This stuff isn't going to be anything too substantial, but hopefully it might spark more creativity (and by 'more' I mean 'actual').

DAWN OF WAR 1

A young Captain Gabriel Angelos and Inquisitor Toth land on the world of Tartarus, which is being beseiged by a massive army of Chaos cultists and their Ork mercenaries. Officially, they're there to evacuate the Guardsmen from a lost fight, but Toth's made it clear that their main goal is to secure, or at least destroy, the Maledictum, a powerful Chaos artifact and the source of the cults' power.

However, the Guardsmen have been fighting for their home; between that general sentiment and the fact that they have managed to preserve most of their world through sheer ballsiness, makes Gabriel take his cover story much more seriously, especially since A) he couldn't save his own homeworld Cyrene from Chaos incursion, and B) if they evacuate the Guardsmen, it would only mean that the Guardsmen who died would've done so for nothing. Despite warnings from both Librarian Akios and Inquisitor Toth that a Warp Storm is coming, Gabriel fixates on the idea that destroying the Maledictum would save the world.

Which is perfect for the ambitious Autarch Kyre of Biel-Tan.

>>60944782
Like the rest, he too seeks the Maledictum, though at this point it isn't known exactly why. After aiding the Blood Ravens in a surprise attack on the Chaos Lord in charge, he successfully convices Gabriel to ally with him, despite the misgivings of Isador and Toth. The two of them seem unstoppable, but despite their best efforts, the elusive Chaos Sorceror who possesses the Maledictum seems to ever elude them. As the Warp Storm comes ever closer, Kyre goes behind Gabriel and Toth's back to persuade an increasingly desperate Isador to divine the Maledictum's location. He does, but the abyss stared back, and Isador now bears the seed of corruption. Even so, the combined Imperial forces strike hard enough that SSSIIINDRIII is forced to begin his ascension early, and his cunning avails him not against the sheer firepower of the Imperial forces.

Which is when the WAAAAGH comes.

>>60944443
At some point they absolutely are going to end up arresting themselves. Someone pretending to be an inept insurgent but is actual an Alpha Legion operative is trying to gather other insurgents around him for a big haul gets lifted by Hydra disguised as Judges.

Would have gone very ugly but they all knew each other. They give up the who stupid operation at that point and got drunk for the rest of the evening before making some sad reports.

>>60944800
The mighty Warboss Orkamungus had known of the Maledictum's location for some time now, thanks to his Weirdboyz, and sold it to the forces of Chaos along with a few of his boyz for muscle. In addition, he also knew that as it grew in power, it would attract both Imperial attention and a Warp Storm- just the way he planned it. True, he wouldn't be able to pit his lads against the spiky Chaos boyz, but now he's got a company of Space Marines, a Guard regiment and all the Eldar he could smash! He's also heard that you can't die in the Warp, so once the Warp Storm hits he wouldn't ever have to stop fighting. Even better, maybe that would mean the spiky Chaos boyz would be brought back as well! All he has to do is ensure that enough blood is spilt to hasten the Warp Storm's coming, which is what Orks do best.

Of course, this is a Space Marine gig, so of course our heroes managed to escape the planet in time. Even so, WAAAGH Orkamungus manages to kill enough people that he gets his Warp Storm, which he finds to his eternal joy to be everything that he'd hoped for, and as the Imperial remnant escaped into deep space, Orkamungus and his boyz are having the time of their afterlives killing and re-killing all the damned souls trapped on the planet. He even gets some Chaos gits to punch!

>>60944824
All right, there we go. I need to get some sleep soon, but tell me what you think. If it's good, I'll get cracking onto Dark Crusade and Soulstorm next. I'm also sure I've missed or skimmed over a few plot points; it's late here and it's been YEEEEARS since I've least played DoW.

>>60944824
So I'm guessing that the Maledictum is possibly a warp-storm attractor. Possibly an Old One weapon left over form their war. Just drop one on a planet, switch it on and bolt back into the webway. Suck primitive shit is a Fuck Your Star System Up weapon on today's battlefields but back then it was a mass produced cheap landmine.

>>60944824
I really like the idea of a Warboss wanting to get caught in the Warp so he can become immortal and thus never have to stop fighting. It's a logical extension of what happened with Tuska Daemonkilla (well, at least it's perfect Ork logic), the main difference being Tuska just thinks daemons git krumped da best, immortality in Khorne's realm being a side effect.

You may want to read the Taldeer entry, that has some of what happened with Sturnn, the 1st Kronus liberators, and Kronus. Somewhere we also mentioned about how Kais had to be called in to clean up Boreale's cock-up as well.

>>60944810
Honestly, it's probably such a likely occurence that their agents have a couple page's worth of protocols regarding the issue, including steps to avoid accidentally getting in the way of other agents, how to respond if such a mistake is made, and guidelines for resolving the situation without blowing either agent's cover.

Of course, there's a fine line between protocol and field work, but it's a known potential snag that agents seek to be prepared for.

>>60944443
So what do they call a cheese burger on Cadia?

>>60949787
An MRE.

>>60921701
>>60921843
I was more referring to the dozens of nondescript client races of the Imperium that are too small to be of any real note, but big enough to have one to give voidships to their name. Tau, Demiuge and such can all field enough ships to at least technically form fleets, or put another way are capable of producing cruisers.

Any more ideas for the rise and fall of Goge Vandire?

>>60914548
Work gave me some time to think about this, so I've been pondering on the in-universe explanation for Chaos having human vessels that function as Ironclads to the Imperium's Frigates, and while "Cronedar did it" is an easy explanation, it probably shouldn't be a universal one. For instance, having the Hellbringer-class ships be essentially vessels that fell to Chaos and got pimped out with Cronedar scraps, making them fast and hard-hitting raiders that are rather fragile due to being patch-jobs, is something that makes sense. However, I doubt the Traitor Marines and any humans who didn't get their brains melted when they turned would be willing to rely completely on the Cronedar for ships.
Enter the Murder-class Cruiser, mainstay of the non-Cronedar forces of Chaos, and the first instance on the scale of ship-class that follows the design theme of the Ironclads- it's slow and somewhat difficult to perform complex maneuvers in, but makes up for it with a damn-tough hide that even armor-piercing weaponry can take time to cut through.
As for how they came about in the first place, well, the short of it is that they were initially a project undertaken by a sect of the Mechanicus in the pursuit of finding a way to recreate Neutronium. The theories were sound, and along the lines of "Stuff is easier to assemble underwater or in a vacuum because you don't have to fight gravity as much." See, the biggest hurdle to recreating Neutronium is that the laws of physics seem to say it's impossible.
Yes, they had the brilliant idea of trying to build a dry-dock to build ships inside the Warp. Yes, that went about the way you'd expect it to. No, this was not okayed by the higher-ups in the Mechanicus, who would have shut it down the second they'd realized the new ship-dock was built to enter the Warp (because that's TECH-HERESY! Oh right, and because the warp is bad too I guess but mostly TECH-HERESY!)

>>60952528
Fortunately for the Imperium, the project was technically a failure. The Murder-class does not have Neutronium armor plating. However, it wasn't a complete loss, because while the armor isn't as good as Neutronium, it's still better than anything the Imperium is capable of producing within the Materium, because Physics are mean like that. Pound-for-pound, these ships can outlast ships of their own weightclass through sheer attrition, with most weaponry either bouncing off or failing to penetrate into vital systems.

Mars sent an entire Explorator Battlefleet REEEEing after the shipyard once they found out, and the Imperium wasn't far behind. Faced with the prospect of all their work and progress getting thrown out by ungrateful pricks and assholes who forced them to bow to Mars in the first place, the Hereteks instead chose to take the whole dock into the Warp and just not come out. Normally the dock would have been blasted in the time it took to charge the engines enough to make the jump, but some Traitor Marines had caught wind and jumped in to help, and even cut the teeth of the first completed ship. Now the dock is sitting somewhere in the warp, guarded jealously by Luther as one of the few sources of ships that does not force him to rely on filthy xenos.

>>60940851
I can't imagine much of anyone going to the Dark City voluntarily. Maybe Orks.

>>60912885
>>60914548
The “frigate/ironclad” comparison also kind of makes sense when you think of how the two navigate. Like sailing ships, Imperial ships are at the mercy of the weather and the waves, which you can kind of predict. Crone ships are directed by warp augury, sacrifice (think sacrifice of Iphigenia), and the will of their patrons, which means they can go against the winds and current as they like, kind of like how steam power freed ships from relying on tides, winds, and the like (and would seem as unnatural to the Imperium as a sailor from the 16th century seeing a steamboat sailing directly into the wind up a river). Which is kind of ironic because despite in some ways being more advanced, “under the hood” Crone ships are directed in ways we would find anachronistic.

>>60952737
I like this, at the very least adding some more detail and backstory to the universe in general. Plus it does a good job of explaining how people like Luther and Skyrar get good ships.

>>60947371
Yep, once I get to DC I'm planning to include those bits as well. I'm kind of going for a butterfly effect thing, where the changes in timeline slowly compound.

>>60940851
>>60954246
There's a special xenos district/ghetto in Low Commorragh (I think mentioned in passing in canon, but explicitly said to exist here) where various races including Sslyth, Slaugth, Crone Eldar, and even human pirates rub shoulders and trade with the Dark Eldar. This is where the Archons go when they want to hire Sslyth bodyguards and is the only place that can even remotely be considered ''''safe'''' for non-eldar in Commorragh.

On Mars, there is a series of missile silos. They appear on no map, save in the personal files of the Fabricator General and his inner circle. Hardcopy, not digital. Nothing about them has ever been committed to cogitator. Their locations are concealed beneath layers of bureaucratic subterfuge; declared off- limits zones, patrolled by guards unaware of what they protect. Onion layers of lies await the curious; the suspicious might continue digging past the first lie, but the second? The third, the fourth?

The bunkers themselves are manned by unaugmented humans; none possess even the simplest augmetic. Perhaps the only such in the whole of the regular armed forces of the Mechanicus. Everything is done with the simplest possible technology; even electricity is used sparingly. Steam engines drive complex mechanical assemblies. Everything is designed with physical, manually- operated lockouts. Everything requires human action to operate. From the air or orbit they blend in perfectly with the environment.

Inside the silos, the crews are terribly isolated. Their only contact with the outside world is a single cable, through which the fire order will come. If it ever comes. None of them know of the purpose of their silo, or of the existence of the others. Each shift lasts a year at least. They play endless hands of cards, read books, and bullshit continuously. And wait for the order to come down. In ten thousand years it has not.

As for the missiles themselves? Vortex warheads. The largest concentration of vortex weaponry in the entire Imperium currently. Over a thousand of the weapons, each capable of felling cities and Titans. Enough firepower to scour a continent clean, to say nothing of the possibility of daemonic incursion.

Arranged in a loose ring around the Noctis Labyrinth.

This is but one of the contingency plans the Guardians of the Dragon have prepared.

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>>60954272
Another interesting way the analogy works is that the differences in design philosophies between the various Chaos groups also reflects the chronological timeline of actual Ironclad development. The Humans and Traitor Marines, who are the relative newcomers, have designs that are either normal wooden ships given boilers and with some Armor plating along the sides (ie normal Imperial ships refitted for Chaos), or like pic related, where their implementation of the new tools available is blocky and still clearly designed for line-battles.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Cronedar have ships with steel hulls, turrets, and breech-loaders that don't blow back on their gun crews. Or, well, the metaphorical equivalent.

Of course, the metaphor only stretches so far; historically Ironclads were something of an "I win" button against wooden fleets because cannons were the only weapon type; The Imperium has plenty of energy weapons that can melt through that armor eventually, and even small escort ships who's guns can't penetrate to anything vital can rake the point-defense systems and antennas and such to make it easier for torpedoes to get through. It's just that in a fair fight, Imperium ships have to try and keep their distance and whittle down their armor, while Chaos just needs to charge in.

>>60952430
Hmm, I actually considered him all that much, but looking over the notes it does seem like he would be one of the ultimate tragic characters of the lexicon. I'll have to check the writings, but I could think of a lot of stuff I might try out in writing with him in this new and improved form. Speaking to ideas, I don't know if it was discussed *how* he broke, only that he eventually did break from the pressure of the throne.

While it is normal to think that the pressure of the big picture drove the man to madness first, I also do love the enjoy of a singular defining incident that ultimately served as a 'straw that broke the camels back' analogue. A relatively small incident, yet came in such the wrong place and wrong time that he pushed him clear off the cliff face of semi-sanity into full blown bloodrage.

And To speak to the OP, I don't think this thread series will end, at least not for quite a while, because I think we all see that there is plenty more for us to explore. (In desperation I'll be more than happy to scrounge a thread back into being.) I also feel a tad sad about not contributing more to write faggotry, but inspiration is hard to come by. I'm going to see about changing that for this weekend.

>>60956558

Nice. How do the crews eat, though?

>>60958597
Tinned food

>>60956558
If ever found out they would probably justify it with the destruction of the other horrific shit they store there.

>>60957875
The thing that probably tipped him over the edge was probably someone asking what Oscar would have done. By that point Vandire would have been Emperor for 200 years High Lord of the Administratum for the previous 200 years and 300 years of being a senior administrator in one form or another. His mental state at the 200 years in the job mark wouldn't have been good because of people constantly comparing him to his predecessor despite him being proven time and time again to be extremely talented and the 1 in a trillion actually capable of doing the job right.

Perhaps it was a dispute over if a particular selection of Exodite Worlds should, assuming reports of theirdevelopment be correct, be classified as agri-worlds and if so should they be protectorates of the Imperial Aegis or should they still be classed as colonies of which ever craftworld they are nominally allied with.

The new head of the Administratum asks what would Oscar do because Oscar is married to Isha and although most humans will acknowledge Isha as their Empress they will usually defer to Oscar first on matters of state. Vandire interprets it "you're too dumb to figure this out. What would the actual boss have done?". He freaks out. It goes downhill from there. That Lord of the Administratum "fell down the stairs" later that evening.

>>60952737
This is brilliant. I like that it's in the warp. If it was in the warp permanently, in a really deep layer of the warp, then it could potentially export it's manufactured goods to anywhere in the galaxy with equal ease as it is as much "here" as it is "there". It's all depends on how you "surface".

Downside is that the dockyard has to be deep down there permanently. This has an effect on the inhabitants and work force.

This would also make them a serious (relatively) low to mid level player in their own right.

>>60960007
Or maybe he was finally starting to get the hang of things, and some moron said something along the lines of "Good work, Goge! Just like Oscar would've done it!", and welp.

>>60961140
That would be after 200 years of shit getting to him. In, I think it is, the assassin section it mentions how the head of the assassins accidently planted the seed of doubt almost immediately after Oscar set sail

>>60960007
>>60961140
I remember that one person put Vandire's fall as "So many people seem to believe Vandire couldn't do it. Except Oscar, whose approval in fairness should have been all Vandire ever needed. If Vandire had focused more on his job and less about worrying "what would Oscar do?" his legacy would potentially eclipse Oscar's in its own right. Which is what Oscar wanted."

>>60958597
Presumably each time there is a shift change the new shift brings in with them a mountain of preserved and long lasting food.

>>60944388
It says something about the gods that a mortal has them all tied up with herself at the centre of a very strange web of favours and debts. If any of them try to fuck her over the other 3 will come to her aid for one reason or another.

>>60956558
>>60952737
These are brilliant

How do the eldar view ogryn?

>>60961763
That is mentioned in the notes that he cared far too much about what other high lords and the people thought of him in performing quite literally the most difficult job in the galaxy. Shows him to be thin skinned and possibly prone to wear his heart on his sleeve in regards to the position. As has been mentioned that passion and care is what Oscar saw in him to allow him to step up, but the other side of the coin ended up being Goge flying into a state of paranoia.

>>60960007
I like the premise of that, I imagine a scene of Oscar finding Goge on Terra, just silently contemplating a wall or desk, and after a terse conversation Oscar hoping that Vandire will be alright in the end while inside Vandire's head there is nothing but anguished screaming.

Or perhaps something different, just a rough idea, I think I'll try to write something quick either way.

>>60966206
Probably with a rather terse politeness. They msot likely are against everything that the Ogryns are just by nature, but they also don't want to try and upset any other human that may be near by. Privately though they may just flippantly disregard them overall. At least I get the idea that many of them would barring a few outliers. Opinions certainly change when one's life only goes on because a skull'ead headbutted that ork just at the right time.

>>60967895
>>60965844
>>60961118
>>60954272
I'm glad to see that my idea is a good one. Once I'm done with my current project, I'll get to work on making a proper entry on for "Murder-class Cruisers" that has the origins and general design of the ships in a more presentable fashion, and some fleshing out on specifics of why the techpriests were out there and able to get away with it, typical armaments of the ship-class, as well as elaboration on some of it's failings that make it possible for Imperial ships to fight them in the first place, namely issues of maneuverability, range, and Imperial torpedoes.
Once I'm finished writing up this space-battle of course. I'd probably be going faster if I'd thought to write up a guideline first, but the thread needed something to keep it afloat, so I bit the bullet and just started posting. On the bright side, all this discussion has helped me decide on a general idea of how to make what I'm going for happen.

>>60956558
What should this facility be called?

>>60971452
Human Resources.

>>60971452
It has no official name because it officially doesn't exist. The onion-shells probably have a bunch of different names, all of which actually refer to absolutely nothing. The Guardians probably refer to it internally as the 'Last Ditch' or something similar.

>>60971452
I'd like to think that there is an official 'unoffical' name that is super unassuming so the Arch Magos can know what they are talking about. Meanwhile I think there could be an absolute load of a ad-hoc names for silos or even groups of silos by the crews there just to alleviate their boredom. I wish I wasn't as sleep addled otherwise I would love to think of some of the random things that a 40k man might call his lovely little hole in the ground.

>>60974028
>>60974401
Meant more in the sense of what would this go under if it went on the wiki

>>60975269
How about "Emergency Analogue?" Think that would work for a wiki title?

>>60974028
I like Last Ditch. That'd be what the people who don't work in the bunkers call it because they know what it's pointing at. The people who work there are kept in ignorance of what exactly they are doing

>>60956558
Somehow the Void Dragon does know about this. He's pretending that he doesn't

>>60975269

Thirding The Last Ditch, I think that would work for a wiki title too (unless you want a title for anti-Void Dragon precautions in general).

>>60978336
It's not about if the Dragon knows about it. Him knowing about it is irrelevant and inevitable. The people who set up and have authority over the sites all have implants he can listen and look through. The point is he can't do anything about it. He has never demonstrated an ability to actually control people, just influence so if the Fabricator-General orders the execution order he can't do shit to stop it. He also can influence the people in the bunkers because they have no cyber-blessings.

However; He does now after all this time have a warp reflection/soul. And it's a big one. When they came up with the measures not long after he was discovered it wasn't such a big reflection and it has grown since. The Old One cage he is bound in is more than likely a psychic construct that is dampening his abilities to use his warp magic but nobody knows to what extent or if it has a maximum capacity.

Also of some concern is that nobody, not even The Dragon, can be sure if the vortex missiles will actually kill him or just dump him (and the surrounding landscape) into the warp. Last time it took 3 of his brothers at full strength to beat him hard enough for the Old Ones to put him in a box and bury him. And that may or may not have been using stolen Old One weapons to assist matters. But he was stronger then. The Vortex weapons will almost certainly destroy his bindings but he can't be sure that it won't also just outright kill him as well.

All in all he knows he is simply better off staying in the box and waiting. They will let him out eventually. It's mathematically inevitable.

>>60966206
Many would hate them because all they see is a human ork. The ones that get to know them usually find them oddly endearing. They are big and strong and jovial and fiercely loyal to their friends even if they aren't the brightest creatures in the galaxy.

>>60954647
Would it be too far to suggest that there are craftworlder missionaries in the xeno district of Low Commorragh? If there were would they still be allowed after the Unholy Wedding?

>>60979807
>all they see is a human ork
That's probably actually kind of sad when you remember that the Eldar were actually kind-of buddies with the Krork. Not many of them are still around admittedly, but I can imagine a couple of wizened old eldar or wraithguards actually being fond of Ogryn because they remind them of their old friends.

>>60981771
I don't think that there are any Imperial Eldar left from that era. Eldrad is thought to be ~15,000 years old and he's exceptional.

>>60981200
They were probably allowed at one point. Even maybe encouraged by their craftworlds. Now they are not exactly banned. Vect doesn't ban things as a rule. However he also doesn't stop Lady Malys from offering a standing bounty on missionaries. A result of that and Isha deeming them beyond redemption has resulted in no more missionaries.

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>>60984317
I think Il-Kaithe had better than usual relationships with the Dark Eldar before the War in the Webway and the Dark Wedding.

>>60982510
Yeah, that was 65 million years ago. Any eldar that remembered the Krork as they were would have not only been a veteran of the War in Heaven but also survived Khaines subsequent hissy fit that saw the eldar thrown into civil war and then not died of old age or reincarnated since then. There aren't many eldar that even remember life before the Fall, and most of them are outliers like Eldrad, are Crones (and thus time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so), are Dark Eldar, or are Wraithguards.

It's been mentioned some old tales survived, which is part of the the basis for the whole "Clockw-ork Orange" stuff some of the more naive seers are doing, but no eldar remembers a Krork in person.

>>60978336
>>60978908
He would definitely know about it. Whether he could do anything about it is a different story. Puff the Mechanical Space Dragon is neither omnipotent or omniscient, despite the appearance he gives off. He doesn't know the Nightbringer is coherent and the Outsider are still factors, for one, hence his self-titled "last of the C'tan" status (despite Tsara'noga being a better contender for the title). Which means bad things happen when he does have gaps in his knowledge.

He freely admits he has no knowledge of Warp physics beyond "it exists", the theoretical basics, and "I don't know everything about it". Which means any experimentation he does with it if he does get out would be trial and error.

>>60952430
I think we decided to keep his last words the same: "I don't have time to die. I'm too busy!" to keep with the nobledark theme of someone who tried to take the weight of the world on his shoulders and snapped doing so. Even in his last moments, he believed he was serving the good of the Imperium.

The only difference is it is Thor who told him he was to be BLAM!-ed instead of Alicia.

>>60985029
What was Oscar doing whilst the BLAMing happened?

Another source of arms for Chaos forces across the galaxy is Doombreed's many times built-up and wiped-out dictatorship on the edge of the Eye of Terror. Blood Pact surplus, reliable lasweapons and machine stubbers with plentiful ammunition, vehicles ranging from the light STeG armored cars to small superheavy tanks, and even the ships that manage to survive the Imperium's periodic reconquests of the region scatter through the galactic black markets, moved by in the holds of pirate fleets and unscrupulous smugglers until it reaches distant markets. Its been rumored there are blessings to Khorne inscribed in the workings of the guns and engines, and that these weapons have reached the hands of many distant chaos cells throughout the galaxy. Some of these weapons have even found their way into the hands of the PDFs and security forces of Imperial backwaters, and when local authorities have taken notice little cause for alarm has been found. Even without a contract with Khorne to spread small-arms to the brigands of the galaxy, the Blood Pact's munitions are among the most common human weapons in the northwest quarter of the galaxy, second only to looted Imperial standard issue among the organized chaos forces of humanity.

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>>60984992
It makes you wonder which target he's going to fuck up first when he gets out of his cave. Deciever for tricking Necrontyr into mass suicideing via his biotransferance machine, Nightbringer for being genuinely fucking awful and massacring his new people, Outsider for cannibalisticly almost exterminating his own kind or Slaanesh for devouring his best friend.

>>60987896
Probably Slaanesh first, since he doesn't know where the others are and that wound will be the freshest. Then maybe the Deceiver. According to canon the Deceiver, while perfectly willing to associate with the likes of the Nightbringer, outright avoided the Dragon. I guess now we know why.

Of course the Nightbringer is the one that really put the hurt on him. At some point either the Dragon piledrived somebody or some body piledrived the dragon into the Yucatan peninsula.

>>60978625
The Last Ditch is fine with me.

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What are some things that are capable of pissing Oscar off?
I don't mean the general stuff like thinking about how Chaos is fucking everything up, I mean things that his first reaction to hearing about them is to actually lose his composure. The guy's had millennia of ruling the Imperium to grind him down and replace what once would have been anger with simple exasperation or a sigh of "of course they did."

>>60991832
Apparently his close (and long lived) agents and advisors, and his wife and hers, have picked up the blue side of unification era finno-urgian from the multi-millennia total of his rare outbursts of profanity.

>>60991832

Ursh?

>>60991832
Whatever his buttons are, I'm sure Malys knows how to punch a good 90% of them.

>>60992117
Malys probably doesn't like being reminded how she lost their first fight

>>60991832
Silent King asking for his trillion soul tribute caused Astropaths across the galaxy to spontaneously break out cursing in Finno-Ugric and a few hundred other extinct tongues at the same time.

It's kind of funny how humanity, tau, and the eldar have their own ways of coping with the universe's seemingly unending tide of bullshit. The eldar look at it and go "of course the galaxy is ridiculous, because they are foolish and beneath us". Kind of like housecats. Humans have reached the point where they sigh and rub their nose and try to make the ridiculousness work for them. And the tau, who are still not used to the way the galaxy works (at least the young ones, the more experienced hands know better) are still at the point where they are going around trying to tell reality it doesn't work that way.

>>60992043
That's actually a pretty good one. I can imagine him occasionally hearing about some sector or planet where the (important figure) has a title that was also used in Ursh, and he has to bite back the knee-jerk bile and remind himself that it's just coincidence, it's a big galaxy, and it's good that simple things like titles were ultimately not corrupted by that hell-country, and that it's evidence that people don't remember Ursh which is exactly what he wanted.
He still starts off any meetings or interactions with the holders of those titles automatically not liking them, because even for a Man of Gold ingrained ideas are hard to overcome, and to be fair most of these nobles don't exactly present themselves in the most favorable light.

>>60994405
And then there are the times when he does encounter Doombreed or agents of him whilst on tour. Then the Finno-Slavic swearing really starts.

>>60992505
Win or loose is irrelevant. Was it fun?

>>60994405
Also given the way that finance flows and cash is exchanged one of the things that could annoy him is when he gets a Bloodpact/Urshii octagonal coin in his loose change.

They are octagonal, with a cross and circle design on the back and the Despot's head on the front. There were a lot of them in circulation in his Warlord days and they still lingered on for centuries after Unification. Now the current crop are minted in the Bloodpact realms, exact duplications of the old coinage by order of Doombreed in insistence that it is Ursh reborn.

>>60991832

You know what would really put him into a mood bad enough to literally blow a fuse in his head?

The Beast reborn. The Second Lord of Slaughter. Ghazhkul mak Thraka.

>>60986849
It's not always on the edge of the Eye of Terror. Sometimes it's in the borders of the Maelstrom, sometimes it's in the halo of the Hadex Anomaly and sometimes it's just a long way away out post the light of the Astronomican. The only criteria he requires to get the Ursh Reborn ball rolling is a few habitable worlds, a human population (native or imported) and time left undisturbed.

His realms and their armies are puny by the standards of The Black Crusades and the forces gathered by the likes of Luther and Malys but they tend to attack from unexpected directions whenever the Imperium is busy with something else and do more damage than their mere numbers would suggest as a result.

>>60991832
Mentioning the name if The Beast's ambassador. The one that taunted him with his dead daughter and he sent back in a soup mug.

Bump

>>60969520
How human are the denizens of the dockyard? Are they members of the Dark Mechanicus?

>>60995651
She didn't know his sword was a psychic construct, got into a deadlock with him for a moment, and got incinerated when his sword became a river of flame and force flowing from his hands

>>60986849
what sort of ships does the blood pact make?

>>61000716
At first they were just one of the groups of Cogboys who had grown up on their own world, then been forced to bow to Mars when the Imperium showed up. Their theories on Neutronium may have even held merit- it's not too unlikely that the DAoT humans were using warp-tech to produce impossible materials, and the Warp was a lot calmer back then so they didn't have to deal with everything warp-related immediately becoming daemons.
Of course that's only speculation, and right now anything warp-related DOES become daemons, so even if they were right and the production of Neutronium does require warp-shenanigans, the risks are too great. Also, resentment from how Mars came in and started acting like snobbish assholes and shutting down things that they'd been working on for decades may or may not have contributed to them not sharing everything about their theories with Mars- to the Mechanicum, it was known that they were somewhat obsessed with Neutronium and finding ways to reproduce it, but that their intended methods involved dipping into the Warp to circumvent the Laws of Physics wasn't apparent until it was too late.
I imagine the leader of the cult pulling off an impressive false-flag operation against the Mechanicus by playing up the Neutronium obsession thing by directing constant demands for access to something Neutronium-related, like access to Salvar or something on Mars related to Neutronium, and really being a total obnoxious asshole to the point where when one of his underlings approached Mars with a proposition for them to get assigned to go build a couple of cruisers in bum-fuck nowhere to give his boss a chance to cool down and focus on something else, it was almost immediately accepted as an excuse to not have to deal with him anymore. This is also why it took so long for their to be an in-depth analysis of the shipyard the sect was building- inspection crews didn't want to hang out any longer than they needed to.

>>61001802
Of course, nothing about the components of the shipyard itself were technically techno-heresy- organized in a strangely inefficient manner, yes, but all according to the sanctions of Mars. Maybe the assembly areas for the Cruiser's Warp-drives are a bit disorganized, and they're going to have to cut out some new doors to fit the drives back out again, the the drives themselves are being constructed in complete compliance of the rulings of Mars.
Then on the way back from one such inspection, a younger acolyte who got dragged along on principle rather than because he was needed asks if having the Warp-drives running and plugged into the dockyard is to placate the machine spirits.
The inspection crew charges back, then goes dark. The honchos back at Mars take the message the crew had sent before heading back and look back over their previous reports with actual scrutiny, and realize there's some serious tech-heresy at play, and immediately launch a fleet to stop them from making new things. Imperium picks up on the chatter and outrage among the cogboys, get a general gist of the situation, and launch their own fleet because "HOLY SHIT THEY'RE STICKING THEIR DICKS IN THE WARP THIS CAN ONLY END BADLY."
When they arrive, the dockyards are already in the process of charging up their warp-drives to go deeper into the warp that the metaphorical toe-dipping they'd been doing for construction purposes. There's also several warships of almost-but-not-quite imperial design around it, as well as the first completed cruiser produced by the dockyards. Turns out their little project caught the attention of Luther, who is very enthusiastic about the possibility of getting a source of ships that are not only more advanced than the Imperium's, but are produced by honest humans rather than filthy xenos. The fleet holds the Imperials and Mechanicus at bay long enough for the dock to make the jump and escape into the warp.

>>61002120
Now, after who-knows-how-long stuck inside the warp, the cogboys of the dock aren't exactly normal anymore- you don't stay in the warp that long without getting changed one degree or another. However, they can still get mistaken for normal cogboys at a distance.
Part of this is because Luther guards them jealously- any particularly-ambitious daemons looking to have some fun with the sillly shipbuilders tends to find itself getting violently and messily dissuaded from the idea. Not that the cogboys don't interact with and even try to use or work with daemons, but anything that might interfere with their ability to produce ships has to get through a bunch of Traitor Marines whose daemons are usually bigger than theirs.
The other factor is that the cogboys have gone from interest to single-minded obsession with rediscovering the secret to producing Neutronium. They are quite happy to keep pumping out ships as fast as they get supplied the materials they require, because each ship is a chance to tweak the formula a little, try a new mix of Iron and Daemon-claws, get just that one step closer to unlocking the secret to that elusive alloy.

>>61002380
Makes me think the Savlar Order might be operating some crazy reality disruption within their foundry, and the particularly mellow warp entities in the area are part of how they manage the risk.

>>61003009
Either that or it’s like Schlock Mercenary annie plants. You can build them in real space, but you need to get a “jumpstart” from a facility in the Warp. So if you don’t have access to the necessary warptech up, you kind of have a chicken and egg situation. Savlar was lucky in that it had enough of that equipment preserved that could still make neutronium, even if the quality isn’t as good.

Of course as if mentioned before, the Iron Minds were more than willing to use the environment of the Warp to make what they needed. Kind of like how it’s been suggested in real life growing certain types of crystalline structures in microgravity except with a higher risk of daemonic possession.

>>61000742
I would argue at first she didn’t think it was fun, because she was still relatively young then and everything was serious business. She thought crushing the Imperium was going to be relatively easy, especially now that you’ve had a proper acolyte of the gods leading the way instead of some overly radioactive mushroom. Of course now she’s older and wiser is learned she needs to take the long view when dealing with the Imperium. And, of course, learning to stop and smell them the rot roses a bit along the way.

>>60992505
Vect has probably been a pretty big sore spot for Malys at some times. Because of their on-again off-again relationship, there have been points where Vect had the colossal wraithbone balls to say to Malys’ face “I’m breaking up with you”. Granted, he would have been ripped to shreds in the second afterwards and it would been revealed that instead of the actual Vect it was some slave or other Dark Eldar surgically altered to act as a proxy for Vect, but the meaning is still there. Of course there’s also been times where Malys has been the one to initiate the breakup, and other times where they just mutually agree to take a break from one another.

>>61003009
Savlar, where the drugs are so abundant even the daemons are stoned.

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>>61004132
>>61003009
The nature of the Small Gods of Savlar has never been determined. Possibly can never be determined. Are they deamons? Drug induced hallucination with similarities born from the minds of the users shared culture and mindset? The will and belief of the population made manifest? It genuinely could be either, any, all or none. Welcome to Savlar where the drugs are plentiful and answers aren't.

But there is this to consider. The Faith of the Broken God is a very separate and different thing to the Faith of the Small Gods. The locals believe in both (the Small Gods don't exclude the presence of bigger fish, though warn not to draw their attention) whereas every almost every other branch of the Mechanics has been monotheistic or pantheistic with the pantheist minority seeing the universe and the Omnissiah as one and the same and lesser gods as either unworthy of consideration of phantoms that will draw you to damnation.

All except the Savlar Brotherhood who seem to at least acknowledge and respect the Small Gods even if they don't actually worship them in any way. This could be just cultural bleed from the savages beyond their gates but they don't typically mingle with them and absolutely do not recruit from outside their walls.

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>>60992932

I'm saving this, it's great. Especially the part about Tau trying to tell reality how it's supposed to work.

>>61003009
>>61003887
It certainly explains a lot about Salvar if the process of producing Neutronium involves Warp-machinery. Even if it's not a hole into the warp or something, some sort of core of warpstuff untouched by the Chaos-gods would still have a gradual effect on the surrounding area, sort of like a nuclear powerplant leaking radiation, only in this case they've managed to either shore up whatever started leaking or slowed it to enough of a trickle for Savlar to still be technically-livable, or at least functional.
It also explains at least part of why they're so hostilely against anyone coming in- there's both risk of contamination, and a risk of somebody freaking out when they discover exactly what's being used to forge all this neutronium.

>>61007102
That and it's their home, all they have and all they hold dear and as much as they love it they will see it dead before defiled and they really don't like Mars.

>>61007102
That's what happened with Caliban and that's what ruined the Watchers' world.

>>60997076
Is Ghazzy famous enough yet that Oscar knows of him? We haven't really hammered out his history beyond the last two Armageddon Wars.

>>61008795
Armageddon Wars are significant events in their own right, and Oscar has a personal history with the place. Leading two of them would probably be enough for Oscar to know who he is on their own.

Most of the stuff from the last few threads is up on the wiki. Nicassar and Yu'vath too. Am going to see about uploading the servo-brain image.

>>61010915
Good work.

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>>61010915
You da real MVP, man.

>>61007211
Their world also had more of an ecology on it. Savlar is only inhabitable by accident

>>60898868
W-what is this place?

>>60899079
This is epic dude wow.

Did anyone save that evolution of the Battle Sister Augmentation diagram?

>>61005358
Holy shit dude censor that lewdity, you can see their cables interfacing and everything!

Should I make a new thread next time this die? It should be titled 65, because I misnamed thread 64 into 62 and thus comes 62a1 and 62a2.

>>61015617
Either that or 63 - Ordo Chronus Boogaloo

Also are there any craftworlds specifically involved with Ultramar?

>>61012752
long running thing /tg/ has been getting done

>>61010915
How much of the original personality and agency survives? Or are they just a data storage device with occasional odd behaviour? Would someone be able to recognize one as someone they used to know?

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>>61013577
This one?

>>61015875
Iyanden is within spitting distance of them. Myrmeara is in the middle of Tau space, so they're not that far off.

>>61012752
For 22 months no less.

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>>60952430
One thing that might be really interesting to see if the perspective of one of the Handmaidens on the opposite side of the galaxy from Isha. The Custodes apparently retired with Oscar, but the Handmaidens were still out there doing Isha’s work. The Handmaidens can sense whenever something is wrong with Isha, but the off-season pairing of the case and otherwise Isha would not have spent 150 years sunbathing on Beach Planet and Thor’s news would not have been a surprise to anybody.

From the perspective of a handmaiden, who basically act as a combination relief worker, first responder, wetworks agent, and ninja, they would see all of the suffering caused by Vandire’s reign first hand and wonder where Isha was. They would basically feel like their goddess had abandoned them, despite carrying a piece of her inside them.

>>61021060
Isha and the Handmaidens might not be that strongly linked. They are not ordained women, they are primarily bodyguards. Presumably when they were not needed to go to the Beach Planet most of them bar one went off to be guards for her priestesses and their temples. The Civil War seemed to not effect the eldar as much as the humans beyond some high level politics. Possibly Isha would only have detected a vague sense of unease bleeding across the connection and shrugged it off as them just missing her, she had been with them for thousands of years.

>>61021421
That is true, the handmaidens are technically drawn from Isha's priesthood if having a really weird relationship with it. Though you might have some still roaming the galaxy looking for ingredients for for cures and what not.

The eldar did participate in the civil war. Eldar were part of Guard regiments on both sides, and some of the Craftworlds posted eldar bodyguards to Vandire, which the other half freaked out over. There was a blurb summarizing it earlier along with previous mentions. It probably didn't get to the point of shooting at each other but it got pretty bad. Which is probably why although the eldar say the civil war demonstrated the unfitness of humanity to rule, they don't make too big a deal over it because otherwise it tars them by proxy. And the eldar never like to lose face.

>>61022961
It was mostly that the ones close to Vandire were trying to curb and mitigate his behaviour. Or so they claim. True or not they won no friends.

>>61018845
There should be a dotted line sideways from the Summer Frost for Valkyrie. It's mildly distinct even if it was accidental

>>61015875
>>61018974
Honestly, I think Iyanden and the Ultramarines would be somewhat close, though obviously not to the point that Ulthwe and Cadia are obviously. Both have lost whom they consider their best and bravest to the Nids and both are relatively long-lived. The fact that Ultramar seems to be a major trading power and Iyanden is a major Navy port (reluctant though it may be) would also help foster ties between the two powers.

That being said, the galaxy's got a lot more Craftworlds than everyone's favourite Famous Eldar Hangouts™, so it stands to reason that there'd be a lot of Eldar running about Ultramar, just not in Iyanden blue and yellow.

>>61027084
How many named Craftworlds are there left in the fluff to flesh out?

>>61028694
Accounted for - Alaitoc, Altansar, Il-Kaith, Dorhai, Iybraesil, Kher-Ys, Anaen, Kaelor, Lugganath, Myrmeara, Yme-Loc, Bel-Shammon, Malan'tai, Ulthwe, Saim-Hann, Iyanden, and Biel-Tan.
Unaccounted for - a bunch of minor ones and missing ones.

>>61027084
There was a suggestion that the Iyanden representative to Ultramar is an eccentric Ultraboo Ilyan Natase, who is just so over the top he comes across to the locals as being some stereotype of their ways (though in reality he's just excited in the way eldar tend to get). I don't know if it got scrapped, but I found it interesting.

there was some suggestion Vandire won favor with Survivor Civilizations by letting them exploit administrated worlds with a cut for the administratum.

>>61032935

Is that something you found around, or drew yourself?

>>61033524

Oh, just found. Ages ago, somewhere on this board.

>>61029646
Ilyan Natase was discussed but went nowhere beyond providing inspiration for the origin of Head Librarian Tigarus. For one thing it is not possible for him to be a hybrid.

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>>61036355
I think it was that at least one anon kept trying to push for him being an experimental hybrid despite this watering down the significance of the Impossible Child. The current Nobledark Varro Tigurius is just a human raised by eldar who has been sent to live with his own kind and make a life for himself. He still writes letters home every month to his dear old mum. For him the adoption of Ultramar culture and customs is just trying to get in touch with his roots and learn what it is to be human.

If we are making Illiyan Nastase then he would have to be something like the Iyanden representative to Ultramar. His job isn't to be an ambassador as such, they are all at least in part a part of the same nation; The Imperium. His job is more the coordination of efforts between the Iyanden Battle Fleet on behalf of the Imperial Navy (of which he is officially a member of and who pay his wages) and the Ultramar Navy. Ultramar as an old and prosperous Survivor Civ has it's own substantial military and resources to marshal in addition to what it pays in tithe to the Imperium. Illiyan Nastase is there to ensure that there isn't any cross-purpose wasting of resources between the two great nations or tragic circular firing squad incidents.

It was impressed upon him by his superiors on the craftworld that he try and adopt some of the customs of the humans he would be working with because it would make his job a bit easier. Now they are worried he's gone native. He wears a tunic more than the robes of his craftworld except on important occasions where he wears a toga. On visits home he tries to introduce the eldar to "not as bad as it looks" human food, it has not caught on.

Like all eldar he is psychic but like most eldar not massively so. It is unknown if he has broken faith with the eldar pantheon as he has been seen in the temple of Hera but neither faith is entirely exclusive to the other.

>>61026697
Are they actually distinct enough to warrant it? I just assumed that the differences were cultural and the job that they did.

>>61032935
I love that this might actually be a thing that could happen in Nobledark. Just some 500-year old Guardian patrolling on his ancient hoverbike, getting a little peckish at the end of his shift, deciding to get some takeaway from the pimply teenager at a nearby fast food shop, and nobody bats an eye.

That reminds me- between Eldar jetbike technology and the fact that the Imperium's a little better at the whole knowledge business, should hoverbikes and the like be more common? I read somewhere that human jetbikes are usually reserved for the Space Marines, but that can't be right, surely? All right, maybe they're not sold in used vehicle lots, but I can certainly see the Guard, Arbites and other such specialized organizations using them on a fairly regular basis.

>>61039249
In the Eisenhorn and Space Wolf books there are widespread use of "air cars" by civilians on high tech worlds, Holy Terra being a prime example where the air around the spires is pretty chaotic with them. They seem to work using anti-gravity.

So in vanilla there seems to be a distinction between the lightweight model and the military grade used for shit like the land speeder. The miniaturized military grade seems to have been lost in vanilla with the extinction of jet-bikes as a result.

In Nobledark Imperium the miniaturized military grade anti-grav motor has not been lost although the secrets of it's mass production have been so every single example has to be made by hand which is skilled and specialist work and time consuming and requires high end components. All of this is obscenely expensive.

Air-cars are presumably still a thing in common use. Air-bikes are presumably a rich fools toy. The Imperium has many rich fools.

>>61039377
Maybe there can be a slightly less efficient jetbike for IG use? A few members of my current gaming group's interested in both Only War and the Nobledark universe, and this thread's given me an idea of proposing an IG jetbike regiment.

>>61040592
Even the lesser quality jetbikes would be very expensive. But they could be done in an IG regiment. Vostroyan Firstborn spring instantly to mind. High tech and prosperous hive world with a substantial industrial base and significant Mechanicus presence. Also a whole lot of rich boys going off to war. Maybe their is a tradition, at least in one regiment or in enough of them to make up one regiment, where they take their bikes to war. These flying warbikes are handed down the line from first born son to first born son and as this is high-end AdMech gear it doesn't wear out and are usually a lot more durable than the riders. Point is that they accumulate faster than they are destroyed down the generations resulting in a t least a few regiments of aristocrats and lesser nobility with a tradition of heirloom jetbike cavalry.

>>61039249
Many Hive Worlds have eldar enclaves. It's not a "could" have happened. It is a semi-regular occurrence.

>>61040858
Now I'm imagining an Armageddon Steel Legion version of a jetbike squad. They'd be the "aristocracy" of a tribe like the Kill-Crazi, and their jetbikes may or may not include "technically an engine for a Valkyrie with a seat, steering, and some wheels welded on" rather than legit jetbikes, and in general their repairs and operational standards are more kitbashing and using what's at hand rather than proper maintenance.

>>61042048
A Valkyrie engine, a fuel tank, a bunch of gravchutes held on with duct tape and wired to a single switch. It doesn't fly as such, it more sort of hops and falls slowly because of the gravchutes, thrust is offered in a abundance by the Valkyrie engine. You steer by holding on with your knees and throwing your weight. Ideally there would be a set of handlebars and someone holding a weapon so one person could shoot and another drive, sadly it's too shit and can't handle the additional weight so it's one man holding on to a bunny hopping techno-blasphemy with his legs and trying to aim some sort of weapon.

It is said that the mere sight of these abominations can make the most hard hearted tech-adept break down in tears.

>>61038716
Probably not as the augmentation is the same. It's just that the result is different because of genetic contamination.

>>61043599
Meanwhile, Hammerhead Bill and Rommel looks on and nods approvingly.

>>61044910
I think that they should be called Space Hoppers. They are unpredictable but often oddly effective. They have never been exported out of the Ashlanders because nobody else is bonkers enough to use them. Also it upsets the adepts that they even exist.

>>61046652
>nobody else is bonkers enough to use them
That's a very broad and inaccurate generalization. The Happalachians would probably love them, they just can't afford them because they're a backwoods planet and don't have the resources of a wrecked Rok laying around to build one themselves.

>>61048138
It is interesting to consider what would come of a human society that’s had hundreds of years hard pressed by war to study the near-peak Ork-tech they’re sitting on top of. Even just the opportunities to analyze the surviving and actually theoretically functional parts of Ork technical problem solving to understand their technological programming would be significant, let alone any reverse engineering or societal influence.

>>61049481
The problem with that is that a lot of ork tech doesn't work right if not worked by an ork.

>>61048138
Bonkers enough to use them whilst still being technologically advanced and sane enough to build them.

>>61048138
There's also the distance issue to consider. Armageddon is in the northern Segmentum Solar. Happalachia is near Tau space. They may not have ever heard of one another.

This is a galaxy that's big enough that most Interexi have never seen a Tau, and most inhabitants of Ultramar likely only know of kinebrach and felinids via pictures in Herotodus-esque The Histories book. Space travel in most parts of the Imperium is expensive and inconsistent. Kind of like during the 17th through 19th centuries.

>>61039377
>>61040592
>>61040858
There's always the mini-mecha of Arkhan and the Hubworlder Destroyermen suits as examples. Lovingly crafted heirlooms hundreds of years old that are cared for in passed down through generations in concert. Only rarely do you get new ones being made, using by begging a tech-priest. You could even draw parallels with noblemen and particularly prized horses.

>>61051464
what have we done with knight houses?

>>61054123
Nothing much, there was a brief mention of drawing inspiration from the 5th edition Bretonnian fluff from WHFB for their background that seemed to be agreeable to folks at the time but nothing much since.

>>61054123
>>61054995
Having House Devine fall like in canon and burn Molech's original population of pterodactyls to the ground would be another good victory for Chaos during the War of the Beast. Especially with Molech so close to Earth.

>>61055931
We already have Molech being burned to the ground in the WotB, although we haven't settled on anyone to be specifically responsible.

>>61037197
In this AU he still wouldn't be an astropath or associated with the DAs

>>61058005
I'm thinking either

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Gharkul_Blackfang

or

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Arch-Vandal_of_Pasiphae

The first one a powerhouse of destruction that fucked up significant elements of three Legions and required direct intervention from the Emperor to defeat. In this AU it is less likely to be the Emperor who gets them because Emperor once the Imperium got to a decent size mostly stayed on Old Earth and took the job of ruling very seriously. The forces of Horus would have been strictly space support for the most part with the majority of the ground forces being directed by Dorn and Morty. Some of the successes of Blackfang would have been because Morty and Dorn were a little uncooperative with each other and both had poor communication skills. Also their combat doctrine was not the most adaptable to changing circumstances. Dorn tended to like finding a wall to defend and was overly fond of holding positions and securing ground where as Morty wouldn't stop. Due to their lack of cooperation they didn't make up for each others weaknesses by integrating their forces and instead had two distinct forces, each with a glaring weakness against the ever so manoeuvrable and mobile Blackfang Marauders.

There were Custodius at that war, but not very many. Each Primarch, as a person of supreme importance to the smooth running of the Imperium, would have had at least one each posted as a bodyguard but more likely a squad. So that's potentially as many as 30 tops.

Arch-Vandal of Pasiphae has a fucking awesome title.

>>61059077
Add to that it probably wouldn't be the primarchs themselves that would be there. The chances of 3 of them being in the same general area would be remote unless it was orchestrated for them to be there.

>>61060000
That's true, you might have something like the strategic but cautious Alexius Pollux, the proto-Black Templar Typhon, and freaking Abbadon leading the charge. Which would either be amazing or a shitshow.

Also on a tangentally related note, the new Battle Angel Alito trailer is pretty funny when you realize it could be a trailer for a movie about the early days of Oscar's life in Terawatt with only minor adjustments. Complete with a salty Orioc magos and his Skitarii who wants to get his hands on the last Man of Gold.

>>61060991
Ezekiel Abbadon actually had both his arms replaced with augmatics at some point before his death pushing back a black crusade, so the void combat might get a little rough

>>61060991
Alexius Pollux we know survives at least as he marries the daughter of The Exiled King and cofounds Rynn's World, this being one of the accolades that move him from a great commander to a legendary one that King Rynn would entrust the safety of his people to.

Having Abbadon here is good because he was all about the Imperial Navy in contrast to Uncle Horus who was more interested in the Merchant Navy sand maintaining space superiority despite the best efforts of a shit load of orks, chaos orks and chaos and dark eldar would go a long way to showing why the Void Born considered him a worthy successor to his uncle's crown.

Having a third big name there is perhaps pushing it. Maybe have somebody like

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Crysos_Morturg

Recruited in the wake of the Rangda Xenocide and extremely grateful not to be cattle for maggots. Not actually one of the docile Thrall breed as his parents were recent captures. Just a small child when the Emperor came Chad-striding into Rangda and putting the golden boot to Iron Mind balls.

Gets severely fucked up on Molech, not so bad that he needs a Dreadnaught, which is good because they don't have an empty one, but too much to stay on the men-at-arms list.

Spends his twilight years as an advisor and training regime director to the newly founded Deathwatch.

Did we do anything with Skyrar of Caladonia?

>>61064728
Transhuman supremacist. Didn't like the idea that augmented humans were expected to play second fiddle to normies. Betrayed Russ during the War of the Beast, later returned in M32 to fuck up Fenris in the Battle of the Fang. Vlka Fenryka were trying to make the Canis Helix stable enough to use on non-Fenrisians, and Skyrar, who had basically been unable to recruit since the WotB due to lack of Fenrisians, wanted it. Brought a shitload of daemons to help out.

Harek Ironhelm could handle Skyrar, not his tag alongs. Invokes the nuclear option and calls in Magnus and the Grey Knights. Magnus and GKs handle the daemon side of things while Wolves fight Dark Wolves. Skyrar is prevented from destroying Fenris, but the research is stolen and Ironhelm dies. Skyrar is roaming around as another warband as evil werewolves in SPAAACE! (as opposed to the Space Wolves, who are Viking Werewolves in...well, you get the idea)

>>61063376
He was a full-blooded Void Born too, wasn't he?

>>61065120 (same)
>Skyrar

Forgot to mention, this is what I recall we had last I checked. I don't know for sure if that was the consensus in the thread or things have changed since then.

>>61065120
Also they were close enough that Russ would have called him brother. Also it's possible he hates Chaos. Skyrar was Nordyc but Caledonia is and remained Gredbritonic and was taken in the days of the Unspeekable Tyrant.

He was almost certainly psychologically damaged from the get go from that but rather than direct all of his ire on Chaos saw mortal men as weak for allowing Chaos to fester.

>>61065120
He was. Also while some of the Sol Voidborn were compatible with astartes modifications, and actually became some of the Great Crusade's best units of literal space marines under the command of Horus and Abbadon, neither were astartes themselves. Horus might have had some non-apparent cybernetic augmentations, but Abbadon was notedly more of a warrior statesman than the diplomatic merchant prince that was his uncle, and might have gone in for advanced cybernetics to vie against enemies if personal combat became necessary.

>>61065120
So deadly Scottish transhuman space werewolves are a problem in the western galaxy. Interesting that on the galactic scale much of the western galaxy is wrapped up in longterm Human and Eldar anti/pro chaos wars and fallout, and he Eastern galaxy was wilderness with some established Imperial colonies until it rapidly filled up with Necrons and Tyranids, separated from the Imperium in the south by a thick buffer of Ork empires.

>>61070447
Pretty much. The eastern galaxy used to be the boring, (relatively, this is Warhammer) safe part, while the west was in a constant dick fight with the dicks from the Eye of Terror. If you look at a map, you can see how the route between Sol and the Eye/Armageddon in the southern Segmentum Obscurus/northern Segmentum Solar sees the worst of the fighting (kind of like the distance between Pyongyang and Seoul in the Korean War, or between Richmond and Washington D.C. in the U.S. Civil War).

Part of the reason for the planned settlement of Cadia was to stop that shit and put a buffer on Chaos. It works...sometimes.

Then Chaos tore a new bunghole in the eastern side of the galaxy (Hadex Anomaly). Then genestealers, and then tyranids. And then the northeastern side of the Milky Way, which was always fringe-y due to being located on the opposite end of the Milky Way from Sol (meaning you either have to go by the Eye or all the way around Ultramar) turn out to be home to metal skeletons.

You can see this attitude mirrored in the Tau. Farsight fought on the northwestern front of the empire and came to the conclusion of "by the Tau'va, if we don't do something Chaos is going to fuck us all", while Shadowsun fought on the southeast and concluded "by the Tau'va, if we don't do something the tyranids are going to fuck us all".

Interestingly too, a lot of Xenos in the Segmentum Obscurus have ties to the Old Empire (Sslyth, Demiurg, Stryxis, maybe Rak'gol).

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>>61063428
Or he could have been just a regular human commander attached to the Death Guard. Every Space Marine behind a desk is not making the best out of their extremely expensive augmentations that the Imperium invested in them.

>>61072480
That too, Though we have mentioned that some heavily injured veteran Astartes not mangled enough to end up in a dreadnaught end up in the Administratum handling Astartes-related business or similar roles, since it isn't wholy unfamiliar. Dantioch, for example, was not fit for combat after what the Hrud did to him. Deathwatch advisor and occassional participant sounds like one of those jobs.

>>61070978
Was there anything particularly horrible that was birthed by the Hadex Anomaly?

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>>60912479
All right, after way longer than it should have taken, here's the next little bit for this star-battle.

Probes reach detected ship signatures. Vessels are confirmed as Chaos-vessels, and identified as the Crone Eldar Styx-class Heavy Cruiser "Manifest Ecstasy," accompanied by Murder-class Cruisers "Despair Horizon" and "Inflexible," and Hellbringer-class Light Cruisers "Illicit Aquisition" and "Jackson's Neverland." (revised)

All Imperial ships reduce speed, standard intercepting torpedo spreads are launched. Rear-Admiral Sprague and Lord-Captain Johnstein hold deliberations as to the proper course of action; in light of anticipated arrival of Primary battlefleets en-route to the system, the decision is reached to engage and fight a delaying action. Battlegroup Vohan forms a line of battle, alongside "Stalward Companion" and "Ardent Prayer" from Battlegroup Samar. Destroyers are ordered to swing wide, to cross-pattern their torpedo launches. "Enduring Conviction," "Legal Repercussion," and "Resplendent Piety" adopt rearguard positions to provide long-range supporting fire.

Torpedo screen reaches Chaos fleet; majority of torpedoes shot down by massed point-defenses. One successful torpedo hit on the "Despair Horizon;" structural damage minimal. "Manifest Ecstasy" adopts a rearguard position, with "Despair Horizon" and "Inflexible" spearheading the formation, while "Illicit Aquisition" and "Jackson's Neverland" bring up the flanks. Chaos fleet moves to engage at the Murder-class' full speed; "Manifest Ecstacy" observed maneuvering to remain behind the spearhead.

Imperial destroyers complete their maneuver and are able to launch a second spread of torpedoes. Strikecraft from "Enduring Conviction" follow behind the torpedo spread, with Fury Interceptors flying interference ahead of the Starhawk Bombers.

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>>61075748
"Manifest Ecstacy" is the first vessel to reach effective firing range, and fires her long-range weapon compliment on the Imperial fleet. Corvette "Try Me" suffers multiple direct hits and is destroyed; no life-pod launches detected. Voidshields on the "Ardent Prayer" are breached, with heavy damage sustained to her prow. "Stalwart Companion" voidshields are reduced to half-strength. "Enduring Conviction" returns fire with her Nova Cannon; shot fails to hit the "Manifest Ecstacy," but scores an indirect hit on "Jackson's Neverland," whose voidshields manage to hold.

Second spread of torpedoes reaches the Chaos fleet, with strikecraft following close behind. Light cruisers maneuver to avoid, while "Manifest Ecstacy" turns back and away from the rest of her fleet. "Jackson's Neverland" struck by one torpedo admidships, suffering minor structural damage and the loss of a minor weapon system. The "Inflexible" suffers three successful torpedo hits; minimal structural damage. Fury Interceptors and Starhawk bombers target the "Inflexible" and successfully destroy multiple point-defense systems; minor structural damage inflicted. Strike craft suffer moderate losses, and begin return run to rearm.

Both fleets enter long-range battery engagement range. The Imperial line begins beating to sunward and opens fire with lances and longer-ranged Macrobatteries; the Chaos fleet tacks leeward to come about behind the Imperial line, with the "Illicit Aquisition" and "Jackson's Neverland" returning fire. Imperial support group makes to fall back towards Telis, tacking and jibing in order to continue firing as they retreat.

>>61076073
>beating to sunward
>tacking to leeward
>tacking and jibing
Very nautical. I approve.

>>61075235
We don't know. All that has been said so far is that it postdates the Great Crusade, its creation was part of a victory for Chaos, and that's about it. No additional details yet.

>>61070447
The Ultramar/eastern Fringe campaign of the War of the Beast was probably really interesting. Especially as there is no Ruinstorm in this timeline.

Not that Chaos needed it. As has been pointed out before the War of the Beast wasn't a simple civil war with a single superpower cannibalizing itself like the Horus Heresy, but a full-on slugging match between two (technically three) large interstellar powers (plus insurrection from people being convinced to go traitor). Nineteen primarchs would be barely enough to keep a lid on things.

>>61058005
>>61059077
In that case maybe we should move House Devine. It seems unlikely the AdBio would have a Knight House around to protect them anyways.

>>61054995
>tfw when you realize the Knights are still screaming "for the Lady" as they go into battle, but in this timeline they just mean Isha instead of Lileath

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>>61076073
"Jackson's Neverland" loses voidshields to concentrated Lance-fire and turns away, circling wide to allow her voidshields time to recharge. Imperial destroyers "Seven to One" and "I am Alfalfa" lose voidshields and turn to make for Telis, as does the "Ardent Prayer." Main Imperial line forced to tack to leeward to avoid giving the Chaos fleet a clear shot towards Telis, entering into main battery range. Both fleets open fire with full weapons compliment.

"Stalwart Companion" loses voidshields, but remains in the line of battle, focusing her fire on "Inflexible." Supporting fire from the "Frank Exchange" and "Legal Repercussion" result in the successful breaching of the "Inflexible's" voidshields. "Inflexible" returns fire, causing moderate structural damage to the "Stalwart Companion." Both fleet lines sail out of effective firing range of main batteries, with the Imperial fleet turning about and continuing to focus fire on the "Inflexible," scoring multiple confirmed lance hits. Minimal structure damage to the "Inflexible."

Destroyers launch a torpedo screen to discourage the Chaos fleet from crossing the T. "Enduring Conviction" redeploys her rearmed Starhawks and Fury Interceptors. Assorted starcraft launched from the Telis tether also join the attack, supplementing the Bomber squadrons. Chaos fleet turns away to avoid the torpedoes, leaving only the "Illicit Acquisition" able to continue returning fire. "Illicit Acquisition" focuses fire on the "Legal Repercussion," forcing her to turn away towards Telis as her voidshields are breached.

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>>61076841
"Manifest Ecstacy" returns from her maneuvers, and fires on the "Stalwart Companion." Major structural damage sustained, with three macrocannons rendered inoperable and multiple system failures across the ship. "Stalwart Companion" turns toward Telis, while "Spirit of Law" moves to shield her from further fire from "Illicit Acquisition." Imperial line of battle now consists of Light Cruiser "Spirit of Law," Sword-class Frigate "Frank Exchange," and Destroyers "Pill Dispenser" and "Major Minor."

Multiple incoming warp signatures detected on the system edge. Chaos fleet slows pursuit and begins to regroup and starts turning in preparation to engage. "Jackson's Wonderland" engages engine boost in an attempt to rejoin the main line of battle.

Arrival in-system of the Imperial "Wolf Pack" Fourth Chanathian Rapid Response group, comprised of Sword-class Frigate "No You," Firestorm-class Frigates "Formal Complaint" and "Ineffable Distain," and Cobra-class Destroyers "Motivation Dispenser," "For You," "How it Fares," and "Double or Nothing."

Brief tactical disruption, as information relay aboard the "Spirit of Law" is temporarily drowned out by multiple expletives issued by Lord-Captain Johnstein.

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>>61075748
>>61076073
>>61076841
>>61077139
And on that note, I hope you enjoyed tonight's continuation of the Battle of Telis Grandios. I'll post more once I've gotten it written out, but right now it's pretty late for me, so it'll have to wait. Hopefully this is still entertaining to read despite the dry tone; it's technically my first time attempting to write in this style, and I'm not sure if I'm managing to convey everything that I'm trying to.
>>61076240
Glad you like it! I'm sure that there are mistakes in how those terms are being used somewhere, but the general idea I'm trying to convey is that the Imperial fleet is trying to fight a retreating battle to avoid getting caught in a proper line-battle brawl, but their maneuvering options are limited by the fact that they have to stay between the Chaos fleet and the Orbital Tether.
this is also one of the ways in which the spacebattles diverge from the proper "Age of Sail" theme that they're going for; ships falling out of line to recharge shields isn't something you'd see in the ships of wood, but makes sense for the Imperium to do, since rather than being out of the fight until repaired like if a wooden ship got demasted, it's just a matter of giving the ship time to bring her shields back up.
Even so, in this fight the Imperium is bleeding ships too quickly for her line of battle to remain cohesive for much longer; it's one thing for one cruiser to fall out of line after a pass, it's quite another to lose nearly half the ships in the line because they're just that badly outgunned.

I'm trying to do a writeup of the demiurg so we can finally move them out of the Notes section, and I need a name for their forge god. Anyone have any ideas?

>>61078468
Maybe something like Jen'Doh? or in other words, a bastardization of "Jane Doe?" It's just the first thing that comes to mind.

>>61076725
It is said that time doesn't work at all properly near it. And the Ordo Chronus vanished. It's possible that these two events are not unrelated

>>61039249
I wonder what they would order. Also how's inquisitor Cadmus in this universe?

>>61083247
Who?

Guy from this series:

http://pastebin.com/VFfiCcK9

http://pastebin.com/HpPHKLZ6

>>61073858
So he got fucked up during the great crusade and had risen to high command down a different road by this point.

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>>61083438
Huh? Is this related to something else?

Also futurist bump

>>61085349

It's just porn fic of canon 40k that someone made a thread about a few weeks ago.

>>61077246
It would be interesting to write up a longer comparison between the more varied makes of Imperial ships we've described, figure a brief comparison would also be fun. Sol sets the tone for most high-end ships in Segmentum Solar, a few following streamlined and dynamic tenants of Lunar design, most in Martian styles of ornamentation fit for the very grandest industrial space cathedrals. The Hubworlders build greebly bricks, the Interex have ships that sit somewhere between star trek and wars, and Ultramar's have a distinctly classical vibe when they get architectural. Voidborn ships are more gothic castle than cathedral but were otherwise pretty standard cherished relics of Old Night when the great crusade began, and being on the vanguard means a lot of the original Fallen are still using those now haunted castle ships they absconded with.

The Imperial Navy's vessels were a mix of Martian and Void Born ships joined by the fancy new vessels Oscar was ordering built around Luna for the Great Crusade. Because Luna and other Survivor Civs can't field the whole navy most ships of the line will always be Mechanicus produced. However, there's still less political need to placate the OMB on Mars, so while a certain level of sanctification is taken as useful in warp transit the Imperium is able to buy much more utilitarian ships. The greater leverage on Mars that made auto-loading macrocannons and other technologies that fell out of use after the Iron War standard in most of the Imperium has also kept them from having to pay for some of the excesses of Mechanicus ship building. Instead of their expensive gothic stylings Imperial ships of the line in the dark millennia layer immense angular bunkers and and outcroppings of weapons and sensors over the same superstructures. When they do embrace ornamentation it is usually in a nod to the Lunar school, sporting a sleek armored prow, a tall gleaming command tower among the squat point defense turrets, etc.

>>61055931
House Devine could have sideded with Chaos because Imperium was allied with the eldar. But they hadn't allied with the true eldar. Croneworlders were the true inheritors of their old empire and the only allies worth having.

Here's a question i don't think has been asked; How do the AdMech anx Isha view each other?

>>61087489
Knight houses having ties with the fae folk through Old Night would be an interesting part of the sub-faction in general.

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A quote I thought of when it was pointed out how the Old One Blackstone Fortresses take the form of Chaos' eight-pointed star.

“The eight-pointed star. You have no idea how much I hate what that symbol has become. Once it actually meant something. To my people, it represented the symbolic representation of one of the fundamental truths of the universe. The idea that from nothing, came everything. My people found beauty in it, covered their architecture with it, built starships in its shape. It was by this ethos that we lived our lives. Even though I’m far from the sentimental sort, I must admit I preferred that interpretation over what has become. A symbol for unruly, undisciplined children and broken constructs to define themselves by.

I suppose by your standards the best way of putting it would be as if a universal statement of purpose and philosophy had been turned into a gang sign. There’s nothing I hated more than what I had to brand myself with that sigil in a twisted way of paying fealty to those who now dominate the Warp. I’m sure the very least to the Changer of Ways knows the original meaning behind the symbol, and is probably laughing himself silly over the irony.”

-- Be’lakor, in a rare musing to one of the Lost and the Damned

I figure this is one of those dick moments like how in canon Vect likes to tell people stories and then intentionally doesn't say how they end to torment them. He wouldn't say this to a Crone because they'd start frothing at the mouth over him disrespecting their religious symbol.

Double extra “Be’lakor is a hypocritical asshole” points for the fact that Be’lakor regularly brands independent Warp entities with the eight-pointed star when he inducts them into his service, even though he stated when it happened to him it was the most demeaning moment of his life.

>>61089323
>even though he stated when it happened to him it was the most demeaning moment of his life.
Of course, when he uses it its with the proper meaning and knowledge and legacy, younger beings should be honored to bear it for him.

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Thought I’d write up the destruction of Macharia to get it off the Notes page.

Macharia is a Hive World in the Segmentum Obscurus that has the dubious distinction of being the closest Hive World to the Cadian Gate and the Eye of Terror. Normally the conditions surrounding the Eye of Terror and the inhabitants that live within it are too harsh to allow a hive world to exist (indeed, no Hive World could exist within the Cadian System itself or else it would be a target of opportunity for Crone Eldar raiders), but being slightly “downwind” of the Cadian Gate in a neighboring sector Macharia is just far enough away from the Eye to allow a Hive World to exist. Macharia is significantly more fortify than your average Hive World, but it is a Hive World nonetheless. Together the three systems of Cadia, Agripinaa, and Macharia are considered the crown jewels of the region surrounding the Cadian Gate, a trinity of worlds that acts as the Imperium’s first bastion against any Chaos incursion.

The surface of Macharia has seen hordes of plague zombies raised by wight kings, roving bands of Khornate Crone Eldar berserkers, and attacks by the imposing, deadly Fallen, just like any other system neighboring the Cadian Gate region. During the 12th Black Crusade, after the repeated failure of Cadia to hold back the Chaos death fleet, the imperial navy fell back and drew a secondary battle line at Macharia, hoping to halt the Chaos invasion there. The surface of Macharia was fortified to the greatest degree possible and Imperial warships buzzed about the planets of the system like angry hornets. Before long the Chaos war fleet entered the system, headed by the dark chaplain Erebus and his flagship the Chariot of the Gods, a.k.a. the Planet Killer.

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>>61089737
The Imperial military had their doubts about the ability to hold Macharia, but they were determined to take as many of the Chaos invaders down with them. Macharia was a Hive World, and nobody expected the planet could be taken with anything less than protracted, bloody struggle.

Then the Chariot of the Gods ominously shifted configuration before opening fire and unceremoniously reduced Macharia to rubble with a single shot. The beam set fire to the planet’s atmosphere, blew through much of the upper mantle and core, and sent continent-sized chunks hurtling through space. The few ships that survived the sudden conflagration and the resulting debris cloud could not stand up to the Chaos war fleet, having no planet to use as cover and no place to which they could retreat for fuel and repairs, and were quickly swept away. The Last Battle of Macharia, which had been predicted to have taken months or even years, was over within a few days, and there was nothing to stop Chaos forces from moving further into the Milky Way.

The only good news for the Imperium is that the forces of chaos were just too surprised by this turn of events as the Imperium was. Chaos had also expected a long, protracted siege in order to take Macharia, and in fact Erebus was giving a motivational sermon to his troops in preparation for such a battle when the Planet Killer unexpectedly activated and fired on Macharia without orders. Nobody on board the Chariot of the Gods has any idea what caused the ship to activate or how to repeat that shot. Erebus has begun taking to bothering Be’lakor, the “last of the first race to discover the Primordial Truth” in the hopes of getting him to tell Erebus how to unlock the Planet Killer’s secrets. Despite being amused by Erebus’ groveling and his rightful deference, Be’lakor has no intention of sharing such information.

>>61078468
>>61080207
Isn't the Demiurg's god the one that's either "totally not Vaul" or was Vaul after he fucked off the serious disrespect he got after the War in Heaven and went to go do his own thing (and is left ambiguous)?

We really need to figure out how and why the Demiurg aided the pro-Thor side during the Imperial Civil War enough that the Imperium decided to break tradition and add them as an actual member state. Especially given that the Demiurg tend to be very merchant-y.

>>61091268
I thought that it was an Armageddon War that they assisted with

>>61092084
The Demiurg aiding the pro-Thor side of the Imperium was what got the Imperium to change its long-standing policy of "by humans and eldar, for humans and eldar" and start letting other species in. Before that you had the kinebrach who were grandfathered in as the vassal race of a Survivor Civ, the Watchers who were the Dark Angel's worst kept secret, and the Diasporex who were an awkward problem the Imperium dealt with by giving them an honorary seat and ignoring them (which worked fine for the Diasporex).

The end of the Imperial Civil War is when other species started to be let in, and 4k years later views in the Imperium have changed from "us and ours" to "citadel of civilization" (with significant shades of Romanization).

>>61092752
Eh, one of the big points of divergence from canon in this setting is supposed to be how the Imperium DIDN'T go all "suffer not the xenos" during the Great Crusade; hostile races still got the boot, but there were plenty of xenos who were happy to play nice and join the Imperium. And the Eldar weren't even part of the Imperium at that time, since it wasn't until the War of the Beast that Oscar married Isha and made the alliance official. That's a pretty big time gap during which the Imperium would have encountered numberous Xenos and, in a divergence from canon, actually given them a fair shake and a chance to join the Imperium.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was a change of policy in that other species started getting let in as their own political entities, rather than vassal states that are made Imperial in the ways that actually matter.

>>61083355
It's an uh, a long story

>>61093406
During the great crusade the focus was again on human reunification, with no actions taken against peaceable xenos, but also no effort diverted to uplift civilizations that had receded and regressed during Old Night, or removal of tyrants of planetbound civilizations that didn't have significant human populations, and when destroying horrors like the Rangdan Empire it was mostly by happy accident that local xenos were also freed from the abuses of the maggot men. The alien civilizations that were part of the Interex were inducted at the same time as the rest of the Survivor Civilization, but part of it was that Human and Eldar were the major surviving friendly populations in the near half of the galaxy and dominated most political entities. Xenos and outsider polities like Tarellians and others could deal with the Imperium through Rogue Traders, and this was the peak era for writs of trade, where as the later Imperium has major Rogue Trader houses turning back inwards to Imperial markets and forming transtellar corporations around their dynasties since almost all but the margins of the map have been incorporated or overrun.

>>61093406
Kind of what >>61093923 said. There were a lot of Xenos Independens in the galaxy back in the day. Most of the time as long as they weren't actively leading raiding parties into the Imperium the Imperium could care less about what they did. The general policy tended to be "you stay on your side of the fence and I'll stay on mine". The Great Crusade was originally about making humanity strong again up up, and apathetic towards everybody else.

The Imperium interacted diplomatically with races like the tarellians and the eldar, but they weren't exactly eager to absorb them. Indeed, after the Raid, humans and eldar kind of assumed the two groups would go their separate ways. Closer diplomatic ties maybe, but not a full blown alliance. That changed with the WotB.

From there things gradually changed over time and cultural attitudes gradually shifted. The Demiurg were the first non-human, non-eldar group to specifically get the title of being part of the imperium. Not as some vassal state. Not as some trading partner via a Rogue Trader. Full blown members. Then the Imperium started snapping up surrounding friendly civilizations like the Tau in canon. Most of the vassal states in the current millennium are member states their own right.

>>61095073
A good example of this would be Trazyn and Solemnace. When the Imperium found Solemnace they assumed it was inhabited by a very territorial but mostly benign and mindless species of Xenos. They they got shot at by mindless Necrons, but when they retreated nobody followed them and they assume they were just territorial. So the planet was marked up as unusual but left alone.

Then the eldar get ahold of Imperial records due to the alliance, find out about Solemnace, and go "holy shit that is a Necron I thought they were extinct shoot it shoot it shoot it".

Unfortunately when the Imperium got back to Solemnace, the Necron nobles had regained their wits and Trazyn was able to meet with the Imperium as a mental equal. The eldar were freaking out about a living Necron, but the Necrons were simply too well organized to simply wipe out.So the Imperium ends up treating Trazyn as a sovereign ruler of a foreign nation. One they find particularly annoying, but one who they parlay with as a normal leader nevertheless.

The only difference is that Trazyn has no intention of joining the Imperium. From his perspective it would be like British South Africa swearing fealty to Shaka Zulu (yes the tech difference is much less great and it would be more like the emperor of Ming China, but remember, Necron arrogance). And he still likes the Imperium much more than the Silent King anyway.

>>61093923
>>61095073
Fair points. It's just that in the context of being based on the 40k universe, it's important to note that the Imperium in this setting did not have issues with accepting Xenos into the Imperium; certainly they allowed the ones that could be reasoned with to remain independent, but there were likely plenty of instances where either the xenos were already working with a native population of humans and came as part of a package deal (because if your buddies have had your back for the past couple centuries, you're not going to let them get left behind), or races that had problems big enough that they were willing to offer their race's servitude in exchange for Imperial help (not that the Imperium actually enslaved them, but made them vassals and turned their industry towards Imperial ends.

The point about the Demiurg being the first actual Member states is probably the closest to what I was trying to say. The Imperium had Xenos even before the alliance of men and eldar was formalized, but their inclusion was along the lines of that of Abhumans; oddities, but under Imperial law with Imperial rulers working towards Imperial goals. It may be a minor point to make, but I feel it's important to show the overall change in mindset from canon; even when they were in the stage of only focusing on Making Humanity Great Again, there were several minor xenos races willing to throw their lot in with the Imperium, and were given a fair shake at being useful in a "If you're offering, we'll take it" mentality, rather than "work in ze camps until you've all died out."

>>61095403
Oh yes definitely. Indeed the Demiurg were only the first in an "official" sense, kind of like how many people think of Christopher Columbus and 1492 when they think of European Contact with the Americas and forget all about poor Leif Erickson. There are probably better real life historical examples that I can't think of. The others are seen as "not counting" for various reasons (e.g., they were a vassal state), though anyone with half a brain would say they were part of the Imperium (case in point the Dark Angels showed up with the paperwork for the Watchers almost immediately after the law was put into place, they knew what was going on).

The same thing is true with first contact with the eldar. The Imperium and the Craftworlders/Exodites had several encounters with one another before official first contact, some rather tense. Official first contact was a much more peaceful event and is treated as such both because it was the first event where both sides were actually interested in talking to each other (rather than chance encounters or scuffles over territory) and out of political expediency.

>>61087436
Good ideas. There's also the fact that, with a bunch of xenos tech present, if not exactly widespread, and general tempering of the Admech's ability to shut down absolutely everything they consider techheresy, there's probably different potential weaponry on ships built in certain areas. The Imperial standard is still mandated by Admech of course, but the Survivor civs especially may see fit to experiment in fitting xenos weaponry to their ships, like Ultramar testing out Tau railgun turrets on top of their conventional macrobatteries.
Certainly not widespread, of course; 99% of the Imperium's fleet is reliant on the Admech for maintenance, and thus can't afford the risks of deviating from the accepted too much. It's just the the "working prototypes" tend to get spotlighted for the press as examples of Unity and working together and general posturing, when the reality is that most of them are basically stuck in rearguard positions around the systems of the group that produced them, both to keep such symbols from getting Lost in the Warp, and because only the areas where she was built are reliably going to provide her with proper maintenance.

I wrote a thing about Cadia's colonies.

---

It is common (although far from universal) practice for long- serving regiments of the Imperial Army to be given worlds, or parts of worlds, to settle (or re- settle, in many cases) for their retirement. This is simultaneously a sentimental gesture, a lavish reward for years of service to the Imperium, and a practical one; worlds colonized by ex- Guardsmen usually develop highly martial cultures, which will contribute many more fine Guard regiments in the centuries and millennia to come. Also, worlds colonized by Guardsmen are more likely to survive their early years with a bunch of fully equipped veteran soldiers as a PDF.

Although regiments of any world may be selected for colonization, there are a few which pursue these initiatives with unique fervor. One such is the Fenrisian Line, as the Space Wolves try to expand their recruitment population. But by far the most visible and prolific are the Cadians, who pursue settlement with special fervor.

Part of this is simply how many Cadian regiments there are throughout the galaxy. But mainly it is a function of the nature of Cadia itself. The immense fortifications, coating the entire surface of the world and crawling deep into the crust, require tens of billions of soldiers to man properly at minimum. Preferably hundreds of billions; in theory the barrack vaults of the deep tunnels while in top condition could accommodate as many as a trillion men, although this has never been actually achieved. And with every Black Crusade that garrison is brutally decimated, with losses sometimes climbing as high as ninety percent. (At least every drop of Cadian blood is brought with a river of the enemies'.)

(cont.)

>>61099155
In the wake of every Black Crusade, it is imperative that the defenses be rebuilt and remanned as quickly as possible. Even with the main conflict over, as long as the Gate's defenses are compromised raiding bands by the hundred will continue to flow through to plague the Imperium. And not just anyone will do; it needs to be people with a tradition of resistance to Chaos both physically and spiritually, of stubborn, heroic resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, down to the last ditch; who have been doing so for so long it has gone past the cultural and down to the genetic. In short, the Cadian Gate needs to be manned by Cadians.

On each of the thousands of worlds colonized by Cadians, the traditions of Cadia are maintained. Universal conscription with military training starting from the early teens, bunker as the basic mode of architecture, sending out hundreds of regiments to fight in the wider galaxy. Worlds colonized by the Cadians almost invariably become fortress worlds and major Army recruiting worlds, bulwarks of the local defense. They would be deeply valuable to the Imperium for that alone.

And when Cadia lies wounded in the wake of yet another war, they respond. Dispatching soldiers, workers, and colonists by the billion to restore and man damaged defenses and refill empty cities. Thanks to its colonies, it takes mere decades for Cadia to recover after each Black Crusade instead of centuries.

It is estimated, by the Dark Clerks and Grim Statisticians, that the effect of Cadia's colonies on the Imperial defense are about equal to Cadia and the Gate itself. For this, they are referred collectively as the Cadian Shield, a defense stretching across the entire galaxy.


Thoughts?

>>61099174
I like it, it really gives some meat to the notion that Cadia is almost the Imperial Guard as a national entity, matching and surpassing Survivor Civs in terms of influence on regional culture and society. Though technically a war zone and fortification, the millennia old culture of the Cadian gate and its vast support structure has had more than its share of defining moments of Imperial culture.

>>61089737

Have we finally decided on the effects of the Pylons and Cadia on the Warp current out of the Eye of terror yet? In my personal understanding, it is like a drain: water (Warp stuffs, warp currents and shit) flowing over it will be sucked inisde and neutralized (physically by the defenders, warply by the pylons), but when there is enough excess water (think: Black Crusade) the drain will take a while to, well, drain it all, and during this period someone can sail on the overflow past the Cadian gate in the Warp, albeit greatly weakened.

>>61096249

"Please state the reasons for these Xeno independants worthy of being a Member State?"

"What do you mean state a reason? They have been helping us Dark Angel for over three thousand-umpggfffh!!"

"What my Chapter Master meant is that they have the entirety of the Dark Angels and our extended Chapters vouching for them, deal?"

Does anyone remember anything about the Tau Chaos-COM? I remember something about the Kais Doomguy, some Daemonbreaker Spec-ops regiment of Tau with Eldar and Grey Knight 'Advisors'.

>>61101529
The stronger the force pushed against it is the harder it pushes back, extremely small shit doesn't register. It's why despite it being possible to use basic human psykery and summon deamons they still hold back the Eye.

>>61102194

Of course, it's like droplets that stick on the basin. Doesn't even register, until the tap is opened.

>>61099174
This is the good shit and a nice explanation for why both the Cadians can recover so quick and why they seem to be everywhere.

>>61091268
It's "totally not Vaul". It's just a smith/craftsman god that looked a lot like Vaul, acted a lot like Vaul and stopped talking to anyone when Slaanesh fucked itself into existence.

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>>61043599
>>61042048
Oh fucking shit, it's happening.

>>61089147
AdMech think she's a failed relic of a failed system that perpetrates the lie that the flesh has any value. But they are polite about it most of the time.

She thinks they're a bunch of shit stains that could learn form their much wiser AdBio brothers.

>>61089176
I imagine that they also promised them cool shit from the Soul Forge. Or offered them the Oblitorator Virus as a reward

>>61107365
That's because the AdBio have secret shameful boners over Isha. She is in many ways everything they adore.

>>61109904
She's also one of their biggest patrons when it comes to funding, so there's that too

>>61109466
Some could have served the Crones, others could have agreements with nearby exodites, or deals with raiders from the dark city.

>>61109466
Nucklavee in space?

>>61099174
I like it.

>>61105102
I suppose additional doubt could be raised by the fact that a lot of races probably have their gods disappear during the Fall. There had to have been some species in the intervening sixty-five million years to figure out at least a crude way of creating Warp entities, even though they didn't have the expertise and skill the Children of the Old Ones got from their gods.

Case in point, humanity and the Iron Minds/Men of Gold. Most of the small gods would have been butchered when Slaanesh was born and Chaos started actually doing something rather than squabbling amongst themselves.

>>61112063
Figure those minor warp gods would have been stronger or weaker than the Iron Minds and Golden Men of the GaBHD? It seems worth considering just to gauge the scale of the violence in the Fall, and how much Slaanesh consumed. Also how significant would the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion's civil war and collapse have been in ushering in the age of strife for the galaxy? Since the Eldar's presence was mostly in the Webway areas not directly effected by Slaanesh's birth would survive to feel the warp storms, turbulence, and the loss of their gods, but it was the Human Dominion that spread throughout the material galaxy, and their empire also went violently mad. It may have been their god machines that killed or distorted quite a few other species as well as their gods.

>>61112063
The eldar gods predate the arrival of the Old Ones but they were smaller. Making the entire species psychic really buffed them up.

Also the eldar gods know how they were created in two ways. They on the intellectual level recognize that they are constructed from their follower's minds and eventually this shared vision gave rise to their consciousness. They know this.

But they also came into being with full lifetimes of memories. Isha intellectually knows that she gained sapience and sentience when the paleolithic eldar reached a state of complexity in their beliefs that allowed her to become a self sustaining reaction with enough complexity to think for herself. But she was made from their stories and in that moment she remembered giving birth to the first of the eldar children. She remembers the courtships of Kronous and their wedding night. She remembers Lilliath's first steps. She remembers the innocent First Days that truely never were but were real to her and the other gods. Now only Ceggorach and she remain that were of that impossible time.

Of course that means that Isha was never a virgin even at the moment of her creation.

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Space Marines being utilitarian is the best.

>>61112443
Probably weaker. Humanity was one of the dominant powers of the solar system during the DaoT, though there were others. Other species might have used warp power in the 'buff up an elected or crowned god-king' sense or something that would seem alien today. And some species just plain didn't have psykers. Humanity had limited psychic ability before the Age of Strife (which is why they had machines to do it for them) and Tarellians didn't have psykers until some serious natural selection kicked in.

Similarly, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold going crazy would have been as bad as the birth of Slaanesh or everyone else going Mad Max. Of course, this all ties back to the fact that most beings with a high enough level consciousness and not enough sense to look away would have been driven mad by the sight of Slaanesh's birth.

>>61106681
This raises the interesting idea of information on things like the Armageddon Steel Legion and their more unique toys being relatively widespread in one form or another due to the Entertainment Industry. There's probably a whole market for stuff like episodes of the Angry Marines special among planetary nobility and governors, and then bootlegs/redistributions/reacts-to videos of that stuff that they distribute to their planet's populace as part of the bread-and-circuses that keeps people from becoming terminally depressed about their inescapable job working at the Manufactorum. Ship captains are probably happy to have a room/compartment of the ship saved for Entertainment media, because it takes up relatively little space and there's always somebody willing to pay inflated prices for it.

Does Corax has any children or wives?

Maybe he has... had a fellow compatriot during the Sino rebellion of his youth. A love that bloomed under the clandestine war of an uprising. Something that burned away to ashes at the moment of his victory, and he never had any others since?

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>>61118291
Had a family and children. They all died working to death in the Urshii factories. Corvus was middle-aged when he led his revolt, and he had nothing to lose. He never liked to talk about his pre-Imperium life for that reason. It was too sad, and hurt too much to remember.

At least that's how I think we had it.

>>61112063
>Nucklavee in space?
Yes. So much fucking yes. Plague flame thrower breath, quadruped, spear arm and all the rest. Once a valiant knight of House Devine that upon seeing all of the bad shit and with some Chaos Eldar prodding fell into a state of absolute despair. Now rusted into being one with his half deamon machine he serve Nurgle

>>61118381
Pretty much this. Once he was made Primarch he was too busy after that to peruse a family life. Or he just refused to. Whether he would admit it or not Ursh had broken him

So when this thread runs out we'll need at least one more for the promised writing.

Also the knight stuff is starting to look very interesting, anyone up for writing about that?

Next thread:

>>61123571