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>>63044149
I think there was a suggestion Dark Glass was a project by the Dominion to break into the Webway and either use it to attack the Old Eldar Empire or enforce mutually assured destruction so the eldar would stop raiding the Interstellar League.

There was also the Corrupted Man of Gold to add to the list, the Man of Gold who got spat out by the Warp as a crazed Cenobite/Dr. Weir nutjob controlling a high-end DaoT ship who started immediately firing on everyone. After a prolonged struggled the Grey Knights finally brought it down and its death screams cut off the Astronomican for a bunch of worlds. The canon version of events was supposedly mentioned in the 5th Ed. Grey Knights codex, but we weren't sure if it was referring to the Cacodominus.

A whole Dark Age/Golden Age faction might be a little much for the balance of the setting. Most factions aren't playing at their full potential. The Imperium doesn't have access to all their DaoT tech. Neither do any of the eldar factions. Orks are limited by how much WAAAGH! energy there is, and even then some of the subtler ideas the Krork came up with are lost. Necrons lost two-thirds of their forces during the Great Sleep. Tau are playing catch-up. The only one who are really batting at full strength are tyranids. A DaoT fleet would blow everyone except Necrons and tyranids out of the water. Imagine an entire warfleet of Ark Mechanici, not just using them as a bunch of capital ships.

>>63044149
Posting the typical copy-paste for these threads for if people need the links. I'll leave out the "last time on Nobledark Imperium" bit because I'm a bit crunched for time at the moment.

Welcome to Nobledark Imperium: a relatively light fan rewrite of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, with a generous helping of competence and common sense.
>PREVIOUS THREAD:
>http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/62813095/
Wiki (HELP NEEDED!):
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Category:Nobledark_Imperium
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Notes(oh god somebody please help)

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>>63044373
>Also, I would like to ask the core of the Nobledark Community if we have agreed to any type of Dark/Golden Age Faction 'Ala' "Out of the Dark" or Generic Dark/Golden Age fleet.
It would be an attempt to force a combination of Orion's Arm and Flash Gordon by way of the Culture into 40k rules. The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion's ship designs are whatever you want to 3D print, with weapons that teleport singularities, antimatter, and any other bullshit they can come up with right up the enemy admiral's butthole, all coordinated over interstellar distances either by Iron Minds or Golden Men. Peak power Golden Men have been noted as more dangerous than Oscar, though he has the potential to surpass them by accessing his declined deification as well as building up the offensive and defensive psychic constructs his kin would had. It was notably within their power to freely travel the upper and middling strata of the immaterium without fear of contamination, and likewise travel the warp between points in realspace, though Oscar does not himself teleport.

Iron Minds are almost godlike in their own right, their vast cogitators and archives integrated to their souls and thus existing significantly in the warp, they could not quite freely walk its paths from world to world as the Sload, but their design gave them mastery of a localized bubble of the warp, close enough to the proverbial surface to impinge on reality. Terrestrial Iron Minds and spacefaring ones alike would cloak their bulky and delicate bodies in vast shrouds of neutronium, surrounded by systems of defense, countermeasure, self repair, all so far beyond any mere organism in complexity, beyond nanites, beyond proteins, and so much greater in scale.

>>63044149
I don't think that the Olamic Quietude can be considered a good representation of what the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion was like. If it was the Interstellar League would never have formed.

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This is probably a terrible idea, but I was thinking if Kiavahr in this timeline is the 40k equivalent of Planet Shadowrun, would it be too far for there to be a shout out to Harlequin seeing as the 40k universe is already home to the Harlequins of Cegorach.

Specifically, there is a Harlequin roaming around the underhives of Kiavahr. They claim to have been stranded in the system and left behind some time ago and haven’t been able to find the Webway gate (or, when questioned on that, claims the Webway gate is off planet and they haven’t been able to hitch a ride). Needless to say, everyone tends to find their story a little fishy. The Harlequin often recruits interested parties from Kiavahr’s underhives for their schemes (read:questgiver), schemes which they claims are intended to help them find a way off planet. Strangely, all of these schemes seem to end up with the megacorps at each other’s throats and the worst of them gutted.

The joke being that Shadowrun’s Harlequin is his cover story and in reality they’re Cegorach’s plant on Kiavahr to keep the megacorps from getting too much power. However my concern is that it crosses the same line that we drew in the sand for Inquisitor Aran a while back.

>>63046940
I think there was an implication in one of the old threads that pre-Strife Olamic Quietude was like DaoT North Korea. Not a nice place, but so technologically backward and cut off (they had no Iron Mind) they weren't worth bothering with. Then the Fall happened and they were suddenly a medium-sized fish in a small pond.

>>63046940
I think someone in a past thread's example of the GaBHD's sort of weirdness was a diplomatic party once serving the meat of vat grown humans and whatever Xenos they were meeting with and not acknowledging it as a very odd move. It might have been a power play, or a very strange joke, or just some child of Sol's idea for dinner. Humanity was a massively varied and even on the individual level frequently changing species, and loosely united in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion they were the second most numerous and heavily armed faction in the galaxy, not counting sleeping Necrons pushing the Eldar back a rank. The Human Dominion's many powerful eccentrics and prevailing cultural eccentricities could be unsettling to fellow and potential members of the Interstellar League, but overall Humans were seen to be friendly and mean well. Eventually it reached a point that it didn't matter that the humans kept getting weirder, the League's minor members would put up with them just to have guns that could do more than just scratch Eldar ships' paint jobs.

>>63047114
I don't really know anything about Shadowrun so any references are lost on me but it does seem like something Cegorach would do. Cegorach at heart is anti-authoritarian and his followers dedicate themselves to playing roles. One goes, is called or is sent to Kiavahr to assume the role of the order upsetter.

It might not be the same one down as started, the role played by many actors. The character remains.

>>63045309
And they all still died. They also weren't infallible. One tried categorizing deamon true names.

>>63047381
What other weird ass shit was GaBHD era humanity getting up to and how did the Quietitude get so fucked up?

>>63047383
It's also likely that Cegorach would deny any knowledge of him/her.

>>63044149
>The Spirit of Eternity

From what I could skim off Google, the Spirit's a sapient DAoT ship who soured on humanity after her captain was executed for 'heresy'- after all, the secular humanism of the DAoT humanity would not have sat well with canon Imperial attitudes.

For Nobledark though, I suggest we go for a more melancholic mood. In this, the captain (and the Spirit by extension) are instead held hostage by the world they encounter. Oh, it's a gilded cage to be sure, but the Cap's and his crew aren't free to go by any means, and the Spirit's not leaving without him. The planet's a bit of a backwater, and the wealth/prestige of returning a GaBHD ship to the Imperium represents more wealth and power than an entire Segmentum could have. Every single Techpriest, both tainted and not, has just reinstalled their tongues and mouths just so they could salivate over the Spirit.

And so the Spirit's still negatively affected by the experience, except instead of rage at having her friends- hell, her family- executed before her eyes, both she and the crew watch crestfallen at how degraded humanity has become. Even the fight over them is more tragic than rage-inducing, as they watch people fight with what amounted to DaOT hunting rifles and weekend warrior 'flak jackets',

But then, Oscar finds out, and he comes to see what the fuss is about.

(Cont.)

>>63050165
For the first time in literal millennia, he has someone he can call like him- a powerful construct of Old Humanity. Hell, she and her very mortal captain+crew could end up teaching the Emperor a few things. Isha would also want to meet the Spirit, if only to do damage control on whatever she might have not been totally honest with Oscar about, and/or to ask her own questions on GaBHD humanity.

Now here's the big thing- IIRC the canon Spirit has seen the end of the galaxy at the hands of the Chaos Gods, and for all we know she's seen the same in Nobledark. The difference is, after meeting Oscar her vision of the future begins to... blur a little. In this timeline she decides to stay and help the Imperium, even if it does mean having a bunch of cyborg theocrats poke around her insides, stinking up the place with incense and oils*, asking inane questions of her crew. Perhaps she's placed in Terran orbit, the better to be protected by Terra's defences and allowing easier Martian access. Or perhaps she becomes part of the Travelling Court- after all, she's not just a DAoT ship, she's a DAoT *warship*, and even the most twisted creations of the Dark Mechanicus or the Hive Fleets will have a tough time against her alone. And if the Imperium's enemies come to do their worst, she and her crew will give those bastards their best.

After all, the Imperium might not be the home they remember, but it's damned memorable all the same. Besides, if there's one thing about the human spirit that has remained true all these thousands of years, it's that humans and their creations are adaptable- and nobody does 'adaptable' better than the Spirit and her crew.

*She secretly likes the attention actually, though good freakin' luck getting her to admit it. She's got needs to, after all, and what lady wouldn't like being pampered and massaged by a bunch of hunky (by machine standards) airheads, after all?

>>63048349
I think that for all the GaBHD's sins, there were lines that they would not cross. The Cthonian ring, the ships that would become the Arks Mechanicus, the Iron Minds and Golden Men, the greatest marvels of humanity- they were awesome, to be sure, but all built to help people. It doesn't really seem that there was anything overtly malicious or sadistic in their creation- arrogance, sure, it's dripping down by the barrel, but that's it.

And then here's the Quietude. While they and the greater GaBHD were all about the "Could we?", only the latter ever paused to ask themselves "Should we?". They might have answered "No!" on the latter less than they should have, but at least they asked it.

Perhaps it was a mercy. For all we know, had the Dominion went on the Quietude's arrogance and sadism might have spread, and the GaBHD would have become nothing more than a human version of the late Eldar Empire. Instead, it can be argued that along with atrocities such as the Helith's augmentations, the Quietude serves as a warning that you can definitely go too damned far.

>>63050271
We don't want to have her become too powerful. She doesn't have a full DAoT library and most of the crew didn't survive the trip to the future.

>>63050165
>In this, the captain (and the Spirit by extension) are instead held hostage by the world they encounter. Oh, it's a gilded cage to be sure, but the Cap's and his crew aren't free to go by any means, and the Spirit's not leaving without him.
>>63050271
>The difference is, after meeting Oscar her vision of the future begins to... blur a little. In this timeline she decides to stay and help the Imperium, even if it does mean having a bunch of cyborg theocrats poke around her insides, stinking up the place with incense and oils*, asking inane questions of her crew. Perhaps she's placed in Terran orbit, the better to be protected by Terra's defences and allowing easier Martian access. Or perhaps she becomes part of the Travelling Court- after all, she's not just a DAoT ship, she's a DAoT *warship*, and even the most twisted creations of the Dark Mechanicus or the Hive Fleets will have a tough time against her alone. And if the Imperium's enemies come to do their worst, she and her crew will give those bastards their best.
The spirit and her crew were written into the Illuminate Order's many theories as soon as she was known to the wider Imperium. As with much of their theorizing (wild speculation) the Illuminate Order is as far as possible from unanimous in Spirit's place in 'the plot' but surely she and her crew were part of it. The indelible reality that none of them had agents on the world that held the crew captive has been a stumbling block to some, but others only see a gap that seems the conspicuous emptiness left by the passing of the Hydra. Reminders that the Hydra, as represented by the Imperial Court, did intervene in the situation very publicly are not seen as particularly relevant. Despite the Spirit of Eternity and her crew becoming popular figures in Sol and as part of the Traveling Court there remain some in the secret handshake clubs convinced it was not, for whatever reason, the case.

>>63051653
It wasn't a big crew to begin with either, the ship could fly itself better than it could with other beings trying to help, so every other individual on board had some value to their mission independent of the ship. Also the Spirit of Eternity might have been a warship, but putting it Star Trek terms, something more like an early up-armed Nebula class than the final version of the Defiant class. Her surviving crew might be at a heroic power level compared to the modern Imperium, but more like Tiberius in power than Ferrus. The Spirit of Eternity andher crew, in peak fighting condition, can hit in the weight class of the Nemesor's hunting parties, with Imperial fleets operating with them in a similar way.

>>63050327
My take on the Olamic Quietude vs the GaBHD is that even if the GaBHD became increasingly perverse they'd still maintain an essential human outlook on the matter, unlike the Eldar empire's post orgasmic declaration of "oh fuck I'm so perfect" the Men of Stone to Men of Gold would exclaim "I'm happy to be a kinky weirdo". For all their arrogance they lack the Eldar's inhuman obsessive quality, and since humanity remade itself instead of being re-engineered by Xenos in their bronze age Human psycho-social development was less affected. Eldar nature has been defined by obsession creating positive feedback loops in their adaptability, Human nature has its faults, but its way of parsing experience down to the atoms, it's fluctuation through cognitive dissonance and reconciliation, dualities that fall away to trinities that fall away to the question of what defines a heap, kept the GaBHD from the Old Empire's path. In essence, the wider GaBHD might look at the sadism of the Olamic, declare "oh how delightfully naughty!" and introduce them to another human colony half a galaxy away that was their masochistic counterpart. Then after having some fun watching, the GaBHD would go back to non-fetish related projects, like harassing the last Old One, robbing sleeping Necrons, etc. Even with nothing to do but play out fantasies, the GaBHD would be as likely to get to a point of escalation so dry, academic, and circuitous as not to have any easily demonstrable connection to carnality, however tangential, as they would be to go cenobitic. Humans are weirdos that ultimately find stuff like mushy idyllic poetry (or their cultural equivalent) the hottest thing possible, not even for the romantic content, but the sentiment behind the description of trees and walking, etc.

>>63044149
>Great and Bountiful Human Dominion
Could we simplify into Great Human Dominion?

>>63052744
We can’t

>>63052744
I like The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. It implies a certain degree of pomposity.

>>63049325
He might genuinely know nothing, it's not as if he keeps his children on a tight reign. He expects orders to be obeyed, obviously he is a god, but what they do otherwise is up in the air so long as it violates none of his teachings.

>>63052744
>>63052966
>>63053109
They probably often just shortened it to Human Dominion, like how Democratic Republic of Congo is referred to as "the Congo", Plurinational State of Bolivia shortened to "Bolivia", etc.

>>63047381
Some of the other races during the DaoT were pretty crazy too. The reason why the Interstellar League formed was the galaxy got hit with a Brain Boy WAAAGH! and started driving everyone back including Dark Age humanity. Then the eldar got involved just long enough to snipe the Brain Boyz when it became a nascent threat to them and left the cleanup to everyone else. The Interstellar League was in part an attempt to make sure something like that never happened again.

Kinebrach built crazy fortresses in the Segmentum Pacificus that not even the modern kinebrach know how to replicate.

Tarellians have sort of a primitive motif because by the standards of their Dark Age ancestors they are a bunch of crazy survivalists. This despite the fact they have industrialization, space travel, and advanced weapons.

Sslyth were advanced enough with eldar backing that they were considered a problem when the eldar tried to start proxy wars.

>>63050271
We've implied in the past that something fucked with the timeline in a way that no one can pin down. Orikan was implied to have seen the canon 40k universe when he made his proposal to the Silent King (though they intended to reawaken during the Age of Strife). That might mess with things.

There's something in canon called the Shadowpoint, where attempts to accurately predict the future beyond the most basic stuff just completely breaks down. We've kind of mentioned it's still present here, and that's why any attempt to see beyond 999.M41 is such a clusterfuck.

Eldrad has seen beyond the Shadowpoint, but as we saw he's literally cherrypicking the best future and aiming for it, ignoring the millions of failed timelines beyond tales of warning. He's not looking at the most likely outcome.

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>>63054898
A lot of it is because the players of the LOng Game on the side of civilization have done everything in their power to create the Shadowpoint. Eldrad and the other seers saw the forces of Chaos eventually winning by sheer time and attrition if nothing else and so have arranged matters so that this might not happen. The Great Game was rigged so that mortals could never truly win. Once the Shadowpoint is reached the board catches fire and all the bets are off.

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>>63054898
Is this okay for a first draft description?

https://pastebin.com/cx4TBw5Q

ARANESSA SALTSPITE!

>>63056208
Its possible the Shadow Point, or the way it was reached and subsequently the dominant possible outcomes, were skewed by the Blue Birds' gambit to steal Nurgle's waifu. The point had been to force a wildcard in the Great Game, if not actually flip the board, to prevent the cycle of slow decay that empowers Nurgle over Tzeentch in canon, and cause a more unstable and small 'C' chaotic galaxy, which suits the bird. Instead he pulls a joker, and Cegorach collects everything the players of the time had wagered.

>>63054898
>We've implied in the past that something fucked with the timeline in a way that no one can pin down. Orikan was implied to have seen the canon 40k universe when he made his proposal to the Silent King (though they intended to reawaken during the Age of Strife). That might mess with things.
It's definitely beyond deciphering in-universe, but out of universe I actually have a vague idea when it might have been. The War in Heaven era changes to the Necrontyr and Eldar put the point of divergence yet earlier than that, and I'd put it somewhere between Be'lakor's ascension and the birth of the Gods of Sorcery. Lots of our 'deepest lore' plot points follow from making Be'lakor an Old One, including Malal in the history of the Chaos Gods, and having a somewhat coherent timeline for their development. In-universe very little of this would be known, save to the Gods and Belakor, and the particulars of the influence would be impossible to really work out after eons. Still, it does not seem impossible that the shadow point, a sort of un-light in psychic vision, is tied to Malal, who was not created, but was the natural negative of Tzeentch. Malal emerged not from the Imatterium, but non-existence, and when the other gods stripped it of its portfolio it went back down its dimensionless hole and returned there.

>>63057545
Since then the elder three Chaos Gods have contained their own inversions, taking even Malal's title of 'the first (primordial) Annihilation" as their collective name. Malal the Vizier of Khorne is not Malal that was Annihilation, and says as much, being merely the aspect of destruction Khorne took as his. The Tyrant Star and the Impossible World, the exit Malal took and the relic it left, seemingly the only lasting addition it could be said to have made to the galaxy, after an age of destruction, denial, and deconstruction. This paradox may only be apparent though, as in that age Malal seemed at many times to build something, propose an idea, create. At each instance, when all was said and done, some work of Tzeentch that thus-far seemed immune to entropy was naught but dust, along with the solvent that had reduced it. It would fit that Malal's final act of self-erasure millions of years ago might do such a thing, and resound back on his twin, his killers that became, in part, him, because Malal ceased to exist.

>>63057741
Another point to this is Slaanesh's distinction from the other gods. Part of it is being many times younger and less developed by far, and that it was developed by another species with different psychology, but Slaany's basic nature is also more different from canon than the other three. Slaanesh can be argued to contain its inverse, pleasure/pain, excess/hunger, etc. but this tends to ring hollow, and Slaanesh can also be argued to have a near universal portfolio under "perfection", and part of this is that it took no part of Malal, and isn't quite as bound by his self-defeating nature.

>>63051653
>>63051849
>>63057400

I think people are underestimating how ungodly fuck-off strong even a single DAoT ship is. Bringing a fully active one into the modern day of this AU would break everything with its power level.

In one vanilla novel (Priest of Mars), there's an Ark Mechanicus that turns out to be a dormant DAoT ship. Long story short, the AI of the ship wakes up, and destroys an Eldar cruiser in one shot by shooting it with a black hole while in the middle of a raging warp storm. And technically, it missed with the black hole (thanks to the Farseer on the ship seeing the future), so it shot the Eldar ship with a time-shifting cannon that moved the Eldar ship back in time so the black hole would connect. Oh, did I mention it also had a complete and fully functioning STC? So you'd have access to the Panacea and all the other broken DAoT goodies too. As for the actual Spirit of Eternity in vanilla, it one shots a Battle Barge and a Mechanicus ship in rapid succession before jumping into the warp, so it's undeniably broken too.

So this is the level of absurd tech fuckery we're talking about with a DAoT ship. Because the status quo is king in 40k, the Ark Mechanicus AI ultimately goes dormant again after wiping everyone on board's memories and the Spirit of Eternity jumps into the warp never to be seen again, but you can see how something like that in the "modern day" of this AU would mess up this up entire. It could probably solo a Hive Fleet before swinging over to mop up Armegeddon in the afternoon. Narratively, the DAoT is supposed to be a mythic, lost golden age that operates on a radically different power level, sort of like Greek mythology. Best to leave it alone.

>>63057820
Half the reason this setting’s version of Slaanesh thinks to write its own myth in relation to the Imperium, but none of the other three do, is because they have ultimately incompatible chunks of Malal bolted on. The parts of Malal’s portfolio they respectively took were destruction (which happened to include self destruction), non-existence (both simple and transcendent), and entropy, and they were Warrior, Creator, and Preserver. The vizier Khorne leans on for strategic wisdom is a nihilistic loonie that doesn’t believe in causality, or surviving the current fight. Nurgle took the entropic part of Malal in hope to restrain it and end decay instead of preserving it, and since has come to spoil all he tries to save. Some say Tzeench bestows the trophy of non-existence on his favorite as the mantle of the Indigo Crow. It was the Crow that failed to significantly impede the pleasure cults before the fall or give Tzeentch any useful insights. The Crow was replaced, and next offered the Bluebirds’ gambit, and was replaced again. Now the Crow carries a warpstone dagger from the impossible world.

>>63044373
>>63045309
The appearance of such a faction would be an interesting thing for a potential non-canon future for the nobledark setting.

>>63057964
I agree. The only way for a DAoT ship to not break everything is for it to
1. be a civilian vessel
2. have suffered from lack of sufficient maintenance over the centuries/millennia and thus be in a state of disrepair
3. Suffered damage sustained during the Age of Strife, perhaps from the crew having to purge sections of the AI after it went crazy, which renders much of it's more impressive technology unusable
and even in this state, the vessel would still be an incredible powerhouse and outclass most of the Imperium's custom-built warvessels, and it's crew would still have access to the suits that Terminator Armor was based on, only in it's original form instead of scrounged together from STC scraps of schematics.

>>63060391
I think another good way to nerf the Spirit without damaging her or her crew is to have her rely on resources that neither the Imperium nor its enemies can access. Maybe her Massive Fuckoff Cannon™ needs slabs of neutronium to fire, her subspace teleporter fueled by blocks of solid Warp energy, that kind of thing. So yeah, she can kick ass when she needs to, but then she's done, which is another reason to have her hang around Terra or the Court instead of going around the galaxy solving the Imperium's problems.

>>63057964
I think you might be overstating the power of a single DAoT warship just a moderate amount here. It would be likely capable of destroying a significant quantity of enemy ships yes, but the entirety of a hivefleet(let alone the main body of the tyranid swarm that is currently arriving in M41 of this AU setting)is stretching it a bit. Not to mention that increasing numbers of necrons are waking up right? They have the firepower to give any DAoT era ship trouble, chaos also would also be capable of countering this ship too due to various forms of warpfuckery/twisted warp science or whatever else. Furthermore, we have an upcoming brainboy waagh soon being led by Ghazghgull(sp?) and his little pal to think about too.

>>63057964
>In one vanilla novel (Priest of Mars), there's an Ark Mechanicus that turns out to be a dormant DAoT ship. Long story short, the AI of the ship wakes up, and destroys an Eldar cruiser in one shot by shooting it with a black hole while in the middle of a raging warp storm. And technically, it missed with the black hole (thanks to the Farseer on the ship seeing the future), so it shot the Eldar ship with a time-shifting cannon that moved the Eldar ship back in time so the black hole would connect
Man, sometimes I forget how capeshit silly 40k is.

>>63061952
>I think you might be overstating the power of a single DAoT warship just a moderate amount here
That sounds like something a Tau would say. "Of course their ships weren't actually THAT powerful, it's just legends and embellishments about things that were simply more sophisticated versions of what they have now." Because it's ridiculous for a vessel to fire black holes, rewind their target to ensure that the shot hits, and generally playing with the laws of physics like they're a batch of play-doh.
Except this is 40k, and the universe is inherently ridiculous in both scale and application, and the stories often don't tell a tenth of the true potential of the things they describe.

It's true that a DAoT warship would have trouble against a true Necron Capital ship, but the Necrons have access to reality-breaking weapons, even if it only got used once. It's not unreasonable to assume that a true DAoT warship would come equipped with the beginning stages of Ontological Weapons that are inferior to what Necrons produced in their heyday but still beyond anything currently in play.
Remember, this is a civilization for which Terminator Armor was standard-issue civilian-grade spacewalk suits.

>>63062068
Well you know, the necrons are waking up in ever greater numbers right? I'm pretty sure that at least a few of those Capital Ships are around right now. Furthermore, the main body of the Tyranid hive fleet is arriving, Ghazzy and Shorty are getting their grand green moron circus party ready and Chaos is chaos and likely has all sorts of nasty tricks that even a DAoT warship would have at least some trouble dealing with. I realize I'm repeating myself here but I really do think that a single warship from the golden age of humanity or whatever is not anywhere near enough on it's own to hand the imperium a victory in all it's conflicts.

>>63057741
You know, it kind of makes sense. Just as Tzeentch also represents hope, Slaanesh passion, Khorne courage, and Nurgle love (philia), Malal’s inverse has often been said to be justice. Which works well with what we have so far. Malal was created by the Old Ones to be the disposer of things that would not work. The fire that burns down the forest so new trees can grow. He was still a perfectionist who saw things in black and white (broken/not broken) for whom the slightest deviation from what was considered “acceptable” was grounds for exercising his domain, but he had a reason for doing so. There was a “right” way the world was “supposed” to work, and anything else was unacceptable.

When the War in Heaven happened Malal saw how corrupted the other gods were becoming and saw they were all broken and had deviated from their purpose, and therefore the only sane solution was for them all to die in a bout of murder-suicide to wipe the slate clean and allow the galaxy to be set right again. Now this was just as crazy as the conclusions the other three had come to, but the other three were strongly in favor of their own survival that it didn’t take much for Tzeentch to convince them to shank his brother. Malal wasn't liked very much anyway.

So it makes sense. Malal is the god of justice and karma, the idea that eventually your own sins will come back to hit you in the face (and hence Chaos turned against itself). Karma is a bitch.

Nurgle’s nihilism may also be a product of having cannibalized Malal, given that his long term game plan of letting the universe burn down and start over sounds very odd for someone who was intended to be a preserver. Which could have been a gambit by Big Bird as he hates Nurgle and knew which parts of his brother were toxic.

The Rise of Khorne also seems to imply that the Skull Throne was once Malal’s un-throne that he covered with skulls just so he could find where the damn thing is. This is funny to me.

>>63057964
It's sufficiently broken.

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>>63063107
The Purge would be a really good way to display this kind of Nurglite behavior. Nurgle wants to let the galaxy collapse in a mess of heat death and entropy, but is usually half-hearted about it because he's also the god of stasis and "doing nothing". The Purge combine the Nurglite love for bioweapons and Exterminatus but the Malalian urge to get something done already. The Purge usually don't get much love compared to the Death Guard, but since the Death Guard stayed mostly loyal and Nimina covers the typical Nurglite angle the Purge could work as one of the larger Nurglite Fallen warbands.

>>63060391
One would think that any such ship would also have a huge number of Men of Iron on board. The Spirit of Integrity is a Man of Iron really, just one in ship form. How many people did the Spirit of Integrity bring with it when it showed up in canon? I know the captain came with it but I don't know who else.

>>63063107
Khaine also has eyes for that chair.

>>63063107
One of the things I really like about this project is the deep metaphysical stuff like this. I don't think any of the other 40k AUs ever delved into these sorts of subjects much.

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>>63057964
It's been subject to the Warp for an unspecified amount of time. Let's assume that it's trashed by GaBHD standards even if it's still space worth by modern standards.

It's still mostly air tight, it's still got barely working engines, the anti-space rock weapons still work and the backup computer still works when it runs off.

Sadly the the backup computer is the personality of the A.I., the ships records and sweet fuck all else. All the actual technical data is lost and most of the really awesome shit that was on the ship is irreparable outside of a GaBHD space dock. It has no surviving organic crew members left which it is upset about and it's few surviving maintenance drones are not in good shape from the last batch of deamons and look like pic related. They don't have minds of their own and are just extensions of the ship. This is unfortunate because there is nobody left on the ship who knows how to fix everything properly.

Presumably the ship manages to limp to a fringe sect of mechanicus who are sympathetic to it and repair it and it's drones using Imperial standard parts. It's crude as fuck but it's something at least.

The ship's A.I. has intelligence falling to the above average of the human range but not massively so. It claims that it was smarter in it's prime and certainly knew a lot more.

It doesn't recognize the authority of the Imperium. It predates the creation of the Golden Men so it doesn't recognize the authority of the Emperor. It has met at least one Ark Mechanicus, there was a brief an intense exchange of radio between the two and then the Spirit of Eternity glided away again. The Ark Mechanicus would not obey it's adepts and would neither lock on weapons or give chase.

>>63066176
Eh, I'm not really feeling it. Might as well make it just some rando GaBHD ship then. Thje thing about the Spirit of Eternity specifically is that it comes with its own baggage which makes it more exciting, at least from where I'm standing.

Personally, I'm all for >>63061621's suggestion- the Spirit's currently at near-optimal effectiveness, but any resources expended above the most basic are irreplaceable. As for its databanks, it's a warship, not a colony ship. It and/or its crew might have some vague idea of how some GaBHD stuff works, but there's no way they can explain it to the bewildered techpriests, nor does the Imperium have the infrastructure to replicate it even if they did.

Imagine an aircraft engineer travelling back to medieval ages. He can explain, maybe even draft out, the design of a modern jet to a blacksmith- but without modern infrastructure and metallurgy, it's all just scribbles on paper. Same with having a pristine fighter jet in medieval times- sure you might be able to keep it in relatively good shape, maybe even fly it, but fuel's impossible to obtain, and once you fire a missile it's fucking gone.

>>63066277
>>63066176
>Might as well make it just some rando GaBHD ship then
I think that's kind of the point; the GaBHD tech-level was at mythical-levels compared to what the Imperium has available. A random, delapitated hulk of a vessel from that period that isn't even a dedicated warship would still outclass most Imperial Battleships.

That said, I do like the idea of "irreplacable resources." We've already got implications that the process of producing Neutronium requires some form of warp-energy, considering the one dock that fell to Chaos might have been on the right track to reproducing it by dipping their dock into the Warp. Considering the Warp wasn't as actively and overwhelmingly malicious back then as it turned out after the birth of Slaanesh, it's possible that a lot of their more mystical tech ran off warp-stuff.
Any 'cores' they might have had either ran out, got destroyed, or had to be ejected when everything started going twisted. Now the only way to power most of their more impressive weapons would be with Psykers- lots and lots of psykers. On the levels of what the canon Astronomican chews through, with the same casualty rates, just for a single shot. Regardless of whether the Imperium has enough psykers to sacrifice when most are needed for the Astronomican and Choir, that kind of sacrifice of human life is not a price they're willing to pay in this setting- not for a single shot with a weapon, regardless of how powerful it is.

>>63061621
Why would she hang around Earth or the Traveling Court? She was built to patrol a patch of space. That is her patch of space. Act lawful in her patch of space or she will tear you a new asshole.

If Dark Glass was what the Vanilla Emperor used to access the webway then it is the device the Nobledark Emperor and the eldar used to punch a hole into the Deep Warp and raid The Mansion.

>>63067993
In Rogue Trader there was an eldar ghost ship called Whisper of Anaris that is often seen around some corner of the Calixis sector. No living crew but is following the last order of its captain to keep anyone away from the Chaos-corrupted hulk of Craftworld Lu'Nasad. It doesn't talk to people so it comes of as inscrutable in its actions.

We could do something like that with Spirit of Integrity. Spirit lost all of its crew and wants nothing to do with either the Imperium or Chaos, kind of like Myrmeara wanting to wallow in their own sadness before the eldar ambassadors showed up. It does talk but rarely does so with anybody, making its motives hard to discern. Kind of another contrast to Castigator and Elmo.

>>63069290
I think we said the portal was made using an old Webway gate DaoT humanity managed to capture and shut down.

The realspace side of the Raid was made in an uninhabited system for secrecy and in case something went wrong. I can only imagine it is not a fun place to visit today, Chaos wouldn't let such a backdoor exist outside of their control (Tzeentch or not) and would love to desecrate any monument to mortal victory they could get their hands on.

>>63067079
Or, we could sidestep the problem of power levels entirely by making its discovery be at the stroke of midnight, 999 M41. That way, whatever happens afterward isn't our problem.

>>63069988
It would not know of the other two. It's a big galaxy and one of them is intentionally hiding.

It would be on the AdMech's list of shit that needs killing with fire but not high up on it as it's not an active threat at them moment.

It views craftworlder ships and ships it suspects of harbouring eldar with great suspicion and will tail ferry convoys and such. It has not attacked anyone on these grounds yet but it's gun ports are open.

It typically does a tour of an estimated 134 stellar systems on the edge of the Jericho Reach, seven of which are inhabited by the Imperium to varying degrees. It has ranged further than this but this is considered atypical behaviour.The

Communication since the initial contact with the salvage team has been rare but has been documented. The ship has little to say.

>>63071748
We've been trying to not bunch up the events like Vanilla has done.

>>63071824
>It would be on the AdMech's list of shit that needs killing with fire but not high up on it as it's not an active threat at them moment.
I think the AdMech would put nearly the highest possible priority on tracking down the Spirit. For the AdMech, knowing that there's an AI- controlled, intact DAoT warship around would be like a group of medieval Christian knights knowing that Satan is using the Holy Grail as a chamber pot in Jerusalem. They'd send literally everything they could possibly spare, as fast as they possibly could.

Both >>63071824 and >>63061621 give good elaboration on the limits of the Spirit's resources and how unthinkably costly to the Imperium it would be to resupply. Making her a crewless wanderer seems to go a bit far in stripping back the base story, and a long suffering, exhausted crew of Stone and Iron Men seeking safe harbor seems a very fun thing to include in the setting. Rather than make the Spirit a junker, it might fit to make her a civilian or merchant ship of the era armed up to face the increasing dangers of the galaxy. Or the Spirit might be like Tiberius, a pre-Iron Mind veteran of many an Ork hunt, retired as the generations of networked fleets that were extensions of the Iron Minds were phased in that leapt back to duty when the Iron War began. In either case, the vast stores of warp energy she extracted and stabilized have been much depleted, and she cannot refill them without contaminating herself with the misama released by the Fall. She has precious few neutronium slugs and kugelblitz singularities in reserve, and no number of sacrificed psykers will replace them, Imperial neutronium being unable to withstand firing from her guns, to say nothing of the miniature singularities.

>>63067993
I'd say the Spirit would be the ultimate security measure, but only once. As such, she'd be kept in places where, if she ever saw active service again, it's the kind of situation where shit's gone so badly you don't care if she expends irreplaceable resources.

>>63075133
I question how much nerfing a DAoT battleship would actually need. We're basing most of our assumptions of capability on the demonstrated abilities of the Spinoza, but the Imperium already has the Spinoza and the setting hasn't broken. Assuming a mostly intact DAoT battleship is an order of magnitude more powerful than the Ark Mechanicus, that would make it more powerful than anything else in the Imperial arsenal (with the possible exception of Zandrekh's flagship), but still only a single ship which can only be in a single place at a time, and can still be overwhelmed by sheer numbers/a World Engine/the Planet Killer. It's an intact STC system that would be the real game changer. Just say it was badly hit by scrapcode attacks in the beginning of the Age of Strife; hardware is fine, but all the software except a backup personality core was fried.

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A suggestion for a Hubworlder military unit, though kind of a bare bones one.

Desperados are the scouts of the Hubworld military. Desperados typically draw their ranks from the young, hotblooded members of the Hubworld League, those looking for danger and eager to make their name. Desperados spend most of their time on the outskirts of Hubworlder society, crossing the unstable surface of planets in the galactic core in search of new mineral lodes, making sure the machinery that keeps the hold functioning is still intact, even tending grox herds on the few worlds of the Hubworld league capable of supporting ranching. However, in times of war, Desperados find themselves conscripted into Hubworlder military expeditions and used as scouters and light skirmishers.

I’m not sure whether jetbikes or wheeled bikes would be better for them. Jetbikes make more sense from a tactial standpoint because it allows them to, and squats would likely have a bigger stash of them than most people because they have some of the best tech and they pass everything down the generations. On the other hand, jetbikes aren’t super common even in Nobledark and do you really want to give your priceless jetbikes to scouts that are liable to be picked off?

I figure the Hubworld League must have some kind of dedicated heavy motorized cavalry they use as actual weaponry, whereas Desperados are militia intended as scouts and skirmishers.

In thematic terms, Desperados are a posse of cowboy bikers that normally spend their time looking for motherlodes and tending grox the Hubworlders rounded up to help defend the holds, which both fits their aesthetic as communist cowboys and some of the biker imagery the squats had in canon.

>>63074339
Someone showed me Xavier Renegade Angel the other day and I can't help but think the way the main character acts with his lack of rationality and pseudo-philosophical metaphors is exactly how the way the Indigo Crow would act.

>>63074582
>>63077246
Agreeing with these guys, the main problem for balance concerns would be the STC database. The ship not having a crew would make it kinda boring in my mind.

>>63078731
>The ship not having a crew would make it kinda boring in my mind.
Agreed- I love the thought of these advanced spacers having to adapt and make do.

>>63072053
There would still be those who want it as a pet.

>>63077246
Zandrekh's is itself not as good as equivalents in the Silent King's fleets. It's a restored classic rather than something from the Star Empire's height.

>>63078674
It could be that the hubworlds are where the jetbikes are made so they aren't quite as rare there. Still expensive and most of the ones in circulation are centuries old or older.

>>63077246
Ark Mechanicus are themselves relics of the GaBHD (much like the Terminus Est in Vanilla), it's just that they have been gradually repaired with available parts over the years that they aren't game breakers.

The Ark Mechanicus could, be cause they are X-BAWKS HUEJ, are salvaged cargo haulers with a little bit of pirate deterrent weaponry.

Spirit of Eternity is a dedicated warship, but it's a very crippled one repaired with what shit parts could be cobbled together. Thankfully Imperial tech is derived from STC remnants so it wasn't as hard as it should have been.

>>63047605
It was succeeding as well until the other deamons figured out what was going on and ganged up on it.

Big apocalyptic war between cyber-deamon thralls controlled by an Iron Mind and the endless hordes of Hell and attendant sorcerers all the while the Iron Mind was accumulating new names to slave to it's will.

>>63079804
How many should there be? There can't be enough or at least any that could upset the balance of technologies observed to exist at 999M41.

>>63077246
>>63078731
This may be something we'll have to agree to disagree on. Space battles in 40k and in this AU are pretty much described like historical naval battles IRL: lots of bombardment, low accuracy, and it takes a long time to actually take down ships. Battle Barges are one of the strongest ships in the Imperium and are built to take even more punishment than an Imperial battleship due to SMs needing them to assault hostile planets, and the canon Spirit of Eternity effortlessly one shots it, while all indications are that the Speranza is even stronger than that.

As an analogy, imagine if a WWII battleship got put in the Battle of Trafalgar. It would be ridiculously faster, better armed, and better armored and could blow up both fleets before they even got in visual range, and even if they did get in close, nothing in either fleet could even dent it.

The only reason the Speranza didn't break the setting is because the AI decided current humanity wasn't worthy and decided to go back to sleep and shut off all the game-breaking systems again. Status quo is king, after all.

>>63081294
If we want to keep the canon depiction of Ark Mechanicuses, it's not that the systems have broken down over the years, it's just that they're inactive and the Mechanicus has no idea how they work. Like the Speranza, if they get activated to full functionality they work just fine.

>>63065047
Given how mortals influence the warp that influences behaviour it's inevitable that it has.

>>63085307
I agree with this; as the one doing the writefagging on that naval battle around Telis (which I can hopefully try to get the next bit finished over break) I always envisioned the rough "tiers" of ships along the lines of the Imperium being late-Sail with "ironclads" that are basically wooden ships with a bit of armor bolted on, Murder-class would be the first generation of "proper" ironclads with all the problems with speed and 'seakeeping' that entails, and Crones/Chaos have the equivalent of the first all-steel seaworthy warships, like the "St. Louis" and the White Fleet that Teddy Roosevelt sent around the world; armed with gun-turrets and the like. Eldar have the equivalent of early Steam vessels, essentially sailing vessels with steam-engines tacked on...

Of course, it's not a hard-and-fast analogy; the inclusion of things like Torpedoes and strikecraft throw a bit of a wrench into things, so you have to mix in WWII-era tactics as well, but the general model holds solid if you scale back the craft to WWI-era levels and consider that unlike sea-battles, space-battles can't rely on "sinking" a vessel (which is what made torpedoes so powerful), but must instead fully destroy it.

By contrast, Old Eldar Empire/Necron Empire/DAoT Humanity vessels operated at the level of WWII-era ships, with massive guns, armor designed to be able to take fire from said big guns, engines powerful enough to have battleships dancing cirles around current-era escort ships, strikecraft that could roam through the "shallows" of the warp to extend their range beyond the immediate system their mothership is parked in, and secondary/defensive batteries that would put even the Big Five to shame. The main reason Chaos isn't operating at that level amounts to entropy and the ships being constantly "at sea," and thus getting "rusted up" to the point that they'd be considered barely functional by the original builders. Necrons haven't done any maintenance.

>>63084404
The obvious answer in my mind would be "some but not enough".

>>63085307
>>63087389
Massive tech disparity or no, we're still talking about one ship here that has received some damage and lost some crew. I find the idea of this singular ship being a massive game changer on it's own to be a little silly.

>>63088368
>I find the idea of this singular ship being a massive game changer on it's own to be a little silly
These are the people who created the Men of Gold. The men/robots/whatever strong enough that the one who's still around (and is a somewhat undeveloped version since he started as a blank slate) who can halt an entire battle between two fleets of spaceships by stopping every ship in both fleets with his mind.

Again; an entire SPACEBATTLE brought to a screeching halt because the guy showed up, decided he didn't want them fighting, and then physically restrained both fleets with his mind.
That is the level of tech disparity here.

Yes it sounds silly. Lots of things in both canon 40k and Nobledark Imperium sound silly. The problem is that being silly doesn't make it untrue.

>>63088602
I think there's been some indication that Oscar has actually become more powerful than a DAoT Man of Gold in some fields due to a combination of age and experience and his own nascent godhood.

>>63088602
>>These are the people who created the Men of Gold.
Unless the old human dominion didn't have a division of labor then odds are the people who designed the golden men/women are not the same people as the ones crewing the warships. Why would the surviving crew of this vessel be capable of pulling off shit similar to the GaBHD at it's height? Can the crew of a modern nuclear powered aircraft carrier build a fission reactor from scratch? Can they do so easily and often while there's a war on that they are involved in for various reasons?

>>63088726
It could be that it never had what it would consider people on board. Not normal, independent people. They look look like people and have some degree of autonomy and individual personality so maybe they are. The ship refers to them as it's crew but it gives the impression that it classifies them as this in regard to species.

It's not impossible that the crew were born and bred to be a "human component" to the ship and would not function optimally outside of their native environment.

Exactly how human they are is debatable given the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion's love of genetic modification and cybernetics.

It is known that there were at most a few dozen to a hundred at most of them when the salvage teams first encountered the ship. In later encounters the ship is operating as if it had a full crew which implies that they aren't sterile like Oscar.

>>63085307
>As an analogy, imagine if a WWII battleship got put in the Battle of Trafalgar. It would be ridiculously faster, better armed, and better armored and could blow up both fleets before they even got in visual range, and even if they did get in close, nothing in either fleet could even dent it.
to extend this though, sometimes current battleships and ones with experimental lasers and railguns show up (NSE fleets) as do Fae ships from beyond the known seas, the best of which outmatch the WW2 ships and even some of the futuristic ones. Also the "wooden ships" of this analogy aren't honest age of sail ships, but post-apocalyptic lunacy with schitzo-tech cartridge-firing black powder cannons and bespoke laser rangefinders, and even the occasional repurposed anti-ship missiles they can barely fire. A WW2 torpedo boat with a couple machineguns won't turn a major war.

>>63088602
>battle between two fleets of spaceships by stopping every ship in both fleets with his mind.
one of those fleets was tied to his empire called off by his goddess wife, the other was a Tau fleet, which I don't picture being particularly well hardened against the psychic equivalent of effectorization.

>>63090248
>>63088726
You guys are underestimating the sheer scale of the discrepancy in technology. Let's assume the time-period analogy still holds, and that the the technological advancement is completely linear in application like for ours.
For Age of Sail/early Ironclad-age vessels, standard armament were muzzle-loading cannons classified by the weight of the shell they fired, with maybe rifling if the vessel was rather advanced. Thirtysix-pounder guns were considered heavy guns, only carried by dedicated warships. These guns had a maximum range of 3700 metres, and a Practical range of 650 metres.
WW2-era battleships come equipped with fast-firing, breech-loading turret-mounted guns classified by the breadth of their barrels; battleships would carry sixteen-inch/406mm guns as the main armament, which would fire either Armor-piercing or High-explosive rounds (neither of which were around in the Age of Sail) that weigh between 1,900 to 2,700 pounds. These guns have a range of about 20 kilometers.

THIS is the problem with a DAoT ship showing up in current-time; it just fucking breaks everything. Let's even be generous and assume it was a tiny little warship instead of a battleship; destroyers were equipped with 5-inch guns which fired fifty-pound shells that could be high-explosive or Armor-Piercing at ranges still measured in kilometers. It fires these shells at a rate of dozens of shells per minute, as opposed to the muzzle-loading rate of fire of less than five shots per minute.

And this is assuming LATERAL ADVANCEMENT. As in that the only way their weaponry was more advanced was in furthering the ability of their guns to shoot harder. It just doesn't work.

>>63090630
I think you're overstating the technological advantage. I think it's reasonable to assume that a top-of-the-line GaBHD vessel would be about on par with, or a bit worse than, a top-of-the-line Necron vessel. I assume this for two reasons:

a.) We've stated that some DaOT tech was developed by reverse engineering loot from Necron tombs.

b.) We've said that the GaBHD and Elder Empire were roughly on par with each other strategically, at least insofar as neither could succeed in an offensive. It's probably also reasonable to assume that peak Eldar tech and peak Necron tech were about equivalent in the areas they could be compared.

Thus, we can probably use Necron vessels as a rough benchmark for what a GaBHD warship would be like. Even assuming that modern Necron vessels have been badly degraded by the Long Sleep, I don't think it would be more than an order of magnitude difference. Otherwise they just wouldn't work at all.

So, I think we can say, as a very rough estimate, that the Spirit would be several times more powerful than a Necron ship of equivalent mass. And the Imperium has been keeping the Star Empire in a state of stalemated cold war for a good millennium now. Powerful, possibly the most powerful single starship in the setting, but not so much so as to break it.

>>63087389
>>63088368
>>63090248
>>63090630
>>63091474
Oh damn, I wasn't expecting this level of passion in response to the "WWII battleship at Trafalgar" analogy, I mostly came up with it on the fly to illustrate the vast gulf in technological advancement. This anon >>63091474 does have a good point in that the Necrons are a bit of a wild card; if they wake up in a state that's anywhere similar to their peak power, they would wipe all the other factions effortlessly which is probably not what we want to imply. Still, I assert that a fully functional DAoT ship would break the balance of the Imperium vs the Orks, DE, and Nids, while the CE might get away due to potential warp fuckery and Chaos gods intervening.

Again, we may have to agree to disagree, and with a consensus-driven project like this it may be hard to find common ground to make the Spirit "canon." At least it's prompted the liveliest discussion I've seen in a while.

>>63081294
>>63085307
The Ark Mechanici in canon were all originally colony ships and are implied to have had STCs on them because where else would you put the STCs. We decided to nix that aspect here because while it's deliciously grimdark the idea of "lets go looking for STCs while riding in an STC" came off as rather silly. It's possible in this timeline the Ark Mechanici either lost the memories of STCs or the ability to do so was tied into connecting with an Iron Mind and downloading them from the Noosphere.

The Ark Mechanici in this timeline are also playing dumb because they're afraid if they do get found out the AdMech will kill them for being A.I.

>>63080772
Indeed. Zahndrekh's flagship is the equivalent of a noble's private schooner or vintage car with a lot of guns glued on. Which the Dark Eldar have shown can be really effective, but it's not indicative of high-level Star Empire stuff.

>>63082858
Define "succeeding". It rounded up human

>>63088726
This was even true of the Old Ones. Be'lakor despite his intelligence has been said to have no idea how to hack the WAAAGH!, as his area of expertise was building Warp constructs. He wasn't even good at making Warp constructs do what he wanted because that wasn't his thing.

>>63094348
>>63091474
Point of clarification: the stuff that was developed was reverse-engineered from the most basic Necron stuff. Like figuring out how to make better nanobots by studying Necrodermis. It wasn't like they were building World Engines.

And the Old Eldar Empire didn't give a shit about humanity. The comparison would be how most nuclear nations could completely flatten any resistance through orbital bombardment, but they don't really have any reason to and in a ground war are still vulnerable to bullets (think Russians in Afghanistan or the U.S. in Vietnam). Only in this case the lack of such weaponry is out of decadence and turning inward rather than fear of mutual annihilation. They could have brought the old War in Heaven stuff out and smashed humanity after a prolonged, bloody war, but it didn't benefit them to do so.

Necron ships' weaknesses in Battlefleet Gothic have always been numbers. One on one they flatten their equivalents, but they have trouble bringing significant numbers to bear. Another good comparison would be how colonial powers always struggled to have large numbers of ships where they needed them to be due to long travel times. Which is the whole reason Szarekh was allowing the cold war, the longer he waits the more troops he can send at once, and the Imperium would rather use that time to hunt down Tomb Worlds than stretch their resources in another huge war.

>>63092612
>if they wake up in a state that's anywhere similar to their peak power, they would wipe all the other factions effortlessly which is probably not what we want to imply.

This. The Necrons have been weakened by attrition in the Long Sleep, and the Imperium's game plan for Ragnarok/Rhana Dandra is to let the tyranids, Necrons, and Chaos blunt themselves on each other. Especially nids, as Szarekh's Star Empire is on the flank of the main Hive Fleet's advance.

>It rounded up human
I derped. I meant to say "rounded up humans and made them gargle sulfuric acid".

>>63084404
I'm with this guy here: >>63088726 The Spirit's crew would be well-versed in keeping the Spirit operational, but utterly clueless as to how many of the GaBHD's marvels were operated and produced- maybe they can give out details that could serve as future jumping off points (or plot hooks if you want to include them in RP), but nothing more than that.

>>63090630
Great, but Spirit doesn't have to be Iowa or even a Forest Sherman, she can be a Castle Class.

Sure, her guns might be from the same technological route and level of development as the 16" 50 caliber Mark 7s that could kill Japanese ships at 40 kilometers with radar fire control, but it's not a battlewagon, it's a patrol boat and convoy escort, so it has a single 4" 45 caliber DP gun. More than she needs to light aflame any of the ships at Trafalgar, at approximately double their effective range, but not so well protected or capable of such rapid devastation that she could steam right into the teeth of the engagement and kill everyone on both sides.

>>63044149
Does the Olamic Quietude still keep a breeding population of humans maintained?

>>63096478
I believe we decided they grow new population in vats as necessary.

>>63094348
>Define "succeeding". It rounded up human
>>63094497
>and made them gargle sulfuric acid

It had amassed an extensive list of names along with dossiers on the characteristics and capabilities of the entities to which those names belonged. And the list of names it was drawing up was still growing right up until the end. In theory if it had been allowed to carry on it could have found out all the variations, built accurate theoretical models on how deamons worked and the relation of the True Names to their workings and then been able to deduce True Names on the fly by a moments observation and examination. In effect it would have broken the Old One programming of the Chaos gods and could then appropriate any piece of them (deamons) that it encountered and salvage them to it's own will.

Human casualties in the running of this project were not considered a valid concern, although they were noticed.

Then the deamons found out what the fuck was going on and lost their fucking shit. The Iron Mind was turning deamons into puppets via their True Names. The mortal equivalent of this is finding out a substantial portion of your planet's population is gene-stealers.

>>63089379
There's a very real chance that this is just how the self aware and fully sapient and sentient ships of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion saw the flesh and blood previous models of humanity. The eldar considered the Iron Minds and the Men of Gold to be the real citizens of the Dominion with Men of Stone as just the primordial slime they crawled out of and ruled over, it's not unreasonable that some of this attitude rubbed off on the A.I. at least a little.

Which is not to say that the ship doesn't like her crew. She does, she really does. It's just that, at least before she got wrecked, she was a much higher life form than them. They were still her friends, they still are her friends.

>>63057545
The jokers in the Great Game aren't just Ceggers. Everyone just assumes that it is the case and maybe that's the point. Ceggers wasn't the one who suggested breaking into a god's house and stealing his rape-basement waifu and that's what set a lot of events in motion. Bright Blue Cockatoo might have supplied the means but the one who actually orchestrated The Raid was Eldrad Ulthuran, the mortal who declared war on the gods.

>>63044149
What happened with OP?

What's happening on Nostramo by 999M41?

>>63101002
Police Academy meets the Addams Family

>>63092612
>while the CE might get away due to potential warp fuckery and Chaos gods intervening.
They can also just call Arrotyr, who has a fleet of Old Empire ships that have since been blessed by Khorne. The Crones have Old Empire military hardware available for really hard targets as well as the support of the Chaos Gods (ascendant Sload AI), the Orks have the Brain Boyz threshold after which they can spam lunar, planetary, possibly even stellar engines, at a level that made them (as the Krork) the Old Ones's chosen line troops against the NSE. One wonders why the hell the normally pretty sensible NSE would have made the world engines? Well just like turning around the principles of the WAAAGH into tactical reality pins and eventually Necon pylons, the Necrons' were fighting Krork/Orks and needed a way to counter entire "attack systems" and the accompanying fleets. Tyranids may have a counter of their own, or in the end these may be details the swarm-mind missed when closing on an ailing galaxy while stalking through the supercluster, mistaking bright colorful spots and enticing immaterial frills for a proverbial bird of paradise, when in fact it fell upon a mad coral reef of encircling golden eels, octopi like eight pointed stars, steely scaled reef sharks, and consuming deep green algae.

>>63094497
>I meant to say "rounded up humans and made them gargle sulfuric acid".
Well, it was used to humans always being down to learn a new word, and it was used to giving humans new bodies and reattaching their souls when they did something dumb or overly dramatic, and it was very focused on its work at the time, how was it to know that the stone-men and stone-men repair situations hadn't been optimal for quite a while.

>>63097493
The completed project would have in essence laid bare the code with which the Old Ones wrote the Chaos Gods, formulated the full language from which Daemon true names are drawn, an essentially reverse engineer the command protocols that Tzeentch reconfigured (drove into rampant/recursive self-modification) to keep Be'lakor out.

>>63058507
>The vizier Khorne leans on for strategic wisdom is a nihilistic loonie that doesn’t believe in causality, or surviving the current fight.
Makes me think of the Rise of Khorne story, where the embarrassment of failing the (ultimately impossible) task of separating the Gorkamorka and binding it to the Old Ones' will seems like the thing that turned Khorne away from valuing "honor", turned him on the Old Ones, etc. Khorne was meant to be the last brother of the Gorkamorka, their synthesis and captain, but receives pain and ridicule instead of his place of galant honor, and he from grand marshal to marauder king, he starts taking skulls. By the time Khorne officially took the portfolio of destruction he already had it, and Malal the Khornate sorcerer was already his architect of demolition.
>Some say Tzeench bestows the trophy of non-existence on his favorite as the mantle of the Indigo Crow. It was the Crow that failed to significantly impede the pleasure cults before the fall or give Tzeentch any useful insights. The Crow was replaced, and next offered the Bluebirds’ gambit, and was replaced again. Now the Crow carries a warpstone dagger from the impossible world.
This definitely fits with the level of fuckery between the Indigo Crow and Tzeentch, and the weird form changing relationship with the changeling and "so crazy he has to read his own mind" thing fits, it seems like it something Tzeentch might have come up with to use his twin's power at arm's length, hopefully insulating Tzeentch from his relationship with his brother. The fact that since the Fall of the Eldar Empire the Teal Tit has had a bit of a shaky record after a rarely broken several million year run of effectiveness is only now becoming concerning.

In terms of remaining aspects of Malal, I'd wonder what piece in particular is invested in Apep, and what has become of the piece Nurgle kept. I have some theories, some simple and some less so.

>>63102828
The simplest of course is that Apep is empowered by the Entropic Malal that Nurgle took. However, Apep isn't particularly tied to that aspect of Malal, and in fact seems affiliated with a much purer sort of absolute negation to the point of inversion, like a specific frequency that erases its opposite. That is to say, Apep seems like a pure prince of Malal, not mediated through one of the elder three that still survive. Still, Apep's nature is revelatory, as both pure Malalic warp phenomena and Malalic aspects in other gods seem to personify (Malal, Vizier or Khorne) or be invested to whatever extent in a mortal like a god's own warp power.

Nurgle taking entropy from Malal's portfolio with the intent to effectively imprison that aspect of Malal, that he could better preserve the things that survived the War in Heaven, only for the new presence in his garden to spread decay even to Nurgle himself is quite the picture in my mind, but it also implies yet another detail. Isha was not the first spirit of considerable might Nurgle had imprisoned in his gardens, nor was she the only one eager to leave with the raid. In the time since Isha absconded with Oscar and the raiding party Nurgle himself has not quite kept with the behavior he has been almost truly constant in since the War in Heaven ended. Nurgle bothered returning his mansions to their long-familiar state of dilapidation following his stormy episode of grief, in the work of cultivating the strains of Orkish corruption he found need to tend his garden into workability, and looking upon the galaxy he has noticed some few bright points to pluck from ephemerality and plant in eternal beds. In the galaxy however, the truly old again dies, an unseen exhaustion thwarts the best or rejuveants, cultures and peoples branch and recombine where once immaterial walls preserved their status-quo over eons, and the age of the hundred-million year empire seems forever passed.

>>63103415
There was also the Horned Rat that got a slice.

>>63103415
It might be that in all the confusion and disarray of the escape, some additional figure might have escaped with the party, and in panicked flight none questioned the gaunt sorcerer clad in black and white that fled with them and threw tempests down on the daemons at their heels. That he was perhaps never seen again 'ere the closing of the gate as Sanguineous fought to save the stragglers might have been a overlooked tragedy to the few that had glimpsed the stranger, but Eldrad's own livery was alike enough to what they saw, and it might have been that wiley wizard anyways.

It could have been that Isha's embodiment before Macha, the high priestess from before the fall, did not bear Isha alone from Nurgle's mansion within her. In her state of despair and decay in the garden, the priestess might well have been as open to Malal as Macha would later be to Isha, and Isha herself might have welcomed the company of a familiar (if not actually fondly remembered) face. Entropic-Malal might have gone its own way after the raid, or it might have thrown in with Isha as part of its vendetta with Nurgle, Khorne, and (especially) Tzeentch. This would actually fit with Isha's change from the Eldar Empire's hippie Earth (shaa-dome) Mother to Marton Empress of the galaxy, if one reconciles the entropy of Malal with her portfolio in the form of aging, maturation, rambunctious chaotic children that mellow into respectable, steady adults, unto an end to life processes that necessitates reproduction, and all the elaboration that can happen on the trip from dust to dust. Malal may have slid into the desolation in Macha's heart as easily as Isha did into the reborn hope.

Or Malal did not leave with Isha, but took her example. Even as Nurgle might be rediscovering the true nature preservation, Nimina is abroad in the galaxy spreading the gospel of inevitable decay. It wouldn't be possible that the Entropic Malal operates like his opposite number in Tzeentch's court.

>>63103572
The Horned rat didn't actually get a piece of Malal, he was made with a piece of Malal and Tzeentch in him to make a synthesis of their properties. It's the difference between being born (or created in a lab by ancient lizard wizards) with a mix of your parents' features and your mom and two family friends dissecting your dad and each transplanting in the parts of him they wanted.
>>63104091
>wouldn't be possible
this was supposed to be "impossible"

>>63104197
But also your dad is the sort of person that's actually a hard vacuum in the shape of your mother's silhouette, moving through a universe of flesh. Not just the opposite of your mother, but the true inverse.

>>63101740
What would the Adams family even be in this AU?

>>63105356
>Rogue Trader Gomez, old Voidborn family Morticia, Catachan arch-militant Fester, Corsair/seer grandmama, with two wards Wednesday and Pugsley, who could either be blanks or psykers, but are definitely very off.

>>63105512
They would still be a family or it wouldn't be them. One of the early Merikan Rogue Trader families established in the Great Crusade that later on became an interstellar mega-corp. Family is fucking huge with branches set up from Ultramar to Macharia. Considered eccentric by the other old trader families.

Unlike many Trader dynasties the wealth is shared out pretty evenly between all members/branches. Due to it's broadness across the galaxy and it's seemingly specialization and fascination in the odd and curious the genetic composition of the family is abnormally diverse, as is evident to any who have attended a family gathering. Inbreeding is not a common occurrence unlike some old noble lines. The Gomez branch suspected to be an exception to this as Gomez and Morticia are thought to be first cousins.

Grandmother is a psyker, that much is known and the dark haired daughter suspected to be. Morticia has either void born or a trickle of navigator blood.

Lurch is a servitor but one of the high class ones that were born mentally retarded and were uplifted with only the best parts and actually has some minimal rights.

Thing is a gift from an eccentric AdBio friend of the family.

They have extensive dealings with many eldar clans on Saim-Hann who find them oddly fascinating.

>>63107260
I'd actually just make the spoilered bit overt, but because their family branches have been so different for so long, their relatively recent joining a generation or two back hasn't actually made them all that much more genetically similar. Like somehow finding a crow and an iguana that are somehow producing viable offspring, the question isn't dinosaur inbreeding, but how the hell the offspring coheres at all.

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>>63104267
I believe the word you are looking for is "yonic".

>>63102828
The way I always view Khorne in this timeline is kind of like Darkseid. Darkseid is often described as a bottomless pit of rage only held in check by his self-control. His son Orion is said to have the same temper and literally froths at the mouth when it’s not artificially suppressed. The primary differences being that Khorne is the god of blood and warfare rather than tyranny. As a result, he much, much more quick to anger, and isn’t into sadism for sadism’s sake like Apokalips is, that’s more Slaanesh’s gig. Khorne doesn’t necessarily want to turn the world into a dystopia. He just wants everyone to know their place, which can only be done by figuring out who is strongest, which can only be figured out by constant, bloody warfare.

You know that feeling you get when you feel everyone around you is being an idiot and you just want to crack heads until people fall in line? That’s Khorne all the time. Except Khorne doesn’t have the same sense of self-restraint and just does it. Khorne doesn’t have calmness, he just has various states of angry. And Khorne likes being unrealistically angry instead of "tranquil fury". It means all the responsibility and self-imposed duty gets purged away in a bout of catharsis.

>>63110271
That’s another interesting thing about this timeline. In canon, both in Fantasy and 40k, the Chaos Gods get away with everything. Technically the Imperial Truth didn’t even make them sweat since they feed off emotions and not belief (at least not solely), they were just after the Emperor like a bunch of loan sharks going “where’s my money” and according to Slaves to Darkness they stopped giving a shit about the Imperium and started in-fighting the moment Magnus busted the Webway and the Chaos Gods got their pound of flesh.

In this timeline the Chaos Gods are still a massive threat, but they’re just as miserable as everyone else. They want to sit back and play the Great Game, but the temporary truce to punish the mortals they thought was going to last less than a few years has dragged on and on. They’re still feeding on all the emotions the galaxy has been producing, you can’t get them to stop. But they can’t just sit back and relax and let themselves get high off of the cacophony of misery like in canon. They have to pretend to be team players and try to only screw each other over behind the scenes. They’re like binge-dringers who have to come into work sober to get shit done. And they hate being sober. Of course the downside to this is you have four Warp Cthulhus who are really interested in coming for you.

>>63101002
Space Detroit, circa Robocop with fewer robots.

>>63110385
>circa Robocop with fewer robots.
Probably about as many robots per capita, really. Well, servitors, but servitors are basically robots.

>>63104197
Wait, so the Horned Rat is a thing here too? That's AWESOME! Does that mean we can include the more noble Space Skaven here as well?

>>63113546
There's a non-canon story about skaven-people rebuilding on a world after all the HAPPENING of the end of the millenium has finished happening, and there's been allusions to skaven in underhives, but I wouldn't say it's exactly canon here. If the Horned Rat is around, he's probably a minor warp entity at present, rather than a major player.

>>63113101
Never got that pic.
>Hey, why don't we lie on the floor? Surely it's more comfortable than the alternative.

>>63113632
In the grim darkness of the far future, there are no beds.

>>63107260
I'd say Morticia is void born- I've never noticed her being anything but creepy-sexy.

Would Thing be a servitor? And is Cousin It just a very hirsute abhuman?

>>63113546
>>63113595
Horned Rat was the Old Ones' first attempt at a Preserver by cross-breeding Malal and Tzeentch. He turned out exactly how you'd think he would. Be'lakor mentions he's a failure but had thought about using him as disposable cannon fodder when Tzeentch cornered him but found out he's trapped in the planet orbiting the Tyrant Star.

Ironically this would mean Great Horned Rat wouldn't be a rat at all, since rodents didn't appear until ten million years after the War in Heaven.

The mention of the Spess Skaven in the underhives was a joke reference to the non-canon stories and half-seriously mentioned as a way one could include them in a Dark Heresy game. Specifically, having traveled back in time from the future like Mind Flayers after having broken the space-time continuuum by accident. Because Skaven.

But again, it's a post-M41 thing. As the anon who wrote said story, I don't want to be shoehorning in things that might ruin someone's headcanon

>>63113802
I think skaven work best with being in limbo; not canon, but not non-canon. If you want them to exist, there's plenty of basis for them to be there. If you don't, there's plenty of reasons why all those reasons are just twitchy underhivers and myths based on particularly bad mutations. Either way, they're minor enough that it doesn't affect the status quo.

>>63113595
The world had been temporally displaced. Those few years contained millions of years.

>>63109957
did we ever say what the hell this is? It gets posted every so often.

>>63113721
Or mankind has learned the wisdom of the Dwemer, and beds are made of rock
>>63114818
they essentially got the Tau treatment, but extra hard. Lucky for them, the Imperium at that point has a good amount of experience integrating time displaced people and populations.

>>63115030
Fortified structures on an agri-world.

>>63115309
Realizing I should have read the file name. What sort of fort? Standard Imperial, Demiurgh, Iron Mind shells?

>>63115398
Demiurg don't build ground structures unless they've been contracted to and business has been very slow recently. They don't like leaving their ships.

>>63115629
They might not need to come down all that often given the amount of spider robots that they have, assuming that it's one of their hives.

>>63115398
It could be a locally designed and built structure, made using local tools and expertise that has nothing inherently related to the wider Imperium.

>>63113721
If Morticia is also Void Born then she is only half void born as she and Gomez are blood relatives and he is at least mostly "pure" human ignoring for the moment that unmodified humans are long since extinct.

>>63107816
In the live action series, the animated series, the films and the cartoons Grandma Addams has been referred to by both Gomez and Morticia as their mother. The implications of that are slightly more disgusting than them being first cousins.

In the Noble Darkness with the use of longevity treatments and rejuvenents she might not actually be their mother but just gets referred to as Grandmother by the entire local branch of the family because she's the oldest member. They are related to her, they know that, but to show you exactly how would require examining a very large depiction of a family tree. She is in fact the common ancestor of potentially hundreds if not thousands of increasingly different people.

Why did she get placed in the Gomez branch? Because everyone else was sick of the batshit old matriarch and she was a social embarrassment at best and a severe liability and serious risk to safety at worst. She's very slowly going peculiar (she isn't she's always been odd) and she's a psychic; that's a terrible combination.

How does the Gomez/Morticia branch provide and income to the collective Addams Family Mega-corp? Storage of artefacts and forbidden tomes for the inquisition. Also some degree of private banking services. there are a lot more lucrative things they could be doing but this provides a standard of living that they can enjoy with a lot of free time to enjoy it with.

>>63044149
What other artefacts of interest could be located in the Ganymede Vaults?

>>63113802
Red, Red Robin found a way to and from Horned Rat's prison. Now Horned Rat knows there's a way out.

>>63119275
The Purple Parakeet himself has some weird stuff going on, that warpstone dagger may be destined for carving the bird as he did his twin.

>>63116711
The both call grandmama that, but I distinctly remember they don't recall whose mother she is.

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Speaking of Fantasy, I had some ideas for notable figures of the Tarellian Neo-Confederacy loosely based on Lizardmen characters in Fantasy. However, I don't have good names yet and I'm not sure if I should just use those of their Fantasy inspiration as a placeholder since they aren't 1:1.

>>63121814
You could do something similar to what I did with the Ulmeathics, with Nakai being a historical figure and the relevant person being his son Nakaidos. Take the Lizardmen heroes and use their names as a "starting point" for the name, then either add honorifics or change spelling. You could also use names from famous Native American chiefs, since Tarellians are Iroquois in space.

>>63116711
>grandma Addams

ehhhh, though it might be what you're implying as well, it's worth noting that back when the Addams Family was made familial titles could be shared by non-blood relatives. For examples, husbands often regularly called their wives 'mother' not out of blood relation or fetish (I mean. I guess most of the time. There were probably, er, some that had those exceptions) but because that was the title the wife held in the family.

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>>63121905
I might do that. The one issue is many New World languages like Nahuatl might not translate to Hynerian very well. A lot of names and terms require sounds that humans can only make because they have fleshy mobile lips and Tarellians with their more reptilian heads can't make those sounds. I mean, try saying "Nahuatl" while keeping your lips stiff.

If anything else we could always just rule they have bird-like voiceboxes, which let birds (e.g., parrots) make human-like noises without any lips.

>>63122703
Eh, I assumed that the lizards have something along the lines of lips, or at least cheeks and tongues that can modulate enough to produce similar sounds. It could be that the things responsible for letting them make human-like noises are somewhat connected to their frills, with louder sounds causing their frills to expand out. In other words, for Tarellians tone and inflection can be as physical as they are phonical, hence why they try to present a 'neutral' attitude towards everything.

>>63121905
It could also be that the letters written down don't make the same sound for them, just the nearest equivalent sound. Like Welsh.

>>63121909
Just to settle the matter I did some research, and according to Charles Addams Grandmama is Gomez's mother only in the original TV show, but in other incarnations including the original comics she is Morticia's mother. She introduces herself on occasions as Granny Frump, and in one of the movies discusses the death of "Father and Mother Addams" at the hands of a mob with Uncle Fester. Mother and Father Addams seem the more consistent appellation of Gomez and Fester's parents. Only in the stage production are Gomez and Morticia actually unsure who's parent she is, but never has she been mother to both of them.

Charles Addams also had an interesting quote on the character dynamic.
>Grandma Addams is foolishly good-natured... A closely knit family, the real head being Morticia — although each of the others is a definite character — except for Grandma, who is easily led. Many of the troubles they have as a family are due to Grandma's fumbling, weak character.

And another tidbit, apparently Wednesday's game of guillotining dolls was inspired by Grandmama's stories of the family's part in the french revolution. Would be fun to figure out the right version of that to extract from Imperial history, maybe some major purge of Chaos infiltrators in a sector government. Something passably close to righteous, but certainly not to restage with dolls.

>>63080014
They don't understand how a relationship would work in this regard. She looks down on them as Men of Rust. But she secretly likes being pampered with oils and polish applied lovingly on every system with caring, dedicated and nimble hands.

Have we elaborated at all on the factions of the Inquisition? I believe we've stated that monodominants exist, but nothing about any of the others.

>>63126850
Not really. Someone made an offhand mention of Horusians being those who embrace transhumanism as the future of the species rather than just being neutral on the subject of abhumans and augmentations, and honestly that may be a good way to go about it since Horus didn't fall to Chaos in this timeline.

Waaay back in like thread 11 there was a suggestion that the counterpart to the canon Istvaanists were the Reforgers (or some name like that). They're not intentionally starting civil wars in the Imperium like in canon except for the really extreme whack-jobs, but they don't have a high opinion of any species or planet that hasn't had the ability to destroy itself and clawed back from the brink. So for a while they weren't big fans of the Tau.

>>63123253
*Cough*Imperial Civil War*Endcough*

>>63127232
I considered it, but being the side that was doing the guillotining would presumably make the Addams House (or possibly the Frump branch of the family) VanDireists. It would be an interesting angle to add to the characters, and an interesting way to look at the political fallout of the Imperial Civil War.

>>63127232
>So for a while they weren't big fans of the Tau.
But after that while they were the biggest fans of the Tau. They went from calling them blue permanent children, etc. to calling the Tau empire the eastern bulwark beside Ultramar. Reforgers actually show a key point about the AU Inquisitorial factions in difference to their canon counterparts. As things change in the galaxy, entire factions will change their agendas and evaluations, and as such there have been many more factions formed and dissolved in the Inquisition's history, and many factions MOs will change over the short or very long span of their relevance. Another example is that Karamazov didn't just take the Monodominant faction on a wild ride to damnation, he fractured it, found his allies, and made off with them, having avoided or escaped his enemies within the Inquisition. Not least among those enemies were the other Monodominant Inquisitors that had other interpretations of the ultimate goal of total central authority in Sol and with the Imperial government.

>>63126850
It might be best to just do currently relevant factions, relationships between them, and notable past coalitions (in terms of internal politics) and what they achieved or fucked up.

>>63129357
Well, all of the factions oriented around the death/ resurrection of the Emperor, like the Thorians, obviously won't exist. Amaltheans probably still exist but are less prominent since the Imperium isn't as much of a faction- riddled mess as canon. There would probably be a bunch of minor factions organized around differing interpretations of the Starchild Prophecies.

>>63131818
Quite a few might differ in their attitudes towards the "big threats" or external species.

"We need to know as much about Chaos as possible to combat it" versus "Do not open that tome of eldritch lore you morons".
"The Imperium's best interests are served by cooperating with non-member species" versus "Species outside the Imperium are ticking time bombs at best" (obviously this debate is less of an issue in the present time)

>>63129319
>Not least among those enemies were the other Monodominant Inquisitors that had other interpretations of the ultimate goal of total central authority in Sol and with the Imperial government.

That's one idea I found interesting. The idea of Inquisitors who are still jingoistic zealots by any stripe but are against Karamazov for the reason of their worldview being incompatible and just as hardline as theirs.

They probably rebranded themselves afterwards for the simple reason that the word "Monodominant" had now become synonymous with "Fyodor Karamazov" in the Inquisition.

The summary of the Reforgers view of the Tau and how that relates to changing Imperial politics is also great.

>>63132125
I think there are two major axes of division:

Monodominant/Horusian, centralizing and decentralizing tendencies, and Puritain/Radical, over how much study/ use of the warp is wise and permissible. Treatment of xenos and xenotech would be much less of a dividing line, although not totally absent.

>>63132125
And then there's Eisenhorn, hated by all

>>63101002
Gotham. It exports Batmans.

>>63133478
There's also psyker supremacists.

>>63069988
Where in real space was the gate for The Raid located?

>>63137228
A Psy-Gore race based on the Cygors of Fantasy but with psychic crystalline weapons and possibly aspects of the Cyclops in Greek Myth would be really cool. Maybe a limited ability to see the future.

>>63137617
Are you imagining Alfred Bester from Bablyon V? Because I'm imagining Alfred Bester from Babylon V. Made even worse compared to other "x-supremacist" groups because few are capable of discouraging their views through social pressure because they edit the memories of anyone who they let too much slip.

>>63138527
We've never said, only that the system was uninhabited to preserve secrecy. That might be something worth expanding on.

>>63137228
Clawed Fiends are a people in the Ulmeathics League, the last to join. They did not join willingly. The Ulmeathics hold them in high esteem due to the fight they put up. The Ulmeathics understood them and the Fiends understood the Ulmeathics. Combat was ritually fought across many arenas and in the end the Fiends submitted and took their place. For their valour and surprising wisdom for a people so primitive they were permitted to retain their armed forces but as a defensive force only subject to League Law.

When the end came Fiend and Ulmeathics died together, brothers in arms.

How are the Vespids seen in this AU? Is Tau mind control still involved, or do Imperials actually have a way of talking to them that doesn't go through a Tau 'intermediary'?

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>>63140069
Vespid are not mind controlled in this AU. Due to their nature as a eusocial animal the tenets of the Greater Good were already something that they lived by instinctively within their social units. It is not to say that they were all the same, indeed they were not and had fought nation against nation in the past. It's just that every individual unit within a given nation was identical in outward will and belief to every other individual having reached effectively identical conclusions for any given problem to every other member of their nation with the same information due to the process of processing any given information being more or less the same.

This did not extend across nations making for the perspective of the outsider every nation an individual super organism. There were about a dozen or so Vespid swarms when the Tau made contact. Even after allowing them colonization rights to gas giants similar to their home across the Imperium there are still only, at most, a few hundred distinct Vespid even if they are spread over billions of autonomous bodies.

A Vespid can be isolated and experience new things and you would think that this should be enough to at least start individualizing Vespid. It doesn't The moment they come in contact with other members of their Nation they sync up and these experiences are shared with the swarm and the swarm is enriched. There was some worry about this being a vector for Chaos contamination to spread but it doesn't seem to work. Chaos is inherently selfish in nature and the Vespid are almost totally selfless.

They work through the Tau to deal with the rest of the galaxy because Tau "get" them more than others do. Which is not to say that they don't find other people interesting, just that they find it difficult to understand what the fuck we are babbling about.

>>63139705
Are Clawed Fiends even sentient? I thought they were only semi-sentient. Clawed Fiends in canon are also said to be used by the Dark Eldar as gladiatorial and war beasts. Maybe they raided the Fiends homeworld in the past? Which would explain their in-universe mysterious presence in Calixis, especially given the Dark Eldar have made deals with Severus. It's another breeding population for some of their favorite slaves.

Speaking of fiends, the Cythor Fiends haven't been mentioned.

Cythor Fiends are said to be bad news in canon. The eldar namedrop them as one of the species that was a major threat to the galaxy they had to smack down in the days before humanity in the same breath as Beast-level Orks in the Beast Arises series. Apparently they’re described somewhat in The Eternal Crusader, Lexicanum says they’re weird and spindly with gaunt faces. There is something weird about them and they don’t die conventionally, the Death Spectres in canon just keep them bottled up. The Black Templars raged at them for not wiping them out and chased them back to their home planet in the Ghoul Stars. They tried to Exterminatus the planet. It just made the atmosphere glow funny colors and changed back to normal the minute the Black Templars went away.

The Cythor Fiends don’t show up on auspex scanners properly as living organisms, which may be due to the downright weird conditions of their homeworld (cold gas giants with winds over 400 km/h) and the fact that their technology makes use of higher dimensions and dimensional folding without using the Warp, though more like a TARDIS than the way the Necrons do (some of their things are bigger on the inside). Their ships and structures are said to be look like glass or paper wasp nests, but it doesn’t act like it. They’re weird.

>>63139642
>Made even worse compared to other "x-supremacist" groups because few are capable of discouraging their views through social pressure because they edit the memories of anyone who they let too much slip.
though that sort of thing may be hard to counter with conventional internal policing, there's also the brute force option with a possible magnitude that really can't be understated. That being the Emperor himself, and if necessary his lovely wife, sparing some thought to attend to the matter. Oscar has made his thoughts on psychic supremacy eminently clear with the fate of Djerba, and while his personal ability to pierce psychic deception in many minds and at great distance shouldn't be understated, commanding the Imperium he also has resources far beyond the Inquisition.
Certainly there are hard limits on what even the highest echelons of the Imperium can do in response to rumored plots half a galaxy away, and the Inquisition itself is often the forefront of that response. But for special circumstances, such as those around psycher supremacist conspiracies among Inquisitors, other tools are used. Beyond Ordos of internal policing and intervention from Sector Naval or Military intelligence organizations, questing Astartes, or whatever else might intercede, there are the Alpha and Omega.
In a galaxy spanning government your local tax collector may have a starship more advanced than your civilization, the outdated and ill equipped subsector defense fleet a shining armada of marvels, and the nearest Hiveworld an ancient and advanced culture refined millennia beyond your own, replete with space infrastructure and monumental wonders. The Segmentum Governor's intelligence committee would strike a person from a mere early-industrialized world as shadowy ageless demigods of tradecraft and worldly, cynical knowledge and talent. The Imperium's spy agency is beyond that, those demigods are former Inquisition analysts that went for a cushy consulting job.

>>63141868
My point being that we've yet to actually put a picture to the Alpha and Omega Legions. They may be beyond us to picture, but they are this AU Imperium's glue, the unseen demons of order that make it operate. All the talk of the DAoT ship breaking the setting is peanuts to the Imperial spy apparatus, and the Hydra that supervises the true Imperial agenda, and the Golden Man that devizes it.

Ave Hydra.

>>63141978
The A&Ω are only part of the Imperium's spy network. The Administratum accounts for everything and has it's Dark Clerks, the Adeptus Arbiters has plain clothing officers and most of the Inquisition are not part of the A even though they have heard of them. Most of them haven't heard of Ω.

A only gets called when shit is so tangled that a conventional or a normal non-conventional solution can't be applicable.

For 99% of problems more traditional methods and agents can and are employed whether it be for people lining their pockets at the expense of the people or unspeakable beings from beyond time and space poking holes in the firmament. The remaining 1% of the time the Inquisition gets involved.

In 1% of 1% of cases the problem mysteriously solved itself before they arrived or it transpires that there never was a problem and any reports to the contrary can be attributed to clerical errors.

Hydra Dominatus.

>>63142644
To sum it up with a reference, what the Inquisition is to the Alpha Legion, what the Illuminate Order is to the Hydra, is the Sherlock (and occasional Moriarty) to the latter organization’s Mycroft.

>>63140756
Vespid and Interex are literally the two biggest things I have to get on the wiki.

Hey, quick question. I'm trying to go through the last thread and get the writefaggotry off. There was a story on there about the Emperor's Scythes, did it have a title or anything for the Writing page?

>>63145400
Doesn't look like it.

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In an attempt to get off my lazy ass and start producing writefaggotry for this project again, I'm going to post the first draft of one of the ideas for notable Tarellians (am >>63121814) despite it not being polished yet. Feedback is appreciated.

The Tarellian Neo-Confederacy doesn’t have a centralized leader, per se. As a confederacy, each of the Tarellian worlds are nominally independent, free to pursue their own desires as they wish. However, in practice, most of the Tarellian worlds tend to follow the lead or at least respect the wisdom of the leader of Nova Tarellia, who tends to command the Neo-Confederacy through sheer force of personality rather than any formalized bonds. The current leader of Neo-Tarellia is Lord Kroq-Gar. Many Tarellian Lords see him as a bit of a meathead. For humans, this is rather surprising, as Kroq-Gar doesn’t come off as dumb or rash. Tarellians seem to have the same kind of mind as the Old Ones did, slow and methodical as opposed to hot-headed (the Tau, on the other hand, immediately see what the Tarellians are talking about). However, if one spends an extended period of time with Lord Kroq-Gar it is possible to see what the Tarellians mean. Kroq-Gar is obsessed with glory and disdainful of psykers and spycraft, though he isn’t fool enough to forego their use entirely. Although a skilled leader and politician Kroq-Gar lives for the excitement of battle, and his elevation to Tlatoani was as much based on his skill on the battlefield as his statecraft.

>>63149579
And of course one cannot speak of Kroq-Gar without mentioning his faithful companion Grymloq, a ferocious Kurnousaur from the Maiden World of Atla-Lorre. The region of space to the galactic north of the Tarellian Neo-Confederacy is home to the densest cluster of Maiden Worlds in the galaxy, including Halathel, the most densely populated Exodite world. Several decades ago, the Exodites came under threat from one of their other neighbors, the Arch-Mangler of Bork. Upon hearing the plight of the Exodites and the scale of the green tide they faced, Kroq-Gar set out with an army to their aid. The two forces eventually met at the Maiden World of Atla-Lorre, where the Tarellians joined the fray alongside the native Exodites. Packs of Tarellian warriors swarmed through the understory of Atla-Lorre, fighting Ork Boyz with kultarr and disruptor rifle in the dense jungle, eventually breaking the advance of the WAAAGH! alongside the Exodites. In gratitude for coming to the defense of their world the Exodites of Atla-Lorre presented Kroq-Gar with one of their greatest honors, the unhatched egg of a mighty Kurnousaur, taken from deep within the jungles of their world. Kroq-Gar raised Grymloq from a hatchling, and the Kurnousaur has rewarded him with his loyalty ever since.

Haven't been able to come up with decent replacement names for either of them yet. They really need them, for despite being inspired by Kroq-Gar there are some major differences. Kroq-Gar is more obedient, whereas this guy is a better leader but exaults in the thrill of glorious melee combat like a reptilian version of Reinhardt from Overwatch.

>>63149655 (cont.)
I know there was some debate over whether Tarellians would use big dinosaurs in the past, namely that it takes away from the Exodites’ hat at being dinosaur riders, in most dinosaurs it would be a massive liability because they would be riddled with bullets due to their large size, and while it’s possible the Tarellians might have domesticated big stompy dinos as pack animals something like Cold One cavalry doesn’t make a lot of sense given that Tarellians on foot can run as fast as a racehorse. So I decided to sidestep the issue and give Grymloq Deathclaw's origin. Which in some ways makes this guy a weird combination of Karl Franz + Kroq-Gar if you take into account the fact he's also a pretty good politician. Since the Tarellians are a confederacy the person they tend to follow leads by charisma, perceived skill, and individual oaths of loyalty rather than strict hierarchical rule.

The Exodites gifting Kroq-Gar a Kurnousaur was as much of a snub as their cousins as actual gratitude. Saying to the Craftworlders “thanks for all the help you didn’t give, and hey these guys were at least nice enough to not knock over our forests with tanks”.

I have others, will post the drafts up when I get them done.

>>63149719
Tarellian and exodite, to great things that go great together. Also giving someone a pet lizard is nice.

>>63149719
This is great. It shows the values of the Imperium spreading to it's vassals and protectorates.

>>63141432
Undead angry space yetis? Yes fucking please.

>>63140756
Vespid are also believed to have been altered at some point in their distant past. They are too environmentally tolerant to be natural.

>>63127232
They might have been on both sides of the civil war

>>63145400
I wish you good luck and thank you for all you've done.

>>63149655
They could enter a trade deal. Kurnousaur make great pets for Tarellians.

Although the event is fifteen thousand years past, you can still see the moment of Slaanesh's birth in real time. All you have to do is stand in the right place.

Although the creation of the Eye of Terror consumed billions of star systems in a matter of days, if not hours, but after that initial orgy of superluminal expansion the light shock of the event continued to crawl across the cosmos at its ordained speed of one light-year per year. And, although this fossil vision is but a shadow of a shadow of the true fury of the event itself, it still carries its own dangers.

The barrier separating Materium and Immaterium is temporarily weakened as the luminous shockwave passes. Mutation rates spike. Chaotic corruption and daemonic possession become easier. Those foolish enough to spend too long staring at the sky succumb to madness. Any cults around will usually choose this moment to launch their plans, feeling the gaze of the dark gods upon them. In many cases their plots are foiled by the varied forces of the Imperium. On the other hand... many a world has burned under the light of the memory of a god's birth.

The Imperium does its best to prepare, of course. The progression of the ever- expanding sphere of light can be predicted with near total certainty, obeying as it does the laws of the Materium even as it degrades them. Worlds which will be affected have years of forewarning to muster its defenses. Imperial Guard garrisons are reinforced, Arbites investigators dispatched, and Inquisitors skulk through the shadows with their retinues. Curfews are enacted, cities placed on lockdown. Worlds with heavy orbital industry may go so far as to construct massive shades in deep space, to prevent the light of the Eye from ever reaching their surface.

>>63159079
But the Enemy is never idle either, cults and warbands planning their rituals and assaults so that their climax will come at the moment of maximum vulnerability when the dark god's influence waxes. Each world in the path of the light front becomes a scene of thrust and counterthrust as Inquisitors and cults flock to the world seeking dramatic victories.

And in deep space, strange cults ride the light wave. Using heretekal drives to keep pace with the racing light, so that they can spend eternity watching the cosmic c-section unfold. Meditating on a single fossilized instant of the birth of the Child Goddess. Mostly Slaaneshi, for obvious reasons. But many Tzeentchian cabals also spend time in study, seeking insight into the deep mysteries of the warp.

For the most part, the Imperium is content to leave such cults far, far down on the priority list. They are not directly harming any Imperial interests, and scattered throughout the incomprehensible vastness of deep space it would be an act of futility to try and hunt them down. But still, worries persist; what fell knowledge could an ambitious cultist glean from from deep contemplation of the birth of a god?

There are rumors of some radical inquisitors attempting to answer such questions themselves. But surely nobody could be so foolish.


Thoughts?

>>63159093

I like it. Actually, that's a phenomenon you'd think would be in canon. It makes a nice tie back-- this is a *variation* on Warhammer 40k, but it's still a variation on *Warhammer 40k*.

>>63159079
>>63159093
>>63159522
As somebody pointed out once in a Warhammer forum, accounting for the canon distance between Old Earth and the center of the Eye of Terror, the light of Slaanesh's birth (assuming it behaves like regular light) would be reaching the Sol system right about the end of M41 or so (the center of the Eye is said to be about 12,000-15,000 lightyears from Earth).

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>>63160416
I did a bit of rough measurements myself using this map and figured that it would have hit Earth about the beginning of M39. Of course, I did my measurement from the edge of the Eye, since that's where the laws of the Materium would take over.

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>>63159093
https://pastebin.com/BTXK0vML

I tried.

>>63160740
The Adventures of Legi and Draco are by far the most hilarious part of this whole AU.

>>63160740

Oh, that is wonderful. Just a few grammar errors you might want to tidy up before it goes on the wiki.

Does it say anything odd that I found Leigenstrasse digesting her own eyes to be eminently reasonable?

>>63161276
Well, what else can you do when the Eye of Terror is hot on your heels?

>>63160740
Sounds good.

>>63160678
It makes you wonder when people did notice there was an Eye of Terror, since from the majority of planets the light wouldn't have been visible for quite a while without quantum warp fuckery. Probably the Navigators would have noticed it right away whenever they went into the Warp.

Whenever it hit Sol must have been "fun" for the Arbites and other local law enforcement.

>>63159093
A name for this entry?

>>63164794
The Emperor would most likely have been present and exerting his power when the light hit Sol. Too important for him not to be present.

As for the name, how does 'By the Light of Hell' sound?

>>63166185
I like that name.

i also imagine that The Emperor would have arranged to be home at that time. Also a year either side of the event to ensure that any significance of the date is blocked.

Isha would not have enjoyed that time.

>>63159079
I’m beyond thrilled some took the astronomical archeology concept and ran with it

>>63166642
It would have been not just like, but actually, literally needing to make a big deal out of the birthday of the person that murdered your wife’s family. It’s not a fun time, unless you’re Slaanesh, in which case it’s delightful, because the capital of the Imperium has to pause and acknowledge you, no matter how things turn out. For Slaany it means a birthday party every day, for every star it’s birth-light washes over, at least until it clears the galaxy’s edge.

>>63167337
There's also the effect that the effect on Isha would have on her people. It's not hard to imagine a short lived but pronounced dip in birth rates on the craftworlds for that year.

>>63159093
The deep space crazies would be a concern for Void Born more than others.

>>63145400
Thank you for doing what you do.

How do Void Born treat their psyker?

>>63168989
This could be about the only Void Born crazies that there are. Their society is too strict, interdependent and monitored due to the very nature of living on a space ship. For a Void Born cult to arise it would require the command level officers turning and then decades of carefully arranging transfer requests to transfer normal people to other ships and bring in other Chaos followers without drawing attention all the while hoping everyone keeps to the scripts. They would be rare because Void Born like to gossip between ships.

They would not be on planets to perform their rituals and in the light of damnation/blessing is as good a place as any.

>>63167841
It could also have been that Nurgle was whispering to her and playing on her fear of Slaanesh to return to him for protection. Nurgle is nothing if not persistent.

>>63166185
That, or "Light of Damnation". Either name would be good, especially as it was impkied in one of the Horus Heresy books that Slaanesh was one of the inspirations for Satan.

>>63171266
They probably send them to the Black Ships like everyone else. Sending psykers to the Black Ships is one of the few rules the Imperium gets insistent on. That was one question we still had for the Hubworld League, since squat psykers were treated differently in canon.

There are probably quite a lot of Void Born psykers, if for no other reason than there are a lot of Navigators on the Migrant Fleets and therefore a lot of intermarriage. Of course, untrained psykers are liable to wreck any void ship.

>>63174159
But the idea of Satan existed before Slaanesh did???

>>63174259
Chaos exists outside of strict time.

It's one of the dumber things in Vanilla and wouldn't fit the chronology of this AU.

>>63168989
Space is wide. 'More of a concern' is still not very much of a concern.

>>63174259
>>63174795
A better answer might be that the Eldar Empire worked on a multimillion year timescale, so it’s easily possible that the early ideas they had of making a god of joy were being tossed around in the Old Empire fifty thousand years prior to the setting’s present. Slaanesh wasn’t born, was at most on the border of actual conception, but the idea was building, beginning to take its future shape. The great personage, Slaan-esh, reverberated in aspect across the galactic immaterium, and in the time before its corruption was fully realized it showed many aspects. Slaanesh is seen in Lucifer, Apollo, Satan, and Bacchus, and others across the galaxy. Much as many lesser war gods are but weak emanations of Khorne’s raging bonfire, mere Ha-Satan, Lucifer, Sauron, cannot hold a candle to Slaanesh.

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>>63178215
>A better answer might be that the Eldar Empire worked on a multimillion year timescale, so it’s easily possible that the early ideas they had of making a god of joy were being tossed around in the Old Empire fifty thousand years prior to the setting’s present.
I always thought this to be very unrealistic, even in vanilla.

The War in Haven happened around 60 million years, a bit after the KT extinction (aprox. 65 million years). The Eldar species are known to be older than that, but their history began after the end of the war, and after they received the Old Ones' surplus. The Old Empire lasted from that date onwards, some shit happened, like the original Mon'keigh invasion, but only just around 25,000 AD they decided "y'know what? let's start to murderrape each other".

There's basically a ton of things GW didn't flesh out to this day, but comparing the eldar timeline with mankind's you'll see either: it's overstretched or they really spend A LOT of time doing fuck all. Honestly dunno, maybe this' my drunken brain thinking or there are books I didn't read.

>>63179670
At least in this timeline, we're assuming there was quite a bit of murderfucking before Slaanesh was born. Gods do not come into being overnight.

>>63174259
>>63174795
Canon has Slaanesh cults that worship She Who Thirsts in the guise of a great serpent (which is Slaanesh’s sacred animal) under the name of “Seytan” on Davin, and another cult worshipping an entity called “Shai-Tan” (which I think is something different) on the planet Morningstar. Yes, really.

>>63178215
>>63179670
I think directly tying the eldar gods and Chaos Gods to Earth pantheons is something that should be done with caution. Implying, yes, but otherwise it turns mythologies into "spot the god". It makes the world a bit too small, as well as points out the fact that the eldar gods are inspired by Fantasy's elf gods, which are in turn inspired by various real life deities (Cerunnonos, Ashur(iyan), Ishtar, etc.). Plus other than Vaul the others don't really have a good reason to drop the eldar, and Mag'ladroth has a better reason for influencing humanity because he's in the solar system.

Of course having said that, I’m entirely guilty of having the headcanon that the Celtic Cernunnos in this timeline came about when a few Disciples of Kurnous (or whatever the pre-Fall equivalent were) landing in the early Iron Age and going “dude, where’s our mammoths, they were here last time we checked a few thousand years ago”. Then they noticed the locals and told them all about Kurnous (saying he is a “bro god”) and their people before leaving Earth in disappointment that all their megafauna was gone. But then we run into the possibility that Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Ereshkigal are all Isha and so on. And the awkward similarity between Mag'ladroth and a certain creator deity as was mentioned before (thread 20 something).

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>>63179852
And forgot my image like a pleb.

>>63179713
>At least in this timeline, we're assuming there was quite a bit of murderfucking before Slaanesh was born. Gods do not come into being overnight.

Yes, IIRC the eldar were playing "Ulthuan World Police" for quite some time. Then they started to become more Dark Elf like where they began becoming increasingly spiteful and cruel (picking fights with the Hrud, stealing suns), and eventually they just started ignoring the outside world almost entirely before starting on their god-building project.

>>63179852
>the awkward similarity between Mag'ladroth and a certain creator deity
Which creator deity are you referring to here?

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>>63145400
Okay, I think I compiled a list on all our Vespid fluff. Can anyone take a look at this to see if everything seems to be there? This is for going on the Notes page.

https://pastebin.com/UMVjhbF6

I also noticed we never really addressed how the Vespid communicate with other races. I would almost argue the best way would be since they are caste-based to have a specific "communicator caste" who wear the communion helms that can translate Vespid pheromonal speech into Gothic or Tau. The vespid when they want to communicate to others relay their message to the translator, who translates it into the necessary language.

And reading this I just realized I forgot the part about how Vespid name themselves.

>>63179912
>Then they started to become more Dark Elf like where they began becoming increasingly spiteful and cruel (picking fights with the Hrud, stealing suns)
I suppose that's when they started skirmishes against the Human Dominion.

Would be interesting if ancient humans met encountered some precursorial eldar refugees.

>>63181441
>met encountered
I'm in serious need of sleep.

>>63181210
It really captures the feeling of a gentle if confusing giant race.

>>63181210
Wonderfully done. I love the idea of nightmare monster looking bugs being sugar junkies.

>>63181210
Seems like it could go straight to the Member States of Xenos pages.

>>63184146
Under the Tau as a sub-catagory would be better.

>>63174159
Squats (and maybe a few other examples) get away with running their own psychic training institutions because they are proven to be of comparable quality to what the Imperium has.

>>63176829
Empty Space is theirs. Chaos defiles it with their presence. The Clans have made it their concern as it is an insult to their gods and an insult to their gods demands correction.

>>63118319
Anything.

Literally anything. The Ark of the Covenant all the way up to the an impossible perpetual motion machine.

If it's too weird to be safe but too useful/dangerous to destroy it has a place in the vaults.

>>63160853
I'm trying to think of other situations they could end up in. Any suggestions.

>>63190192
There's always the obvious one. They get caught by their superiors. Draco tries to smooth talk his way out of it while Legi is constantly undermining his narrative from the side by telling the truth.

>>63186325
The bigger issue is that the Imperium always needs psykers to power the Astronomican. Having a few slip through the cracks with Nicassar or eldar training isn't a big deal, but Survivor Civs refusing to do would make other worlds question whether they have to do so. Which could be the crux of a historical dispute.

Navigators are exempt but then again they aren't treated like other psykers for a long list of reasons.

>>63190836
Only if they find out.

Emperor could have met with the Hubworlders i n private and had a quiet word with them that amounts to "keep up it quiet and shuffle a few to the lighthouse and you can do your own thing". He's had this deal with a few of the Survivor Civs and every one of them assumes it's a secret deal he made with just them.mes

Even with all of this the combined Survivor Civs are a few thousand out of a million worlds.

>>63191284
The Hubworlders (and others that got similar deals) might have only considered because their traditions were not just sufficient, but conducive to producing model psykers. Hubworld trained psykers may also be culturally predisposed to volunteer and succeed in the choir at a notably higher proportion than those of the Solar-Prosperan school.

>>63191555
The Solar-Prosperan school isn’t deficient when it comes to stability or a sense of duty, but it’s all relative, and Hubworld psykers often end up even more so.

>>63192776
The current High-Lady of the Psykana is forcing reforms on the mainstream education of psykers. She's pushing hard for a return to the older method of masters, apprentices and covens. It's not popular and seems to be lowering overall performance whilst increasing safety and stability. Her reasoning is that the job of her department is to make people safe, not perform parlour tricks.

>>63190836
Who should Jaq Draco's direct superiors be?

>>63193895
Whoever runs Ganymede.

>>63191284
>>63191555
That actually makes some sense, and adds to the realpolitik flavor that this Imperium has.

It might also explain why canon squat psykers are all really, really old if they keep a low profile most of the time. Only really showing up when they get so old their age would be noticeable (i.e., "living ancestors" from canon).

It would have to be Survivor Civs who have actual policies though. Ultramar wouldn't for example since they don't have a cultural tradition of protecting psykers.

How would soul-binding work, though? Humans are usually at risk unless soul bound or a couple of other weird versions in canon. This Imperium would probably love to daemon-proof xenos members as well but the Emperor can't link to non-human psychology that easy.

>>63192916
I wonder if the High Lady would make some unfavorable comment about the old system producing Ahrimans, given that Ahriman's heyday was thousands of years ago, definitely was a space wizard, and is not highly looked at and currently considered a fuckup by most of the Imperium.

It makes you wonder how fast or how many cultural trends have gone on in the Imperium. You have slow, glacial ones like reduction of xenophobia and starting to believe their own hype, but think of how many cultural changes have happened on Earth in just the last century. Of course, a lot of those are going to be planet-limited, the spread of others will be stymied by interstellar travel, and society in general is going to tend towards slow change because of its gerontocratic nature.

>>63194182
>I wonder if the High Lady would make some unfavorable comment about the old system producing Ahrimans, given that Ahriman's heyday was thousands of years ago, definitely was a space wizard, and is not highly looked at and currently considered a fuckup by most of the Imperium.
It’s kinda the essence of her whole argument that the Solar-Prosperan outlook that Ahriman was paragon of fundamentally faulty in its categorization and formalization of warp lore to evaluate and mitigate risks it could pose. Ahriman’s students and his own actual historical behavior in this regard are all examples useful to her argument and agenda, but the fact that Ahriman wasn’t actually trained in the Solar-Prosperan school of thought despite his work being integral to its formation is much less useful history. Ahriman was actually trained under Magnus in an arrangement much more like what her reforms would return to favor, and the Prosperan and Solar traditions were separate for most of his early career, as the Prosperans still had Prospero, and the Solar school was composed just of Malcador, Oscar, and Magnus’ collection of notes and some ancestral knowledge.

Still, the argument that the Solar-Prosperan school only came about due to the joint fuckup of the constituent schools making their continued separate existence untenable is also somewhat compelling.

>>63182497
>>63183124
>>63184146
I think it might need some more smoothing out to make it easier to follow since I literally just put the posts together with minor alterations, but if everyone thinks otherwise it could just go up.

On a related note of something that needs to go on the wiki, for the Daemon Prince who runs the “Wild Hunt” we mentioned in last thread, I was wondering if his daemon prince form might be some kind of stag-centaur. No longer must he dismount to chase his quarry and gives kind of a “weird, primeval liminal spirit” vibe. We still need to figure out a name for him. I remember there were suggestions of Herne or Arawn or the Erlking or something along those lines (I’m not sure which sounds the most eldar-like though), but there is also the option of Orion from Fantasy (who honestly has some similarities if we go with the deer-man). Or maybe Actaceon, the hunter in Greek mythology which was turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds.

>>63195727
I think I like Erlking the most out of the options, possibly because it's more of a title than a name.

>>63199402
Wonder what is she doing in this timeline.

Probably being a closet racial supremacist.

>>63199402
>>63199999
Who?

>>63197399
Seconded

>>63199999
>not being a virulent public racist that compensates with supreme treatment of all Imperial citizens as demonstration of her superiority in nobles oblige.

>>63201621
She could also be a military supremacist who wants to convert the Imperium into a stratocracy.

>>63200981
I think it's Amallyn Shadowguide, ranger of Beil-tan.

Let's put
>>63201621
>>63201882
>>63199999
together and have her be a Beil-tan supremacist. It is only sensible to her mind. Beil-tan is the craftworld with the largest population, the largest growing population, the largest number of exodite worlds in it's direct protectorate, the only one that acknowledges the direct continuation of the Eldar Empire into the Imperium, hit's way above it's considerable weight in the defence of the Imperium and the punishment of it's enemies, produces a dis proportionate number of autarchs and doesn't need to keep begging their avatar to help with the fighting. In times of absolute war the military takes command until the emergency is over, it has always been so in almost every nation across all of the galaxy and all of history. Why should now be any different?

To her mind the Imperium should be run by the military until the Long War is over and the military should be run by the most competent war leaders that the Empire has to offer; Beil-tan autarchs.

Civilian governments can be reinstated after Rhana Dandra is over.

>>63202432
It'd make Biel-Tan one hell of a political battlefield, with Amallyn on one side, and both Cain and his granddaughter on another two. Cain just wants things to be 'normal', at least by the standards of the Imperium, while Miriam is all for endless crusading and shit.

>>63202800
Everything on Beil-tan is a hell of a battlefield. The Avatar of Khaine staying awake is bleeding stupid back into the minds of the craftworld's residents. If one of them has a view then they will exalt that view enthusiastically.

Khaine has made them passionate and fiery. Not freakishly so but still it exaggerates what they already had. The call to war is redoubled but correspondingly birth rates are also up.

>>63194182
Who would run Ganymede? Is it a joint ordo operation or is it a thing in it's own right?

>>63204836
Probably these people

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

although it is probably a joint project.

>>63205527
It's been mentioned before that it's probably a joint project between many departments pooling expertise. Leggi knows that Draco reports to many masters and suspects that many don't know about all of the others.

>>63202800
Plus the actual autarchs on another, who also want things to be "normal" but want Cain to take the fall for proposing unpopular ideas so they can get what they want but not lose popular support. They probably see Amallyn as a dangerous youngster who has no idea of what she's doing, and her unironic support of rash actions is going to put Biel-Tan in overextended and awkward positions.

>>63202432
Biel-Tan's Avatar hasn't been let out since it refused to go back to sleep. The autarchs are worried it would produce too many awkward questions and they don't have a lot of control over it. Very few people even know Biel-Tan's Avatar is awake.

>>63201882
How would she get around the fact that one of their gods is on the throne? Eldar see the Imperium as a theocracy whose legitimacy is based on Isha placing divine right in herself.

>>63202432
Pretty good.

>>63202800
>>63207005
I'm out of the loop, wasn't Cain just an ambassador to Biel-tan?

>>63207005
>Eldar see the Imperium as a theocracy whose legitimacy is based on Isha placing divine right in herself.
This is actually an interesting reminder of Vect's thesis for Commorragh, which he frames in contrast to the Imperial and Crone theocracies. For those that were taken in by the vision that Vect laid out the Old Empire was brought down by the failing aristocracy letting sorcery and religion into the halls of power. Commorragh was the legitimate successor to the Old Empire, whose society may have been faithful but whose government was rightly secular and partitioned from divine influence, with new cabals and oligarchs to replace the aristocratic houses that fell to true debauchery. To them the Craftworlders post raid weren't just sad puritanical exiles, but puritanical exiles that had gone into the wilds following their mad prophet and returned with an unsettling, new, syncretic idol for their mortified devotions and having taken to playing uncouth, prosthelytizing games of conversion with savages. On the other hand, Shaa-Dome had become a playground of magicians, spirits, and gods' favorites, the Old Empire government totally collapsed and overtaken by the factional politics not of houses, but cults. Sure a cousin of the royal house still claimed to rule, but so did a priestess, a prominent general, and a preeminent sorcerer as well, and soon enough a fifth notable claimant came along as well and cowed them all.

>>63207127
Ambassador of the greater Imperium of which Isha Everqueen, All-Mother of the entire eldar people, is the the Empress of (also her shiny golden husband). On top of that Cain is a commissar with a record of accomplishments that is almost beyond compare for a man of his relative youth to say nothing of his confidential work with the Inquisition. Even his attaché is a veteran of the Inquisition Elite.

When Ambassador Cain speaks you fucking listen, his words are tempered by hard won experience and the wisdom of age come early. He once took a few dozen PDF soldiers and a few hundred untrained.civilians and in a few months not only had they decapitated a WAAAAGH!!!!!! but had got to safe territory to report it. He has fought and inspired other soldiers to fight necrons, orks, dark eldar and tyrannids of all sorts. He has personally bested deamon princes and The Fallen in personal combat. His daughter is the daughter of a woman blessed by Isha and she commands Word Bearers in an unending Holy War.

*just* an ambassador. Beil-tan wouldn't have accepted him if he was a mere politician. The man is a legend.

>>63207127
Indeed. Cain is the ambassador to Biel-Tan whose unofficial job it is to prevent Biel-Tan from going on a Space Noldor rampage across the galaxy. He doesn't know about the active Avatar underneath his feet but considers it just part of the typical Ciaphas Cain luck that the most aggressive and warlike Craftworld suddenly got moreso shortly before/after he arrived.

The autarch council are using Cain as their fall guy. They also want brakes on the train but if Cain is willing to be the one to voice the unpopular opinions they're going to let him do it (e.g., stopping them from declaring holy war on Dorhai, as trying to invade a Craftworld is one of the most costly military decisions one can make and you'll be lucky to limp away with a pyrrhic victory). As an outsider Cain can get away with not being as much of a zealot about Biel-Tani values and the younger generation respects him enough that they won't dismiss what he has to say outright. For the autarchs it's a win-win situation.

>>63141432
What more do we have on them because this is interesting as fuck.

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This actually brings up something that I have been mulling over and becoming concerned about. I was worrying about the possibility that we are playing straight and unintentionally supporting the ideas that 40k was originally created to parody.

I realize that 40k effectively stopped being parody and started playing its themes straight with the Grimdarkus Maximus of 3rd Edition, but it is still something that makes me a little worried. This is going to get a little rambly, so feel free to ignore it if it’s not up your alley. It's going to take a while.

We’ve tried to make the nobledark Imperium neither an idealized utopia from the viewpoint of its authors (indeed, we deliberately avoided that in several cases) nor an outright dystopia but simple “a place”, with its own flaws and virtues. In some ways it actually provides counterarguments to some of the big debates in the fandom as part of the whole “providing contrasts with canon” thing. You want to see an Emperor that actually cares about humanity beyond what he can sculpt it into? You want to see an Imperium that actually functions as a government? This is what it would look like. Note the differences.

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>>63212601
In general, we’ve been trying to aim for more of “heroic fantasy IN SPACE” motif than the dystopian hellscape of canon. For example, the Imperium being nominally led by the union of the Emperor and Empress is a play on the typical fantasy trope of “the good kingdom” being led by a benevolent king and a queen (with additional references to the Last Alliance of Men and Elves and the Aesir-Vanir war among other things). Furthermore, the in-universe justification is that Oscar and Isha were put in charge out of merit, because they were the best people for the job at the time (though as mentioned before Isha would cite being given the power of divine right by herself), and the idea of succession has never come up because both are immortal. However, I have often heard it said that the only difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship is the idea of divine right.

Erebus is even supposed to be a meta-commentary on this, pointing out that enlighted despotism only works as long as the despot in power remains enlightened, and the Imperium is unusual (“unnatural”, in Erebus’ words) and only functions because its heads of state continue to respect their people’s wishes and are immortal. His conclusion that this means the Chaos Gods which are more like natural forces are more worthy of dictating morality, however, is deliberately portrayed as missing a few steps in logic.

>>63212623
Additionally, we’ve also pointed out that despite being people who try to do the right thing, neither Oscar nor Isha are perflect, flawless individuals. The life events that make Oscar such an effective ruler (namely, his lightest touch necessary approach to governance, his desire to only exercise power in the name of the common good of the people, and how his government style boils down to empowering the individual rather than reducing people to cogs in the machine because he doesn’t want power), has caused him to be plagued with self-doubt and a lack of confidence, as well as caused some of his greatest failures when his repressed desires for basic human needs bubble up in unexpected ways to the point that frickin’ Eldrad has had to step in to avert some of them.

Isha we haven’t talked about as much, but from what we do have it definitely seems like her fatal flaw is ruthlessness; she is more than willing to wear the mantle of god-empress and do whatever it takes to make sure no one destroys her family again, blaming her own passivity and Asuryan’s self-righteousness for the Fall (somewhat ignoring that she is falling into the same trap).

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>>63212762
We’ve also tried to get across that even though the Imperium in this timeline is sympathetic on its own merits rather than in a relative sense “because they are human” (like canon Imperium), “because they are trying to save what is left of their people” (like canon eldar), or “because they are the lesser evil” (like canon tau), Imperial morals =/= modern Western morals even if there is enough overlap to make them not come across as unsympathetic. In many ways the Imperium would come off as warlike and barbaric by modern standards, and is not meant to be an endorsement of those policies. Indentured servitude and Roman-style slavery are permitted as “lesser evils”. There is still discrimination against mutants, even if it’s not institutionalized.

Chaos ironically smooths over the integration of people of a hundred different species and a thousand different customs because it clearly provides a moral “polarity” that nearly all religions can mutually agree represents “evil” in some way and most people are willing to bite their tongue and work out a compromise because the alternative is being left to dry when Chaos comes. Or fighting a bloody war of secession with the Imperium because it does not allow fair-weather friends, something that we’ve described as morally repugnant but unfortunately politically necessary.

Species other than humans and eldar are decidedly under-represented in Imperial politics and are semi-autonomous client states, and while the worst effects of this are mitigated by the fact that for most species the Imperium’s influence is little more than a mutual defense pact similar to space NATO it is not gone, as the Tau or even Fenris show. Horus’ “Star Confederacy” or elector counts IN SPACE would undoubtedly be “fairer”, regardless of ease of implementation. And the idea of social change is going to rear it's head in the future, especially if the societal “glue” that is Chaos falls apart.

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>>63212879
The Imperium also isn’t a paragon of civil rights no matter how you slice it, it doesn’t regularly trounce on the civil liberties of its citizens but at the same time the there is nothing equivalent to the Magna Carta or Bill of Rights preventing such things.

The Imperium would be a whole lot worse if the people in positions of power didn’t believe in what it represented (indeed, this is kind of what we see in canon to some degree), and even then there is still in-fighting between different schools of thought of which idea of “the right thing to do” is more valid and there are always going to be people in any system who are just bad.

I primarily came to this dilemma when I was trying to figure out what kind of government this Imperium would be described as and if it is fascist like canon. We’ve mentioned that the nobledark Imperium draws on ancient China and Persia a bit more than canon, where the same influences are present but lessened compared to that of Imperial Rome and feudal Europe. Like ancient Persia (and to a lesser degree China), the Imperium is run on a satrapy system where as long as you maintain central infrastructure, follow a few central rules, keep the populace happy, and don’t rebel the central government could care less what you do. Like ancient China, the most powerful centralized institution is a bureaucracy (Administratum) mostly due to the fact that in a universe with unreliable faster than light travel he who controls distribution of goods controls the galaxy. Additionally, like Imperial China the Imperium is run under a combination of legalism and a mandate of heaven. The primary purpose of the Emperor/Empress seems to be less to run the government and make laws (which is the job of the High Lords or local law bodies), and more to provide oversight and make sure things run smoothly, something which I've heard is similar to early Turkish government but cannot confirm because I am not an expert in that area.

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>>63213122
I tried comparing the nobledark Imperium to the list of criteria that some political theorists have used to diagnose fascism.

The Imperium as of M41 is hyper-nationalistic but that is mostly because the few remaining independent powers either can’t be communicated with (i.e., Thyrrus, Orks) or can be communicated with and are decidedly hostile (Chaos). However, despite being isolationist, it had no intrinsic hatred towards other powers like the Thexians, Tarellians, and Tau when they were still independent (even if it did get more assimilationist) and occasionally tried to help because it preferred neighbors which could be reasoned with diplomatically rather than responding to attempts at communication with “WAAAGH!”

There is surprisingly little glorification of war or hatred of the other for a series based on 40k. There is no state-sponsored hatred of internal minorities (though hatred does exist); the Imperium has lots of different groups under its aegis, many of which vehemently disagree with one another and in many ways the Imperium can’t afford to discriminate even if it wanted to. The Imperium does hate Chaos and the Orks (and Necrons, Slaugth, etc.), but that is because Orks are Orks and Chaos declared a holy war on the Imperium 10,000 years ago and refuses to stop. The Imperium would love nothing more for Chaos to go away and never bother them again (and ironically without a shared hatred of Chaos the Imperium would likely collapse). There is glorification of military in the sense that the galaxy has been in a state of total war for 10,000 years, but in the sense of “war sucks, here’s thanks to the people who do the shitty job so the rest of us don’t have to” rather than “it is better to die for the Throne than live for yourself”.

There is no glorification of masculinity or youth, if anything the Imperium is a gerontocracy (again, kind of like Confucianism ideals in Imperial China).

>>63213433
It 200% glorifies the “golden days” of the past, the Emperor started the Unification and Great Crusade out of a desire to return humanity to the days of the GaBHD and remove the anarchy and techno-barbarism of Old Night, and the Craftworlders base their legitimacy in the claim that their way of life is closer to how the Old Eldar Empire was in its glory days when they were still benevolent and decadence hadn’t set in.

It is also very imperialistic, though not in the same manner as ancient Rome or Victorian England. It does gobble up unclaimed planets like nobody’s business. It also was very aggressive in uniting humanity during the Great Crusade, claiming a manifest destiny to unite humanity out of a somewhat misperceived notion of the unity of the GaBHD, though it preferred to do so via soft power and alliances where possible. And at the same time when it ran into the Tau and other such empires they did not just start drawing up plans for killing or subjugating them and taking their stuff, most of the time they just tried to ignore them unless they were preying on humans.

The Imperium is definitely very authoritarian. One cannot deny that.

It’s hard to say if the Imperium is a one-party system, particularly as there generally aren’t elections or stratified party blocs. Debate over political issues has been mentioned before. We’ve also never really detailed what the Imperium does in the event of a rebellion where there is good internal reasoning and no chaotic influence. Like a Hive World governor who pockets money instead of replacing Hive ventilation and the people rebel because they just want to stop breathing smog. I could see the Imperium siding with the revolutionaries in this instance not only out of morals but the pragmatic idea that taking their “side” makes them more likely to go back to normal because the government supported them (which is kind of a Mandate of Heaven thing). We’ve mentioned that kind of thing happening.

>>63213122
I for one have been pushing this angle for months. The Imperium is at its heart an empire, and all of the flaws inherent to the practice of such a system come with that, even if it is the noblest empire we can conceive of. In fact the questions you raise about it’s governmental structure lead to other essential ones about the core virtue of nobility that underlies it’s elevation from canon’s Imperium. Nobility, civilization, magnanimity and noblesse oblige are the ethics of the enlightenment empire, as are efficiency, dignity, and discretion, but these are also the things that define their excesses as much as the faults of corruption and petty vices.

Doombreed may be an enemy long diminished in the arc of Imperial history, but there is one dig at Oscar he still occasionally makes that barbs the Emperor of Old Earth and many more worlds besides. On the list of conquerors raised on that world, the overlord of Ursh was second only to the warlord of Terawatt-Uralia that defeated him, and not by a close margin. Oscar has waged more wars, perhaps even personally killed, more than any king in human history. He has conducted purges on a scale to blanch Stalin, and with absolute conviction in his purpose. He has let planets, stars, and societies be destroyed or languish in horrific circumstances. He permits, even backs, areas of lawlessness, exploitation, or endless war in the name of peace and civility elsewhere in the Imperium. He doesn’t do this gladly, but he is accepting of thing, even actions, that are distinctly horrible. He is noble, and as such was fit to take responsibility for civilization’s expansion, but this does make nobility responsible for what follows.

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>>63213820
The Imperium definitely revolves around the idea of a charismatic leader, much to the Emperor’s chagrin. Oscar even tried to hand power back, but it resulted in the Imperial Civil War and the people Life of Brian-ed him, which we’ve tried to present for tragedy in the sense that humanity failed to stand on its own and Oscar is now trapped in a hole of his own making, which he hates. Even if you had a magic voting machine that could instantly record the votes of everyone in the Imperium, the majority of people would still likely vote for Oscar because everyone knows what he’s done for the Imperium and his record. In some ways it’s kind of a deconstruction of what do you think would happen if you tried to help a vote in a universe where you have someone who is immortal and has shaped known history, as long as they didn’t fall out of favor through some scandal they would be likely to always win simply because everyone would know about them in some way.

Of course, we only know that because we as the readers have a magic window into the Emperor’s head and can see what he really thinks and feels. Without that, he doesn’t look that different from other dictators, and many quite horrible leaders actually created a myth of them being “reluctant dictators” to make them look more favorable to the public (see: Augustus Caesar and a lot of Roman tyrants and emperors).

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>>63214046
The closest thing I can think of it it’s a quasi-feudal hegemon in the style of the old Delian League albeit run in the manner of Klaus Wulfenbach. Which ironically makes a lot of sense because whenever I've tried to write Oscar's perspective I've always written it as "what if Clark Kent grew up to be Klaus Wulfenbach instead of Superman".

Maybe I'm overthinking this and this is just mindless rambling. Maybe I'm just over-sensitized and over-reactionary with how the world is today and the ugly feelings you often see stirred up in the 40k fanbase (namely, the "Imperium did nothing wrong" sentiment). I do hope that is the case. Nevertheless, as one of the frequent writefags for the project, it's something that's been occupying my mind a lot recently and I feel like I have to get off my chest.

>>63214046
The calixus sector stuff, with duke Severan and the rebellious Dominate, remaining slaugh from the Xenocides, the neighboring Bloodpact’s Grand Despot Doombreed and the Arch-Arsonist of Bork(?) as the classic foes of the Imperium supporting malcontent, and forthcoming Imperial response seem ripe for these themes.

As does the tragedy of Goge Vandire, which still needs more fleshing out.

>>63214227
The Imperial Civil War and the Age of Apostasy is the part of this AU that definitely needs the most fleshing out. It's one of the most morally gray conflicts, because although Vandire had snapped a lot of the people fighting on either side thought they were doing what's right and that the other had betrayed the ideals of civilization.

Old Earth has only been besieged twice in its post Age of Strife history. Once by The Beast and once by the Imperium itself.

If anything would produce some of the long-held rivalries seen in canon, it would be this. Heck, some people might hold a grudge against the Salamanders because Vulkan was trying to keep the peace, in part because he was old and couldn't just take up his warhammer and start smacking fools.

The issue is writing the Civil War in a way that it is conceivable the Imperium could recover from.If the scars run too deep, it risks turning into the Horus Heresy but with less Chaos and the Imperium fragments into several states and gets picked off piecemeal when the next Black Crusade or Beast WAAAGH! comes calling. One of the other writefags ran into this exact problem.

>>63214215
I think I should clarify that I have nothing againt this AU. Working on the sociology, history, and xenobiology/xenopsychology for this has been some of the most fun I've had in a long time, and I would hate to be the one to ruin someone's enjoyment of it or cause it to implode. I'm just worried about it turning into something ugly.

bump

>>63215332
>I'm just worried about it turning into something ugly.
I haven't seen any signs of that, personally. Is there something in particular worrying you?

>>63215332

I think your concerns are perfectly reasonable.

I'm not sure there's any serious risks involved-- the canon fandom has some deeply scary-sounding memebers (I'm not sure if the Imperial supporters or the Chaos supporters are more disturbing, or how much difference there is between them), but Nobledark doesn't seems to have much, tonally at least, to appeal to those particular nasties. Atmittedly my involvement with the project has been extremely intermittent so I may not have a complete picture.

One thing that would concern me is comparing Nobledark to Canon-- in which the Nobledark Imperium is vastly nicer-- and never really comparing it to real life, in which the Nobledark Imperium is still an AWFUL place. That could skew a person's viewpoint.

Actually, you brought up Girl Genius... that might be a good comparison. GG is great fun and I'm a huge fan, but when you take a close look at the setting it's an awful place and DEFINITELY not something that should ever, ever be idealized. Klaus himself would be an unequivocal villain in a less messed-up setting.

Atmittedly the Nobledark AU being 40k fanwork, it's a lot more likely to be noticed by the nasty sorts. I doubt it's anywhere near as dangerous as the canon franchise though.

>>63218314

Erg. It's late here and I managed to leave out my main opinion-- the only thing that concerns me would be losing perspective on just how fucked-up even the Nobledark Imperium is.

Also, this is a really niche project, isn't it? Not something that could gain a lot of influence.

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>>63218367
>Also, this is a really niche project, isn't it? Not something that could gain a lot of influence.
About that...

>>63197399
Is the title inherited or has it always been the same dude?

>>63219570
I'd leave it up in the air.

>>63219570
Nobody is sure about a lot of thing about it. All anyone is sure of really is that it's not a deamon prince because it can hunt in real space.

>>63214215
High up Imperial Government is a Meritocratic Stratocracy with a lot of civilian employment. Local level is too varied to make sweeping statements. Or at least that's how I'm seeing it.

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>>63218775
We did it first and better.

>>63202432
>Rhana Dandra
I feel that the eldar seeing this time of trials and prophetic fulfilment should be making more of this. Or it's kind of the thing everyone is trying to avoid talking about. It's coming one way or another, you can't stop it, you can't run far enough to get away from it. All you can do is plough through it and hope you survive to the other side. The eldar don't want to talk about it, but they are all secretly stashing tinned food and bottled water.

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>>63222269
Will Macha ever get Mon-keigh lover?

>>63222820
Yes. She's the High Priestess and host of Isha who is married to the Emperor.

>>63222938
Wouldn't it make more sense for Emps to have Isha herself, who would heal him? Or would Macha be granted powers to do that?

>>63222953
Macha and Isha are now inseparable entities much like the fusion of an Exarch to it's host.

>>63222820
In this AU sue did a fusion dance with Isha. Isha entered into a political marriage with The Emperor. It is rumoured that the royal bed had to be built with an adamantium frame it's not a rumour.

Macha had, before the borderline suicidal mood set in, a very healthy sex drive. Being bound to Isha has not reduced this in the slightest as Isha is also the goddess of consensual sex for procreation.

>>63224426
Well, I hope she (or perhaps they in this case) are happy with Emps. Also, is this written somewhere? I'm new to this Nobledark AU thing.

>>63224555
Most of this stuff is saved to the 1d4chan pages, the links to which are at the top of the thread. Usually they're in the OP, but this time the guy making the thread was somewhat inexperienced with it and forgot to include them.

The marriage to Emps started out as a political thing, but thankfully the two were compatible enough that it's now a genuine and mutual relationship. As for whether Macha is enjoying it, well... Isha is a goddess of Fertility, whose needs are "simple, but great," and one of the reasons Eldrad arranged the marriage in the first place is because Oscar is probably the only being around who can give her what she needs and live to tell about it. Otherwise the increased birthrates among the Eldar would have been countered by the rapid depletion of their surviving males.

>>63224659
Oh boy. Though I hope Macha's personality was not fully replaced by Isha.

>>63224695
It's not that one has replaced the other, it's more that they've sort of merged together. Part of the requirement for a suitable host is a similar mindset, and thus in the eons since becoming a single entity their thought processes have become so similar that at this point there's no functional difference between the two. Macha's had influence on Isha just as much as Isha's had influence on her, so the current result is a mix of the two rather than one subsuming the other. It's possible Isha's more vicious streak is partly a result of Macha's frustrations, though the eternities she spent as Nurgle's captive certainly didn't help.

>>63223392
Adding to this is the fact that Isha identifies as Macha now as well. When she thinks of her face she thinks of Macha's face, even if the truth is a bit more complicated (her whole title is technically "Macha-Isha, The Avatar of Isha" before you start getting into the "God-Empress", "Everqueen", "All-Mother" stuff. It's one of the side effects of confining a mutable Warp being (albeit one who thinks like a mortal more than most of the eldar gods) in a mortal body that experiences causality in real-time.

Which is one of the reasons why Isha is so careful about throwing around her power. Although in theory she is potentially one of the most powerful individuals in the Imperium, Isha restricts her power to around Emperor level and keeps the rest of it dumped somewhere else because if she channeled any more energy through Macha she would burn up. Although Isha would reincarnate in one of the Handmaidens the idea of having to relearn her face and body all over again, not to mention potentially waste the lives of two of her most ardent followers, makes that distasteful. Plus the issue that while strong she can't take any of the Chaos Gods head-on. Of course "revitalizing a planet" is considered an arduous, if acceptable level of power, so context is important.

Which leads to the potentially amusing image of Macha-Isha having to figure out mortal things such as "eating" or "using the bathroom" or "getting drunk". She'd probably know from the Macha part of her but the idea would still be hilarious, especially in the early days before she became Empress.

>>63224659
And vice versa. Eldrad saw at least one future where Oscar retreated into himself and turned into someone little different from the canon Emperor without someone who could balance him long-term out of a desire to never feel loss again.

>>63224695
It wasn't. It's two liquids poured together. Isha as she is now is neither fully Isha or Macha.

Isha is not as she was before The Fall, she's more ruthless for one thing, although how much of this is because of Macha's influence and how much is because of her experience in The Mansion is unknown.

>>63221002
It is to an extent but the extensive civilian elements are arranged into an extensive but efficient bureaucracy. The structure, decentralised as it is, is too vast to survive without someone doing the paperwork and keeping track of whose holding what.

>>63224848
It's entirely possible that Isha took Nurgle's aspect of Malal out of the mansion with her, also attached to the ailing undead body of the long suffering high priestess of the temple of Isha on Shaa-Dome. Isha, now Iron Mother of Empire, may well also be Mother of Entropy, Queen of the Fall as well as the Spring, who reaps as well as sows.

Such a case might be particularly relevant if she were to bear child, a god of death perhaps.

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>>63226604
>Such a case might be particularly relevant if she were to bear child, a god of death perhaps.

Oh sweet Jesus. Malal wasn't just killed and/or enslaved when Khorne took his un-throne, he was dismembered and cannibalized.

When Ynnead is born he's going to be the part of Malal that was "a good and natural ending", the Thanatos equivalent of the pantheon.

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>>63194182
She'd be more likely to suggest that the old system produced Gregor Eisenhorn of DeKere's World and everyone who had seen the reports would shut the fuck up. Voke was the previous Inquisitorial Representative, he would shut the fuck up more than the others but there are whole other flavours of silence. High Lady Kissa knows the sound of silence and the deafening difference of someone with nothing to say and someone who is not saying something. Voke's eyes would meet her grey, blind eyes and they would both instantly know where the other stood on this subject and the silence would take a cold though not overtly hostile flavour. Not on this occasion at least.

In any case the name Eisenhorn would never be mentioned again in any official capacity.

The other High Lords present would not have been aware of anything going on between Voke and Kissa, of all the things not said and implied declarations and lines drawn. If they did then they would have had to wonder who would have won if the subject had been pushed. Voke is at about the low end of the Beta scale in terms of raw power but Kissa can use what she has in ways politely considered "non-standard" to say nothing of her bizarre fluency in the the fell speech of the gods that cuts the air, the tongue, the lips and the ears at the very least.

But the subject was never raised again out of that silence and Voke eventually semi-retired to be an overseer and adviser to The Guardians of the Covenant chapter.

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>>63227091
Oh yeah, definitely. Why do you think Malal only has enough power to make one Daemon Prince? The current Malal himself has even admitted that he is little more than a revenant corpse being puppeted by his brother Khorne’s power.

It’s also the reason the other three don’t like to talk about Malal very much, and the reason they flipped their lid during the Malalian Heresy. Tzeentch would do so anyway because he’s a jerk, but the murder and subsequent drawing, quartering, and cannibalization of Malal is one of the Chaos Gods’ darkest secrets. Malal gets more power the more someone pays attention to him. Like how the more someone talks about how the system is broken and there needs to be a revolution increases the chance a revolution occurs. The more you acknowledge a problem, the bigger the problem becomes. Slaanesh joins in the shunning because he/she is a spiteful beast.

Malal’s death is also a problem because it demonstrates that Chaos gods can, in fact, die (even if in this case it took the other three ganging up on him), and sets the standard for fratricide being a legitimate means of behavior.

The Chaos gods hate one another, but this is like saying poison in the previous night's drink is a legitimate method of killing someone in an honor duel.

On an unrelated note, does anyone know of a good reason for the Farsight Enclaves and Ultramar to pick a fight with one another? I had an idea for Farsight related thing, but I wasn't sure how to set it up. Officially, the Farsight Enclaves and the Imperium are at war with each other, even if the Enclaves are near the bottom of the priority list due to being mostly isolationist and the Tau Empire not wanting to waste the lives over a grudge match, but I assume there must be some kind of occasional brushfire conflicts.

>>63228880
Colonization rights to border worlds, trespassing, loitering with intent and nipping the problem in the bud all spring to mind.

>>63228880
Recall that Farsight's ambition is only internally kept in check by his own sense of traditionalism to the point of codependency with the cadre of traditionalist Ethereals that joined him in his enclave. They defer to him on military matters, but he still insists on having them set strategic goals, as well as the agendas of their small Water and Earth Caste populations.
As such the Farsight Enclave has been guided by an insular and increasingly esoteric 'sect' of the Tau'va over their great general's long life. As Farsight's influence on the enclave's relatively small population has become intergenerational that sect has taken on his distinct image, though it is hard to call a personality cult or similar. Still, if Farsight thought war with Ultramar wise, the enclave would contrive a reason righteous in their own minds at least.

>>63215332
>>63214215
This may not be completely related to the issue you guys are talking about, but this discussion reminded me of something somebody said last thread about how the eastern part of the galaxy is taking on an Age of Exploration vibe with all the interplay between the Tau, Ultramar, and a bunch of other xenos like the Ulmeathic League. More importantly, it makes me think about how the Age of Exploration was followed by what could be considered an Age of Rebellion, with first the Americas breaking away, followed by a French Revolution, followed by several other similar revolutions.
There's already fears that the Primaris Initiative could be seen as an attempted break-away from the Imperium by Ultramar, and those fears aren't helped by the fact that such a rebellion would actually be feasible due to their neighbors. The Tau were incredibly reluctant to join the Imperium, the Tarellians were conquered and assimilated, and the Ulmeathic League will probably side with whichever faction is gearing up to deal with the Tyranids because they've got a grudge to settle (and the entire point of the Primaris Initiative is prepping for the inevitable main Hive Fleet). If Ultramar did go independent, they'd have enough potential allies to make the Imperial response so costly that both sides would just end up bloody and battered for their myriad enemies to come in and mop up; this is incentive for Ultramar to stay loyal, but it's also reason for the Imperium to not be able to respond in force if Ultramar did go rogue.
Nobody's planning on it of course, but all it would take is a perfect storm of Mechanicus clerks being snippy about "why don't you just use your precious xeno-tech instead?" getting misinterpreted as a refusal to provide the weaponry they need to prepare for the Tyranids, or a request for more forces being replied to with "no we can't spare them, also we need you to send us your forces to prepare for the potential Black Crusade."

>>63232864
To summarize the point I was trying to make, if canon Imperium's problem is stagnation and rigid adherence to dogma that has become institutionalized stupidity, Nobledark Imperium's problem is that there's too many voices with too many different opinions. A rebellion in canon would be limited in scope and quickly dealt with because the Imperium has been hardening itself against a second Horus Heresy for so long that it's second nature to just blam the dissenters. A rebellion in Nobledark has the potential to have a cascade effect, with big chunks of the Imperium breaking off all at once. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because everybody in charge recognizes the plethora of bigger threats out there; that may end up changing as different parts of the Imperium get different ideas about which threat is the "biggest" one to deal with. Cadia and Terra and that whole section of the Imperium would see Chaos as the biggest threat because of the Eye of Terra, while Ultramar and the Tau and eastern Xenos would see the Tyranids as the impending doom of the Imperium, and the Eldar are probably flipping out about how the Necrons are almost all woken up and ready to start War in Heaven 2.0.

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>>63232864
>>63232995
Ho boy. This sounds eerily reminiscent of both Badab and Farsight and Shadowsun's arguments over what is the biggest threat in the galaxy right now.

I guess what kept things from normally boiling over is the ruinous catastrophe of the hour generally had the politeness to wait in line, but now you have Szarekh, the 'nids, Malys, and everyone's favorite dark horse Ghazghull springing their kekaku at the same time. And the last time something like this happened the Orks almost took Armageddon and broke into the core territories of the Segmentum Solar and the Demiurg (who had previously been a neutral party) had to step in.

>>63220260
I think we said he may have been granted princehood and he's been dragging people into the Webway for his hunts. Of course if you could just jump out of the webway and be safe it defeats the purpose of his

>>63222269
Accurate farseeing more than a short time in advance is starting to become more difficult and the seers don't like talking about it. The few things that do end up remaining consistent tend to be varying scales of bad, from "Gorgutz comes back for round two on Kronus" to "The Dragon shall throw off his chains and arise from the halls of the Forge Lords to make war upon those in his kingdom" and "The exile will return from his long banishment", none of which make sense but all of which seem ominous and in the realm of the Starchild Prophecies.

The non-seers are probably getting worried about it too.

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>>63218246
>>63218314
Nothing in particular, just having tried to do some searching for cool lore made me really think about it, having seen some of the worse things the fandom brings out in people, and it brings up the whole idea of "becoming the mask". The idea that just thinking about something in a certain mindset long enough warps us and makes us into something we don't want to be, and perhaps all we've done is create a sweeter smelling poison whose effects take longer to manifest. And some of us have been spending our days marinating in this for over two years.

The comparisons to Chaos are not unnoticed.

>>63218314
>>63218367
>perspective
I guess that's a good thing to consider. The Nobledark Imperium is "good" only in the sense that it's making lemons out of lemonade and is striving to avoid merely being the lesser evil, by most standards it would not be considered so. I know we've pointed out the average Imperial's life is more similar to living in WWII-era Britain, Great Depression-era America, or a developing nation than many science-fiction series (better off than Dune, arguably about the level of the Empire in Star Wars but more due to broader socio-political concerns than extreme institutionalized cruelty on the part of the government).

I guess the obvious point is that the nobledark Imperium supports such governing conditions no more than your typical high fantasy arguing that monarchy is a good idea.

>nobledark is niche
Yeah, that was one thing I noticed. A surprisingly high number of people didn't seem to like nobledark, which was more surprising in the fact that the majority didn't seem to not like it because of it's lighter tone (which is understandable and a matter of personal preference) but because they seemed to have swallowed the Imperial kool-aid. Warhammer is already niche, so the people who don't like vanilla but would like this are already turned off and.

>>63237190
What would be the eldar equivalent of innawoods survivalist nutters?

>>63238905
Crafteorlders and exodites. It's why they left their Old Empire.

>>63228556
What is Eisenhorn doing at the moment, assuming his career was more or less the same?

>>63206127
I think that we should leave the exact nature of his employers a secret. He might have some names (probably fake) and recognizes some faces (also possibly fake) that bark orders and demand explanations but that's as afar as it goes. He knows that someone is reading his reports because someone writes back.

Ganymede doesn't send out reports by astropath and there is division of knowledge as a necessity as some of the shit they have boxed up spreads by people knowing about it.

In truth Leggi is actually pretty mundane compared to a lot of the shit that is kept in extremely elaborate boxes. She is even allowed her own key for her cell and has free run of the non-restricted sections of her particular facility.

Bump

What would be a good idea for an AdBio gone wrong sect?

>>63243858
off the top of my head, "lets make a brain that can self-modify in a way that produces corresponding changes in its soul", "how much Old One can we extract and recreate using Navigators", "We invented an organ that lets you eat brains to absorb knowledge, and want to spread them across the Imperium", and the reason the descendants of the Genesmiths are discouraged from practicing psychology, "Imperial Reason is so eminently reasonable and compelling that we can probably re educate this horde of Orks."

>>63244199
I imagine that the Old One resurrection attempt was stamped out hard by the Navigators. They don't want a repeat of what happened when they tried it.

>>63215332
How much overt fighting was there i. the Civil War or was it mostly just political moving and a relatively brief war at the climax?

>>63245253
I don't think that anyone in the Imperium knows the Navigators were made with Old One DNA. They know it is some kind of xenos-splice, and they maybe, just maybe know it came from extinct species based on half-remembered folklore, but the details of how the Navigators were made was lost with the GaBHD.

Unrelated, but what does everyone think about this Lovecraft quote to go with the Crone eldar entry as an homage to the other army entries on 1d4chan?

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

>>63239971
Exodites moreso, as they are literal dinosaur-riding Amish Native American elves going by canon.

Though in this case it's kind of debatable whether there is any place in the galaxy that will be safe. The only place that's likely to survive if Chaos, the tyranids, or the Necrons have their way is doing what the eldar did at the end of the War in Heaven and hide in Commorragh in the Webway, but that's dangerous for a whole 'nother set of reasons. And that may not even be enough to survive Szarekh, the Cadian Pillars are planned precisely because they missed a spot last time.

We really need to define Vect's game plan post-Wedding a bit more. He's never going to convert to Chaos but exactly how he plans to square the survival of Commorragh with Chaos' long term plans remains to be seen.

>>63246995
150 years of a Vandire Reign of Terror, ten years of actual fighting which ended relatively quickly when Thor found the Steward and broke the morale of most Vandirists. Thor managed to get to Old Earth on his own, Steward contributed to the last push but didn't get to the palace until after Thor had killed Vandire.

>>63247802
I think Vect's plan is to be the last man standing.

Nids have shown no interest in the webway

Necrons can't into webway well, or at least not anywhere near as well as his people.

Orks can't into webway bar Wazdakka.

The gods of Chaos can't see into the webway properly so it's of limited interest to their followers.

Vect might not know about the Big Red Cadian Button.

Malys and her followers are not sustainable empire builders. He'll back them to win, sit in his bunker city whilst it collapses and emerge to rule and predate over the broken survivors.

>>63240814
His life has been more or less the same. Cherubael still fucked his life up.

>>63224848
Well that's nice. But how about babies?

>>63250346

With her husband? Biologically impossible, since he's a human biomechanical construct. Humans and Eldar can't interbreed.

Except that "impossible" is likely to get thrown out the window after 999.M41, because many prophecies refer to an Impossible Child of the ruling couple and Lofn has just been conceived naturally (not born yet-- is she only due after the cutoff date?).

>>63250314

I have a vague recollection from a previous thread that Eisenhorn's fall from grace actually happened very differently from canon-- did that get changed back at some point? (Something about getting curious about how Chaos works and then "next thing you know you're jumping across train cars with stolen texts under your arm, being chased as a Night Lords neophyte training exercise". I DEFINITELY remember "Night Lords neophyte training exercise".)

>>63250346
Humans and eldar can't interbreed normally. Despite their resemblance their similarities are only skin-deep, like wolves and thylacines. Isha's wanted a kid but they haven't been able to have one for milennia. But then you get the Starchild Prophecies and the unusual pregnancy of Taldeer Ulthran...

It's been hinted at least one possible outcome is a certain god of death will be the result of the Starchild Prophecies. As in, what happens when you combine a human not-god with powers of psychic communication with a goddess of life and healing: a liminal psychopomp that straddles boundaries with power over reincarnation and crossing the veil.

>>63250681
>Humans and eldar can't interbreed normally
Just use that old lore of half eldar space marine...

>>63250675
That does sound better for Eisenhorn. We can assume that his curiosity about it all came about in the wake of the Pontius Glaw and Saruthi events. Also if so he will still have his fate bound to Cherubael although events after that are changed.

We know that he still recruits Gideon Ravenor who still ends up in an armoured life support chair presumably in the Thracian Gate Atrocity that we know also happened.

He would now be on the Night Lord's little list.

>>63250722
We've already considered him. Librarian Tigurius of the Ultramarines is a human raised among eldar as this AU's equivalent.

>>63250852
Well then, I hope eldar x human hybrids will become possible later. Need to have Lofn born.

>>63250888
Colonel-Farseer Taldeer is, at the moment of midnight of the last night 999M41, in the final days of her pregnancy with the first ever hybrid child.

Lofn will be born very soon, Grandfather Eldrad has foreseen it. He also knows that he will not live long enough to see her with his own eyes.

>>63250998
>He also knows that he will not live long enough to see her with his own eyes.
Well that's sad. But what would be the reason that this pregnancy is possible?

>>63251150

It's suspected to be a cosmic test run for the Impossible Child.

Ideas for next thread's theme?

>>63250675
>>63250820
Dredged the old threads and found it. Cleaned it up and put it on the wiki. Yep, got chased as a Night Lords training exercise. Holy shit everyone hates him. Ahriman and the Daemon Breakers even hate him. Damn.

I think there was also a suggestion that Yssarile was one of the weird undivided Warp entities (the type that nowadays mostly flock to Be'lakor or the Soul Forge for protection from the Big Four) and Cherubael was a servant of his, Cherubael jumped ship and either joined up with Be'lakor or hid in realspace as a god figure once superior Old One engineering eventually beat the crap out of Yssarile.

>>63251235
Plus friendly pranking revenge by Isha for Eldrad setting her up with the Emperor without either of them knowing beforehand. Meant in a friendly sense because she knows Eldrad will do anything to keep family safe.

Hence why Kronus mysteriously ended up being repopulated by retired guard regiments in a quid pro quo agreement with the Tau Empire.

>>63251355
Malal-themed? Isha themed?

>>63253327

Missing Pieces of Malal Edition?


And thanks for putting up Eisenhorn!

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>>63254768
Malal: Firstborn of the Neverborn edition?
Pleasing be to the first Lord of Paradox.

>>63253327
Is Yssarile ever mentioned anywhere else?

>>63257257
Don't think so and it's possible he was a deamon of Big Bird.