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>>52931666

>>52931666
I'm not falling for your lies again, Satan.

>>52931836
Is there still a Draigo in this AU?

>>52934636
I don't know, I just wanted to post that and leave.

>>52934636
I'm pretty sure he's been mentioned several times, but no further detail.

>>52934722
How is he surviving?

In vanilla he kept going by faith in the God-Emperor. That is clearly not an option in this AU. Is he being surreptitiously assisted by Malal for petty spite?

Which Legion should have discovered Mordia and which Chapter recruits from there now?

It is known that tech-marines go to Mars or prestigious other enclave of the Mechanicum if too far away for training.

It can be assumed that Chaplains make their own arrangements depending on their religious practices with the addition of training as a psychiatrist specializing in super soldiers.

What of Apothecaries? Do they go to Molech for training? Isha and her disciples are supposed to be the best healers in the Imperium so do they go to one of their august ranks for wisdom?

>>52935674
I'm tempted to say Iron Warriors, since I think they'd mesh the best with Mordian discipline.
>>52935017
He didn't get thrown into the Warp, obviously. He's still in normal space being the Grandmaster of the Grey Knights.

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bump while I write a thing

Every Legion had its black sheep during the War of the Beast, even the most stalwart and loyal. The Salamanders were no exception.

The full story of Lieutenant-Commander Maartje and the two thousand Astartes under his command is not known. No records survive, and the people involved are not forthcoming. What is known is this:

Lt. Com. Maartje and his men were defending the world of Ndorea, a beautiful world of some five billion people. Having been unified and untouched by the wider galaxy for thousands of years, it had no defenses, no armies, nothing that could protect it from the storm now sweeping the galaxy. And perhaps because of that very innocence, several raiding fleets, both Ork and Croneworld, targeted the world for destruction.

Maartje swore this would not come to pass. As two thousand Astartes were not enough to cover and protect an entire world, he resolved to meet the invaders in space. In a series of brutal boarding actions, every attacker was destroyed, enemy ships turned into crematoria by the Salamanders' justly famed affinity for flame weapons. Multiple enemy fleets were utterly annihilated, the Salamanders returning to Ndorea after each battle for resupply and repair. Over the months, the bonds between the Salamanders and the people they protected deepened, with several Ndoreans even being inducted into the ranks of the Astartes to replace the losses taken in their defense.

Sadly, the defense did not last forever. While the Salamander fleet was away intercepting an incoming swarm of Ork Roks, a Croneworld battleship slipped into orbit under cloak and burned the surface of the world, using well-placed torpedoes to trigger long-dormant volcanoes and fault lines. The Salamanders had their revenge, but it was far too late; all five billion of Ndorea's citizens had burned to death within a day.
-

>>52940850
Maartje, and all the men under him, swore eternal revenge, and tore into the fleets of the Beast with the fury of men possessed. This is where the chain of events gets spotty, as they only intermittently kept in contact with other Imperial forces. Eventually, they stopped responding to orders and hails at all. Then, when the Navy sent a frigate to try and re-establish communications, they boarded and burned it, just as they had the Orks and Chaos forces. Through the rest of the war, they would indiscriminately attack both sides.

When the Beast died and the Fallen fled into the Eye of Terror, Lieutenant Commander Maartje and his men followed. Today, they are the Burning Earth. Retaining their mastery of flame weapons, they delight in burning pretty much anything that catches their attention alive, posing as much a threat to nominal 'allies' as their foes. Whether it's turning starships into flying ovens or choking the life out of a hive city with a masterfully managed blaze, they delight in the flame and the name of Chaos.

Thoughts?

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>>52934636
>>52934722
>>52935017
Long ago in one of the old threads, I, anon, had an idea for how Kaldor Draigo could be presented in this universe. Kaldor Draigo was basically a Samurai Jack expy in canon, which was an interesting concept but poorly implemented and Mary Sue-ish. So the idea was to go maximum Samurai Jack with it. However, when the new season came out (I told you it was long ago) I held off because it would look like I was merely jumping on the hype train. Since we’re talking Draigo now, I might as well throw my suggestion out there.

Draigo was born in the area off what was once Sino-Japan. It has been suggested in this timeline that the ethos of Grey Knights are a weird mix of idealized knights, samurai, and monks in their code of honor and extreme asceticism. And that is where Draigo stood out. He was not the physically strongest of the Grey Knights, though he was skilled with a chainsword. He was not the most powerful psyker, though he had talent with warpfire. But he by far the most, and the most humble. An ascetic among ascetics.

So when M’kar the Reborn threw Draigo into the Warp with his curse, nothing could touch him. Khorne couldn’t touch him, because he held no hate in his heart. Slaanesh couldn’t touch him, because the only pleasure Draigo wanted was a quiet room and a warm cup of tea, which was borderline sensory deprivation for the Prince of Pleasure. Nurgle couldn’t touch him, because Draigo was single-mindedly fixated on his quest to return to realspace and would not fall into despair. And Tzeentch couldn’t touch him, because Draigo wanted nothing to do with a future he could not make with his own two hands. And with his aegis armor acting like a spacesuit, even the natural aura of the Warp could barely touch him.

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>>52941207
M’kar’s curse manifested itself in a funny way. It wasn’t so much that Draigo couldn’t return to realspace, it was that, whenever he had the opportunity to, it was as if fate itself conspired to keep him in the warp. Draigo would find some other person who had just become stranded in the warp, and had to choose between sending himself back or saving them. That sort of bizarre series of bullshit coincidences and twisted fate. A string of bad luck that would put the canon Lamenters to shame. The number of people Draigo saved over the years reached the point where he became the Imperium’s unofficial patron of those lost in the warp, even though it was not officially known he yet lived.

Some say that Draigo rampaged through the halls of the Brass Palace, burned down Nurgle’s Mansion, and shattered the walls of the crystal labyrinth of Tzeentch. None of these stories are true. Draigo did not survive by brute strength, but by his wits, and by being smart enough to avoid anything higher up the food chain. Indeed, the dark gods forbid any direct harm (key word being “direct”) come to Draigo, because they found his struggles hilarious. They wanted to see how long he would go before he snapped and started begging them for aid.

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>>52941228
Eventually, Draigo’s travels brought him to Kairos Fateweaver, the Vizier of Tzeentch. Kairos was a bit too high on the totem pole for what Draigo usually dealt with, but due to constantly seeing the past and future (but NOT the present), Draigo was able to beat Fateweaver. After defeating Fateweaver (and royally pissing him off), both of Kairos’ heads suddenly stood at attention and spoke as one. They told Draigo that in this one instance, they would tell Draigo the truth.

“You desired my knowledge Kaldor Draigo, and so I will give it to you. Why, you might ask? Because I know it will make you suffer.”

And so Kairos told Draigo what he knew. Draigo was fated to return to real space five minutes before midnight on the eve of Armageddon. His return was to be yet another herald of an end of an era, where a great empire would fall. And then Kairos told Draigo of a great secret, one that few in the Imperium knew, that if not addressed, would be the doom of them all.

Draigo had always sought to return to realspace, but now Draigo’s travels with a new measure of urgency. He has to get back to the materium, even if it does mean the apocalypse. Because if he doesn’t bring this information to the Emperor, it could mean the end of the Imperium and life as we know it.

>>52941228
>>52941253
>>52941207
That said, after all that (same guy), maybe we should just go with "Kaldor is alive and in realspace". Makes the Warp seem less hospitable and Chaos a bit nastier without some random guy wandering around in there (whether it is Draigo or Oxyotl). And reduces the HFY quotient.

The suggestion the Chaos Gods forbade harm to him was built off that one guy in Fantasy who the Chaos Gods forbade harm to in the Warp for sick thrills. Of course, this doesn't stop daemons from trying to kill him behind the gods' backs anyway.

Also, I agree that it would be nice to have more Necron, Ork, Chaos, and tyranid stuff. I get that tyranids have only minor changes, but Necrons and Chaos have some big changes that could be expanded on.

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>>52931666
We finished Arrotyr, though it was noted some changes had to be made to fit him into the timeline. Had a suggestion of how that could be done.

Arrotyr was a descendant of one of the old military families of the Old Eldar Empire, one that could trace its heritage back to the days of the War in Heaven. His ancestor was famous for having once personally bested the Necron Imotekh the Stormlord both tactically and in personal combat, and all members of his house were expected to follow in his ancestor’s stead.

When Arrotyr saw the disgusting murder orgies that sprung immediately prior to the birth of Slaanesh, Arrotyr put two and two together and assumed that the person who was responsible for all this was the goddess of sex and fertility, Isha. Although some in the empire knew of the whole Slaanesh thing, Arrotyr wasn’t one of them. So Arrotyr simply did the “logical” thing and marched his soldiers into the biggest temple devoted to Isha on Shaa-Dome and simply started killing everyone there (shades of the Greeks desecrating the temple of Athena in the Illiad). For obvious reasons, this did not stop the Fall. Keep in mind that while Arrotyr might have considered himself the only sane person in the waning days of the empire, he wasn’t. He was so crazy and ruthless it’s amazing he hadn’t falled to Khorne already (think Eldar Quaritch). However, Khorne was amused by such an epic display of team-killing (plus the butchered civilians) that he blessed Arrotyr and his warriors, making them the flaming skeleton terminators we all know and fear today.

When Imotekh woke up, he either saw Arrotyr as a worthy opponent to succeed his ancestor, or wanted to humiliate him for what his ancestor did to him.

Either that or the old Arrotyr is literally the current Arrotyr, only having gone through several thousand cycles of reincarnation.

>>52940868
It is good and all the more harrowing for it being a chapter usually held up as an example of humanity.

>>52942854
It does seem weird that there's a bunch of 'we fought to protect the imperium against chaos fuckers, failed once, let's go chaos' stuff going on, though

>>52942924
Which examples are those?

>>52942924
I was going more for "led astray by the desire for revenge' there, which I could probably have conveyed better.

>>52942972
I've mostly been reading the 1d4chan articles so far (just noticed this thing existed the last thread that was made, seemed neat), but it seemed the few fallen marine groups mentioned followed that pattern.

>>52943050
Yeah, I'm gonna agree with this anon here, it seems pretty much the same as the other Fallen groups we have in terms of motivation.

>>52941325
There could be 2 Draigos. 1st was the Sino-Japan born. Part of the original founding of the Grey Knights and currently running around the Realm of Chaos.

Draigo the Second was the one that rose to be the current Grandmaster of the Grey Knights. The name is coincidental, they aren't related.

>>52943050
I think there's been sufficient variation so far. The Night Lords got into a fight with other Imperial forces over their methods, *then* fell to Chaos. Sigismund's defense of Necromunda was actually ultimately successful. The Iron Warriors fell slowly over the course of a long and bitter siege. A lot of the beats are the same, I will admit, but the details are different.

>>52941207
>>52941228
>>52941253
I like it, although I'm not quite sure it's necessary. Do you have any idea what the great secret actually is?

>>52936479
They should have to go to the AdBio, not necessarily their homeworld but to one of their training facilities.

Or they might be able to have one of the bio-druids come to them. It seems that the AdBio have less of a stick up their ass compared to the AdMech.

Not sure how Isha's disciples would be helpful to Space Marines as anything but field medics given that Space Mariens aren't natural by even the elastic definitions of Isha's chosen.

>>52945322
Seconding this unless it's meant to be left a mystery.

>>52943604
Hell, could just have taken the name in honor of the original. Could even be a thing with the Knights - they have a tendency to take a new name when they become full marines, frequently that of one of the early members whose traits they wish to be an exemplar of. 'I will be as fierce as blah/resolute as bleh/wise as bluh, and thus shall be known by his name' kind of thing.
Also leads to people outside thinking there's a lot less Knights than there are (since they keep repeating names, though not all do) thus making them a bit more mysterious

>>52947477
That's good.

Also might give the impression to plebs that they genuinely are immortal.

>>52947477
This raises the question of how the GKs actually operate in this AU.

What sort of flavour should they be?

>>52950105
There's some stuff in the ooooold threads (like thread 5 or something) where GKs are described as pretty close to the canon warrior-monk/knight compared to other SMs in this AU, which lean a bit more professional/military. They were one of Magnus's projects with help from the Eldar, and because they have an entire galaxy of daemons to deal with their numbers peaked out somewhere around 10,000, falling to around 7,000 by M41.999 due to all the craziness and attrition going on.

This is entirely going off my memory, so if anyone wants to go archive diving and correct me, feel free.

>>52950455
That sounds about right, yeah. They wouldn't be secret, which might affect how they go about things compared to canon.

>>52950455
Yep. As >>52941207 mentioned, samurai-monk-knights. Trained with the help of Eldar (who helped turn them from "merely" daemon resistant to daemon shredders, one of the Eldar's gifts in return for the raid I think), and were a joint project between Magnus and Russ. Russ' involvement was a bit of an olive branch on his part to Magnus, and was one of the last things he did before he disappeared. Magnus is typically seen as their "founder" because he was the individual who put the most work into them, even though a lot of other people did as well.

Not organized into chapters but more flexible brotherhoods, which means they don't break apart into 1k-3k chapters (did we ever decide what chapter size was? I remember it was higher than canon and the wording in the codex was "you should be about this size" as opposed to "you have to be this size"). Heavy attrition in the last millennium, if not earlier (I don't recall exactly when it started).

Publicly the Grey Knights are seen as a public morale booster. There are posters. However in person the Grey Knights have kind of a James Bond-esque aura. As in "If I told you what I'm here to do, I'd have to kill you". Most people do what they can to help the Grey Knights then get the hell out of the way, lest they be sucked into their own personal Call of Cthulhu campaign.

All their creepy junk gets stored on Ganymede in this timeline, for which they act as the riot guard in case things go ploin-shaped.

>>52942972
>>52942992
>>52943050
>>52943470

Good point. There had to have been some other motivations for falling among the Astartes beyond "he who fights monsters" and "Galactic. Eldar. Conspiracy".

It was mentioned that some of the Night Lords turned out to be real sociopaths as opposed to Kurze's Judge Dredd meets Batman personality. Skyrar was said to be a real monster, though his personality was never fleshed out. There are probably a bunch of marines who turned out to be real horrible people. Even if the people in charge are good, doesn't mean all of the footsoldiers are the same way.

>>52945322
>>52947396
I agree it's probably not necessary.

Couldn't really think of what the secret was meant to be. Obviously it was supposed to be in part secret, but I was thinking something like the Terminus Decree was sabotaged, or Chaos figured out how to open a Warp Rift beneath the Imperial Palace.

>>52952704
Alternately, it could be that the secret itself isn't actually that big, but the implications of it ARE. Something that even Chaos shouldn't know, yet does. Or something that is seemingly inconsequential in and of itself, but with further thought means some horrible horrible shit is going to go down unless something's done about it.

>>52941720
Seeing as he attacks the greatest temple of Isha in the Shaa-Dome, the High Conservator of Nurgle who was once one of Isha's priests might have an interesting relationship with the Marshal of The Old Helm, especially after the actual birth of Slaanesh.

>>52953020
The constant infighting and bacstabbery of Chaos is the Imperium's greatest advantage over them. This would be one more rivalry to be grateful for.

Are there Legion of the Damned in this AU?

>>52954331
Yep. They're the poor guardsmen and Astartes caught between dimensions as quantum space ghosts when Ahriman tried hiding Prospero from the Fourth Black Crusade.

I don't know if we've come down on either side of the debate yet, but I'd prefer Draigo to be a name/title that each GK grandmaster inherits, similar to >>52947477 and >>52948918

>>52955187
I was thinking: Mandrakes come from some weird shadow dimension between the Materium and the Warp, right? Perhaps the state Prospero is stuck in has some relation?

>>52955840
Could be that, while not every Grandmaster is named Draigo, more Grandmasters HAVE been named Draigo than haven't.
They do not choose the name seeking leadership, but end up there due to the traits they aspire to emulate and some odd coincidences here and there. A few HAVE tried to game the system when this was noticed. They ended up in a position of leadership, but that was more Sergeant Draigo than Grandmaster Draigo.
On the outside, it looks like this one guy steps up to lead when he's needed, and steps down when he's no longer needed to lead. The Knights do nothing to confirm or deny such beliefs.

>>52956616
Maybe, given there's something distinctly wrong with the mandrakes and Vect seems to have some kind of control or allegiance with them yet they aren't directly allied with Chaos or the dark gods.

>>52957497
Eh, I meant it more as an actual position than a name itself - as in, the new grandmaster assumes it once promoted after the death of the previous Draigo.

>>52958798
I like the idea of the Grey Knights taking on new names more than 'Draigo' being a specific title, desu.

Done with my big paper on the sistine chapel and insufflating a skinny white guy at post finals, contemplating the fate of Fulgrim. Expect to actually finish the bio within a week or so.
>>52960624
"Draigo" could be something akin to Augustus, or even have a history like Caesar

>>52960624
I'm with this guy, taking on previous names is already a thing in canon and if I see "Draigo" appended onto every GK Supreme Grandmaster I'll puke.

>>52953020
I'm imagining that the following of Isha was at an all time low by that point. It would have been a sad battle. The priesthood weren't fighters and there weren't that many of them, priestess' or congregation.

It would have been more tragic than epic. Almost a ritual sacrifice of a rival gods followers.

>>52962057
>Almost
Might have been literally that, towards the end.

IS there a chapter/regiment that specializes in Dark Eldar and the fucking up of them?

Has the Soul Forge been claimed?

So far we have imperium(with eldar and tau), nids, necrons, and chaos(split between daemons, CMS, and chaos guard), but should we add in some new xeno faction or take some cool xeno race from canon and make the relevant?

>>52964522
We have the Q'orl, there are the Saruthi from Vanilla that could be expanded to be a far bigger threat and there was mention of the Rak'Gol in the previous thread.

>>52964459
No. It is a mercenary manufactuary. There was some suggestion that at its heart is an anvil with a short length of broken chain attached.

>>52966681
I thought it was mentioned that it's an even bigger point among the Chaos Gods that the Forge stay neutral (or at least, they would like to control the forge, but neutral is an acceptable second), since there are fewer CSMs and a higher need for Obliterators. Of course this doesn't stop the gods from scheming behind each other's backs anyway.

>>52964522
On a galactic scale, the four powers worth any mention are the Imperium, tyranids, Necron Star Empire, and Chaos (which also has the Cronedar, who outnumber the CSM by a huge margin).

Orks come in fifth, mostly because they've been manipulated into being cannon fodder by Cronedar for centuries. Ghazzy's big plan is to break the Orks off into their own independent faction and make the Orks great again. That's not to say they are still one of the most common threats in the galaxy, but they currently aren't organized in a manner that would make them a threat on par with, say, the Necrons. Dark Eldar would be on the same level, but the Cronedar have roped them in to fill the ork-shaped hole in their forces.

C'tan come in sixth, if only because there are only four of them, two are doing nothing, and the other two are currently acting through proxies.

There are lots and lots of other threats in the galaxy to the four major powers. Q'orl, Rak'gol, etc. But they tend to be comparatively minor powers.

>>52962570
To Khorne it probably was, since that's what got Arrotyr his blessing

>>52963374
There's Lugganath among the Eldar.

>>52967559
The Orks are still a pretty independent faction; the Chaos Eldar don't have that strong a grip on them.

>>52967559
It would also have earned Arrotyr the ire of Nurgle and his white knighting followers for hurting their mother-waifu.

>>52969217
And both of them would be endlessly mocked by Tzeench and Slaanesh

Did a description of Craftworld Lugganath from what we had for 1d4chan. Does it sound good enough?

https://pastebin.com/aeYn1HqA

Also, should Lugganath have any special ties to Isha? IIRC, in canon they were supposedly close to Isha for some reason, but I'm not sure if that would also hold here.

>>52970753

Sounds more than good enough.

I think in Vanilla they were the only craftworld to take the rumors of Isha's survival seriously.

As Isha is the patron of growth and healing they may consider her their patron still as they intend to found a new and better empire in her name.

>>52960624
>>52961438
>>52961511
Clarification (again) - the name Kaldor Draigo itself is the title that gets passed down, both for the illusion that he's immortal and to honour the original a la James Bond

Also I didn't realise the taking on previous names was a canon thing, please don't sue me

Some thoughts on the Mechanicus:

The Dark Mechanicus are all hereteks, but not all hereteks are Dark Mechanicus. 'Heretek' is effectively a political designation, Techpriests that reject the authority and teachings of Mars.

Thus, there are groups designated 'hereteks' without leaving the Imperium or even being doctrinally heterodox, for reasons of rejecting the political authority of Mars. This happens for a variety of reasons and takes a variety of forms, from simply blithely ignoring any orders emanating from Mars to outright declaring secession. Such succession is often accompanied by a petition to join the Imperium as a subject of the Administratum, which places the organs of the Imperial state in a bind. On the one hand, the Charter of Unification which bound Mars and Earth together at the beginning of the Great Crusade clearly states that Mars has authority over all forge worlds; like the Imperium, the Mechanicus is not something you simply leave. However, there are precedents for worlds switching alignment between one member civilization and another, and prying a forge-world from the grasp of Mars and thus reducing its near-stranglehold on the Imperial economy is always a worthy goal. Such conflicts are always fraught with peril and unpredictability; the red tape generated will tie up bureaucracies for decades, and even minor armed conflict is not unknown.

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>>52973110
It also means that the Hubworld Mechanicus is a Heretekal institution.

Some day the Hubworlders might even give a shit what Mars has to say. Some day. Might. Stranger things have happened. No they haven't

Also reading up on the last thread. How different do the "natural" Fenrisians look?

>>52973204
Human. Whatever else is in their genes, it is minor and long diluted.

>>52973204
Like >>52975403 said. They're not even different enough to qualify as abhuman. The differences are about as much as how people living in Peru and Tibet have adaptations to living in high altitudes, Polynesian populations have adaptations to surviving starvation, and European, Indian, and east African populations can digest lactose.

>>52973110
I think this was actually brought up in a previous thread as one of the ways to revamp the Korod Technocracy. For those who weren't around, the Technocracy was supposed to be a sort of "Balthasar Gelt and the College of Magic" thing in 40k, founded by a guy who went "fuck Mars" and went to start his own. One suggestion was the guy was a tech-priest who got excommunicated from the AdMech for tech-heresy.

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>>52971938
“What kind of fool do you take me for. He’s Draigo. He’s Draigo. You’re Draigo. I’M DRAIGO! Are there any other “Kaldor Draigos” I should know about!”

*Warp rift opens in the middle of the room and the original Kaldor Draigo comes flying out of it and slams into a wall*

“Present”

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A thought I had:

The war-regalia of the Chaos Eldar are often literally painful to look at, and sometimes also difficult to look away from. Clashing color-patterns, bizarre eye-capturing whorls, jagged and deceptive angles and textures, combining into a whole that strains the human eye and mind beyond their limits. Not enough for damage, not enough to be a weapon in and of itself- that is the domain of the Gorgons and their exotic, specialist equipment. But enough to give them an edge. Difficult to shoot something when it hurts to look directly at it.

Such designs are foremost the domain of the Slaaneshi, of course, the masters of sensation. But the techniques have disseminated; Tzeentchian crones also make a great deal of use of such techniques, and a handful of Khornate of Nurglite forces who want an edge in battle badly enough to overlook the source.

Thoughts?

>>52978759
Sounds exactly the sort of thing that they would do and nicely differentiates them from the Dark Eldar to observers.

>>52970753
I really like this and think it needs putting on the 1d4chan page.

>>52950455
I like that.

Each Brotherhood is an autonomous group.

They recruit from a common pool so as to maintain even numbers spread and prevent the formation of in-house factionalism.

If they have been getting more recruitment than the attrition rate they scoop out volunteers from each Brotherhood and form a new Brotherhood from the mixture of veterans and N00bz. There has never been considered a limit on the number of Brotherhoods there are.

All special equipment and vehicles are also held in common between Brotherhoods

How extensive is the Eldar involvement with the GKs?

>>52978759
So their color schemes are literally the worst of 80's hair-metal style 40k?

Bumf

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>>52984247
Worse, if at all possible. I'm also thinking of dazzle-pattern camo a bit- obnoxious patterns as a form of defense.

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>>52982123
>>52950455
Add to this that they were the single largest individual chapter at their height. Now the Space Wolves and possibly the Black Tempelars outnumber them.

Do they still use mind wipes? I'm guessing not but I have to ask.

>>52987866
You mean on other people? Almost certainly. There are indeed things it is better for the regular man not to know, not to remember; memory suppression is effectively a form of psychotherapy.
On themselves? Maybe. I imagine the sort of person who becomes a Grey Knight would be the sort of person who would do it to themselves if they thought it would give them an edge over the gibbering and demonic.

>>52987950
I suppose a month or two of missing time isn't so bad a thing. Especially considering the things those months might contain.

It's a hell of an improvement on Vanilla where genocide of Imperial citizens is considered standard procedure.

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Cadia was green, once. There were forests, green plains of flowing grass, lakes and rivers. The sky was blue, once. The air was clean. Once.

That was a long, long time ago, though. Before nobody knows how many millions of nukes went off in that clean sky, before how many millions of tons of gas and poison were released by both sides, before how many daemonic hordes trampled over its surface and were pushed back by how many billions of tanks.

The ground is churned mud, discolored by the iridescent sheens of ancient chemical weapons. The sky is bruised smog, the air corrosive and lethal in minutes. Geiger counters crackle and hiss. All landmarks, all features of terrain, have been chewed up by artillery barrages and orbital bombardment until all that is left of entire mountains is mud-filled craters. Unexploded munitions, some millennia old, litter the ground. Every rain exposes ancient corpses and ruined war machines, to be covered back up when the ground shifts again.

Imagine if the battle of Verdun had continued for ten thousand years.

Civilization on Cadia, such as it is, has moved underground. Vast underground vaults, hardened against shock and bombardment, house factories, armories, farms, apartments, schools, mines. All sheltered from the attention of enemy warships by at least a hundred meters of rock, if not more.

Each of these cities is, of course, also a fortress. Every corridor a chokepoint, every intersection a killzone, every building a bunker. Every entrance rigged to collapse. In many cases, the entire city is rigged for total destruction if it falls, to deny resources to the enemy and spite them one last time. Atomic demolition charges, magma floods from geothermal taps, simply bringing the ceiling down with melta bombs.
-

>>52989649
The entire planet is a fortress, spiderwebbed with defensive lines and connected by underground passages. There is not a point on the planet that cannot be hit with at least one gun. Individual bunkers fight on for as long as possible before the crew abandons the position and falls back to the next line through the tunnel system, just a hundred meters away. Areas the enemy thinks secure are struck by commandos through secret passages and hidden sally-ports. Fortresses surrounded on the surface can hold out for years with supplies flowing into them through the tunnels. When the enemy gets into the tunnels, they will find nothing but booby-traps, collapsed passages, and ambushes.

Some of the bunker systems extend down halfway to the mantle. Even if the surface, the cities, the top fortification layers, all fall, resistance will continue. Tunneling machines loaded with atomics crawling up from the depths, like very slow ICBMs.

Imagine a combination of the Maginot Line, VC tunnel systems, and the Japanese defense of Peleliu and Iwo Jima.

Normally, the reaction of the Archenemy to defenses of such magnitude would be warp-work, drown it in daemons and drive the defenders mad. Not on Cadia, not with the Pylons, not under a Null-Field powerful enough to stitch the Eye of Terror shut. Daemon engines stutter and malfunction, Nurgle's plagues are banished by conventional treatment, daemons are banished by the humble lasgun. Victory will have to be by fire and blood.

Sadly, Chaos has plenty of that as well.

In places, the bodies of the dead are mounded high enough to be terrain features.

Thoughts?

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have we come up with any noise marine equivalent?

>>52990433
There probably are actual Noise marines, there are less CSMs around but that's not the same as none. There's also the Gorgons, who use sonic and holographic attacks to fry and occasionally control people's brains.

>>52989666

Really good.

>>52989666
I’m not sure Cadia ever had a history as a civilized world.

The thing is despite being one of the most famous worlds in the Imperium, Cadia was never actually incorporated into the Imperium during the Great Crusade. In canon Lorgar made a pilgrimage to Cadia shortly before he fell to Chaos, where he found a bunch of purple-eyed tribals using knapped stone tools. After the Heresy the Imperium killed every last man, woman, and child on the planet like they did with every other planet associated with the Heresy, and then resettled it with new stock in M32, who then developed the exact same purple-eyed mutation as the planet’s original inhabitants, to serve as a bastion against Chaos.

Since this is a nobledark universe and the Imperium is not trying to hide their failings like a child trying to hide their soiled bedsheets from a parent, I’m assuming that Cadia wasn’t purged in this timeline. The current inhabitants of Cadia are, at least in part, descended from the original tribals. The original inhabitants of Cadia didn’t really worship Chaos per se. Being so close to the Eye of Terror, Chaos didn’t have to be subtle or enticing, and the Cadians didn’t so much worship Chaos as pray that the gods would leave them alone, like people used to do for “unpleasant” gods in old Earth mythologies. Like all tribal worlds the Cadians had stories of monsters in the dark eager to snatch the unwary, only due to being right next to the Eye of Terror these stories were more literal than most. What the Imperium did is give the inhabitants guns, and taught them that the daemons of Chaos could be fought, and more importantly, killed.

>>52993373
Of course, the Imperium still shipped in millions of people from other worlds to populate Cadia. In both timelines, Cadia was envisioned as a fortress world, building a stronghold literally on the doorstep of the Eye of Terror as close as you could get before the Warp started to overtake you to try and stop any attempt to leave the Eye of Terror before it even started and limit Chaos holdings in realspace. A tribal population in the millions who were just getting the hand of not using stone tools is not enough to man an entire fortress world, and the Imperium knew it. As mentioned previously, Ulthwe loved this idea, because it means that now there was another meat-shield to stand against the forces of Chaos that wasn’t them. In the early days of Cadian history, it was probably the inhabitants of Ulthwe giving the new immigrants to Cadia the “listen up you lot, this is what you need to do to survive in the literally ass-end of the galaxy. Additionally, as has been mentioned before, this means a lot of Cadian culture is actually Ulthwe culture, or at least Ulthwe influenced, since the population of Ulthwe is greater than Cadia by at least one order of magnitude.

>>52993389
How big is Ulthwe, anyway?

>>52993941
Ulthwe is said to be one of the larger Craftworlds. I think it was mentioned in the previous threads that canon has "Mid-sized" means about Earth size. Some sources have the largest be near-Jupiter size. Some say they are "only" the size of Luna, but dense enough to house Earth-level populations. It's hard to say, as GW isn't consistent with how Craftworlds are depicted. We threw a dart at the wall and had Iyanden (the previous biggest population center before Kraken) at about 100 trillion. Most are much lower than this.

The biggest Exodite world, Halalthel, is said to have had a population in the "millions" in canon. But it's Space Amish central, so that's to be expected.

Ulthwe might have lower than average population compared to Biel-Tan, Saim-Hann, Alaitoc, and the like, given that they suffer from constant Chaos incursions.

What is agreed is that the eldar are a drop in the bucket compared to the quadrillions of abhumans.

Does anyone have the fluff for Valhalla? It seems to have vanished from the 1d4chan, or never got put up there in the first place.

>>52989666
I actually think that this is massively superior to Vanilla Cadia. It shows that this has been the nightmare killing ground for millennia.

>>52993389
I like that. The original people to discover Cadia still just have to be the Word Bearers. Instead of going to Chaos they look up at the broken sky and radio for reinforcements. The crusty old Katholian Yndonisic veteran leading them declared "we're going to lay siege to the gates of Hell". Due to changing logistical issues Black Legion with the original Word Bearers detachment kept on as spiritual advisors, psychology help and intermediaries with the locals who's trust they earned.

>>52989666

I asked my gramp, a veteran VC for any suggestion for writing the Cadian defense effort fluff as while the Cadians may have a lot of weapons and supplies diverted to them, there may be times where thoze are not available for the cut off units and else, and he gave me these few... ideas:

-booby-trap cover: any piece of terrain feature that may be used as cover by the enemies from kill-zones must be trapped, mined, or actually another kill-zone itself. Like Perty's forts, for example. Especially effective in tunnel fighting.
-a cheap airlock can be created using a few planks of wood, some mud and a plastic sheet.
-a tunnel 3 metre deep can withstand small bombs, 5, medium, 10, MOAB (at least, with ferrite-rich earth)
-combat-manufactories set up in sub-surface bunkers to fix and recycle weaponries, etc.
-Easy, instant booby-traps: nails. 1.5 to 2 inches nails can be spread out randomly close to a kill zone (or anywhere, for that case.) Doesn't even need to be covered. When someone steps on a nail, they will cause a 'minor' distraction (and the guy who stepped on it will lose a leg, hence incapacitated), and that is when you bring out the guns. Or, in reverse, bring out the gun may cause them to be too distracted trying to silence/hide the gunner to notice the traps.
-punji pit: a small pit slightly bigger than your foot, nails lined up on the inside will incapacitate the unlucky sob who steps into it. Easily covered with... anything actually. Use as above.
-tiger pit: a pit filled with stakes, covered up. Will take care of a sob.
-Rotateary tiger pit: like a normal tiger pit, but covered with a gyroscopic top, used to hide the bastard that fell down when it rotates back to position.
-a kind of IED made easily from a cooking pot filled with explosives (and/or nails) and some firing pin. Used as emergency mine or disable tank tracks when it is rolled under one.
-ran out of grenade launcher? Used a thick rubber band as a grenade slingshot.

>>52998135
>>52989649
>>52989666
I suppose that this is the mirror of Krieg. Bothe worlds ultimately the same in environment but Cadians are bro-tier.

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>>52931666
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>>52994780
I thought, in the Noble Darkness at least, that the major craftworlds operated in the tens of billions with pre-Kraken Iyanden the only one to pass the 100 billion mark.

Might not sound much considering that they are meant to be the 2nd largest species and account for 8 - 9% of the entire Imperium population. You also have to take into account that bar a few notable exceptions like the Forgeworlds, Krieg and at least officially Old Earth basically every human world and most of the xeno worlds have at least a few elder living on them.

That's over a million other little outposts, not including Exodite, settled Maiden Worlds and all the minor craftworlds.

>>52997014
I remember there being a basic outline on the 1d4chan page but it is gone now. Unless I'm imagining that I saw it.

From what I can remember in the threads that dealt with this way back when it was linked with Yme-Loc craftworld. From what I can remember the notes on it could be summarized more or less as this.

>Agri-world. One big continent covered in the greens and golds of fertile farmed land.
>Nice climate, no seasons because of little/no orbital tilt. No natural satellites of note.
>Productive and exported huge amounts of food to a dozen worlds. Imported mostly processed "biological waste".
>Sparse population - only a few unremarkable regiments ever raised.
>One day a very large chunk of dirty ice gets spotted on a collision course with planet.
>Imperium sends a small fleet to nudge the ice a few critical degrees whilst it's still a long way off.
>Warp shenanigans. Time dilation effect. Fleet not going to arrive for ~30 years.
>Everybody fucking panic.
>If Valhalla launches everything (not very much) at the ice it will break up. Rather than kill everybody it will alter the climate to ice age for the next half a million years.
>Better than extinction. Preparing to launch.
>Yme-Loc appears at system edge and is accelerating towards the planet.
>Refusing to answer signals.
>Reconfiguring craftworld even as it accelerates
>Ice getting close to weapons range of planet
>Yme-Loc getting really close to ice. So close that it will be destroyed if Valhalla launces attack on Ice.
>Yme-Loc slams into Ice and keeps on burning those engines because FUCK YOU ICE!
>Ice and Yme-Loc now inseparable but Ice diverted into a nice stable but highly elliptical orbit around Valhalla
>Yme-Loc claim the Ice as their own.
>Some years later orks arrive.
>Eldar and Valhallans fight together, brothers in war.
>Bonds of friendship forged.
>Start talking to each other and form defence and trade pact.

>>52997014
It's on the Notes page. Well, should be on the Notes page. It still needed to be written up as a full entry as opposed to the informal style we talk to each other with here.

>>53000087
Eldar numbers were said to be in the low trillions (which I think is relatively close to canon). Then someone suggested Iyanden had 100 trillion. They'd have to be in the low trillions to outnumber the Tau, who have a space as large as Ultramar and number in the hundreds of billions at least.

I think there may be a few eldar on Earth, but their living there is highly regulated and like, say, Hawaii in the U.S. they don't so much own a place to live as rent it. You would have to have representatives from each of the Craftworlds at the very least, and the High Lords have a number of Eldar on staff as advisors.

>>52997014
>>53001648
>>53001732

Just checked, it is still there, on the Notes page.

>>52998987
That's a good point and it shows that the biggest problem Krieg has always had is the Kriegers.

Are there any Valhallan characters from Vanilla we can adapt?

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>>52989649
>>52989666
Another idea I had:

The enemy has tried to destroy Cadia and the Pylons hundreds of times. Mass orbital bombardment, cyclonic torpedoes, asteroid drops and suicide ram attacks by entire fleets, vortex bombs to the world's core; all that and more. Every method of planetary annihilation ever conceived has been tried; and every one has failed.

The Necrons did not want their Pylons to be easily destroyed.

From the uppermost bedrock down to the very core of the world, Cadia is infested with thin strands of necrodermis, like the roots of some plant or fungus, binding the stone of the world together. The rock of Cadia is as hard as armor plate, and will even slowly 'regenerate' as functions of the necrodermis strands draw up material from the depths of the planet. Makes digging bunkers somewhat inconvenient, but in exchange the fortifications of Cadia are incredibly resistant to bombardment, necrodermis strands weaving themselves through ferrocrete walls.

There are rumors of more active defenses as well. Scarabs pouring out of the Pylons when directly threatened, enemy armies vanishing in flashes of green lightning, coils of necrodermis wire erupting from the ground to strangle and dismember. Perhaps the Inquisition knows the truth.

Thoughts?

>>53007483
I like the idea in principle but not to outright state it. It is known that the Pylons and the black material they are made of are unidentifiable because nobody can chip bits off to identify. It looks like volcanic glass but it also looks like polished metal.

Beyond that nobody "knows" anything. The planet itself seems resilient to attack to an almost unnatural degree but nothing that can't be at least theoretically explained by conventional means however unlikely. One explanation is femtomatter or necrodermis or some higher end shit but it's all unproven.

Another more disturbing suggestion is that the Warp itself is actively holding the planet together as an expression of the Chaos that defies other Chaos. But that's an outside tinfoil hat theory.

>>53008487
We know what the Cadian pillars do in this timeline. They're supposed to sever the connection between the Materium and Immaterium to starve Chaos and turn the warp back into the Realm of Souls. It's the Necron's win condition.

I'm willing to bet the Imperium has some idea of what the Cadian pillars do too, even if they don't know how to do it themselves or at least have some idea how important Cadia is to the Necrons. Otherwise all the Silent King has to do is direct the Imperium's attention somewhere else for a little bit so he can take Cadia and bam! It's game over. Necron-held Cadia is just as bad for the Imperium as Chaos-held Cadia.

>>53009430
I think Necron Cadia would be at least a little better than Chaos Cadia, since a Necron Cadia would still act as a bulwark against Chaos incursions. Chaos Cadia would see the Pylons destroyed and the Eye of Terror expand, and nobody wants that.

>>53009789
Necron Cadia literally everyone dies. Necrons activate the pillars, Eldar, humans, everything that needs a soul to live (including Tau, who are warp resistant and have a tiny soul but do need it) die. Chaos is separated from realspace and the gods and daemons starve to death. Tyranids lose the Hive Mind, among other things. Necrons wait until Chaos stops struggling in their stranglehold and then turns off the pillars and biotransfer themselves to the first sapient race to emerge after the cataclysm.

>>53009990
Pretty sure they'd need more than just the one installation for that.

>>53009990
Well. Pariahs/Untouchables would survive.

bomb

We do anything with the Blackstone Fortresses yet?

>>53014309
Sons of Horus have one. Had to call in the Eldar to figure out what it was. SoH and Eldar managed to figure out how to turn on the lights and the "fuck your shit up" low power weaponry, and turned it into the dreadnought/religious shrine/tourist trap known as the Tomb of Horus by building half a ship around it. It's basically equivalent to one of the Five Big Bastards because they haven't found the "doom" button yet.

Erebus found another. He calls it The Chariot of the Gods. Others call it the Planet-Killer. Whatever it is, he tools around it in the Eye of Terror as his personal pimp-ship.

The Tau have found the third. They have no idea what it is beyond that it is important and it "sings" to them in their dreams. As another anon put it "They don't know what it is, who built it or what it does. They don't even believe it is as old as it appears because shit obviously can't be that old. They won't report it to the greater Imperium until they have something concrete about it to offer. Finding something that big and handing it over without even a basic understanding of it would make them lose face they feel."

>>53014485
They're Eldar-made, right? Wouldn't they at least know the 'doom' button exists?

>>53014572
They're Old One-made, like the Webway.

>>53014682
I thought they were made by the Eldar god Vaul?

>>53014995
Nope. I think it's one of those "Eldar taking their mythology a bit too literally things". Like how originally the War in Heaven was Khaine going on a team-killing spree, and him allying with the C'tan. Of course canon has always been schizophrenic. Sometimes canon says the Eldar gods were really Old Ones. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the codex says the Old Ones made them. Sometimes it says Vaul did. Notably, it's mostly the Eldar calling them the Talismans of Vaul. IIRC, the Necrons say they're Old One.

In this universe, I think we decided to just go with the Blackstone Fortresses being of Old One design. Which makes sense. The Old Ones uplifted a late Stone Age/early Bronze Age culture to do their dirty work. They're not going to give them the best guns, no matter how quickly the Eldar adapt to being a spacefaring species.

The Blackstone Fortresses also have all the hallmarks of high-end Old One tech. Manipulate the immaterium to a degree people didn't know possible? Check. Use raw warp power? Check. Not wraithbone made (as one would expect for Eldar)? Check. Alive? Check. That same description fits known Old One constructs like the Webway and (in this universe) Malal and Tzeentch.

Finally, even if they were Eldar-made, there's no guarantee they'd know where the right buttons were. The Eldar lost a lot in the Fall, including all their most advanced technology.

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Are there hybrid deamons?

Like Khorne and Slaanesh working together to make the ultimate duelist or Nurgle and Slaanesh making a fear daemon and shit like that.

>>53016693
Almost certainly not, they all hate each other. Any cooperation is purely on the basis of hating Emps more.
It might be possible to get daemons that combine aspects of two gods as a weird implementation of Chaos Undivided, but not active collaboration.

>>53016830
The question is then do they hate each other to equal amounts?

>>53019183

Its difficult to say. For example, Nurgle:
-is the antithema to Tzeentch, so hates that guy with a passion
-Khorne and his minion tried to kill his waifu, so NOPE
-Slaneesh... tried (and failed, and still wants to) devour/ ravish his waifu.

Khorne: hates every one equally, except for Tzeencht who earned the 1st place in his shit list.

Tzeencht: I dunno. Who knows that guy? Hates Nurgle tho.

Slaneesh:
-Nurgle: too ugly.
-Khorne: excessive violence, just hir style.
-Tzeentch: uh ...

NERF VAMPIRE COUNTS

>>53019675
>Tzneetch
- Can get along with Slaanesh because always trying new things but too obsessive
- Can tolerate Khorne on a good day because strategies and tactics but soon becomes insufferably fixated
- Nurgle FUCK YOU NURGLE YOU FESTERING HEAP OF SHIT
- Malal REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>Khorne
- Slaanesh kind of alright but too easily distracted and cowardly
- Nurgle can take a punch and still keep standing but too apathetic to give a punch back
- Tzneetch TAKE SOME FUCKING RITTALIN YOU LITTLE SHIT!
- Malal fucking hilarious, would war with again

>Slaanesh
- Khorne not too bad, fellow adrenaline junkie but no intrest in finer things in life
- Tzneetch good for finding new shit but incapable of focusing on it
- Nurgle OH FUCK YOU WORTHLESS UNFEELING TURD HEAP!
- Malal unending rage and need to destroy for that long is pretty fucking deliciously obsessive, sadly it's all he can do and therefore becomes boring

>Nurgle
- Khorne is a shit who keeps wailing on me but is ultimately predictable and therefore not as bad as he could be
- Tzneetch FUCKING SLOW DOWN YOU ADHD SHIT STOP TOUCHING MY STUFF REEEEEEEEEEE
- Slaanesh STOP LOOKING AT MY WAIFU REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
Malal - FUCK YOU STOP SETTING FIRE TO MY SHIT HEAPS!!

>Malal
- Khorne GET OUT OF MY FUCKIGN CHAIR!!
- Nurgle STOP HORDEING YOU DISGUSTING FUCK UP!!!
- Slaanesh GET OFF MY LAW POND SCUM OR I'LL BREAK YOUR FACE!!
- Tzneetch REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--------------------------!!!!!!!!!!

>>53020800
desu even being at Senator Armstrong level is still too powerful. He could withstand blade slices and stabs that would mince Scout Titans. If anything, vampires being as strong as a Baneblade could work. I mean you need multiple baneblades to take down even one Scout Titan. And you would need multiple tanks to disable a baneblade.

>>53022327
I thought only the really old, really powerful C'tan vampires were at that level. Like a C'tan Dracula, or Abhorash (I think. I don't know who counts as an uber-vamp in Fantasy).

>>53022527
that was the consensus. There are maybe a handful of vampires that are actually that strong

>>53021173
Malal has problems.

>>53022327
Oh I meant Warhammer total war. Sorry I misposted.

>>53022527
>>53022791
No, the consensus was that people don't understand how ridiculously strong Senator Armstrong is. In the final boss fight Raiden's upgraded cyborg body can pick up and throw the Excelsus, the giant spider bot that Armstrong is piloting, and once he gets out Armstrong pretty casually overpowers Raiden, meaning Armstrong could probably juggle Warhound Titans. That sort of physical strength is beyond any single entity in the Warhammer universe, and it's simply a poor fit in terms of power levels: GW plays fast and loose with reality, Platinum Games laughs at reality and chucks it out the window, and god bless em, that's what makes their games so damn over the top and fun.

>>53025043
>>53022327
>>53022527
What's the power level of a canon C'tan Shard? That seems like it would be a good benchmark for an upper limit.

>>53025197
Inconsistent. In the TT game they could be taken out with a ratling sniper.

In the fluff it varied wildly. On the one hand enslave and exterminate whole worlds with ease but on the other hand was scared of an Ultramarine with a bomb.

Just wana say I appriciate you guys carrying on this project. Nobledark 40k is something I always wanted to play.
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>>52993389
>>52993373
>>52997976
The original Cadians, the regressed flint knappers, would have been if not closet case chaos cultists then anti-chaos cultists. Or maltheists possibly. They do believe in the Chaos gods, how could they not if they live on Cadia but they do not worship them or venerate them and spit on their name. Every morning they awoke for them was and act of defiance because they did so in spite and to spite their shit gods. Every day the sun rose they would look to the sky wit disgust because they knew their gods were watching and would defy them by living as good as they could and every night they would set a watch so as to spot and kill their twisted servants and offer them insult.

Why did Chaos not just step on them like and ant? Because Chaos likes a punching bag that can suffer and sometime hate is as good as veneration. And suffer they did, oh yes. Oh fucking hell yes they suffered. The purple eyed people knew all about what games Chas could play with you out in the forests and the lonely paths should the Twisted Ones find you.

And then one day Bishop-Captain Kol "The Anointed" Badar of the Word Bearers 10th Expeditionary Fleet lands on Cadia. Not an astartes himself but commanding a full Chapter of them plus appropriate Imperial Army elements. He was a curmudgeonly old priest from the Yndonisic Bloc and although he did have had a good heart it was buried under a lot of crust and grump. Although a godly man he was also a seasoned and accomplished military commander. He raised the old banner of the Unification (he always refused to adopt the "mutant pigeon" iconography) and declared Cadia under the aegis of Old Earth and the Imperium. When next Chaotic forces came to give Cadia another kicking they were caught totally unawares by how hard Cadia kicked back. By years end the forests and the lonely places were declared cleansed of the Twisted Ones.

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>>53027318
Kol Badar not long after the fist year received orders from his Primarch via astropath to redeploy. The planet was cleansed and there was need of his forces elsewhere, a small garrison and an astropath were all that was needed for Cadia at this time. Kol Badar, ever the diplomat, re-sent his initial report followed by "are you fucking joking?" and a request for back up.

>>53022527
Did anyone save the stages of vampire growth someone put fort or am I going to have to trawl through all of the threads to find it?

>>53029550
Looks like you'll have to trawl.

Looks like interest is dying down, is this project coming to a close? (Though we have said this several times before sudden revitalizations)

>>53027057
God yes, if anyone ever runs a 40kRPG in this AU, put that on game finder, I want in.

>>53033942
I have a bunch of unused notes, haven't had time to work them into something worth pitching.

Also I think we've gone longer than Imperium Asunder or Hektor Heresy. Maybe. Based on 1d4chan records.

>>53033942
I'm still gonna finish Fulgrim when I'm done with finals

>>53033942
This happened before and internet came back again.

>>53014485
Was there ever a mention of how many Talismans were made?

>>53036761
I think canon had six?

So has anything been done about Caerys?

Ulthwe is getting a bit character heavy. Should she come from a different craftworld?

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>>53027057
Would the Imperial Army even allow combat drugs? Probably not, but that doesn't mean regiments and battlefleets don't have smuggling rings the sell that shit. Krieger might use illegal substances to stay on active duty until dying from overdose or a heat attack. Rates take meth-laced candy for 12 hour shifts in void engagements. Addicted wounded soldiers trade whatever they have on more painkillers. Since this is a military affair either the Inquisition or Orders Militant have the authority to investigate and court martial those involved. It is a never ending war to prevent the more harmful combat drugs from being used. Although, it is still a necessity to supply the Imperial Army with "less-lethal" combat drugs.

>>53037140
I think that drugs and he regulation thereof would be too small-scale for the Imperium itself to care about. It would be a local law level thing.

Unless the drugs cause Chaos. Then the Inquisition/Arbiters take keen interest.

>>53037140
I assume the Army would permit at least limited drug use, although not all regiments would do so. No point in turning down advantages.

>>53037140
Can't have Savlar Chem-Dogs with out the Chems.

Also the Imperium doesn't care.

>>53036872
Where should the other 3 be?

>>53027318
>>53027584
So I'm guessing that the Void Wolves either intercepted the message and answered it themselves because closer and glory or Lorgar made the journey in this continuity to inspect the place and see what all the fuss was about.

Or both at the same time and Cadia became a joint effort between Void Wolves and Word Bearers.

Either way Black Legion has to end up stuck on the eternal misery that is Cadia.

Word Bearers are great diplomats so maybe it was they that brokered the Ulthwe/Cadia Gateworld Garrison arrangement.

Although it does raise the question of what faith the Cadians ended up as given the prevalence of Katholians in the Imperial forces and the traditions of their brutal and defiant tribal beliefs.

bumf

>>53037124
I like Caerys for the "senpaiiii" quality of her relation with Taldeer, but yeah, Ulthwe has too many characters at the moment. I wanted to write about a Biel Tan Autarch to explain better my half assed reference to the old DoW1 tactic for Eldar of "make an avatar, leave it at the base for its global buffs' but no inspiration has hit me yet.

After fleshing out the other craftworlds though I would love to write up Caerys.

>>53041668
What craftworld would you have her he?

>>53043093
Caerys? Ulthwe as in canon. i enjoyed the fan dynamic of Caerys and Taldeer with the mentor/apprentice relationship, so I'd work on that.

>>53043093
I would almost say her more militant attitude would put her in Biel-Tan in this timeline, but then again just because a Craftworld has a stereotype doesn't mean people fit that stereotype. Take Ulthwe. Known for being manipulative, militant (but in a different way than Biel-Tan, more defensive like Cadia), and human friendly. Sreta checks exactly one of those boxes (which is one of the reasons I like her). For all we know Caerys could be from Yme-Loc or Lugganath based on her personality (if we ignore canon).

>>53039854
Void Wolves seem to be present as backup when the Imperium did big things in the Crusade. After all, the Space Marines are riding around in Navy ships. Horus was one of the two primarchs present when the Imperium made first contact with the Interex and found the information that needed to be passed to the top of the Chain of Command, and was present in the battle for Ullanor where he slagged the Beast-to-be's bunker from orbit.

>>53044468
I'd go with Yme-Loc because Valhalla and the red and grey uniform looks good.

Also just because she isn't Cadian doesn't mean that she wasn't on Kronus during it's reconquest. She could very much be a member of the Kronus 1st or at least reliably tags along often enough.

>>53045179
Since you mentioned Yme-Loc I looked them up and found this:

794.M41 - The Craftworld is ravaged after Khornate Flesh Hounds followed the scent of explorer Caelec back to his home.

>Caelec
>Caerys

Perhaps the two are related? Caerys could be seeking vengeance against Khorne ( or one of his daemons) for what was done to Caelec. Could also explain an eagerness to erase familial taint, or a self imposed exile.

Or something. I'll let it stew.

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>>53045400
It was mentioned previously that the Craftworld Yme-Loc was one of the first to set out from the decadent and depraved Eldar Empire. They saw it as sinful and knew that some god's judgment would find them. This makes them the only craftworld that didn't need Eldrad Ulthuran or equivalent forgotten peer to persuade them to exodus the fuck out. They set out to find some vague and nebulous "Promised Land".

They were considered a strange breed by their fellow eldar. Not actually overtly hostile but very insular. They remained isolated from the Imperium and even the other craftworlds during their wandering days and as a smaller craftworld they could mover easier than many others and weren't afraid to travel by Warp with planning and preparation.

It wasn't until they settled down after becoming immobilized in a snowball orbiting Valhalla and had fought alongside the Valhallans that they started to talk to any outsiders. Even then they still only talked to the Valhallans rather than the rest of the Imperium whom they don't know and therefore don't trust.

Point is that by having relied on their own for so very long they trust and hold each other dear and tight because family is all to them.

Caelec goes wandering due to adolescent curiosity of the outside world and an attack dog of Khorne follows his mind-scent back and goes on a rampage down the craftworlds streets only being stopped when their Khine avatar wrestled it to the cobbles and tore it's heart out. Because he is family and it was a fuckup rather than an act of deliberate malice he is forgiven.

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>>53046650
This shows the Shipwright Council of Yme-Loc two things. Firstly damn fucking right keeping the barricade up is a good idea. Did you see the fucking size of that thing holy shit lets never have another come through the door. Secondly it's advantageous to actually know what's out there and although their new neighbors have shared all they know Valhalla is still an out of the way agri-world and therefore might not know that much. It is decided that the craftworld needs it's own eyes and ears out in the greater Imperium so they can know what the fuck is going on.

To this end it was decided that Yme-Loc should only send it's best and brightest volunteers. As atonement Caelec was the first to step forwards. The Shipwright Council restated that they wanted the best and brightest volunteers and Caelec stepped back. Caelec's sister the accomplished farseer Caerys steps forwards and tells the council that she has predicted that she steps forwards and they pick her as one to go beyond the barricades.

Caerys finds her services useful to the Imperial Guard who, by their nature, travel around a lot and so she acquires much information for her home. She also by her selfless service and usefulness makes a good impression for her craftworld. She finds herself being shunted from one regiment to another as the demand for farseers greatly outweighs the number of available farseers willing to do military service. He jumping from regiment to regiment eventually sees her attached to the Cadian 412th during the reconquest of Kronus. Due to the still precarious nature of the resettlement it was deemed prudent for her to remain there as another farseer in addition to Colonel-Farseer Taldeer can only be a good thing. Taldeer and Caerys despite their differing origins get along like a house on fire and are about as dangerous to bystanders.

Any opinions on what would work best for a converted/kitbashed Oscar model?

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>>53047488
Use some green stuff to make the face less gaunt and paint the eyes gold with white around them to make them look like they are glowing maybe.

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>>53047488

>>53027057
I actually have my friends about to start playing Only War with me but they have no knowledge of what 40k is like. Would NobleDark 40k be a good starting point to ease them into vanilla later on? The pure GrimDark is too stupid for most new players it seems.

>>53046978
>>53046650
I would also add that Caerys might have a knack for mechanics and technology. Yme Loc is renowned for their spiritual ties to Vaul, and their titans and grav tanks. They're a craftworld of smiths.

As a sidenote, this makes Valhallan equipment a touch unique. Though Yme Loc is not acting as a personal orbital forgeworld, enough Valhallan heroes and prominent citizens over time have impressed Yme Loc and been conferred unique gifts. Very rarely any manner of eldar equipment, but usually modified or refined human gear. It is considered a test of an eldar smith's skills to make something marvelous from something... Less marvelous. Sometimes these gifts reach the general population, and Valhallan gunsmiths take note. Valhallans favor reliable, easy to repair, easy to learn equipment. A tendency that pairs very well with Imperial doctrine. But Valhalla also produces beautiful and lethal versions of standard arms attempting to copy eldar improved gear- generally not for the rank and file, but officers and arms enthusiasts. Many officers across the galaxy covet the Mogant mk2 pattern stub pistol- kicks hard enough to bruise, heavy on the hip, but accurate and lethal, and surprisingly ergonomic, even if it looks a little strange.

>>53047764
I don't know. The only problem would be the whiplash getting into vanilla 40k. "Why do i have to kill the eldar? Wait, the commissar is going to execute him for losing the primer? What do you mean I'm a heretic?"

>>53047764
I would think so, but it may spoil them to the grimdark of vanilla. Seeing a Nobledark commissar using his bolt pistol to give a poor guardsman grabbed by a pink horror the Emperor's Mercy is going to make them startled when a grimdark one executes an Ork-fighting guardsman for calling for a tactical retreat to the high ground so the squad can rain lasfire down on the enemy.

Just remember how that one anon reacted when we explained how Ullanor went down in canon.

The best way might be to treat it all like Call of Cthulhu. It's not if you're going to die, it's when, and how amusing it is OOC when you do. That said, it's easier to make black comedy out of CoC than 40k.

>>53047892
40k is Paranoia with every instance of "Friend Computer" replaced with "God Emperor."

>>53048026
So does that mean Nobledark is the Fallout to vanilla's Paranoia?

>>53047764
>>53047808
>>53047892
>>53047892
Eh, Vanilla'd be far easier to explain imho - the grimdark is much more extreme to the point where it's flanderised beyond belief. Nobledark has all these intricate relationships and shit between factions and PoIs and all, whereas Vanilla's more "if in doubt, assume all parties involved made the worst decisions possible".

Plus, do you really want """smart"""
players trying to look further into the lore and finding our unholy shitheap of a thread/archive/1d4 page?

>>53048239
I... don't understand.

Autarch Kayleth and crew would be a good add for Alaitoc.

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>>53048997
How would you write her?

>>53037140
Combat Chems maybe Panzer chocolate.

Depending on the Unit

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>>53049038
See this picture?

This is Kayleth, most of the time, talking to her superiors in Craftworld Alaitoc. Not that they ever listen to her. Or ever regret their decision.

Kayleth has mastered small unit tactics, because she very rarely gets anything larger than a handful of soldiers. Alaitoc maintains Kayleth, and her flexible, freewheeling barely more than a company of soldiers, purely as a social nicety, when they don't much care for the Imperium, or anyone else outside of their spartan and rigid social structure. Alaitoc has armies. They can take worlds, if it's called for. But they only lend meager forces out to the Imperium, purely as lip service to the idea of unity. Not that they're shy about gaining glory. To maintain status among their peers, they send their soldiers to the most challenging of conflicts as the pride of Alaitoc demands.

And Kayleth is the one that has to somehow bridge the gap between her inadequate supply, and the impossible missions she's assigned.

She isn't pleasant to work with. Cold, imperious, and ill suited for cooperation. But very careful, more than she lets on, about her allies. After a tragic friendly fire incident with a fellow eldar force, she's privately vowed not to let something like that happen again. She has an eclectic group in support. Warlock Veldoran, a sage veteran, acting as the voice of reason and diplomat at times. The Farseer Elenwe, who has taken a vow of silence as part of a fringe philosophy in Alaitoc. For whatever reason, and the suspicion of some, Elenwe only communicates with Warlock Veldoran. And Ronahn, a pathfinder from Ulthwe, and, to some concern, an outcast Ulthran.

Kayleth trusts and respects them more than her own family. And she also is driven nuts by them all. Veldoran is a pompous, inflexible windbag that constantly harps on what's proper and undermines her authority. Elenwe is a farseer that only shares prophecies with Veldoran of all people, and Ronahn...Less said the better.

That being said, Kayleth is a resourceful and seasoned commander who has managed to thrive with what little Alaitoc shares with her. She tries to stay dignified and commanding in the face of her quasi-independent operation's dwindling fortunes, and she is never one to turn away frorm a fight. But, the memories of the friendly fire incident wear at her, and have made her unwilling to cooperate with other forces, for fear of repeating the prior incident. And she's taken a few (To put it diplomatically) unofficial assignments. Without proper support frorm Alaitoc who consider her work unsuitable for their craftworld, Kayleth has had at times to be creative in making sure her soldiers are fed and equipped. Though she would never act against her own craftworld's interests, or the Imperium's interests, she has done work for money rather than honor before. Don't call her a mercenary, she doesn't like that.

She prefers to put on a model of being an honorable soldier of her craftworld, and is all business. But a few rounds of amasec, and she curses like a voidsman, and is none too shy in explaining just everything wrong with everyone around her. If you break down the barriers when sober, you'll find that she can be a good, if suspicious ally, always second guessing you, and herself.

>Came out kind of generic, but ehhhh whatever. I'll take another crack later.

>tl;dr Cranky mercenary that is in denial about being a mercenary, trying to do good and represent a craftworld well that feels indifferent about her. Has deeply buried guilt, and a tight knit bond with her cadre of officers.

bump

>>53049603
>maybe Panzer chocolate
What?

>>53052567
it has tasty meth in it.

>>53050308
Didn't some other anon claim they were doing something with Ronahn? Or was that you?

In the interest of pumping fresh material into the thread, here’s something I had been kicking around for Xeno Week but wasn’t able to get it done in time. Also I was worried it would be seen as a bit too human-centric. It’s been mentioned several times that the Eldar have gradually softened their stance towards humans over the ten millennia, going from essentially allies of convenience to it being at least socially acceptable to admit that humans sometimes have their good points, even if the Eldar are in general more skilled and sophisticated (and the old guard is still uncomfortable with people saying it).

Obviously, like many subtle societal changes this isn’t something that would have happened overnight, but this is something that history textbooks would pick out as a “watershed” moment. The setting was in M33 for several reasons. General time of thawing of Eldar relations, Imperial “Golden Age” so less societal disruption, etc.

https://pastebin.com/MFC2uP7x

As to how this happened, keep in mind the following. Eldar are not homogenous. There are a variety of thoughts and opinions among the Eldar people. And if there are modern-day humans who are willing to devote their lives to saving non-sapient beings, it is possible that individuals with sympathy towards non-hostile sapients (for whom the gap would be much less pronounced) would be present in other species, even if they would be seen as weird by the majority.

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>>53052917 (cont.)
As for why nothing comparable exists for humans, it already kind of does. Humans got the stick out of their ass earlier on in this timeline because the nobledark nature of the universe meant that the Imperium encountered plenty of xenos who just wanted to be left alone (and the Steward was willing to oblige, he was out there to unite mankind, not give it more enemies). Steward being “born” at the end of the Age of Strife meant he didn’t have an axe to grind like in canon. Additionally, the positive relationship with the Eldar showed many humans that it was possible to have positive relationships with other species. Therefore the xenophobia train didn’t get going as it did in canon.

Sadly this seems to have been replaced with a general sense of imperialism and cultural posturing regarding the nature of the Imperium, as in “oh aren’t we imperials so great”. At least there are fewer genocides.

>>53052962
the classical, roman ideal of imperium was actually thought of as pretty cosmopolitan, seeing as it unified countless cultures and peoples under a coherent government. That representation of it isn't really compatible with the reality of romanization, but it sure beats xenophobic extermination. The Imperium might be so kind as to reclaim a chaos tainted world with generations of reeducation, creating a horrible sort of enlightenment styled panopticon society that forcibly re-engineers the tainted culture's collective subconscious to be well organized and full of arete. It's better than the pointless dystopia or exterminatus of the canon imperium, but you still have to march and study for the glorious vision of noble immortal space napoleon/alexander.

>>53052884
Yeah. I want to have other characters fleshed out before adding another ulthwe. Admittedly Kayleth doesn't seem too good in my eyes right now since I wrote it off the cuff, so maybe I should stick to characters I have a clear vision of.

>>53053325
And that only lasts as long as noble immortal space Napoleon/Alexander stays immortal. One lucky shiv with a murder knife and you get absolute chaos (and Chaos) due to a system of succession that makes Roman emperors looks organized and the fact that despite being focused on human survival Big E at least treated the non-human races fairly and with no prejudice. No guarantee his successors would be the same.

>>53053519
I assume there is a system of succession laid out, because Oscar's not the sort of guy to neglect that. Could be as simple as the High Lords collectively assuming executive power.

>>53054404
It's possible that if Oscar dies Isha takes his job. If Macha dies then Isha will probably just possess the most suitable of her disciples or possibly someone already under her influence. There is a small chance that Jubblowski might be the next Empress.

>>53050308
I really like this. It gives her a good bitter flavour.

An idea I had for some cheapo chaff units for Chaos Eldar:

Marionettes are slaves- human, other Imperial, and badly disgraced Croneworlder, in descending order of commonality- who have been sealed inside suits of sensory-deprivation armor. As protection, the armor is... better than nothing. The true purpose of the ghastbone suits are to filter the wearer's perceptions of the outside world, rendering the wearer entirely dependent on the commands of their Master to function.

At the highest level, a Marionette's armor induces total sensory deprivation, even suppressing internal senses like proprioception and balance, with the commands of the Master- delivered direct to the nervous system- the only sensory input. This level is rare, as it requires the Master to manage each individual twitch of a muscle on top of whatever else they're doing. This highest grade of Marionette is therefore found mostly in the retinues of the highest and most perfect nobility, who can manage such complexity, moving in perfect concert with their master.

The average soldier-Marionette, of necessity, operates at a lower level of filtering, the outside world heavily abstracted to a level where they can do simple tasks like walking and aiming independently, but anything more complex is virtually impossible without outside direction for simple lack of information. Thousands of such soldiers can be found marching in the battles of the Black Crusades under the command of a single Master, moving in perfect formation through even the heaviest defensive fire- which they may not even perceive, seeing nothing but the ground under their feet and abstract targets to be shot, everything else reduced to featureless void.

Aesthetically, Marionettes (naturally) vary; the most common is blank, featureless white plating, reflecting the total suppression of independent will and inner life, but excessive riots of color and ornamentation are also reasonably common.
-

>>53056731
The primary users of Marionettes are, naturally, Slaaneshi warbands. Tzeentchian forces are the second-most-common users, and have developed their own variations on the technique. Some of the more together Khornate warbands use Marionette armor to control their berserkers, herding them in consistent directions and preventing them from turning on each other by limiting their perception to the desired objective. Nurglite forces, hardly at all.

Thoughts?

>>53056737
It is suitably horrifying. Especially given that the Imperium when fighting them is almost certainly killing it's own kidnapped citizens.

Although it probably counts as a mercy killing.

It also is a very real display of the subjugator and subjugated that feeds the outlook of the croneldar perfectly.

>-In many noble families of the Eldar Empire, it was a tradition to initiate a child into adulthood with incestuous torture, often with prayers to Isha for a child to result from the various couplings. In some families, those children of incest, twisted by the sorcery used in the torture that conceived them, started an honored line of breeding. In others, they became the centerpiece of a feast to celebrate their parents.

>those children of incest, twisted by the sorcery used in the torture that conceived them, started an honored line of breeding.

Is this the origins of the mandrakes?

Also if Vect was a child of this is this why they listen to him maybe.

>>53047720
Damon that's subtle.

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>>53055456
>Isha becomes the sole ruler of the Imperium
>maybe with Jubblowski
>EIDF at it again
Luther did nothing wrong!

>>53060056
Given that the Emperor is an ageless super psychic who can shrug off tank weapons it's doubtful that it's ever going to be a practical concern.

>>53060496
The Emperor also has multiple gods out for his blood. There are plenty of things out there that can kill him, and most of them want him dead.

>>53056737
>>53056823

Sounds good, a nice source of cannon fodder for the Cronedar when they do things by themselves. And it’s entirely within the means of canon too. If the Dark Eldar can scoop out a human’s soul and put a xenos one in its place, of course their less inhibited brethren would take that even further.

Though one wonders why the Cronedar would entirely dull their slaves to pain rather than turn the sensation of pain up. Or rather, manipulate it so the marionettes’ level of sensory deprivation is whatever the Cronedar want it to be. Have some subjugator fiddling with a device directly tied to the marionette’s sensory deprivation off to the side of the battlefield, turning the marionettes’ sense of pain as high as it can go before it starts affecting combat performance when firing, and turning it off when they want a horde of mindless berserkers. It fits in with the whole Cronedar (at least the Slaaneshi ones) themes of “dominate or be dominated” and the idea of a natural sensory response being perverted into something mechanical and manipulated.

Also, just as a question, did anyone have any thoughts on >>53052917. I'm only asking because the paste in on a timer and will go down in about a month. I was hoping it wasn't too stupid and if it is we just get rid of it.

>>53054404
>>53055456
>>53060496
>>53062842

I agree that the Emperor definitely has contingency plans. Whatever he is, the Emperor isn't stupid and he knows not to put all his eggs in one basket if he can help it.

The problem is are people going to listen to his wishes. As a comparison, there is some thought that when Alexander the Great was on his deathbed and asked who his empire would go to, he said "Krateros", one of his generals who IIRC was considered "the responsible one". His generals decided to smudge that into "Kratistos", meaning "the strongest", so that they would have a claim to the throne. Alexander's empire tore itself into pieces over that.

If Big E dies, you're going to have Isha either claiming the throne as dowager empress or nominating someone to rule (to maintain power and stability without people seeing it as an Eldar coup), Mars and its forgeworlds declaring independence, human separatists trying to bail from the Imperium, Il-Kaithe and the like possibly going the way of Dorhai, and more.

The last mortal emperor was one Goge Vandire, and everyone remembers that. Any attempt at bringing the Imperium back together with force would, for once in history, be seen as delegitimizing, because most people will see it as "that's how Vandire would have done it, Oscar could have done it without military law". That might be a bit rosy and not entirely true (Oscar did have Curze to get people back in line after the WotB, among others), but it's how people raised in M42 would see things.

>>53063139
>That might be a bit rosy and not entirely true (Oscar did have Curze to get people back in line after the WotB, among others), but it's how people raised in M42 would see things.
it would be pretty interesting to imagine the view of the emperor held on some backwater, semi-developed, modern earth level world. Imperial politics would be so distant and ancient to them, and even a pretty coherent historical record would be sparse and unbelievable, considering imperial grandeur and their hands off approach.

>>53062950
It was good and illustrates an important moment of social change in the Imperium that makes the setting breathe rather than be stagnating.

It's definitely worth saving.

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>>53063447
They would consider a lot of it to be total bullshit for one thing.

The Emperor is not 10,000 years old. Oscar is a name adopted upon coronation to give a sense of continuity.

In a similar manner the Empress is not the same one that first married some long ago Emperor. Eldar live long but not that fucking long. She is the high priestess of Isha, not Isha herself. She marries whoever is the current Oscar.

No Oscar has ever been a "man of Gold". That was a fiction made to impress Old Earth primitives in a stupider age and the pretense is now a fiction maintained out of tradition.

The Primarchs were probably real men or at least maybe several men whose exploits have been amalgamated into one man. Obviously no one man could do so much.

Also it's pretty ludicrous to believe that The Beast was over 20 feet tall when it's pretty clear that orks top out at 15 max.

No Eldrad is not that old holy shit. Or if he is it's because he leap frogs through the ages in a cryo-coffin.

It's also obvious that the raid on the Mansion of Nurgle to rescue Isha was a poorly remembered metaphor that has been badly garbled by time and translation across holy scripture. It was probably something to do with "you can salvage whats left of the innocent times if you join the Imperium". Nobody actually went into the Warp because that's impossible.

Also the Dark Carnival is not presided over by an actual drunk joker god. Don't be fucking stupid. It's an eldar in a cap and bells costume.

Then one day the Traveling Court appears in orbit and they have to come to terms with things.

>>53065139
Wait, I recognize that uniform.

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>>53065213
What's it from?

I only got that pic from The Collector's last image dump.

>>53063447
>>53065139

And Oscar would be more than willing to poke holes in the larger than life myths that surround him, putting the things that actually happened in greater contrast.

"Sigh, for the last time, I did not single handedly destroy the World Engine from the inside out. Nor have I ever blown up a sun."
"What about the thing with the ork 'ambassador' during the War of the Beast. They say you crushed him into a paste so fine it fit in a teacup".
"Oh, that? That definitely happened. Did the same thing to the Silent King's diplomat a while back. My favorite trick for false ambassadors".

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>>53065286
>What's it from?
Bible black. That eldar is a dirty dirty slaaneshi.

>>53065139
Does the Imperium at large even know Oscar's name is...well, Oscar? I thought it was one of those "not common knowledge things that Oscar will freely admit to if asked, and will simply say 'you never asked' if people complain he never brought it up". Like his Man of Gold status.

>>53066219
I imagine it's not common knowledge outside the high positions, historians and his few friends. Because why should anyone care? He is what he does.

He was just Oscar for a brief time when they fished him out of the tank and for those happy sunny days on the beach.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Nobledark

Archived

>>53057211
In canon Mandrakes are tainted by some sort of shadow dimension, I think. Sort of a shallow end of the Warp.

>>53057211
Vect in this timeline is said to be a survivor of the Old Empire. Hence living 10,000 years without much of a problem. Of course he also has access to Haemonculus technology, so he doesn't look like a crystallized husk.

And there's nothing to say Vect is or isn't related to this at all. Port Commorragh was the extralegal domain of the Eldar Empire's rich and famous, after all.

Though I think the mandrakes are a bit weirder than just being inbred. And Vect sure as hell doesn't look like an inbred tortured wreck.

>>53065139
>Also the Dark Carnival is not presided over by an actual drunk joker god. Don't be fucking stupid. It's an eldar in a cap and bells costume.

Only technically true. Ceggers isn't usually drunk, and when it is it's when one of his followers volunteers to be his meat-chaperone for a day...wearing a cap and bells costume.

>>53071138
And of course, 'don't be fucking stupid' is just sound advice. Otherwise you might do stuff like blow up planets for no good reason or kill sapients because they look kinda funny instead of because they're trying to kill you!

So, did we ever pin down Emps' power level?

>>53073419
Here are my rough logic and calculations:

We agreed that a full brotherhood of Grey Knights would be a significant threat to Oscar. In comparison, a brotherhood of Grey Knights takes down Angron in the vanilla 1st War of Armageddon, but Angron has the help of a dozen Bloodthirsters and in the end it's only like 20 or so GKs that actually take down Angron. So as a lower bound, Oscar is a significant margin above the choppiest Daemon Primarch.

Then in his fight with the Beast, Oscar is almost equal to him but slightly outclassed, and its Eldrad's help that put them over the top. The vanilla Beast was about equal to a Primarch judging by his fight with Vulkan, so with Chaos juice that would probably put the AU Beast at the same level of vanilla Chaos Horus a la the final showdown on the Vengeful Spirit. This means Oscar during the WotB is slightly weaker than Chaos Horus.

We've said that Oscar got stronger since then, given 10 millennia to train and what not, so I think it's safe to say he's solidly above Chaos Horus now, though still a long ways from vanilla Emps. If I had to put a wild estimate on it, I would say that as of M41.999 Oscar is probably equal to several (3 to 5) vanilla Primarchs.

>>53073789
And DAoT humanity had hundreds of the guy.
I've seen it proposed that a contributing factor to the Eldar's Fall was humanity's rise, the sense of being pushed out of their place in the sun, which they reacted to by turning inwards. Thinking of what a hundred Oscars in one place would be like, I can believe it.

>>53071138
That's one possibility. The other is that it is actually Ceggers in person.

He plays by his own rules or none. usually none.

>>53074320
The Dark Age humanity were capable of building a ringworld. Given that nothing more grand than it has ever been discovered nor any other ringworlds it can be assumed that the Cthonian Ringworld represented the very height of what humanity of that era was capable of and they only ever got around to building one of them.

Which is still pretty impressive given that it's a hoop ~299,200,000 km across and ~40,075 km wide.

It's also the possibility that by that point the Eldar Empire had already turned in on itself. They had been space traveling for 65 million years and were monstrously arrogant. They had discovered everything worth discovering in the galaxy. If it was unknown to them then it probably wasn't worth discovering g because things only had value if touched by their own magnificence. This mentality would cause them to turn inwards out of necessity. Also if they could live for tens of thousands of years at a time and reincarnate effortlessly they were truly immortal or near as makes no difference. After the first million years things get a bit stale so you look for new things and with only inwards to look it hedonism and depravity is going to occur and only get worse as time passes.

Dark age humanity would have, therefore, have had limited contact with the Eldar due to how insular they had become by that point. The only contact was probably them abducting or hunting for sport free range humans, and there would have been little the Dark Age humanity could do about that.

>>53077254
Consider that the eldar never needed to build megastructures beyond the shellworlds and even then only out of convenience and land value prices going upwards in the core worlds. They had the webway. To them even the most distant outpost was in walking distance. You couldn't invade any of their worlds without the might to defeat their entire Empire in one go. Now add to that the fact that reincarnation was a certainty and so death had no meaning to them. Now add to that the 65 million year headstart. Near stagnant as they were that's a stupid huge head start. It's almost a certainty that they could have built Dyson Spheres, they just saw no point.

So it's not that we were supplanting them that turned them in to monsters it was their own inherent awfulness with no moderating influence that did that. Their gods would have moderated them but Asuryan was a fucking idiot and prevented interference.

Also there wouldn't have ever been more than 1 Man of Gold in one place. One of their jobs was to be a communications network. the other job was to be the middleman between the god-like A.I. and the plebs.

Going to read the archive of old threads. To contribute in full, one must know what's been gone over before.
Though before I do, I must wonder...what happens with the hive fleets other than the big three?
A few are obvious or already alluded to, but what about Jormungandr and Moloch, that came from the northeast? Scylla and Charybdis in the west? Colossus, and its zoats that sought refuge from their masters before going bugshit nuts and attacking anyways?
Ouroboros, the temporal paradox that showed up in the middle of the Crusade in the middle of the galaxy, was said to have been bested by the Emperor, and is thought to be responsible for the spread of genestealers and possibly some of the various feral tyranid-like beasts

>>53077338
Nothing concrete on the other hive fleets beyond them arriving earlier.

Presumably they were more spread out across the centuries rather than just arriving in the last half hour.

Nothing on the Zoats so far.

>>53077338
>>53078000
There were no other hive fleets beyond the big three and the galaxy eater that has just shown up on the Imperium's doorstep in this timeline. All the others were splinters of the vanguards. Naga and possibly Moloch I think were splinters of Kraken that looped north.

Fenris and Catachan don't have feral tyranids this time around. They're just shitty places to live in regardless. That hasn't stopped tyranid sleeper agents from conducting smash-and-grab operations via bioespionage on these planets to raid the native lifeforms like the Fenrisian Kraken and Catachan Devil for useful sequences, like they did with the Eldar and the Zoanthrope and the Space Marines and Tyrant Guard.

>>53073789
>>53074320
This doesn't quite seem right - for a start, the Oscar is completely outclassed by the Beast, and is almost pulped by it even after it tore through pun intended sangy and the remaining BAs and Custards.

As for the GK comparison, that sounds inflated quite a bit. I think the original comparison was that a squad of them would significantly *inconvenience* Oscar, and a brotherhood would comfortably take him down - from previous discussion it seemed more like he's on the upper end of the Primarchs (certainly tougher than any of the Vanilla Loyalists) but still very firmly mortal.

>>53079974
maybe in pure physical strength and martial prowess, but we've pretty consistently talked him up as a semi-deific psychic powerhouse as well. The extent of this power, which matches or exceeds vanilla emps, has mostly been kept from battlefield use by requiring complex and built up infrastructure and preparation. Still, we should remember that Oscar's established greatest deed is the raid on the garden of Nurgle, and we should give him the power to correspond to that.

>>53080086
He wasn't alone. A whole load of mortals went into the Garden and many made it out.

Bjorn for example was just a Mk1 Dog Soldier with no psychic abilities.

>>53079974
The Beast was the size of a hab-block, had tusks the size of tree trunks, and had the marks of ALL FOUR CHAOS GODS. "Less powerful than The Beast" is a pretty broad descriptor.

I think one suggestion running around is that thanks to the power going to the Golden Throne, Oscar is just reaching vanilla Emps levels, but has no clue yet. Due to the Great Crusade being over by 10k years, he hasn't been on the front lines to test his limits. Maybe not vanilla Emps, we have been saying that although it varies, his power has always been between "primarch" and "</= 1 chaos god". Not "can stall all four" of vanilla.

The Men of Gold were also said to be able to interface with Dark Age tech to the level that it almost made them physical gods in their sphere of influence (think "A.I. in control of everything" levels, though lacking the brute calculating power of the Iron Minds). There are said to be scars across the galaxy left from their rebellion akin to Mass Effect's Great Rift of Klendagon (though not sure the size would be comparable). Due to his origins, Oscar doesn't know how. Teaching it to him now would be like trying to teach a hand-reared eagle who has never even seen another bird in his life how to fly. The Imperium might not even have records of what the Men of Gold could do beyond "be powerful".

Oscar is a runt by MoG standards, but he's a lot more conniving, incentive, and loyalty-inspiring, at least from what we know.

>>53080139
This. I don't think Oscar even put that much juice into the rift (Magnus and Malcador did a lot of it). Or if he did it was the kind of "power Astronomican and lead Great Crusade" level of multitasking.

>>53073789
>>53079974
>>53080543

Way back in one of the old threads, it was mentioned that in the vanilla Grey Knights codex, there was mention of a Dark Age cybernetic person shaped thing on a vessel lost to the warp that they Grey Knights intercepted and killed. Its psychic death scream was said to blot out the Astronomican for a large number of ships. It was suggested that this was one of the few “Man of Gold” encounters that could plausibly represent an actual lost Man of Gold. Sadly, the entity was clearly hostile, so the Imperium decided to respond with all of the dakka. Including Grey Knights, because if this thing was a Man of Gold you don’t want to mess around.

The entity’s identity as a Man of Gold was never confirmed, because it was clearly unreceptive to being analyzed while alive and it was not possible to get a confirmation or denial from the monatomic ash it left once it was dead. So the Imperium chalked it up in the “mystery” column.

However, I can’t find this entity in the lore. The only thing I can find that is close is the Cacodominus, which did something similar but was a xenos cyborg psyker. If this entity does exist though, and is a Man of Gold, it might give an idea of what it takes to kill one Man of Gold with a starship.

>>53080543
>Oscar even put that much juice into the rift (Magnus and Malcador did a lot of it).
opening the pathway is part of the task, but the whole raid was contingent on Oscar's power over the warp being able to keep the raiding party coherent in the very heart of a chaos god's realm and influence. It's a notable accomplishment that Magnus and Malcador held the rift, but Oscar and Eldrad had to make themselves the living gellar fields for an army in the very realm of infection and demoralization. As >>53080139 said, tons of non psychics were involved in the raid and returned from the nadir of corruption, so one assumes Oscar and Eldrad were making some active effort to maintain them.

>>53065139
>It's also obvious that the raid on the Mansion of Nurgle to rescue Isha was a poorly remembered metaphor that has been badly garbled by time and translation across holy scripture. It was probably something to do with "you can salvage whats left of the innocent times if you join the Imperium". Nobody actually went into the Warp because that's impossible.
This misinterpretation is almost valid at some level, because for Oscar and Eldrad to act in the great game of warp gods by rescuing Isha, they literally had to stride into the abyss of complacency and enforce their vision on it in direct contest with Nurgle. They really did save the surviving goddess of fertility from an unwanted marriage to the lord of decay.

I'd say that Oscar's abilities are awesome across th board but only godly in a few regards.

Godly abilities mostly being walking Gellar Field, physical buffs and Astropath things.

In terms of everything else he's merely extremely good.

Apex Twins are possibly not far off in terms of raw power when together but Oscar has way more experience.

Although to put this in context the Apex Twins can anatomically invert a Deamon Prince with their minds. Whilst giggling.

>>53082524
Since they were meant to be a galactic FTL communications network for the advanced AIs of dark age humanity it might be apt to compare a fully realized Man of Gold to a ship's effector from the Culture, except psychic instead of powered by handwave super-science. A Man of Gold might read and control minds for lightyears around, perceive and understand warp phenomena on a scale beyond mortal understanding, translate the astropathic cacophony of the warp into axioms comprehensible to the Iron Minds and vice versa, and enforce its own will on the immediate material world through passive warp influence all as a function of their galactic scale telepathy.

>>53083418
I thought that we were trying to get away from the Emperor being an unstoppable OPplznerf living god who can't be ever beaten as in Vanilla. The idea was to make him less powerful but more sensible.

>>53083957
'Wait, there's only two stats. Power and Reason. Why wouldn't you put every point you could into Power?' - canon Emperor

>>53084094
Is that a TTS quote? It sounds like one.

>>53084127
I have no idea what you're talking about, if it is a quote from something it's a coincidence.

>>53084175
Youtube series, "If the Emperor had a Text-To-Speech Device."

>>53083957
that anon seems to be saying that all that stuff would be coming along as byproducts or side effects to the intended power of FTL psychic communication the Men of Gold were designed for. It's not to say he has all that plus canon, but that the way his psychic powers work are conducive to his purpose of being a node in a communications network, and while this can also be used for combat the actual strength of it lies in its communicative purpose

>>53081752
Yeah, that's how I imagined the Raid as well, essentially like those escort missions in video games where you have to stay inside of a shield bubble and you die if you go outside it.

The only correction is that Eldrad and his farseers were on the outside helping hold the portal open, since it takes a LOT of juice to force open the doors to Nurgle's domain, and they had to kill all the daemons trying to get out of the portal and into reality as well. So it was pretty much Oscar maintaining the Gellar field though he had help from the veteran Librarians and Eldar on the Raid.

Also, is Malcador a psyker in this AU? I thought he was just a wise, grumpy old man.

>>53083957
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree, I thought there was a still a gap between Oscar and Big E? >>53080086 Like I don't think he's surpasses canon Emps at all except maybe in a few select areas.

>>53082524
I think that may be overstating the Apex Twins, beating a Daemon Prince is a significant feat for any individual in the 40k universe. Magnus' power was probably around the limit of natural human psyker potential, so I could see each of the twins eventually growing to his level of power. They're still like 12 years old though, whereas Magnus had centuries of experience before he got to "blow up Titans with mind lasers" levels of power. God have mercy on the souls of the enemies of the Imperium when the Twins get to that level, but seeing as shit is coming to a head in M41.999 they may not have centuries to learn...

>>53083957
Not >>53083418 but I agree that we are trying to keep the Emperor from being an OPplznerf living god. However there are two things to keep in mind.

One is that Big E lacks any of the accessories that a DaoT Man of Gold would have to do their job. All of the technology and machinery that would essentially be extensions of themselves. To use a computer analogy, Emperor is basically a bog-standard computer. A DaoT Man of Gold would be like a computer with max upgraded RAM, solid state processing, bluetooth capabilities, advanced graphics cards, surround sound, and anything else you can throw in there.

Additionally, there is also the matter of scale. Emps may be powerful in terms of raw numbers, but in relative scale he comes up short against any of the Chaos Gods. Possibly Cegorach and Isha too, though it's hard to say since their abilities don't translate to direct combat as well as Big E. There's a reason the Emperor delegated to the primarchs, and a reason why he ran like a madman into Nurgle's garden instead of just striding in and pimpslapping the Lord of Decay.

Also there's the subtler issues to worry about. Oscar can still get killed by a murder knife or other ways of assassination. Just because you use trickery to play outside your weight class doesn't mean others can't do the same. The original OP Men of Gold were killed after all.

>>53084971
>The only correction is that Eldrad and his farseers were on the outside helping hold the portal open

I thought Eldrad went with Oscar, along with the Phoenix Lords-to-be?

Other parts make sense though. Using Oscar as a living Gellar Field generator explains why the war party didn't instantly turn into Nurgling mush.

>Also, is Malcador a psyker in this AU? I thought he was just a wise, grumpy old man.

It was said he helped hold the portal open and lived to talk about it, so that implies some psyker ability. Maybe not "3rd strongest psyker ever" but not insignificant.

>>53084971
Malcador was a wise and grumpy old psyker. He was fairly powerful by the standards of Strife Era Old Earth but the Imperium is a bigger pond so it's hard to say how strong he actually was compared to later psykers.

Also the Twins only look 12. They're were born in 827M41.

>>53085150
to add, even at the peak of his potential "galactic scale telepathy" he's still just one node in the system, and his power is localized because of it. Also, any significant warp influence on his part is fundamentally different than a chaos god's or canon emps, because while they wield massive raw warp power inherent to themselves he achieves it through psychic access to the collective minds that form the substrate of the warp. The emperor is able to punch way above his actual weight class, meddle in the affairs of the gods and such even when all his actual raw power can do is keep him from evaporating in their presence, because of the way the Man of Gold communication network was meant to use the collective subconscious as its medium.

>>53085201
Regarding the Raid, here is a blurb from the Sangy bio, which I think is the only place the Raid is detailed in "official," non-thread writing.

"Later, he would be part of the great raid on the twisted realms of Nurgle, and nearly perished there in the stinking hellscape.
As the raiding party retreated to the portal with Isha in tow, they received word that Eldrad and his council of seers holding the portal open in realspace had come under ferocious daemonic assault, and that the portal was failing rapidly. As the allied forces rushed to the exit, Sanguinius lingered trying to save the lives of several wounded Exarchs and Astartes. It was only through the combined heroics of Lion El’Jonson, Jaghatai Khan, and the Phoenix Lords Asurmen and Baharroth that he survived, as they carved a path through the hordes of slavering monstrosities to drag the Angel through the collapsing portal."

Considering that the Phoenix Lords were created shortly after the Fall of the Eldar, I think it's safe to say there had already been several incarnations of each PL in the several thousands of years between the Fall and the Great Crusade.

>>53077254
>Eldar empire and how the orgies started
In canon, it is also said that Eldar also have kind of an empathic feedback loop going on. One Eldar gets depressed, it makes the other Eldar around them more depressed, which makes them more depressed, and so on until something bad happens. It's one of the reasons they keep their emotions so under control. In vanilla, spiritual dissections suggest that every Craftworlder is in some state of depression, which is actually contributing more to their dying race status than actual population decline (given the codex mentions the Craftworlds actually have a growth rate high enough that the Eldar have to set up colonies. Wut). Eldar are also kind of emotionally OCD compared to humans, even not counting the extended lifespans, which is why you get things like exarchs and farseers.

The point is, once that feedback loop began before the Fall, it would have been much more difficult for the Eldar to pull up out of it than anyone else, because it would be so easy for nearby people to get caught in the feedback loop. The few people who would be free of that feedback loop would be those with enough willpower to see where the crazy train was headed (Eldrad, Arrotyr), or had been far away enough from the other Eldar that they could clearly see that something was wrong from their outsider’s perspective (again, Eldrad, Arrotyr).

Ironically, this means that the Eldar are benefitting psychologically from having non-Eldar around. Despite most non-Eldar being emotionally ADHD to Eldar eyes, non-Eldar can rapidly shift emotions and more importantly project them psychically without being influenced in turn, meaning they can break an Eldar out of a rut and cut the feedback loop off at the source. Before humans go getting a big head over this, it should be pointed out that this could be achieved with any race for the same effect. The Eldar could be hanging around with the Tarellians and get the same benefits.

>>53074320
It all seems to go back to how each race built their gods. The Men of Gold and the Iron Minds were humanity’s gods, for all intents and purposes. The Old Ones grew their gods, built them like works of art, and then used them for mundane purposes or experiments. The Eldar, as well as many of the other races the Old Ones uplifted, went the whole nine yards and treated their gods as gods, probably because many of them were uplifted from Stone Age to Medieval tech levels and the Old Ones kept it simple for them. The Necrons didn’t so much make their gods as find them and then give them names from their own mythology, as if humans built A.I.s named “Zeus” or “Ra” (interestingly, this means Aza’gorod was both the Necron god of the sun and god of death, an unusual if appropriate set of domains). The Chaos Gods, despite mostly being of Old One origin, are essentially feral, naturally formed gods, gods gone wild without any purpose or directive.

But humanity? Humanity manufactured their gods. Stripped all the mysticism out of the process, but in a different way than the Old Ones. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were spectacular, but unlike the other gods they were all manufactured from a common template. Oh sure, each was probably unique (I doubt the Men of Gold all looked identical, and the Iron Minds code was probably just as divergent), but they were far more similar to each other than the C’tan or any of the warp gods. This meant that although individually the Men of Gold and Iron Minds were weaker than any warp god, unlike the other pantheons you could organize them into an army to beat bigger opponents through numbers. Of course, it also made them easier to kill if you caught them separately.

Tl;dr: Eldar built a few, really strong gods, humanity built weaker gods but built more of them.

>>53074320
>>53077254
>>53077296
That’s kind of how it was in canon, and what has been suggested so far. Pre-Fall, the Eldar were the closest thing there were to masters of the galaxy, but they preferred to stick to their well-developed Crone Worlds where they had everything just to their liking. The Webway meant that every planet was within walking distance of one another, so they didn't really have to occupy space beyond the immediate vicinity of their worlds. Eldar "territory" looked like Swiss cheese with large sections inhabited by other races or just not claimed. Super insular, to the point that in canon humanity barely even recognized that the Eldar were there or as advanced as they were.

Also, as advanced as humans were, the Eldar still had a huge head start, so the historical confrontations between humans and pre-Fall Eldar were more like “yey we inflicted enough damage to make the Eldar think this rock isn’t worth it” as opposed to actually winning. At least, when humans did win. It was a strange era where the side that used time travel to reload its guns was actually considered the primitives.

Shell-worlds also seem to be kind of an Eldar thing as opposed to ringworlds or Dyson spheres. It doesn't mean the Eldar couldn't make them or other races couldn't make shellworlds, as Commoragh is essentially two Dyson Spheres stacked on top of each other and hives are said to be almost proto-shellworlds out of necessity, but it seems to be more of a cultural preference. Maybe the Eldar liked the aesthetics of living on a planet?

File: 1493436759439.jpg (3.33 MB, 2745x1926)

3.33 MB JPG

>>53088011
>One Eldar gets depressed, it makes the other Eldar around them more depressed, which makes them more depressed, and so on until something bad happens. It's one of the reasons they keep their emotions so under control.
So some of the really clever seers and philosophers of the Old Empire decided it would be a great idea to make a self sustaining god of joy, because they were all depressed neurotic wrecks that could just barely hold themselves together, and could see society spiraling into infinite fatalistic ennui. Thus the purple cabal embarked on their great endeavor to conceive of a worthy prince for the Shaa-Dome, and found great success.

Crones, much like Orks, love the state of the galaxy.

>>53088405
Something like this was actually suggested in one of the old threads. Some enterprising Eldar decided the Eldar should create a god of peace and joy to clean up the Warp for the lesser beings out of a sense of noblesse oblige. Ended up turning into a monster due to the type of emotions that went into it and the fact that many Eldar had already jumped in the cocaine heaps and misheard "god of peace and joy" as "god of drugs, sex, and rock n' roll".

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

>>53088382
>Shell-worlds also seem to be kind of an Eldar thing as opposed to ringworlds or Dyson spheres. It doesn't mean the Eldar couldn't make them or other races couldn't make shellworlds, as Commoragh is essentially two Dyson Spheres stacked on top of each other and hives are said to be almost proto-shellworlds out of necessity, but it seems to be more of a cultural preference
Well the description of Shaa-Dome has referred to it as layered until at some inner point it crosses over into Slaanesh's realm in the warp. One could imagine that pre-fall the shellworld could have been the anchor for any number of extra-dimensional webway spaces comparable to Commorragh in scale, as well as essentially abbutting all other realspace holdings, and their own webway spaces. Between the crone worlds and the developed areas of webway that existed before the fall, it might be appropriate to consider eldar society a more-or-less contiguous megastructure. The planetary bodies they now inhabit in the eye of terror are little more than the ruined foundations of this realm, dragged into the warp by Slaanesh's birth and turned into its realm.

>>53088279
>Gods Gone Wild
You won't BELIEVE what these gods will do when we hand them a camera!

>>53088382
>Commoragh is essentially two Dyson Spheres

Where is that from?

>>53088549
>Some enterprising Eldar decided the Eldar should create a god of peace and joy to clean up the Warp for the lesser beings out of a sense of noblesse oblige.

And then thousands of years later Lofn comes along with a bizarre ability to inspire feelings of peace and good will to all sapient beings capable of such in her general vicinity.

Is her hybrid soul composed of the last vestiges of those long forgotten noble intentions held safe for this eventuality by the cap and bells god? Is it all a coincidence? No one will ever know.

An idea for a CEldar unit:

The Dragons' Teeth are one of the many ways the Chaos Eldar have to make the Imperium's life more difficult and miserable. In their inert form, they resemble metallic seeds- and in a sense, that is what they are. They are scattered about as a raiding force withdraws, dormant- until the conditions for their awakening are met. What those conditions are varies; it could be time elapsed, large numbers of people nearby, a snatch of birdsong, almost anything. Then it awakes, and starts to grow, sending tendrils through the ground. Then, once it has fully grown, it emerges.

They are wireframe horrors, masses of razor-wire in the vague outline of a living thing. They attack by entangling their prey, slicing them apart with a thousand cuts. They are very stealthy; having no skeleton of any kind, they can squeeze themselves through gaps an inch wide and flatten themselves against the ground to avoid detection, and they make excellent use of this ability. They have a natural grasp of terror tactics; sneaking into a tent of sleeping soldiers and killing every third of them without waking the rest, stringing up soldiers inside themselves without killing them and forcing the rest to shoot their comrade, more. They often prefer to maim rather than outright kill; they also seem to take particular pleasure in blending their way through hospitals. They are perfectly capable of lying low for years between rampages.

In short, they are ideal weapons for tying up large numbers of Guardsmen for long periods of time. Any planet affected by them has to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Maimed people must be cared for- and guarded, along with every other element of the logistics chain. And an inert seed could potentially lie waiting for millennia; some worlds still have occasional problems with Dragons' Teeth centuries after being visited by a Chaos Eldar raiding party.

Thoughts?

>>53091678
I like it. It's spiteful and needlessly cruel and so fits perfectly.

One question. How smart are they? Are they a really malevolent land mine that fucks shit up indiscriminately or do they differentiate and refrain from attacking Chaos Eldar when they revisit a world?

Because there could be hilarious delayed "friendly" fire.

>>53087911
I though that by that point there was only one Phoenix Lord, Asurmen, and the other PLs were at the time just specialist aspect warriors/Exarchs that became PLs.

The PLs being the elder warriors that survived the raid with their minds intact and didn't jump paths when they got home.

An example of a failed PL would be the wraithguard that keeps turning up at the Fang to wake up Bjorn for another adventure.

>>53071116
Are they still deamon/mortal half-breeds or are they just always and always in the "other" category?

>>53094994
I think they're always in the "other" category, their origins a mystery. Or at least poorly explained and only alluded to.

>>53092543
They're land mines. They don't attack other Dragon's Teeth but that's as much target discrimination as they can manage, which is why they're deployed when the CEldar are leaving.

>>53095986
Sounds something like smart, self-replicating barbed wire. I could see the Scions of the Broken Helm using a smart napalm equivalent, and on a large scale stuff like this would be the sort of technological horror evoked by EP's fractal weapons.

>>53096488
Something like this maybe

http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-457

>>52941207
>>52941228
>>52941253
>>52941325
Love it!

>>53096488
>smart napalm equivalent
Isn't that pretty much Phosphex?

>>53098135
I was thinking something more like
>Knight of the Old Helm finally gets put down after questing through an entire hive city
>blood is a slick of deamonic kerosene that will flow towards targets, leap for exposed flesh, and then die down to a barely perceptible smoulder to bait people closer
>It'll try to get into fuel supplies and infect them, then slowly seep to somewhere where it might catch a spark
essentially the thing, if it was also the gasoline

>>53091678
>>53092543
Sounds a little silly/grimderpy, if I'm to be completely honest.

My problem with it is that it doesn't seem to align with the "rules" of the 40k universe: it seems like it would need at least some rudimentary intelligence to operate, but neither machine spirits or daemon-binding would work for a disposable unit like this. Machine spirits simply don't have the level of complexity to pull off stealth operations, the most advanced example (excluding Titans) is the Land Raider, which can drive around and shoot autonomously. Actual cogitators in the 40k universe are the size of an entire room. On the other hand, daemons are difficult and time consuming to summon and bind into the material universe, and if we look at canon all Daemon Engines are like tank-sized vehicles or larger, meaning it's only worth summoning a daemon if you can give it a tank level of power.

The grimderpiness comes from the fact that it seems like a lot of effort for something that's essentially a better, crueler landmine that can be somewhat negated by metal detectors and tighter fitting doors, and the core theme of Chaos is efficiency and punching above their weight.

>>53093713
Not sure what we've discussed about PLs so far, but in canon Asurmen and his students formed their shrines shortly after the Fall. I prefer that to be honest, the Eldar should have their own heroes and legends that emerged from the Fall centuries or millenia before they met the Imperium. It would explain why they're so revered: they're exemplars of the Eldar that fought off the darkness and helped save the entire Eldar species during their darkest hour.

>>53098926
>The grimderpiness comes from the fact that it seems like a lot of effort for something that's essentially a better, crueler landmine that can be somewhat negated by metal detectors and tighter fitting doors, and the core theme of Chaos is efficiency and punching above their weight.
I'm sorry, but everything so far for the Crones has had them as requiem style giddy lunatics, in direct contrast to the sanity and effectiveness of the Imperium and the posthuman amorality of the Necrons. Efficiency was never a core theme of Chaos. Maybe amoral pragmatism, but only insomuch as a weapon powered by mortal sacrifice is totally unobjectionable to them, and that's mainly because they were going to debase and kill those people anyways. Any discussion of the Crones punching above their weight has been in reference to their relatively small numbers and absolutely balls-to-the-wall mentality that invites deamonic possession and gleefully embraces chaos.

They're manipulative and deadly, but not through a concentrated and orderly effort to be so. Thats far too orderly.

>>53098926
>Chaos
>efficiency
Anyway, my interpretation of 40k is that there is a continuum of warpy shit between the purely material and the full-blown daemonic, which these fall somewhere in the middle of. Essentially technological artifacts, although admittedly from a scientific lineage far removed from the Imperial, imbued with a touch of the warp to fill in some gaps- animal intelligence and probably sensory gear. Less effort than a full-blown daemon engine, for less raw firepower but possibly greater morale effect.

>>53099051
My mistake, "efficiency" was the wrong word for what I wanted to convey. What I meant was is that Chaos is the undersupplied underdog because they only have the worlds in the Eye of Terror to draw resources from as opposed to the Imperium which has an entire galaxy, and because of infighting and the risk of being crushed by the Imperium, Chaos factions are forced by survival of the fittest to use their resources as effectively as possible.

So murderous daemon engines? A pain to create and control, but totally worth it for the destruction they cause. Fabius Bile's insane experiments? They have a huge potential payoff and create hulking mutants to be used as fodder. But I don't see the same level of payoff for the Dragon's Teeth, for the reasons I listed above, and again they seem to skirt the "rules" of the 40k universe.

>>53099202
Sometimes the followers do a thing for tangible and useful payoff, sometimes they do it because they think it's funny and sometimes the Leprechaun tells them to burn things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLnecKDUweA

For what it's worth I do like the Dragon's Teeth. Do they make total sense in an effort to payoff way? No they don't. But it's Chaos. They do cruel and unusual things because they got bored with the cruel and usual.

>>53099202
We've been throwing around the idea of posessed or tainted wraithbone for a while now, and it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for them to throw around weird shit with its own rules, just like the craftworlders, deldar, and harlequins. Off the top of my head, dragon's teeth and similar technologies could come from rubbing Nurglite filth on soulstones until they can germinate and grow like evil seeds. That would make them the fungal infectuion equivalent to his plagues, and that would be a good gimick for the Attendants of Isha. Being able to make such things would keep them relevant without giving them massive manpower we already said they lack.

>>53099457
That's good.

In Vanilla the Soulstones are the Tears of Isha, it was never nailed down what they are made from in this AU.

The soulstones the Croneldar are using could be the tears she shed in the eternity she was subject to Nurgles affections.

They are half-life fungus infection deamons. On the one hand it's hard to get a big deamon to keep in reality. On the other these aren't big deamons and soulstones are meant to hold souls out of the Warp and can presumably hold deamons the same way.

When the wireframe eventually rusts apart the deamon rejoins the toenail grot and verrucas of Grandfather Nurgle.

There may be some link to the oblitorator virus providing the transmission method of getting the fungus into the rock. It's not out of the question with it being a warp derived virus.

>>53099793
they might even be able to grow more varieties of Daemonic plants and fungus. Demonic barbed wire vines might be joined by semi-living wraithbone forests and fast spreading fungal smart-mines. I'm kinda imagining a sort of deamon-engine/wraithguard siegeworks or trench warfare system that the Attendant clergy would fill with Chaos Undivided rabble recruited from across the eye on the delusional promise of stealing back their fertility goddess.

>>53098926
>>53099051
>>53099201
>>53099202
>>53099327
>>53099457
>>53100290

Chaos? Limited resources? The Cronedar have access to all the material floating around in the Warp, in addition to any material in the Eye of Terror and whatever worlds they can drag under. The Warp is literally galaxy-sized. The only limiting factor is how fast the Cronedar can mine the stuff, and how well it holds up in realspace.

In all honesty the Dragon’s Teeth sound almost exactly like low-end Nurglite Daemon engines or Nurgle-tainted ghastbone. Semi-sentient non-quite-plants/not-quite-machinery that attack anything with a soul leaving the inhabitants of an area in a constant state of dread and the area itself in a constant state of stagnancy because no one can build there after the Cronedar salt the Earth.

Indeed, the conservators might be even more of an issue that the Nurglite Plague Marines, because the Nurglite Eldar are all about concocting new varieties of plant, fungus, or disease in the name of the Plaguefather whereas most of the vanilla!Death Guard are a gun you point at things. So on the occasions Chaos gets its act together, the Cronedar get new toys.

Only question is why do people call it Dragon’s Teeth. Humans, if they still remembered it, would equate the term to the legend of Jason, in which an army was created by planting dragon’s teeth in the ground. Eldar equate the word “dragon” with Mag’draloth, whose idea of “area denial” equates to “tripwire attached to low-yield nuke”. To the Eldar “dragon” has connotations of “brute force” and “overkill”.

I’m also not going to lie, when I saw the description for Dragon’s teeth until I got about 1/3 of the way in I thought about Mass Effect’s Reaper-made Dragon’s Teeth.

>>53100824
Is...is there something WRONG with extreme overkill? Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, after all.
And that sounds like a perfectly suitable area denial weapon to me.
You denied the area, after all!
Though why is it a low-yield nuke? Shouldn't it be high-yield? Denies more area that way!

>>53100824
well, it could be high end dragon's teeth really do spawn fetid ghastbone skeletons, and get tossed about by Conservators as personal troops. Could also be that some of the horrible Nurglite fungus takes 'mushroom cloud' literally, and you could end up with isotope rich fungal blooms blurring the boundary between fallout and spore dispersal.

It's the Attendants' pretense that they maintain all the bountiful fecundity of Isha, even in her absence. Their creations are the worst mix of lifeless killing machine and battlefield vermin. I can picture them using geoengineering and fucking with planets biospheres to produce or destroy fortifications, stuff like sewing forests of wraithguard sized ghastbone trees with clawed limbs around besieged hive cities, or growing immense trench complexes with fast spreading daemon fungus. Teamed up with Plague marines like Sigismund's they presumably become exponentially more unpleasant, as they can grow killing fields and fortresses that themselves seek to aid the plague father's servants. Facing entrenched nurgle marines is bad. Facing entrenched nurgle marines on a planet where the barbed wire grows like ivy and looks for windows is hell.

>>53101088
Sorry, should have clarified. Tripwire attached to a low-yield nuke replicated numerous times across a wide area. Only difficulty is making sure the nukes aren't too close so they don't all go off at once and people get wise.

>>53101193
Ah, yes, that makes sense then. Being self-replicating would be a reason to go low-yield.
Finally, a use for low-yield nukes!

Matron Macha was not the first eldaress to become the primary mortal focus of the cult of Isha, though she is certainly the fairer that remains in the galaxy's memory. Nimina Demthring, the High Conservator of the Attendants of Isha, is the other, and she is far from beloved by the mother goddess. She was born in the sprawling pleasure shrines of Shaa-Dome, into the worship of Khaine the bloody handed, and worship of an Isha that was witch-mother to her monstrous fairy kin. In the loathsome latter years of the Old Empire Demthring was initiated in the palatial shrine of the all-mother, and in the manic orgies of the fall she and that bleak coven were among those few that remained aloof from the purple cabal's entertainment. That is not to say that foul sisterhood refrained from the debauchery, and in that time Nimina bore innumerable strange children in the name of her goddess, and gleefully partook alongside her depraved superiors in that long corrupted convent. It can be said only that the wicked traditions and sacred fixations of Isha's followers preserved her worship as distinct from that of the gestating Prince of Pleasure, but in the end little but her cult and their prolific brood remained her faithful. As the empyrean hell welled up from the final debaucheries in the heart of the city that lay behind the doors in the hills, and the ships of the Old Empire returned to reign as fire upon the surface of the Shaa-Dome, this last strand of true and faithful worship dragged Isha on through the assaults of newborn Slaanesh. Burning Arrotyr, already damned, melted a shaft through the superstructure of the shellworld and came to strike down the witch-cult and atomize the temples. This he did, and after he slew and burned Isha's faithful in the middling layers the Marshal left again for his firestorm on the surface, driven back in equal measure by his contempt for the resurgent Slaaneshis and the ferocity of the newly realized daemons and cenobites followed.

>>53102094
my steel donut detector is bleeping

>>53102094
Though the near obliteration of Isha's remaining cult did next to nothing to impede Slaanesh's arrival in the universe, it left few but Demthring alive in her service. Arrotyr's hot iron sank deep into Shaa-Dome, and though it was meant to wipe Isha from existence it came just as she would have been made sport of by Slaanesh. As the Marshal and Taskmaster fought their first gory, maniacal war together Slaanesh had eyes for none but Khorne, and when the smouldering ruins of Isha's shrines were again made a boudoir for occult debauchees the mother goddess's witches were nowhere to be found.

Nimina says it was in this time that Isha manifested before her, wearing the modified and sculpted body of the dying high priestess, and that she nursed the wounded, dying goddess as she hid in that form. They were attended to by Nimina's brood, and dwelt in the ruins of the shrine even as it was brought low by the war of the fall and turned to a charnel pit of discarded flesh and rubbish in the years of Slaanesh's endless victory celebration. Demthring and the high priestess remained in this state of foul hospice until the latter woman expired of her wounds, and of her company. Likewise, there in Slaanesh's midden mother Isha remained until father Nurgle extracted her, or so the High Conservator tells it. She says Nurgle's visits were frequent, doting upon them, adorning the embodied goddess and her with his gifts upon flesh and unclosing wound, until at last he drew up his courage and ferried them away to his estate. Demthring in that time had gathered what little was left of the coven, and by the providence of her loving care for the all-mother her brood came to dominate that near-dead order. Her foul children were the first conservators beneath her in this new cult, and no survivor of Arrontyr's purge had the will or means to contest her. They went with Isha into the realm of Nurgle, and took with them every relic, corpse, and scrap of holy writ.

>>53102618
>this named character you invented for a faction we invented for this setting we invented seems like an original character
I'm sorry, a few threads ago I'd said I would come up with some backstory for another one of OC Crone Eldar leaders we had floated ideas for. Apparently I was mistaken.

>>53102743
>Nimina
>Malaria
>Isha (sorta...kinda...no)

Nurgle, interdimensional ladies' man

>>53102797

This is really, really good!

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>>53102743
None were so bold to challenge Nurgle himself when the interlopers dared enter his vast mansion. Few were said to have glimpsed him, down the hazy length of an infinite hall, but those unlucky few were not among the raid's survivors. When a Warmaster, armor long ruined and body wreathed in a mandorla of golden flame, came seeking Isha she quailed and cowered in the chambers her host had quartered her in. The Steward of the Golden Throne, after searching the infinity of that foul house, came upon her in a chamber of fetid paradise. Isha dwelled in a jungle of long abandoned refuse cobbled into a parody of life, and pressing on through trees draped with rotting silk and boughs heavy with slops of fruit the Steward found her, surrounded by all manner of unlife and undeath, not least of which were the Attendants. When first he saw her, Isha was still bedecked in the finery of Nurgle's wife, the body of the high priestess he had so adorned for her. She was bloated and emaciated, gaunt, pallid, gangrenous, and swollen, eyes bloodshot and full of cataracts, flesh pimpled, blistered, and ulcerated, and the carcass she was given was splayed upon a hill of stones alike to coins of dirty ice. She coughed and shook, half buried in the mound, and around her shuddering form the Steward saw the figures of the Conservators.

Nimina knew this interloper not to be hated Arrontyr, but had really no desire to reveal this to her goddess. She hailed Oscar as if she were the matron of Isha's cult of old, and entreated his congress with her own 'divinity', that he might be among the flock of the All-mother through herself. That the Steward came forewarned by Eldrad as to the situation of captivity in which Isha was held was good, but wholly unnecessary. Demthring was yet a vision of the Matron's beauty, as she understood it, and made great and excited offer of the eternity of wriggling, slick comfort in which Oscar would henceforth abide beside her.

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>>53103166
Speaking of which, since we're on Cronedar.

When the combined forces of man and eldar had invaded Nurgle’s mansion and wrested Isha from Nurgle’s captivity, none among the forces of Chaos were as shocked by this development as Nurgle himself. Khorne was angry, as he always was, ranting and raving about how the theft of Isha was an insult to all the Chaos Gods. Slaanesh was displeased, for they had still craved Isha for themselves and now the chances of having the last elder goddess at their mercy seemed as remote as ever. Tzeentch was annoyed, for he had used the presence of Isha as a tool to sow discontent among the Chaos Gods and now that tool was gone. But Nurgle. Nurgle was destitute. Nurgle had long been aware that existence was futile in a cosmic sense, having watched his every effort to preserve the beauty of the universe wither and be in vain, but this was the first time he had known despair on a personal level.

For the Conservators of Isha, this was unacceptable. After venting his initial bout of fury upon realspace, Nurgle became despondent. The theft of Isha had forced the Lord of Stagnancy to change his lifestyle against his will, and he didn’t like it. Nurgle withdrew from the rest of the world, and the Conservators of Isha no longer received visits from their beloved Plaguefather. Something had to be done. And so it was that one brave high-priestess went before the Lord of Decay, and offered herself up as Nurgle’s guinea pig in Isha’s stead.

>>53103972
The few remaining records of the Old Eldar Empire list her name as Maleriel, though across the galaxy she came to be known as Malaria for reasons that will soon become evident. Nurgle took Malaria up on her offer, and for a while it was good, or at least, as close to good as things could get in the Realm of Chaos. However, Nurgle’s mood soon began to sour. Malaria had been brave, but she was not Isha. Whereas Isha’s flesh would have always rejuvenated itself eventually no matter how noxious Nurgle’s creation, Malaria’s flesh warped and mutated. As much as it pained the Lord of Decay to admit it, it just wasn’t the same, and Malaria could never replace Isha in Nurgle’s heart. Nurgle ceased experimenting on Malaria and moved on to other things. The Conservators of Isha breathed a collective sigh of relief, they loved their Plaguefather, but they knew that few could survive such personal, painful attention from the Lord of Decay. However, perhaps the greatest abomination was yet to come: Malaria was still alive.

Today, Malaria is a living biohazard, a one-woman weapon of mass destruction. Nurgle had ceased his experimentation on Malaria, but not before he had merged her body with what was at the time his latest creation, the Destroyer Hive. After that, there was no more Maleriel. There was only Malaria, the Living Hive. Malaria is a disgusting creature. Half of her body is covered in hive-like outgrowths, resembling the honeycomb of a paper wasp or the inside of a termite mound, home to growing maggots, rot wasps, daemon flies, and plague gnats. However, the parts of her body that are not covered in these outgrowths, including much of her face save the area around her left eye, are covered by pale white skin, looking as pristine and flawless as they did the day of the Fall.

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>>53103985
However, this is only a veneer of normality, literally skin deep. Malaria has almost no original tissue left, and when she has been damaged in the past, breaking in half where most mortals would merely bleed, it is clear that her entire body is nothing more than honeycombs for the insects inside her with a thin layer of skin on top. She shouldn’t even be able to move, having no brain, muscle, or bone, being as much a creature of the warp as flesh and blood now, animated by the arcane powers of the warp and the soul of what was once an eldar.

As for Malaria herself, she does not care as to her appearance. She has the mind of a child, despite producing swarms of plague-bearing insects so vast that they can blot out the sun. Malaria exists in a constant state of pleasure, happiness, and religious ecstasy so common to the followers of Nurgle as insects pupate inside her body, giggling like an innocent child in spite of the horror she leaves in her wake.

tl;dr: One part Typhus, one part Ku'Gath, one part Foulspawn, one part SCP 439 (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-439). Engineered for maximum NOPE. Just point your NOPE detector in the right direction until you hear it start screaming.

More of a front-line fighter/sapper than the High Conservator...probably.

Also previous nope.gif got eaten.

>>53103891
They vied against each other, briefly, and their exchange ended with the rotten body of the High Conservator strewn across the hill of embittered soulstones. The Warmaster took waifish, crone Isha in his arms and fled, and as she left the mansion of Nurgle the goddess seemed to die again. The long deceased form of the high priestess was shed on the threshold of the gate from which they emerged and for a moment, just as long as the rift persisted, Isha stood in glory in the materium before the seers of Eldrad and the assembled warriors. The door shut, the Matron Goddess collapsed into the body of the seer Macha, and the deed was complete.

The High Conservator was not long dead, and easily reassembled. ND hates Oscar, more even than she hates Arrotyr or the Taskmaster. Maybe as much as she hates the Indigo Crow. She wants her sick waifu back so she can go back to nursing her precious baby. She absolutely hates leaving the Mansion of Nurgle, which she views as a perfect paradise, but she is also a weird sort of Isha evangelist. She essentially tries to rally the vat/murder-orgy born rabble to fight her infinite crusades to 'rescue' Isha, and preaches Nurglite doctrine in the name of Isha and calls it chaos undivided. Nimina isn't especially perceptive, adventurous, or deadly relative to the other three or Malys, or Vect, but she's single minded and really persistent, and had been constantly ready for action since the raid. Malys might need to convince or coerce the other faction leaders to fight in a black crusade, Nimina she needs to keep from pouring resources into non-productive sinkholes.

>>53104188
should the Taskmaster of Shaa-Dome or the Indigo Crow be next?

>>53090892
Canon depiction of Commorragh essentially has it as two spherical outgrowths of the Webway stacked one on top of each other with a stolen star located about 1 AU in the center (or however many AUs the eldar prefer to see things, grow stuff, and not get toasty; canonically it is said that their starlight is rather red), along with a series of smaller cities located at various nodes from the main one.

They even have a name for these stars, Ilmaea, or black suns. Which are stolen from inhabited systems because this is the Dark Eldar and of course they are.

>>53104188
I was just realizing I wrote Nemina as a really fucked up mix of Sapho and Menelaus, if Helen was also Ishtar or something. Also, if Nurgle is supposed to be somehow named after sumerian underworld god that would link him to Gilgamesh, who ended up being deified as king of the underworld centuries after his epic about how man can't become god, and one must accept the reality of death. That kinda fits for this shit.

>>53104188
Interesting.
>>53104217
I'd say Indigo Crow.

>>53105117
K. I'm not really sure how to make this one more than just a wandering wizard of some stripe, but it will work well to show the setup of the Tzeentchian Crones.

The idea of the taskmaster seems pretty fun, seems meant to be a slaaneshi that's also a joyless sexless bureaucrat, but I'm not sure where to actually go with that either.

>>53100824
No depiction of the Warp in canon shows it to be a source of infinite materiel, otherwise CSMs wouldn't be undersupplied and have to scavenge for shit all the time. To the contrary, warp material holds up rather poorly in realspace if daemons are anything to go by, it requires elaborate rituals and sacrifices to summon in any significant quantity, and most of it goes poof when whatever is anchoring them in realspace gets destroyed.

>>53105319
To be fair, having access to raw materials isn't the same as having access to finished goods.
Canon Chaos Marines would've had what was on their ships to start a manufacturing base and that's it (while also dealing with each other trying to fuck one another up, and also daemons) while Crone Eldar would have whatever manufacturing capability was already on their worlds and wasn't destroyed, wouldn't they?

>>53102618
Did you forget where you are?

>>53104217
The Crow plz

>>53104188
>>53104036
>>53103985
>>53103972
>>53103891
>>53102743
>>53102094
Mr. Bones won't let me off the wild ride.

Plz Mr Bones, Plz.

>>53108527
So there's been stuff on Slaaneshi Eldar, Khornate Eldar, and now Nurglite Eldar.
What about Tzeetchi Eldar?

>>53109246
they would maybe be the ones who viewed the Fall as no a complete catastrophe but a changing of states from the stagnation of the Old Empire to the current extended transitional stage. Everything from the Old Empire's first slide into depravity to it's current state has just been growing pains.

The eldar are to become as the gods are, like they believe the Old Ones were. Gods, empire and even the Apocalypse are a stepping stones to this goal.

They are utterly amoral and without standards or inhibition but unlike the mindless hedonism of the Old Empire citizens and the Slaaneshi adherents they have an end goal of sorts so it's not horror for horror's sake.

Problem is that they are all playing to their own tunes and compulsively backstab.

Page 10 bump

>>53104188
So was Macha one of the last of the old faithful from the original priesthood who didn't fall from grace?

>>53112298
I don't know. I think there was supposed to be a delay between rescuing Isha and Macha allowing Isha inside her.

I think the implication was that the rescuing of Isha and the possibility of hope for the Eldar race caused Macha to find religion and switch careers. She was always a typical Biel-Tan battle-axe but if Isha was never rescued she would have stayed a battle-axe, instead of joining Isha's priesthood. I imagine having another Eldar god come back from being lost would have spurred a huge revival of Eldar religion, like Ceggers did in canon, as opposed to the "gods are dead" attitude in canon.

>>53098926
>Phoenix Lords
I agree with this assessment. Phoenix Lords are like Eldar primarchs. Primarchs were the ones who helped drag humanity out of the darkness (mostly, there were other individuals involved), PLs did the same for Eldar. When Eldar and humans made first contact, both had already gotten back on their feet to some degree, and the alliance only made sure of it. Both could stand on their own, but they could stand even taller together (due to Eldar getting their goddess back and humans having a less shitty method of resisting Chaos).

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So who's the toughest canon character he could beat in a fight?

As a follow up, could any canon character beat him in an actual war? For scenarios, a world war, system spanning, or galaxy sized?

>>53112621
I suppose one of the big differences between the humans and eldar of the Imperium is that for humanity the age of larger than life super heroes is all but over. For the eldar they are all very much alive and active.

It's like if the elves of middle-earth got their elder days awesomeness back on when Aragorn turned up.

>>52993941
As big as your mom!

>>53113486
Canonically? One of the major daemons of the Big Four. Ka'Bandha, Kairos, and the like. As well as any of the vanilla primarchs. Maybe struggle with canon!Horus on Chaos. He'd lose to vanilla Emps, as well as any of the whole C'tan or Chaos Gods. Oscar couldn't have K.O.-ed the Void Dragon like Canon Emps could.

As a comparison, think of Hercules during the Gigantomachy. Hercules is keeping pace with the gods and surviving, but in terms of weaponry he's basically using fancy arrows. Meanwhile Athena is using the island of Sicily as a bludgeoning weapon to crush Enceladus. On the other hand, anything that doesn't have "major divine" in it's job title (including minor gods like Achelous) is fair game, including things that are supposed to be otherwise out of reach of mortals (like killing the Hydra or the Nemean Lion).

Tactically I have no clue. The list is probably a lot longer, because you don't have to be a superman in order to kill one. Both vanilla and nobledark Horus might have been able to do it.

Against any canon Imperial Oscar would have an initial disadvantage because he would try to reason things out while Imperials would either see him as a fake or have a knee-jerk "xenos, five round rapid" reaction. Few would be those he could reason with. However once it becomes clear there would be no peace, he would attack with vigor, probably nastier than the vanilla Imperium because he knows how to think tactically instead of relying on brute force and reserves. However, he would hesitate at doing the truly nasty stuff the vanilla Imperium wouldn't blink twice at, which would give them another edge.

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>>53114928
>However, he would hesitate at doing the truly nasty stuff the vanilla Imperium wouldn't blink twice at, which would give them another edge.
How much of an edge does stopping for war crimes when fighting an opponent that's evenly matched for gear and better trained than you give, by your reckoning. Assuming this is Imperial Army vs an equivalent force of Imperial Guard and Astartes, not dark eldar, Terror tactics could be just as easily a liability. I suppose you may mean preemptive exterminatus type stuff, but I'd kinda assume the AU Imperium has protocols for that sort of warfare, seeing as they share a galaxy with Crones, Chaos Orks, and are managing a cold war with the Necrons.

More questions. How does the naval doctrine compare?

I guess I've been imagining that Emperor Oscar, though less ruthless than a canon Imperial would be something of a diplomatic and military savant, between the Alexander/Napoleon references and the being a golden psychic bio-android. Went with the image of the Traveling Court ambling through the galaxy and getting side tracked every so often with minor wars and potential unrest the Emperor wants to sort out while he's in the area. This, his intervention with the assassins, living and waging war through the great hunt and the age of apostasy, for every black crusade, essentially moving to ultramar when Hive fleets need breaking, maintaining (nominally) peaceful relations with the Necron Star Empire, etc. seemed like noteworthy experience.

>>53114928
Eh, I'd say he'd probably beat most of the vanilla primarchs, bar Sangy and the properly Chaos-Juiced ones

>five rounds rapid
mein negro of superlative taste

>>53115597
I’ve actually been thinking about this one. Aside from boarding actions, ship-to-ship combat in the Imperium can be divided into two broad categories: heavy caliber and light caliber weapons. Heavy caliber weapons are things like gravitic launchers, nova cannons, cyclonic torpedos, vortex missiles, anything with a physical projectile. Heavy-caliber weapons are extremely powerful, but the weapon itself tends to be extremely difficult to maneuver in the midst of combat due to its massive size and also has to be reloaded after each shot. Therefore, heavy caliber weaponry tends to be aimed and fired once in the initial salvo of a battle, and then possibly once again at slow-moving targets that cannot dodge.

That said, the Imperium uses many forms of torpedos like guided torpedos and seeking torpedos that get around this issue, possessing a machine spirit (or just a plain old A.I. in the case of groups like the Squats, Interex, or Tau) than can correct its course at closer range. However guided torpedos and the like can be jammed and interfered with.

Light caliber weapons tend to be directed energy weapons or weapons like railguns. Things like lance batteries and the like. Light caliber weapons can’t blow huge holes in a ship like heavy-caliber weapons have (at least not without sustained fire), but have next to no travel time and can easily be re-aimed at a moving target. Ship-to-ship combat often consists of lots and lots of light weapons fired at each other, punctuated by the occasional blast from a high power heavy caliber weapon.

>>53117176
That said, this being the Imperium, things can range massively from one side of the galaxy to the other. Nova cannon does not always mean the same thing on the same ship, even though the Imperial Navy took pains to standardize the term. You can find a ship with plazma-based Nova cannons and ammo-shooting macrocannons or railguns alongside one with typical Chicxulub-caliber Nova cannons and lazcanon lance batteries in the same fleet, let along the same part of the galaxy.

When the Demiurge joined the Imperium, one of the key things they brought with them as a “housewarming gift” was ion cannon weaponry. Believe it or not the main ship-to-ship weapon used by the Tau in vanilla actually came from one of their auxiliary races. The invention of the ion cannon was a godsend for the Imperial Navy. It essentially worked like a railgun, but since it essentially worked by accelerating a beam of metal ions up to relativistic velocities, it did not use as much energy and could be used for sustained fire to carve up ships. It also had a lower chance of overheating for this same reason. As a result, many member states, along with the worlds whose tech-priests were liberal enough to not REEE at the xenos tech, have begun replacing or supplementing their current weaponry with ion cannons.

The Eldar, as might be expected, are weird. Instead of typical void shields, Eldar ships tend to be armed with a weird “mirage drive” or “stutter drive” that makes it almost impossible to hit them from long distances. However, this type of drive seems to only work well for smaller ships, so Eldar tend to use hit and run strikes and strafing rather than slugging it out. Maybe use carriers for large combined forces engagements. Typical Eldar tactics involve using the stutter drives to get in knife-fight range and then attacking ships in close quarters where they can fly circles around their foes.

>>53115597
>I suppose you may mean preemptive exterminatus type stuff, but I'd kinda assume the AU Imperium has protocols for that sort of warfare, seeing as they share a galaxy with Crones, Chaos Orks, and are managing a cold war with the Necrons.

Probably stuff like this, along with things like using radical inquisitors to sic daemons on a world (which the Nobledark Imperium would draw a line at, no one deserves to get destroyed by the Primordial Annihilator), avoiding military action to perform Exterminatus on high-population civilian centers, etc. It's less that the canon Imperium will perform these actions and more that the nobledark one won't stoop to them unless really pushed.

I agree though that Oscar is something of a diplomatic and military savant. Canon Imperium still has a decent chance of losing if he's around, if for no other reason that canon Imperium has lost their superhuman military savant. Oscar can juggle fronts better than any baseliner can. Oscar versus canon Emperor in a game of galactic chess is something else, especially since if the points in time are the same Emps has 40,000 more years of experience that Oscar doesn't.

>>53117365
That makes sense, I suppose.

>>53117365
I think Nobledark Imperium would beat canon Imperium in a fight even without factoring Oscar in simply because their military organization isn't a clusterfuck.

It's weird to see Macha as a serious character in DoW 3.

>>53120795
Not to mention they have like a hundred other sapient species incorporated, 2 of which are legitimate galactic powers in canon.

>>53121104
Those two of which are also a big larger than in canon because they're not frittering away their population in pissing contests with the Imperium. Humans doesn't benefit as much because their population is so large but for the Imperium as a whole it makes the Tau and Eldar more powerful members.

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>>53120795
>Commissar in Unified Imperium trench tasked with maintaining morale
>doing a pretty damn good job honestly, easy to keep people motivated when you're fighting the dark reflection of your entire society
>see your opposite number in the Imperium of Man's fortifications
>Disgracing the noble uniform and name of the Imperial Commissariat, slaughtering his own men, and stifling sensible tactics to demand fanatical suicide charges
>ABSOLUTELY LIVID
>THIS SHIT WILL NOT STAND
>Put a price on enemy commissars, pay by the sash or hat, but won't turn down scalps
>lead trench raids and make a showy point of being a righteous, exemplary frontline officer to your men as you hound the enemy officer corps
>Fanatical IoM troops get to watch what look like Imperial Guard fight with well drilled combined arms tactics that to them seem them the domain of Karskins or stormies
>lead by a reasonable but utterly ferocious commissar that's dedicated to wiping out their own *BLAM*-happy superiors
>The enemy Commissar has Astartes. Why doesn't our Commissar have Astartes?
>dissent in the ranks leads to more *BLAM*, or desertion to what seems ever more apparent the more legitimate expression of Imperium

>>53121888
Come to think of it, it would be entirely appropriate for a Commissar to *be* an Astartes here.

>>53112456
There can't be much of a delay between getting free and finding a host or she would fall back to the Warp.

Maybe seer Macha had some sort of religious epiphany when Isha for that moment stood before them and her mind was extremely welcoming to her.

>>53123143
Wasting training of that sort on something as rare as an astartes isn't efficient.

Also that's one of the jobs of the Chaplain

>>53123191
Macha might have come with the seer group as her repressed, frustrated self, and when Isha emerged from the portal Macha had a very strong religious experience. Macha would essentially have been a repressed, machiavellian, psychic elf oracle all her life, maybe not the meme ever-virgin but someone that long ago squelched thoughts of enjoyment or self-fulfillment in the name of duty and civilization. She would have gone with Eldrad expecting to fail, or a Pyrrhic victory at best, and went expecting to burn out or be eaten by daemons while holding the gate.

She doesn't just survive though. She watches as heroes return in something resembling real triumph, and she sees the Steward of the Golden Throne carrying the exhausted All-Mother across the threshold, and is overcome by the scene. Macha, unexpectedly and at the core of her person, reevaluated the universe's potential to bear truly joyful and virtuous things, and at the same time Isha was shedding her desiccated, traumatized form. Isha stood in radiance on the ground of old earth, Macha was the most perfectly receptive of that radiance, and so it simply follows that she received the radiance of Isha in that moment.