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Okay guys, >>55583946 here. Real talk. I know we've been saying "more weebs" for nigh on twenty threads now, but truth be told we really do need some more on the Tau. What we really need is a write-up for Commander Shadowsun if anything. She and Farsight are the Tau equivalent of primarchs and Phoenix Lords, and everyone in-universe seems to know it. Aun’Va has even been slipping her stuff to extend her lifespan even beyond what the cryostasis and rejuvenants would allow, because he knows the Tau need a big cultural hero to look up to and the only other option is a xenophobic renegade.

> Born mid M39, on Tau’n (the Poctroon homeworld) if we go by canon. Would explain why she is more open to xenos cooperation whereas Farsight is more traditionalist. In canon was a student of Puretide, not established if the same is true here.
> Was a student and friends with Farsight, and is implied to have had less platonic feelings towards him (the Greater Good does not approve of this action).
> Farsight crossed The Line during the Tau Civil War. One suggestion was that he may have had a hand in inflaming tensions that led to the conflict erupting into violence, which is a big taboo in Tau culture. Shadowsun thought it was fine to disagree and debate, but actual violence was unjustified. Now all she wants to do is strangle Farsight with his own intestines, and the two have a very personal hatred that only those who were once close friends could have.

>>55584266 (cont.)
> Swore a blood oath to see Farsight dead, but is pragmatic enough that she won’t let the Tau empire burn to fulfill it.
> Has been leapfrogging through time Master Chief-style by using cryostasis after helping stabilize the Tau Empire. Explicit instructions to wake her if Farsight sticks his neck out. Plan has become unexpectedly extended after Farsight failed to die of old age.
> More open-minded and less xenophobic than Farsight (known as an Imperial hero even outside of Tau space, which the Tau will remind you of quite frequently), but at the same time more prone to obeying the Ethereal Council and is more manipulable by them.
> Given her specialties in fighting tyranids and cryostasis, may have gone on the hunt with Kryptman once or twice.

bump

>>55584266
Speaking of writing characters up, we also need some stuff on the Phoenix Lords too, seeing as the Eldar are equal partners in the Imperium. Most things can stay unchanged from canon, but it'd be interested to see the PL work with Imperial forces, especially the Primarchs.

Also imagine the primarch/PL/other-hero wars on Imperial imageboards.

>Not having Shadowsun in top tier. Shit taste desu senpai
>Implying your blueberry is on the same level as someone who solo'd a Bloodthirster
>Silly mon'keighs and their non-immortal leaders, when will they ever learn?
>Our primarchs did more in less than one millenia than the PLs did in ten

How bloody was the Tau civil war?

Are we talking the targeting of civilian population centres and the extermination of families or more of a really large scale ceremonial duel, ritualized and governed by notions of honour?

Did we decided if Aun'Va was Aun'Da or one of his first pupils living unnaturally long?

>>55586557
I'd go with him being a first early disciple rather than him being Tau Jesus. It leaves it so that he is trying to spread the dream of a man he called friend without actually knowing 100% for sure what Tau Jesus would have done in the circumstances. Makes him less grand, more of a person.

Also have his longevity remain a mystery, even to himself. He hasn't been kept young, that's for damn sure. He is an old man and has been for a very long time. His knees click when he walks and he needs glasses to read. And has done for thousands of years.

His longevity is known only to the Ethereal inner council. Everyone else just assumes there have been a line of Vas from Tau St Peter on down the ages.

Bumping for hope of revised Old Earth cross section

Is Lion dead or just in a coma?

It keeps being said that Ferrus Manus was the last primarch but nowhere does it say that Lion died.

>>55584266
By 999M41 are there enough Poctroon around to have soldiers?

Also is any information ever given about them?

Has there ever been a number given on how tall in miles a Hive is?

>>55590072
We have them as looking like Kerbals. When the Tau discovered Tau'n, local Nurgle cultists used First Contact as a distraction to kick off a massive plague. The Tau freaked and did everything they could to help (because they refuse to let the first aliens they've ever meet die of a plague right after), but couldn't diagnose the symptoms. Long story short (it's on notes page), about 1% of the original Poctroon population survived. They're still a ridiculously small minority on their own homeworld.

>>55589492
Lion's was last known to be in a coma and then people lost track of him. It's entirely possible he 's dead, its entirely possible he could wake up tomorrow from wherever he is given the strong Arthurian overtones of much of the Dark Angels. Of course, it's just as likely Russ would show back up again from his mysterious vanishing (i.e., very slim).

>>55587406
Like Tau St. Peter meets the Wandering Jew. This has promise.

>>55586443
I'd say somewhere in the middle. We have mention of things going bad when talk of whether to work with the Imperium went from debate to rioting and violence. Then it escalated into military action, especially once the Ethereals thought their honor had been breached. The issue at heart wouldn't be one worth civilian atrocities by the military, but at the same time it was a much dirtier, more personal war than the Tau usually fought. Half the time civility and honor went out the window.

>>55591216
>Kerbals

Oh fuck that is beautiful. Were they as batshit crazy as the name implies?

>>55589492
I think he's been in the Coma so long that it deserves a capital letter. He is close enough to dead as makes no difference.

>>55593288
Calgar: I've been in a fucking coma since the Battle of Ultramar, and I'm still trying to figure out when I'll wake up.
Lion: Get on my level scrub.

>>55586443
I'm seeing it as both sides going to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties and keep the actual violence contained to the Fire and Ethereal castes. The whole reason for the war was to sway/guide the people down the correct path, killing the non-combatants would just feed the other side.

Despite all that it was the first time large scale Tau on Tau violence had been done since the days of Aun'Da. Think of Babylon 5 and no Mimbari having killed another Mimbari (except accidents, duels and cases of genuine insanity) since the days of Valen.

Then boom, the unthinkable happens. Tau don't react well to disorder at the best of times but previously they could comfort themselves with it being inflicted on them from outside and they they would overcome it with good order and the rule of law. Their law being the source of disharmony would have been abhorrent to consider and insane to live through.

It would have been a defining moment for the species by that point. Brotherhoods formed and torn apart in blood and suffering the likes of which mere years previous would have been incomprehensible.

By the standards of the Arbiters stationed on worlds like Necromunda it would have gone on reports as a very large but polite riot.

Other than Shadowsun, Aun'Va, Shas'O "Doomguy" Kais and Farsight are there any other named characters for the Tau?

Are there any named characters for the Vespid or the Kroot at all?

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>>55597728
>Are there any named characters for the Vespid or the Kroot at all?
In canon or here? Here we don't have any yet. Canon has very few named Kroot. Anghkor Prok is the most famous, he was a guerilla fighter on Pech fighting the Ork invasion. Despite the Kroot evolving from Kroothawks that ate Ork carcasses, long-term the Orks would have sucked the life out of Pech by orkiforming it. He fought them for years before the Tau showed up to lend a hand, and in return earned the loyalty of both Prok and the Kroot. Even though the Kroot take on mercenary contracts from anyone against the Tau's wishes, the Kroot will never take contracts against the Tau or eat Tau meat without permission because of this.

The only other named Kroot characters are a few Shapers in the Last Chancers and Ciaphas Cain series. There are no named characters for the vespid.

>>55597728
As for other notable Tau, there's Aun'Shi, who's notable for being an Ethereal who likes to lead from the front lines and is pretty good with an honor blade in close combat (hey, it's technically "leading"), who was brought up as a possible example of how the empire has changed since the more rigid days.

There's Puretide, who's was basically Tau Sun-Tsu and codified the Tau code of war based on a mishmash of historical techniques and tribal hunting strategies, much of which was drawn from his own considerable experience. He probably wasn't murdered by the Ethereals in this timeline to make computer chips.

There's El'Miyamoto, who is basically a loose canon Fire Warrior who doesn't play by the rules, but gets shit done despite his unorthodox and risky methods.

There's Sho'Aun, the Tau Battlesuit otaku who designed the heavier-end battlesuits and the first Tau titans.

And there's Farsight's the Eight. Farsight's seven companions, comprised of five Fire Caste warriors, an A.I. engram, and an Earth Caste scientist who had to GET IN THE FUCKING BATTLESUIT O'VESA. We weren't sure if they would be separatists or loyalists given in canon they are loyal to Farsight, but at the same time are rather unorthodox.

Bump?

>>55596321
Wasn't part of the issue that the separatists feared the rise of outsider-inspired ideas was going to lead the Ethereal Council to force them to follow the Greater Good in a way they didn't believe in? In that case there might have been some reason for the Earth, Water, and Air Caste to fight, because it's their belief system that's now at stake. Not that the Ethereals and Fire Caste would have wanted them to, but funny things happen in an environment of uncertain fear and mob mentality.

As a historical parallel, are there good records of riots/rebellions in Tau-like societies like Imperial China or Feudal Japan? Do they tend to involve lots of formality and dueling or do things tend to get messy.

Is Farsight Tau Oda Nobunaga arming the more populous Earth Caste with guns?

>>55602409
>Is Farsight Tau Oda Nobunaga arming the more populous Earth Caste with guns?
I think this would be a cool element to include, that in his crusade to reestablish the Tau traditions of old, Farsight is essentially breaking them all and establishing new ones, all while being too blind to most of it, and excusing what he allows himself to be aware of by saying it's for both the Greater Good and the greater good.

>>55590716
I seem to remember reading in canon that some Spires can pierce the sky, but I'll be damned if I can remember the source. For all I know I'm getting Hives confused with the Fang.

>>55596321
>>55602409
These seem broadly right to me, I see the Tau Civil War as starting off like the Wars of the Roses, with sporadic and relatively contained clashes between the two factions, but then rapidly escalating into a major and paradigm-shifting conflict like the American Civil War when both sides refused to back down. To both sides, the other faction's actions would have been unconscionable breaches of Tau'va: from the loyalist viewpoint Farsight was undermining all of Tau society through sheer hubris, whereas to the secessionists the Ethereals were leading the Tau down a path to destruction, hence the refusal of both sides to give an inch.

To continue the American Civil War analogy, this probably would be the major cultural turning point for the Tau, the "loss of innocence." In the same way that the US Civil War raised philosophical questions about whether the union and the grand experiment of democracy was viable, the Tau Civil War probably would have undermined people's faith in the Greater Good itself. For the first time, there was no consensus on what the Greater Good even entailed, and to a society as rigid and structured as the Tau it would have been a huge shock to the system.

So while population centers and civilians were probably left unmolested, the casualties of the war were probably huge. Every Tau citizen personally knew someone who fell in the war.

>>55602692
(Cont.)
At present, the Farsight Enclaves and the Tau Empire (are they still called an empire if they're in the Imperium?) are in a tense Cold War standoff, with the Damocles Gulf border region heavily fortified by both sides. While the regular Tau forces are vastly greater than Farsight's, they're too pressed by other threats like the Nids to commit the forces necessary to retake those worlds and the casualties would be intolerably high if they did, which is pretty much a reflection of the canon Imperium's stand off with the Tau.

I imagine the Eldar have called for Farsight's assassination several times, seeing as he holds one of their most sacred relics, whereas the Ethereals staunchly refuse any Imperium intervention, seeing this as an internal issue and matter of honor. The Emperor for his part probably holds out hope for a reconciliation with Farsight, as all hands will be needed against the coming dark and the final battle, and they cannot afford to needlessly lose such a talented ally and rich worlds.

>>55602409
Despite what weebs would have you believe, East Asia is not all HONOBURU SAMURAI or kung fu masters. Look up the list of deadliest wars on Wikipedia, several of the top 20 are rebellions in Imperial China and and the Sengoku era in Japan was a bloodbath. That's how war goes, shit gets messy quick.

How knowledgeable are the Tau on warp and psyker shenanigans in this AU?

>>55603950
I like to think that with increased contact with the Imperium, the Ethereals are more than informed about the threats of the Warp, and they might even be a little thankful that their signature is so small.

The Poctroon, Vespid and Kroot were all part of the Tau Empire before being absorbed into the Imperium and presumably are part of the Tau empire together under the Imperium.

IF I wanted to maek a Vespid character what should I know about them beyond big insects?

>>55602630
Is that a literal piercing of the sky or a ,ore figurative sense that you need breathing equipment at the top?

Not that it matters. Some of the Old Earth Hives definitely get into space because the Orbital Tethers are grounded in them.

>>55602771
>Are they still an Empire?
Ultramar is still called an Empire despite being within the Imperium. So I suppose the galaxy is large enough for there to be an empire within an empire (empireception).

> Imperial stance on Farsight.
Sounds pretty good. The big thing about Farsight compared to all the other adversaries in this universe seems to be that compared to the tyranids, Chaos, Orks, and most of the Necrons, Farsight is actually a relatively nice guy (especially if you are a Tau). He doesn't go around killing babies or wearing human skin, and his primary reason for rebelling was so the Tau could just be left alone. He actually cares about the people under his command. It's just that he's a xenophobic asshole.

He's the kind of guy if you were an Earth Caste walking into a bar, he would invite you over for a drink and nearly bowl you over with his sheer charisma. At least, until you find out what his political leanings are and where you stand on the issue.

>>55603950
>>55604542
The Tau know about the warp and psykers. They don't have those abilities, but they have good theoretical knowledge of it. Indeed, it may give them a bit of advantage over daemons, because they don't have the innate primal fear of daemons that eldar and humans have. This means they tend to deal with daemons by, say, hitting them with void-to-surface weaponry and refuse to play the daemons superstitious games unless there's no choice.

>>55602616
I think we have a bit of this already. The Farsight Enclaves already have a bit of deviation from the norm in that the Fire Caste has way too much power than dictated by the Greater Good and Farsight is technically calling the shots over the Ethereals, but people (including Farsight), tend not to notice this.

What is the Tau homeworld like? Are there very well designed mega-cities?

>>55608940
also how often has homeworld been taken?

>>55609379
As in been captured? Never, unless you count the Chaos-caused A.I. rebellion and the Civil War. Attacked? Probably several times, given that Shadowsun has been woken up for shit-hits-the-fan level stuff. Thing is T'au is right in the middle of the polygon-shaped space that is the Tau Empire. Resistance gets increasingly harder as you get towards the core (and the planets in the core are in a tight cluster). Though I'm sure Chaos, being Chaos, has tried to answer the question of "how many warbands does it take to get to the crunchy center of the Tau Empire".

>>55609945
I really like the image of Shadowsun being the Tau WMD that walks like a mortal.

It has the lovely image of Aun'va as some sort of Davy Jones dinosaur of another era that the others of his kind defer to out of respect/fear and when shit gets too hard to handle he declares "release the Shadowsun". Those are the days that you know shit has got beyond real. If is the legendary 1s Sphere veteran commander than by now she has fought everything from Dark Eldar to xeno Skynet. Like Kryptman she is awoken when needed and preserved when not. Like Kryptman she is getting on in subjective years now despite this though not to the same extreme. Like Kryptman she is awake in the final days of 999M41 and it doesn't look like she will sleep again soon.

Humans have stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, Tau have Shadowsun.

Farsight was to be her replacement for when she has to sleep the sleep of the never waking. Maybe she secretly hopes that one day he will somehow still be.

Imperium has Saint Celestine around whom the masses flock with songs ion their lips and fire in their hearts. Shadowsun is this also. When she wakes up the other casts start to readily form citizens militias to ease the burdens of the Fire Caste PDF equivalents. Not actual soldiers, goodness no. That would be against the scripture. They just assist and serve as best they can right up to what they can bend the scripture to accommodate.

Shadowsun believes in the spirit of the teachings but is a soldier and has seen some shit. More shit up close and awful than probably any other Tau bar maybe Kais. She believes in the Greater Good and the Empire as if fights for the Greater Good and the Imperium as it seems to mirror and facilitate the Greater Good but she also believes that Aun'Va was a late bronze age bureaucrat and blind obedience to the rules of another time taken in a vacuum and not adapted to this time will always lead to disaster. Her original dispute with Farsight.

Are there psychic Vespid or are they like the Tau with the bluntness?

From reading the 1d4chan it seems that all Securitas are sisters but not all sisters are Securitas.

Are the Katholian sisters like Mirium Cain and the Fenrisian Valkyries augmented like the Securitas?

>>55583946
Read William Hope Hodgeson's 'The Night Land'. I would describe it as one of the first nobledark stories in fiction, and one of the earliest 'very distant future' sci-fi stories, as it was published in 1912. It concerns an adventure story in a year 'so far in the future numbers cannot explain it', after the sun has suffered a serious malfunction and collapsed, only emitting a very minimal amount of infra-red light and a small amount of heat.

>>55614209
Just going a bit further it also has the first force field (The 'air clog'), the first cthonian/chaos beasts (the 'great watchers'), the first light saber (the 'diskos'), and the first arcology (the 'redoubt').

I highly recommend it.

Bazump

>>55613807
I have no clue. Fenrisian Valkyries have something done to them that activates latent Canis Helix genes in them that are supposed to be turned off through genetic copyright. Normally any such genes would have a DaoT self-shutoff sequence to deactivate them to keep the supersoldiers from breeding true. Hence the whole "Daughters of Russ" thing. Otherwise the genes would be junk DNA and they would be normal women, but whatever is done to them turns them into werewolf-themed valkyries.

Miriam Cain might be an actual Sister for all we know. Fanaticism within reason is considered a plus for Sisters because it blunts their mind to Warp corruption. As long as they aren't going to go burninating, say, non-Katholians for no reason strong faith isn't exactly a reason to turn them down.

>>55612310
I don't know. Lexicanum says nothing about Vespid psykers. It's said the Tau had trouble talking with them when they first met, but that could be as much due to Tau not being able to receive telepathy (see Dawn of War) than Vespid lacking psykers.

The Vespid are said to need a communications helm to communicate with other species. Like the Q'orl they "talk" through pheromones, though psykers could always use telepathy with them and the Tau with their ability to sense pheromones can get the gist of what they are feeling. Given that this is Nobledark, I assume the communication helms are not hidden mind control devices. Even without the mind control the Vespid "get" the Tau in a way that other races do not, they understand the caste system and the idea of putting the whole above the self.

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>>55610525
You know, I actually had idea for a character piece for Shadowsun. I never got around to writing it because I wasn’t sure if everyone would have liked the direction it would have taken and since Shadowsun is an up-for-grabs “primarch” in a sense I wanted to give someone else first crack. But it seems we are all on a similar wavelength here.

It was supposed to be written in a short, straightforward format, like a cross between Eastern poetry and the bluntness of a soldier who has seen some shit. It would start with the following, straightforward statement.

“My life is war.”

It would point out that from Shadowsun’s perspective, literally every waking moment of her life for the last nigh-on a hundred years has been some form of conflict. The closest she has ever gotten to “down time” is the moments of strategic planning and stretched of boredom between FUBAR events. She goes to sleep only to wake up a moment later wondering “what in the name of the Tau’va is wrong now”.

It would point out that Shadowsun has essentially lived through every major military conflict of the last millennium, which would be the equivalent of a soldier fighting in every war since the late 18th century, and all the changes in technology that implies. Imagine having to constantly relearn how to fight as weapons go from muskets to bolt-action rifles to semi-automatics. Shadowsun would point this out…albeit in a rather cynical fashion.

“Sometimes the weapons are different. Better, faster, they say.
In the end they are all the same. I pull the trigger, and something dies.”

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>>55616678 (cont.)
Shadowsun would muse a bit about all the comrades she has lost, from the long-time friends she had to abandon at the end of the Civil War to the fleeting friends she made during her brief bouts awake. She is more philosophical on the subject as opposed to Kryptman, who redirects all his anger at the Hive Mind for “making” him live this way. She knows she has lived much longer than she should, and she is suspicious of it.

“I do not know how I have lived so long. Even though I have spent most of the last millennium in cryo-stasis, I still use up a little bit more of my life in every war or battle I fight. The Earth Caste who wake me speak of new drugs, new medical breakthroughs, but even this is not enough to explain my extended lifespan. I should have been long dead by now. As should he.”

“He should have been dead a hundred times over by now.
And yet he is not. His stubbornness appears to let him thwart the course of nature.”

And here we get to the meat of the situation. Farsight. Shadowsun has killed legions of foes for the Tau empire, a list that would make Khorne proud, and yet the one foe she wants to kill has always seemed to elude her grasp. Shadowsun believes that he is to be her final opponent, and if she can kill him, then she can finally rest. A whole Miles to Go Before I Sleep kind of thing. But it’s essentially become a game of wills between the two of them, and it’s taking a self-admitted toll on Shadowsun.

“And yet I will not bend or break. The people of T'au need a hero, and I must be it for them.”

Unfortunately my brain turned into pudding and I couldn’t finish it. Also I worried it was too similar to Eldrad’s “got to make sure everything is prepared before old age gets me”. Posting here in the hopes that maybe it will inspire someone else.

>>55610525
Shadowsun has probably figured out by now that Aun'Va is more than meets the eye. The "my identical grandson for whom politics skipped a generation" works after a while, but someone who knows the guy personally would see right through his act in seconds.

She doesn't voice what she knows because Aun'Va being in charge is literally for the Greater Good, but it allows her to be more critical of him because she knows he knows she knows and she sees his feet of clay through the shared ages.

>Maybe she secretly hopes that one day he will somehow still be.

Worst possible end, Farsight decides that he needs to die in order to atone for kicking off the Civil War and decides to fall on his sword to die “honorably” a la the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You need someone else to hold your sword for you to do that. Farsight gives Shadowsun the Dawn Blades, and commits Death by Shadowsun in order to both restore his honor and his ailing friend’s health. Shadowsun is now immortal, the exact opposite of what she wants.

The reason Shadowsun hasn't been able to face him in person might be because while he still thinks he was in the right, he is embarrassed that he ruined their friendship and refuses to fight her.

>>55583946

How is progress on the map of Terra's layers going?

>>55616700
This could definitely work, it's planned-out already and there's not much to dispute this rendition of Shadowsun's character.

Her personal mission is to uphold the values of the Imperial Tau'va by adapting to new tactics and destroying whatever she's pointed at better than anyone else can, and to find closure by ending her former friend's life. She doesn't really concern herself with issues that aren't relevant to this, having a sort of tunnel vision that makes her an extremely dangerous opponent and which probably helps her cope with having to constantly play catch-up in the fastest-developing society in the entirety of the Imperium. She's built her entire life around fulfilling this purpose, becoming cynical and jaded instead of wrathful and manic the way Inquisitor Kryptman has, as a person who hasn't quite lost everything and is simulataneously expected to be a paradigm of the Greater Good's ideals.

Tldr; Eldrad would be the kind of person to focus on the big picture, plotting and manipulating fate in pursuit of a better future, while Shadowsun is ironically more like the "better, faster" weapons that she uses rather than a galactic strategist or stereotypical Magnificent Bastard. And therefore, if someone were to write a character short about her, she should be perfectly fine without ripping off traits from the others that we already have.

>>55616921
would she have asked him about the longevity? does he knownthat she knowa?

>>55616921
There would have been another constant for her since the Tau Civil War, and that would be Imperial high officials. She was the idealistic champion of unification with the Imperium in her original youth before the civil war, cold sleep, and all the wars that followed, but in the following centuries they would not be exempt from her mounting cynicism. This is not to say that she would doubt the union, but on a personal level, as her kinsmen fell away through the decades and centuries, she would find all her lasting contacts are with alien, ancient lords and officers. Of the Tau, only Aun'Va would be constant, but she would come to know the high, slow-ageing officers, diplomats, and adepts sent by the Men of Stone, their harsh and even longer lived metal priests, their indomitable, pillar-like Generals of the Astartes, and the strange, undying Eldar that accompanied them in all endeavors. O'Kais might understand the horrors of the wider galaxy, but even he isn't quite able to relate to the experience of falling out of his culture and into the courts of elder beings.

And whatever perplexed, incredulous relationship Shadowsun has with her fellow and elder traveler Aun'Va, he has many times over in the face of the Imperium's sovereigns.

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Was there ever an actual write up for the Big Blue Cockatoo?

>>55619526
Given her age and such would she be slightly racist against Kroot?

When she was young they had just joined the Empire, were armed with primitive black powder weapons and their homeworld was unsafe as quite a lot of the more remote tribes still ate visitors.

Also Tau are vegetarian and meat is the food of barbarians. Exception being Kais due to living alongside humans and others for so long and they definitely do eat meat.

>>55619560
There's a bit in the Notes page but if you want to do a writeup and transfer it to the other page then please do.

>>55620427
I ask because I remember a long and winding greentext about how the Raid was contingent on a massive miscalculation on his part.

>>55620545
I don't think his master plan was copied across.

I was reading the Notes page and found a writeup about the secret societies in the imperial government. It really seems to need editing, a lot of the phrasing is unclear and it uses a bunch of alternating names, but what I gather is this.
>upper level Astra Militarum, Inquisition, Administratum, Mechanicus, Aristocracy (Courtiers, Navigators, and Rogue Traders), and a few Xenos make up the Illuminate Order
>Higher ranks of Astra Militarum, Navy, and Inquisition can make use of Alpha Legion via their official capacities, but only know what they can find about the Omega Legion
>all factions in the Illuminati chase secrets like Void Dragon and The Hydra, with degrees of success
>essentially a very powerful social/political club, like galactic Masons

>Alpha and Omega legions report to the Hydra, and keep tabs on the Illuminati from within and without
>both do secret stuff, Alpha is top level tradecraft and blackops, Omega is for risky and dirty business
>Omega seems to answer only to the Hydra, Alpha's assets are available to high level officers in official work

>The Hydra has its roots in the Unification, possibly Terrawatt, and includes the Imperial family, close personal allies and confidantes, the leader of the Custodes, few High Lords, and presumably the primarchs when they were alive
>Essentially Oscar's inner circle, and the ones that set things in motion behind the scenes in the Imperium
>The Illuminati have tons of crazy theories about what their nature and aims are, and are unclear as to their membership
>the populace of the galaxy have little to no knowledge of The Hydra, to the point of thinking it a motto, if they know anything at all
>while the Illuminati plan to do things with the Cthonian ring in the future, The Hydra is already doing stuff with it
>The Hydra is the point at which the Imperial government changes over from great men to demigods and gods, and entails the long term strategy tied to that fact.

>>55621429
also, both the Illuminati and Hydra seem preoccupied with the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, Iron Minds, Men of Gold, and Cthonia, as well as godhead in general.

theres also mention of chaos false-flag opperations and FOBs in the Eye of Terror in connection to the Omega Legion.

>>55620782
I'll rewrite it after I finish Fulgrim

>>55614236
>>55614209
Cool, I'll check it out.

>>55622419
I'd recommend Night Land Retold.

Hodgson tried to write it in the manner of a 1700s gentleman. He wasn't good at it. Retold makes it much more pleasant to read.

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>>55608940
It's endured way, way more shit in this AU than in Vanilla.

I am all for it resembling for the most part The Cursed Earth.

Each city is a nation unto itself. A hard citadel at the heart of a protectorate of fertile land. Usually walled in some way at the border.

Beyond the Great Walls is the wasteland. There is all the shit both weird and mundane as you would find in Judge Dredd.

The cities are actually pretty nice to live in and the people are mostly content with this. The wasteland isn't a concern most of the time given the relative ease of traveling over it.

Assuming the whole place doesn't get eaten by 'Nids or whatever in the next 50 years then eventually the toxicity and radiation will have died down to the point where it becomes worth the effort of reclaiming it.

Presumably it ended up this way during their A.I. rebellion.

>>55583946
Haven't been in one of these in a while, but did we ever come to a decision on how Nobledark RIP'N'TEAR assassins would work? If at all.

>>55624331
like this
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UoDKXozA0M4

but with more knife

high speed, high lethality, drug fueled but precision RIP AND TEAR

>>55622554
this. oh shit it was painful to get through

also wife beating

>>55624331
Sangfag wrote a really good story regarding an Eversor. Really hit the notes of whay people had suggested while still portraying an individual who was somewhat...disconnected from the rest of humanity despite his best attempts otherwise.

>>55623732
Might be a bit too much in the "Tau ball-kicking category". A.I. rebellion was millenia ago after all. Maybe something like immediate post-WWII Europe. The place is looking nice again, but there are still places that bear the scars of old battles. And there's always the occassional equivalent of an active landmine discovered in someone's backyard.

>>55621429
I thought Illuminati tended to be the aristocrats whereas high ranking Administratum members (Inquisition, military, Administratum) tended to oppose them (though there is a disturbing amount of overlap). Illuminati are a problem because they like to dig into everyone's secrets, not just DaoT, and so they do things like dig into Imperial secrets or accidentally wake up Necron Tomb Worlds.

The most zealous of them hate the idea of an artificial being (which in their mind usually equals servant) being in control of the Imperium and are looking to ways to "reprogram" Oscar. The higher-ups in the Imperial government also know of Oscar's origins (he doesn't exactly make a big deal of hiding them) but don't give a shit that he was born in a lab and don't like the idea of someone brainwashing the Emperor (the Illuminati as a whole tend to get tarred with this brush). The Hydra also doesn't like them because they like their secrecy and they're not fans of waking up Tomb Worlds or brainwashing the Emperor.

>>55625844
That would probably work better.

They had the Cursed Earth phase, they are past it now.

The mega-cities remain but the land between them is green(ish) and pleasant ad productive. Only occasionally does an old killbot get unearthed

>>55621429
Hydra existed longer than the Imperium A&O were part of it. They were primarchs and therefore already of great accomplishment.

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>>55583946
>geothermal heat sink
Every time

>>55628103
Figure that works with The Hydra being a Terrawatt Clan organization. Probably not the same Alpharious and Omegon, but holders of those names, could have been the ones behind Malcador's original journey.

>>55628523
This brings back The Hydra's preoccupation with the Cthonian ring, if not the Man of Gold that would become emperor.

I bet at least a few of the Illuminate would theorize that Alpharious Omegon was and remains the Golden Man of Old Earth, or Alpharious and Omegon being the Golden Men of Earth and Mars, ruling the Imperium through their much younger sibling.

Once a new inductee to the Illuminated few floated the idea that the secret master of Terrawatt and the Hydra could be some kind of super ancient shapeshifting psychic demigod formed from the unified souls of gurus from the dawn of human sapience, cultivating the Imperium as an unseen hand in all things. He was subsequently disinvited from all future gatherings of the Illuminati and was later dismissed from his position at the Schola Psychana.

>>55628920
Those would be in universe tinfoil hat theories.

>>55618823
>How is progress on the map of Terra's layers going?

Slowly.

I can't draw or computer for shit. Also work and life eating up my time.

>>55628920
That Schola Psykana official insists he was the victim of reprisals from his supposed arch-manipulator guru, but really its because his theory was clearly derivative of apocryphal accounts of a similar being supposedly encountered in the Himalayas by Magnus and the Warlord. Said accounts were dismissed by Magnus as quaint fictions invented by bored apprentices about their headmaster's youth, but they remained in the Schola's archives.

I'm curious, does anyone know which writefag wrote the Long Odds story about Eldrad?

>>55633261
Khanfag did.

>>55628920
>dat theory

I keked heartily.

>>55630369
what was in those mountains should remain a mystery

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Would the old Dark Age monsters be equivalent to The Shrike?

>>55635605
This. Emperor was not sad or glad that they went. They went without violence in the end but had been strong enough to keep everyone out since the day the Earth stopped making sense. There is no evidence of where they went, just that they went.

Add to all of this Magnus as a young man wandering in to their lands and being the first in millennia to wander out again but not unchanged. One eye missing and scars across his face and head and strange text in red in across his body in a language not know to mortal man in that age of strange forgotten scripture.

>>55635605

Agreed.

An idea on the Path of the Enforcer.

Eldar are designed to be super soldiers to fight in the War in Heaven. This leads a lot of them to have murderous and overly aggressive instincts in early adulthood and late adolescence. In vanilla this meant that they had to be booted off the craftworld for a few decades until they had worked through their murderous rapist phase and could return to society as productive and contributing citizens.

In this Nobledark Imperium this is not an option as booting them off the craftworld to murder across the galaxy means that they are being shit heads to the Imperium. The Imperium that is protecting their craftworlds, that their craftworlds are contributing and benefiting members of, the Imperium that their All-Mother is the joint head of state of.

This is now no longer an option.

So when a late-teens elder starts getting all murderous the Enforcers hopefully catch them before they try to do something stupid. The delinquent is then dragged to the nearest Shrine of the Aspect Warriors. They do not have a choice in this. This is not Vanilla "every elder can follow their desires because every child is special snowflake" eldar society. There is still a fair amount of that but only within the confines of the Law. Break the Law and the Law breaks you back.

In the aspect temple they are broken and rebuilt into something not shit. They will learn discipline or they will get another broken rib. They will learn to control their inbuilt murder boner generator or the beatings will continue. They will learn that there is a right way, a wrong way and a very wrong way and what the consequences of each are.

99% plus survive and reform. most of the failures end up running away to the Dark City thinking that there they will be accepted for who they are (they are wrong). Few actually die.

It is not a perfect system, it's just better than the alternatives.

>>55638949
I imagine that this was the brutal way that were broken and regimented by the Old Ones.

>>55636200
Possibly the monsters built at it's height, just before it all imploded. These were the things built when the Ring World was, soldiers built by god-like things to guard their troves.

Should the Necrons still have the Celestial Array in this AU in working order?

Bumping

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I'm struggling with this.

What needs to be added to it?

Can I redesign the Tau writing? It triggers me how an alien language just uses an A-Z alphabet.

I'll base it on a kind of fusion of Korean and Japanese.

>>55645101
If you think you can it sounds good

>>55645101
>>55645267
I'm going to be rather amused if an AU originally based on waifuing Isha and Emps spawns a conlang.

>>55645101
It could be that what we read as the Tau language has just been changed into an analogue to make it easier for us/Imperials to understand, sort of like how Low Gothic is supposed to be almost totally incomprehensible to a modern-day human but is translated into English.

Although that's probably one of the stupider excuses that GW could come up with.

>>55644971
It looks pretty nice(especially the mix of architectural styles in the Hive City), but the caverns just look like they're there to destabilize the surface. If you're looking for inspiration of questionable quality for what these caverns do, look no further.

At the bottom, caverns could be specialized towards infrastructure that wouldn't get a lot of foot traffic and/or benefit from being down there, like power plants(geothermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, whatever wouldn't produce a lot of fumes), filtered water reservoirs, mines, and a conduit or two to process magma and deliver for the Daisy Chain or busy factories(not sure about that last one, it might be many more miles down).

Mid level subterranean features might include an Astra Militarum garrison not far from the Hive City, hydroponic farms and water processing facilities returning clean water to where it's needed, major munitions depots for high-yield planetary defense weapons and the garrison(s), electrical utilities on a massive scale, sewage treatment for all the crap that millions in a city would produce in a day(if that's not already dealt with by the city), and manufactorum clusters producing local goods(like cars and clothing that can be quickly adjusted for fashion changes).

>>55648211
>It could be that what we read as the Tau language has just been changed into an analogue to make it easier for us/Imperials to understand, sort of like how Low Gothic is supposed to be almost totally incomprehensible to a modern-day human but is translated into English.

I would almost say that, at least in this universe, people tend to use names like Shadowsun instead of O'Shaserra or Farsight instead of O'Shovah because it's easier to fit with human naming conventions, or it's easier to distinguish one individual from another given how Tau names work (both Farsight and Kais have Kais as one of their names, for instance).
Or at least in those cases the nom du guerre is so familiar that even mentioning the name "Shadowsun" is enough to make people shit bricks, because they know exactly who you're talking about.

Or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, places like Ultramar or Gue'vesa tend to use the original because they feel it's more respectful, whereas farther away places use translated names because they feel it gets the point across (the logic being "this person has what is supposed to be a name showing how awesome they are", translating it gets the cultural intent of showing off their deeds across).

Who knows, we and GW have been kind of inconsistent in how we translate things. Farsight and Shadowsun are referred to in the same sentence as O'Kais and Aun'Va.

>>55648211
(cont.)

>>55644971
Lastly, there's the caverns just below the surface. They would be designed for heavy civilian traffic, with the exception of one dedicated to weapon housings for banks of anti-ship missiles/lasers(less prone to secondary explosions compared to macrocannons), fed by ammo dumps/power plants further down. Air reprocessing plants would whir away to keep surface air clean and breathable without a mask and preventing death by suffocation underground. Around the Hive City would be at least one cavern dedicated as bunkers for civilians to be evacuated to in case of an enemy assault.

The rest, I'm not fully sure about. There would be offices that couldn't gather the capital and political clout to claim a spot 'downtown', aka the Hive City where the big players are, and residential areas that try to simulate the day/night cycle for those who don't live in the city. Some of these might be for the people who don't want to live in the crowdedness (and sometimes, squalor) of a densely-packed urban area and can afford to use the transportation lines(massive underground subways?)/personal transports but just aren't wealthy enough to live in the upper regions of the spires, while others can't afford the transportation they need for a paying job outside of the city. With housing comes stores and markets, so at least one of the caverns would essentially be an oversized shopping mall, likely oriented towards the rich and the middle class, who have the time and money to travel to and buy goods there.

Also, batteries for solar/wind farms on the surface? Such a resource likely wouldn't be left unused, considering that the Imperium is actually trying to keep Terra from becoming a dirty rock in this AU. Terra's hive cities have far more space to work with than most hive cities, which is why reason my suggestions went the hybrid 1950s-modern direction, but these suggestions probably have a logic flaw in them somewhere, so take them with a grain of salt.

>>55639843
They were basically a bunch of Ancient Greeks/Celts genetically modified, handed lasers, and told to go shoot the skeleton-looking guys. I imagine normal methods of control were not on the table.

>>55638949
Are you me? I was thinking of a similar idea to expand what had been said before about how Eldar have mandatory military service to knock the crazy out of the heads of the youth (to explain why there are so many Guardians running around).

The first Craftworld to ever develop a standing militia, as opposed to an as-needed defense force was (as in canon) Ulthwé and its Black Guardians. In contrast to other Craftworlds, Ulthwé didn’t have the luxury of only having a part-time army, due to being in the orbit of the Eye of Terror. Even after Cadia was built up as a second bulwark, the Black Guardians were still necessary to keep the Craftworld from being overrun.

The second Craftworld to create a standing militia, and the one whose model most of the other Craftworlds followed, was surprisingly enough Craftworld Biel-Tan. The autarchs of Biel-Tan saw the advantages of mandating military service. Shortly after the War of the Beast and the union between the Steward and Isha, human military had been pushing for greater Eldar involvement in military affairs. The Eldar had been extremely helpful in providing intel, but when it came to actually fighting they either provided no help or provided a pittance of Aspect Warriors. At the same time, the population of Biel-Tan was getting restless. The youth of Biel-Tan had been energized by the rescue of Isha, seeing it as the rebirth of the Eldar Empire, and were itching to reclaim worlds. However, though many of Biel-Tan’s youth were eager, they were untested and naiive to the battlefield.

>>55649308 (cont.)
The autarchs of Biel-Tan saw a way to turn this political landscape to their advantage. Form Guardian militias out of the war-hungry youth and send them off as auxillaries to aid the (at that time) all-human Imperial Guard. No fancy Aspect Warrior gear, just the basics. Show them what war is really like, not enough to kill them, but enough to get the aggressiveness and overconfidence kicked out of them. Those who found war to not be to their liking would nevertheless have battlefield experience, and be unlikely to freeze on the battlefield in the event that they would be called upon to defend their Craftworld. Those that still harbored a taste for the battlefield would prove experienced aspirants for the Aspect Temples.

While it may seem surprising that other Craftworlds would follow Biel-Tan’s lead, when Ulthwé had come up with a similar idea years before, it becomes less so when one considers Eldar cultural influences. Ulthwé was always seen as an odd duck amongst the Craftworlds, and the Craftworld’s customs were its own. Biel-Tan was the center of Eldar culture, and for many years Biel-Tan dictated overall Eldar cultural trends. Iyanden was the only other major pole of Eldar culture at the time, and Iyanden wanted no part in any attempt to cooperate militarily with the mon-keigh.

That was the basics of what I had so far, the rest was an expansion of what had been suggested before.

The purpose of serving in the Guard auxilla from the Eldar point of view is not to cultivate martial perfection, like an Aspect warrior, though many often strive to perform well regardless. Instead, the point of this lesson is to teach and reinforce discipline and self-control learned in their younger years on the Craftworlds. Eldar have a tendency to get emotionally overwhelmed. If you can keep your emotions in control on the battlefield, you can keep them in control anywhere.

>>55649343 (cont.)
This may seem barbaric, but in truth the galaxy is such a big place that the vast majority return home unharmed or even without seeing combat. An Eldar's stint in the militia can be as dangerous as a war for Armageddon or as mundane as serving as a guard for an important Administratum center. There are also slight variations between Craftworlds. Iyanden, for example, only began mandating military service until after the battle with Hive Fleet Kraken, and even then only for the Navy. The casualty rate in general is very low (and to be honest, even on battlefields, casualty rates for humans tend to be proportionately higher than for Eldar, because Eldar tend to be better at avoiding fire).

On top of that, the system is still heavily biased in favor of the Eldar. An Eldar is only expected to serve the same amount of time as a human Guardsmen (few decades), which most Eldar do and get on with their life, whereas Guardsmen who retire (if they retire) do so because of old age (the average guardsmen doesn't get rejuvenants, after all). From the Eldar's perspective, it benefits them and gets the non-Eldar parts of the Imperium off their back (though the Imperium didn't necessarily want a militia, they would have probably been happy with more Aspect Warrior support or Eldar technology for guardsmen, both of which would be less favorable).

Additionally, normal Guardians are never sent to the worst battlefields in the galaxy, the gate worlds of Ulthwé and Cadia. That is the sole domain of the Ulthwé Black Guardians, except in times of crisis like during a Black Crusade.

>>55649304
i have no idea how to even start drawing that

>>55649409
So how inherently dangerous is an eldar youth compared to a human? They are tall and rangy but is the inhuman grace inbuilt or a learned thing?

>>55649304
Keep in mind that they are still following the plans left by Perty and extrapolating from there based on his notes, and previous designs.

They were interlocking fortresses that turned the planet into a fortress but they were not prisons and were actually nice to live in. It was suggested way back when, unless I'm imagining it, that the original hives were stepped pyramids in basic shape with the steps supporting what are no ancient forests of fruiting trees that look like romanticized primeval forests full of fruit.

Point is it would be Rivendel or Lothlórien as much as Helms Deep or Minas Tirith .

>>55650610
I would say a bit of half and half. They are naturally slightly more agile than humans with and have a better sense of balance but this is honed over time. a human hits a peak when they know what their body can do but the body hasn't started to fall apart yet.

Eldar don't fall apart until the very end centuries later. In all that time their natural aptitudes are honed. When they go off on their adolescent hormonal aggression binge they are in their late 30 - early 50s. At tat point they are not massively more ninja than a human of 30 years in good condition.

But after not many years past that the human starts to decay with age. The eldar remains in their prime and they just keep getting more and more graceful until they hit a hard limit on what they are capable of. This limit is reachable for a truly exceptional human of the sort that either ends up as a winner in interstellar gymnastics competitions or recruited by the Assassins if found early enough.

Then you get the exceptional eldar who live on the path of the Aspect Warrior. They are far superior to the average eldar and when you combine that with centuries of training and exercise and that harsh lessons of the Long War you get something truly horrifying.

Thankfully by that point they have calmed down a lot.

Warlocks and Seers can look like they are dodging bullets sometimes by this inhuman grace coupled with the precognition.

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>>55621585
You have no idea how happy it makes me that there is a Fulgrim to look forward to.

How far have the Tau spread across the Imperium with access to better travel and a friendly Imperium?

>>55652709
I would say that they have sent missionaries out to spread the good news of the Greater Good quite far, mostly so that they could surreptitiously see if what the Administratum scribes and ambassadors were saying was true. Actual missionaries don't go more than a hundred light years past their old border.

The ones that have made it as far as the Daisy Chain have had their little minds blown. Despite the comforting insistence from the high ups back home the delusions of their importance in the galaxy has been stripped away.

>>55651710
Don't forget that Eldar are capable of selectively expressing parts of their DNA based on whatever path they are on via some kind of epigenetic effect. In canon you hear about it most for those on the path of the Warrior and the Seer, but it seems to be present for all paths. Those on the path of the Warrior are literally more swole than average, and those on the path of the Seer literally have more psychic kick than average, traits that turn off if or when Eldar leave the Path.

My guess is it has something to do with the Eldar's bizarre method of organizing DNA ("megasomes" in Xenology), since epigenetic effects in Earth organisms are often based on DNA physically blocking RNA from binding to protein sites and extra thick chromosome analogues would be perfect for that.

Thick basic genetic organisation (and hence the ease with which the Eldar could be messed with) may have been what drew the Old Ones to Shaa-Dome in the first place, like the proto-Orks and their regenerative ability.

Is there still a Creed and Kell in this AU?

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>>55655869
With Shaa-Dome being a shellworld and having been one for some time I'm imagining that it isn't like a world that has been shelled anymore. It is layers all the way to where a core would once have been. But it still has the same mass, more or less, as it did despite being very hollow.

Shaa-Dome therefore is fucking huge but as dense as a sponge.

Just layers upon layers of cenobite labyrinth of every possible flavour behind the facades of high society and refined culture.

But this hollwed world hallowed ground. It is here that the debauchery and insane excess was at it's most intense. Here is where reality itself was raped and Slaanesh was born.

At the heart of the hollow world things get more twisted as reality itself is more intensely violated as you descend further and further.

And at the very core of that place the street plan become directly analogous to the heart of the Impossible City at the "center" of the Realm of Chaos and if you have managed to survive this far into Shaa-Dome you don't need defunct web-way gates and psyker trickery to brute force your way into the playground of the gods, you can just step across and walk down the street a little way.

>>55655874
There's a Creed, don't know who Kell is.

>>55657012
Shaa-dome is literally Slaanesh's doorstep with the opening to the Brass Palace at it's core. It's been mentioned Slaanesh likes to occasionally snack on the souls of Crone Eldar children when he/she can't resist the urge.

>>55651710
At what point are eldar considered adults?

>>55657978
>>55657978
Biologically, probably after a few decades, not that much longer than humans. Culturally, probably once they commit to a Path.

>>55657978
>>55661005
Took me a while but I found where it was mentioned before. We said about 30 to maybe 50-ish, because beyond that point you run into maturation rate issues that no long lifespan is going to fix (namely population crash).

Socially it takes a few centuries. The only canon mention of how Eldar view age is a mention of an individual a couple of centuries old being treated like a hothead young adult.

>>55657755
What do the Croneworlders think of it? Is it a blessing or just the rent?

>>55662637
Did we ever come to a conclusion about how old Taldeer was or what the others of her kind think of her?

>>55665923
all i remember is slutty ears

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>>55614209
Just re-read the stuff on Prospero.

I never realized the similarities before now.

Bump for hope of Fulgrimfag's return.

>>55669197
I'm here all the time, gonna work on it after class

>>55665923
Taldeer is said to have left home at the first opportunity, when she just barely came of age. Given the nature of Eldar military recruitment it could be less that she ran away to join the military than she refused to come home after her tour of duty ended, because artillery bombardments and Orks are better than Sreta. Had Seer instruction from Eldrad when she was young, started using it once she was able, and got pathlost pretty quickly. It was suggested either 60's or 160-260, the latter because it's supposed to take time to get pathlost on the Path of the Seer. It's also why it's Colonel-Farseer Taldeer rather than Colonel-Warlock Taldeer, since she never finished an Aspect (though that might be because it would send her back to Ulthwe and Ulthwe has shitty Aspect Temples at best).

It would probably be a few centuries since then that she ran into LIVII, so she would be about 400-ish now?

As a seer, she's considered very sloppy. She likes to settle for solutions *right fucking now* as opposed to meditating for ten hours to find the perfect solution. That said, she's not bad as a seer, it's just she doesn't tend to have opportunities to plan things out five hundred years in advance. This wins her points with humans, Guardians, and Aspect Warriors, who see her as a seer who actually does something for the grunts, but looked down on by Seers and a chunk of the general Eldar population because she's seen as crude, unrefined, and somehow managed to get pathlost on her very first path, which is downright embarassing by their standards. Warlocks weren't mentioned but I'd hazard they'd be a mixed bag, due to being both warrior (so they know what war is like) and seer (they know how brute force Taldeer's methods look).

Most of it was in Thread 32. It mostly jives with each other, the only issue is the timing.

>>55670938
I'm assuming the threeish centuries it took her to get to colonel was due to people being reluctant to promote eldar to higher ranks.

They cause severe career congestion. They find where they are best to be and could stay there for the next thousand years.

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>>55670938
I'm now imaging what it was like after Sreta gave Taldeer 6 months to endure Cadia. Her belief was that after half a year in No Man's Land Hell she would be begging to come back.

She sends two dignitaries in fine but drab robes. Their clothing after less than an hour on the surface is mud up to the knees and soaked by the constant drizzle.

They descend into the Stygian depths of the Cadian Tunnels, a place whispered in fear by allies and adversaries alike. The only light is ancient glow-globes fading away to oranges and reds but down here it is warm and dry.

The Cadians move differently down here. Up there in the chemically tainted mud and the radiation they scuttle about fearfully, alert and wary and never looking up if they can avoid it. Here they move with surety and confidence like bears in their caves. Purple eyed bears with arms and armour.

They move deeper and deeper into what might be natural caverns or might be crudely carved and undressed naked rock. A labyrinth of unmarked passages through which purple eyed demons walk and the Kasr fortress cities that haven't ever seen sunlight.

In the outskirts of one such Kasr they find little lost Taldeer. She must surely be desperate to return to civilization now.

They find her in a seedy drinking establishment full flack armoured pants and a vest top locked arms with a human dancing in circles on a table with a bottle of something 80% in the other hand. On her shoulder is tattooed a cartoon deamon head with crosses for eyes. Little Baby Tally has just bagged her first deamon.

When they finally get her attention and express dear ol' Sreta's concern for her well being and an invitation to return the bar goes silent. Nobody on Cadia gets exemption from military service. Taldeer streams of a long line of High Tongue curses that devolves into the guttural Base Cadian. The two leave to the sound of laughing Cadians.

Working on the post unification stuff for fulgrim, reread the existing stuff and related primarchs. I realized that while I think Fulgrim fits the Jay Gatsby/Thin White Duke/Spider Jerusalem idea I started out with, the story of Merika's military defeat kinda reads like Werner Von Braun getting command of the Luftwaffe then deciding to usurp the nazi government and join the allies as a means to actually go to the moon.

Also, would the AU version of Horus be able to best the canon version in a naval engagement of their entire 'Legions'?

>>55674718
This AU Horus would be extremely good at understanding Void warfare by virtue of having spent his entire life in that environment.

On the other hand he more of a used car salesman than a warrior.

On the whole this AU would have the advantage so long as they either didn't suffer boarding actions because this AU Horus had Void Born officers who were also 100% at home in space.

>>55674718
>>55674805
Naval, maybe. Nobledark!Horus was a big fan of "nuke it from orbit, just to be sure" in the option that diplomacy failed. He played hard, he played dirty, and he played to win.

Canon Horus, on the other hand, would win the moment boarding actions became a thing. Not just because Void Born can't win in a firefight with a Space Marine but because Horus was a better coordinator of ground troops. Horus v. Horus on a field of battle both using the same marines and no personal intervention (meaning no op plz nerf primarch or frail Void Born captain) would probably end in canon Horus winning.

>>55664552
A common saying when a child dies is that only the good die young and their death is God spiriting their soul to heaven. Only in this context replace "God" with "Slaanesh" and...yeah.

On the other hand the adult Crones might not be aware that the children are being fucking eaten given that Slaany tends to vomit up its favored servants or the adults who do get eaten tend to be prisoners or those who fail Slaanesh. At least some Crones are said to think that all will eventually become one in Slaanesh, others (particularly the non-Slaaneshi) think that's bullshit.

It also remains to be seen if it's just like Warp SIDS or is it Keepers of Secrets ambushing Crone children walking home from school, or somewhere in between.

As I understand it, one of the missing Legions is the Omega Legion that officially doesn't exist and does the stuff that even Alpha Legion would disavow. What about the other one?

>>55679417
It was never confirmed.

It's possible that Steward Oscar intended for 20 bur couldn't find another 2 minutes who fit the requirements.

Omega Legion is a secret, giving them a primarch would have drawn too much attention.

>>55678050
It could be depending on how into the warp the child was when taken. If in more or less total real space the child just drops dead. If in the unreal sufficiently the child is taken bodily by Her servants.

Either way the Slaaneshii Cronedar would see this as the pure being taken to heaven. The only ones who would know what this actually means at the rare as fuck Undivided Cronedar who have gone back and forth multiple times and have seen with their own eyes what happens to those kids and the unspeakable tortures they now endure. From that they would conclude that yes, actually, that looks quite fun because they are so far round the bend that they can't even see normal with a telescope anymore.

>>55679417
It's on the notes page that Oscar was going to make 20 but only found 18 worthy of the title. The other 2 would have been Jenetia Krole of the Sisters of Silence and Uxor Honen Mu of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad.

Both were ultimately rejected for the role because Oscar didn't feel comfortable with women in the frontline military and he felt it would have set a bad example. Krole remained Soulless Queen of the Black Ships and Honen Mu remained Uxor.

>>55673492
Taldeer goes native

This would only make Eldrad laugh as Sreta cries/rages.

>>55657755
Color Sergeant Jarran Kell, Creed's right hand man. The man with the vox system and banner usually seen standing next to Creed.

>>55680501
I don't think we ever decided what happened to the Geno soldiers.

>>55666330
What defines the sluttyness of ears?

>>55684606
We (as humans) don't know. It's an Eldar cultural thing that humans just plain don't get because ears aren't really a thing we think about. It's like how the Tau and Eldar would be confused with some of the traits we choose to place value on. Like why would having yellow hair make people think a human is stupid?

>>55684606
very sensitive and shapely lobes, freckles

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>>55684793
Are these slutty ears?

Can they wiggle their ears?

>>55670938
I'd put her age of being pathlost as young as possible. It adds to the way the other eldar look down on her.

My computer died last night while I was writing and won't turn back on. Really sorry for another delay, I'll have the end eventually

Bumpan for hope Fulgrimfag performs rite of Lazarus on cogitator

>>55689634
Been prodding at it all day. Might try to rewrite on my phone, but I've also got class work to figure out

>>55682965
I'm going to guess that Creed is a locally raised but Administratum appointed Governor

>>55691801
Governor? I thought he was a general.

>>55691801
Creed is still a general. The Ulthweans consider him the only human general they are willing to refer to the title of Autarch, particularly because his style embodies their ideas of warfare.

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Tried my hand at this universe's version of the Aquila with the eagle and phoenix heads. Turns out the eldar version of the phoenix is a lot more falcon-y than the human version. I got the Eldar phoenix symbol from this collection of Eldar runes here http://eldar.arhicks.co.uk/miscellaneous/eldar_runes.php and tried to replicate it the best I could.

The circular motif is supposed to represent the rays of the rising sun combined with the typical slotted feathers of the canon!Aquila. The rising sun seems to be a big deal for the Eldar, probably due to the connections with the phoenix and Asuryan.

Tried to keep it as close to the geometric motif of the Aquila as possible, with some smooth lines to represent the Eldar influence (especially in the phoenix portion and the rim). No clue how easy it would be to stencil on Imperial gear though. On the other hand, the canon Aquila isn't all straight lines.

Wanted to do a version where the inside is black and the outlines are white but with a black edge, but couldn't. If anyone is able to, just wanted to point out the throat splotch of the phoenix should be white if the colors are inverted.

>>55694075
I dig it. There are some small aquilas in the artwork on the wiki that all seem pretty varied, and it would make sense for different permutations of the Aquila to exist alongside the standardized ones as symbols of various Ordos and administrative arms. One might recognize the Ultramar Aquila, the Ulthwe Aquila, or the one associated with the Imperial Court as easily as their signet seals.

>>55694075
Good shit, the only thing I might change is tweaking or removing the feet since they look a little funny, which is also true of the canon Aquila.

>>55694075
I like it. Fits with the new style.

>>55686115
They usually can move up and down on the side of the head a little. So not more mobile than human ears.

By common agreement those are the slutiest of ears. Which is one reason why she was considered by Sreta and the rest of the Ulthuan Cartel as such a good little commodity.

>>55649891
For one thing there would be no ground/earth at surface level bar a thin strip across the top on which the verdant green and pleasant fields of Old Earth grow. There would be around the fortress cities for some considerable mile in all directions infrastructure to at least half a mile depth with more clustered around the borehole for ease of access,

The Hives are not blocky fortresses. They are beautiful and elegant, their strength is disguised (though good luck finding something on google images easy to copy/paste that would do for that).

>>55692772
Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed. He has overall command of Cadia. He is the "big picture" man of the bulwark. Black Legion Marshal is an advisor of his, not his boss.

With Abbadon long dead who commands the Black Legion?

>>55644971
Food on Old Earth for the masses is typically algae, kelp, krill, fungus and shrimp and other such things grown in the great vats from biological and near-biological waste. It is processed into something that is usually a bar or a smoothie in consistency and in taste ranges from bland to nope just bland. You can buy flavourings separately.

The surface and some of the near surface caverns are where the actual real food is grown. Grain and root and fruit and nuts and meat and if you live by the water fish and shell fish. The spire lords and other rich people can afford an item of real food once a day every day, the common pleb can afford a real food meal once a week, once a month maybe. Such occasions are when an entire hab-block or gallery will pool their resources and have a community strengthening communal meal together. Also Special occasions such as Martyr's Day and various religious celebrations.

The deep warrens are as low as people go and usually not willingly. The layer of the Deep warrens gets ever deeper as the surface rises and the levels of habitation deepen. They are typically emergency marching tunnels in case of another siege. They go everywhere and the only people who have complete maps are the Grand Architects, successors of Perturabo's project managers during the rebuilding.

You can get close enough to the Sunless Sea to fish from the Deep Warrens but you might not want to eat what you catch and it is officially illegal in any case. The official line is that the Deep Fish are poison. This is untrue, though they are usually nightmarishly ugly.

Truth of the matter is that those fish are the food reserves of the Watchers in the Dark who live in the Dark Tunnels. But they don't officially live on Old Earth by order of the -]I[- Ave Hydra.

>>55694694
Yeah, the feet make it look a bit busy. But when I tried shrinking them down or narrowing them it made them look dinky compared to the body. I wanted to try to find some way to make them work since feet are present in both the Imperial Aquila and the Eldar phoenix.

>>55694075
Not too concerned with the feet, they look alright. Not sure what is happening with the neck on the left head.

>>55697381
The previous was Lord Corpulax. Sadly he got zombie plague during the later stages of Black Crusade XII. His final moments were spent in agony, screaming, sprinting towards enemy lines. Then the IEDs he was carrying went off and took out a Deamon/Oblitorator/Baneblade.

Current Lord of the Black Legion is Zagthean the Broken. Son of a Cadian algae farmer from one of the Convent of Alabaster Maidens. "Maidens". They were offworlders who specialised in offering basic medical care, always a needed skill on a world with as many wounded workers as Cadia. His father was given algae duty because he was crap at soldiering.

Know as The Broken due to the insane number of injuries survived. Stoic, ruthless and blunt to the point of rudeness. Also deeply spiritual who fights for the day of no more wars rather than just for the sake of fighting.

>>55700465
>from
*and

not sure what happened there

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>>55699237
The Eldar phoenix has a black throat splotch similar to some real falcons that kind of resembles the yin symbol without the white dot. That's the best I was able to approximate a design defined by curves in a geometric framework.

The other issue is that the eagle head is just plain bulky no matter how you look at it. The phoenix has a nice space between it and the wing, but the eagle doesn't because of it's big beak. It's even worse if you try to copy-paste from the canon Aquila, where it looks more like a vulture (which I assume is supposed to be the point). The problem is try to reduce the beak too much and then you have two phoenixes, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a phoenix and eagle to show the alliance of mankind and eldar.

>>55698159
So it is confirmed that the Watchers are living in Old Earth's deepest tunnels?

It makes a sort of sense and does fit with the setting. They dealt a savage blow to the Fallen Angels by destroying their old homeworld. If the Fallen had gotten hold of the Old One leftovers or even just used it as a Deamon Pokemon generator shit would have been disastrous.

It's the equivalent of letting a friend borrow your couch due to a house fire.

Although it's probable that they only talk through Dark Angel intermediaries due to being very slow to trust. Which means that the Dark Angels need a minimal presence on Old Earth at all times. A Recruitment station in the lower areas with a window looking out across a borehole maybe. Maybe in one of the lesser districts where once the all but forgotten capital of Franj was in ancient days.

They do recruit a few from Old Earth but it's not economical. They claim that it's more for show than anything, in memory of their Primarch. The last outpost of Franj with an old flag still flying. Overly sentimental hogswash but then the Dark Angels have always had a somewhat romanticized view of things and it is the sort of thing that they would do.

Just don't ask about the "fire exist". The stair case that runs out onto the wall of the borehole shaft. It does indeed go up to safety and light. But it also goes downwards towards the Dark Tunnels and the Sunless Sea.

>>55703249
>"fire exist"
*fire exit

Can Tyranids get infected by the Oblitorator virus?

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Okay, second go. I made the heads a bit more symmetrical, which might fix the issue with the eagle's beak, and I messed around with the tail to make the feet look less obnoxious.

>>55708157
It would say it's perfect or close to

>>55708157
Hm, I actually preferred the old tail since it retains the symmetry of having the feather "rays" all the way around. Would making the legs narrower so there's some white space between them and the feathers on both sides make it look better?

Oh, is this still going? I dropped out about a month ago, I thought it had petered out. Glad to see it's still going.

>>55709092
I can put the feather rays back on the tail.

>>55693997
I'm imagining him with two eldar advisors; a farseer and a death jester.

>>55700465
Lord Commander Corpulax was previous Lord Commander of Black Legion

Current head of the Legion is Zagthean the Broken.

Ygethmor the Trickster is the head of the Black Legion Battle psykers. Steeped in Deamon Lore.

Marshal Devram Korda, Liberator of Sarora, is head of the First Cohort.

Marshal Araghast the Pillar, head of the 2nd Cohort

Xorphas Firestarter Marshal of the 3rd Cohort. Latent psyker whose abilities developed after achieving his current rank.

Drecarth the Sightless. Spent half the 12th Black Crusade running around without eyeballs after a sever injury. Leader of the 4th Cohort.

Amalaxis Deamonslayer. Marshal of the 5th Cohort. As close to a Chaplain as you can get without actually being one.

Valicar "the Graven" Hyne. Marshal of the 6th Cohort

Verzekh the Siege Engine. Marshal of the 7th Cohort, only member of the Marshals to retain rank whilst interred in a Dreadnaught.

Kor Megron "Corpsemaker". Much repaired and cybernetically patched up Marshal of the 8th Cohort

Troskzer The Elder. Marshal of the 9th Cohort. Oldest member of the Black Legion not inside a Dreadnaught.

Urkrathos former fleet commander

Threxos Hellbreaker current fleet commander

>>55712337
Starkzahn, Saviour of Darristen. Marshal of the 10th Cohort. Due to close association with the Tau has adopted beliefs in The Greater Good.

Octorian, Pilgrim of Mars. Head of the Tech-marines.

Lheorvine "Firefist" Ukris - Dreadnaught

Telemachon Lyras - Dreadnaught. A reject of the Terra's Children Legion back in the day but wasn't into the whole arts and music thing they had going.

Sargon Eregesh - Dreadnaught. Last of the Word Bearers that discovered Cadia and refused to leave. Suffered extensive plasma burns in the final days of the War of the Beast by Chaos Eldar retreating into the Eye.

Skyrak Slaughterborn. Direct patrilineal descendant of one of the original Cadian chieftains. Head Apothecary.

If I survive today I will do a write up on them all. A few paragraphs each.

bamf

>>55679707
As would giving them Space Marines. Typically they would manipulate someone else into sending marines to take out a threat that the Imperium didn't know it had assuming that they couldn't just kill the problem and make it look like an accident.

>>55714762
Isn't Omega Legion just a subset of the Alpha Legion, which tends to be large because of the AL's screwy cell-like nature and the fact that they never really did (or needed to) break into chapters in the first place since cells work just as well?

>>55678050
How would the servants of other gods view the abductions?

>>55709585
That's pretty much the story of this project, the threads will often dip down to just a few people posting and keeping it alive, then interest will revive and things will speed up again. These threads may not be the fastest or most active, but they're resilient.

>>55712337
Psst, Urkrathos was already written up for this AU.

>>55716097
I think it's best to leave the Omega Legion deliberately vague as befits their nature. Our discussions about them could even be in-universe debates as to their true nature, which is probably only known to the Royal Couple, the High Lords, and a few others in a strict need-to-know basis.

>>55716769
Honestly I've been thinking all our more ambiguous or conflicting conversations are theories floated by the Illuminate. They seem to know just enough to imagine galaxy spanning, semi convincing bullshit

>>55716769
>Psst, Urkrathos was already written up for this AU.

Thanks, I almost made a very stupid mistake.

Bumpin because I'm writin and need a bit more time

First 3 done

https://pastebin.com/1re7XpZp

Are they okay? I need to know if I should keep going.

>>55719754
Pretty interesting. I think you should keep going.

>>55716769
I thought we had something for the Omega Legion. It's an off-the-books organization (as in, even the Throne doesn't even know about it, and the Inqusition can't official connect it to the AL) that involves the most monstrous activities the AL deems necessary for the Imperium's safety with as much plausible deniability as possible. If Omegas get caught they are branded renegades. Those who don't still know they have become monsters, but comfort themselves with the fact that one day they will be judged for their sins and damning their own soul is worth keeping thousands more safe.

>>55716493
Most of Shaa-Dome is either Slaaneshi or Undivided. Followers of other gods could care less about the Slaaneshi, they dug their own grave when they decided to side with Slaany over their preferred patron.

Eating Undivided they might not be too happy about. Those are potential converts to their side that are being eaten. Nimina and the Conservators might raise a bigger ruckus because they're all about salvation for everyone (via Nurgle) and getting eaten kind of makes that hard. But the Conservators have always been evangelical preachers to anyone who'll listen, what else is new.

But then again this is Shaa-Dome. Slaanesh's doorstep right next to the heart of the Brass Palace and Slaanesh's seat of power. What are you going to do about it?

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>>55709092
>>55709980
Fixed the tail.

>>55719754
Tis good.

>>55721557
That's the deliberately vague description we settled on. It fits with the notions of black sites and FOBs in the Eye. Claims that they answer to the Hydra wouldn't be backed with hard evidence, let alone any official command structure, but it would be assumed because believers in the Hydra think that everything not clearly Chaos or Xenos Horrificus could answer to the Hydra.

One would imagine though that they give intel to the Royal Family/Alpha Legion/The Hydra, if not actually taking direction from them, because failing that they're functionally no different from the more factional and delusional Fallen. It's worth nothing that the Hydra's circle could be as little as a hundred or fewer people (possibly over its whole history) in a galaxy of quadrillions.

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>>55721606
>>55721195
I'll have to do more tomorrow. Is getting late

Marshals of the Cohorts 1 - 10

https://pastebin.com/JHupwSgP

Random click pic

>>55721557
What about the Crow and Arrotyr? Thinking back a number of threads, Arrotyr is an arrogant dick and has a murderboner for Slaaneshis only matched by his hatred for Slasnesh itself.

Also, I think the relationship between the gods' respective chosen was something like:
>Arrotyr hates Slasneshis in general for ruining the Old Empire, the Taskmaster in particular for defeating him in the fall, Nimina for being an obnoxious Isha loving slag that escaped him, and The Indigo Crow for being a Tzeentchian and a fuckup
>Nimina hates Arrontyr with a passion for burning the grand temple of Isha, dispises Slaanesh but currys favor with the Taskmaster for ships and preaching grounds, and loathes the Indigo Crow for being the Tzeentchian lunatic fuckup that lost her her idol
>The Crow thinks Arrotyr is a small minded and dim impediment to the Old Empire, that the Taskmaster is an easily manipulated pawn that got lucky, and that Nimina is a pathetic liability to Nurgle that should be capitalized on

I think there was just a bit of characterization of the Taskmaster so far, along the lines of gladly killing or enslaving the other three for more power and resources, in the order of Arrotyr for his ships, the Crow for its secrets, and lastly Nimina, because she doesn't really have much to steal besides Isha. Pointedly, I remember he prioritized capturing parts of Arrotyr's fleet instead of actually trying to seize Isha for Slaanesh, and he's described as the designated (administrative) driver for Shaw-Dome while everyone else is all id all the time.

>>55722183
They all hate each other. That sounds about right. And then you have Malys who has to slap them to get them in line and hates every minute of it because it cuts into her getting high time.

We do need more on the Taskmaster. It's hard to think of a personality there beyond keeping the pleasure cultists focused.

What was the Crow doing before the Fall? Was this said or was it never mentioned. He was able to get Eldrad to trust him before he saw through his plans (albeit Eldrad was desperate at the time), so either Eldrad knew him before the fall or he was really good at disguising himself.

>>55721959
So, was that last bit referring to Kais or did Starkzahn see/participate in a brushfire war with the Farsight Enclaves?

>>55725040
The Indigo Crow doesn't know it's original identity/true motive as a stipulation of being the Indigo Crow. It only knows who it is when it transforms into something else, at which point it's the Changeling and not the Indigo Crow. The Changeling knows its plan and past, but lacks a solid identity. Generally the Crow is loyal to Tzeentch and very powerful but a bit scattered, the Changeling is subversive to Tzeentch and somewhat focused, but significantly weaker.

Presumably the Crow was a prefall seer like Eldrad, but made a deal with Tzeentch for power and has since twisted himself into metaphysical knots trying to exploit loopholes.

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There pulps in the nobledark?

>>55726588
I'd imagine so. Cheap plasticbacks filled with THRILLING TALES of WAR and ADVENTURE on the FAR FRINGES of the IMPERIUM? There's honestly no way they don't exist.

>>55725110
Possibly. Or he participated in a mission with some tau against another enemy.

Are Tech-Marines still a thing or does more reasonable Space Marines and marginally more reasonable Tech-priests just have them commissioning adepts from the Mechanicus?

Should the Black Legion stuff go in the 1d4chan?

>>55721606
This looks really good.

On a standard what colour would they be?

>>55733970
Gold, the objectively best color.

>>55734028
So sayeth the good and noble Emperor.

>>55734550
>>55734028
How about red and gold on a black background? Aquila is golden but the Phoenix is fire.

bump

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Due to a migraine that feels like it extends some distance outside of my skull I have not done what I said I would on the Black Legion. Sorry.

As always a random click pic

>>55734028
I would say gold too, maybe with black and white "feathers" to resemble the zebra stripes on eldar helms. Not sure what color eldar phoenixes are, but red seems likely. I think they're red in Fantasy as well, where they're more directly associated with Asuryan. So that's a point in red's favor.

Maybe gold with red feathers?

Red and gold don't seem to work well together unless the gold is trim, like this universe's War Hounds.

>>55738809
The red should be copper or cut ruby in crests. It wouldn’t do to have the Imperium’s better half represented with common pigment.

>>55740072
Do the Eldar even place any value in gold, though? Do they even see it as being a nice color?
On the other hand, red is both a primary color and a primary pigment.
Humans looking at it think it means the Eldar have some humility. Eldar looking at it know it means they're of primary concern.

>>55740301
Do eldar even have tricolor vision? Tricolor is the human norm, but Earth mammals are generally red-green colorblind and many fish, insects, reptiles, and birds see in four colors, the three we see plus ultraviolet.

One of the ways that Eldar are described as looking different from humans despite the overall similarity in this AU is having hair colors that are more birdy than human-like. Like red hair that is a really vivid red more like a bird than the red-brown of humans. It might not make much a difference, but it could imply differences in vision.

On the other hand, the fact that GW has Eldar colors in human terms either means that Eldar have "close enough" vision to humans or the colors are being translated for our convenience like Gothic is.

>>55741846 (same)
Also, unrelated but fun fact, did you know that in canon Eldar can drink human alcohol but Eldar alcohol gives baseline humans stomach cramps and more?

In one short story in an issue of White Dwarf, Vect gives a baseline human slave Eldar "wine" (described more like nectar) as he tells him the story of the Fall, only to tell him after he drinks it that humans can't digest it. And he leaves the Fall story on a cliffhanger to drive the slave mad wondering how it ended (which was the point of the whole affair).

The Emperor's Children were able to eat Eldar food during the Horus Heresy, but then again Space Marines in canon can eat rocks, brains, and rock monster brains.

It makes sense that Eldar can eat human food, they were modified by the Old Ones and later by themselves to be as adaptive as possible, so it would make sense they could handle varied biochemistry.

Xenology claims that Eldar biology is highly efficient and suggests it is a result of psychic-aided digestion. But that wouldn't make sense with the Dark Eldar, who should be starving given their atrophied psychic powers. Vect and the Archons may be able to make death and terror their meat and wine, but that doesn't account for the dregs of Commorragh.

Maybe Eldar have some kind of gizzard that breaks down food further than is seen in humans, meaning later nutrient absorption is more efficient. It would look like an outgrowth of the stomach if you didn't know what you were looking for, and maybe whoever was doing the dissections in Xenology missed it or thought it was a different organ.

It also explains Eldar having solid crystalline waste, which usually means highly efficient water reclaimation systems in Earth life.

>>55742071
Or it could have been that Vect put shit in the wine because he's awful.

>>55742071
How official is the stuff in xenology?

>>55673492
>They find her in a seedy drinking establishment full flack armoured pants and a vest top locked arms with a human dancing in circles on a table

I take it the human Taldeer was dancing with that time is none other than LIVVI???

>>55744161
No.

This would probably be many years before he was born.

I have done a thing and moved what we had on the Black Legion to:

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

But I don't know how to Internal Links so in the old place we have

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Space_Marine_Chapters_of_M41

Which looks very inelegant.

Does anyone here know how to do an internal Link properly and clean this up?

>>55734028
Not when it's just gold. Then it looks tacky. Gold and red looks good together. Gold and blue also but if the other half is a phoenix then it has to be red rather than blue.

>>55743587
This.

I don't think Vect would ever pass up the opportunity to be needlessly cruel in a petty way if it didn't cost him. It that sort of attitude that got him where he is now.

>>55741846
Given their official colour schemes I would say yes but with maybe a greater ability to distinguish between colours.

Did the stuff about the Valkyries get transferred to the 1d4chan?

I can't find it but that might be because I'm stupid.

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bumpan

>>55743587
>>55746956
Vect drank some of it too. That was the whole point of giving it to the human, they think it's safe because it tastes good and Vect's drinking it too, and then it turns out the side chemicals put humans on the toilet with stomach cramps for a week and Vect's laughing his ass off the whole time. Let them know a bit of pleasure to make the pain worse.

This kind of thing isn't exactly uncommon in nature. Chocolate is fine for humans to eat but for toxic for many other mammals like dogs, despite it tasting good to them as well. Some berries taste good to humans but we end up puking out guts out because we can't handle the toxins in them like local herbivores can.

>>55743790
In general, people seem to follow or ignore it at will. Some parts people like, other parts they find dumb. This is the book where the Eldar ears thing first started, after all.

>>55749290
Yes. I believe it's under Forces of the Imperium.

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How are the Harleqins arranged in this AU. With their god being a lot more active and accessible ate they ordered into any sort of hierarchy?

Also what's their and their god's view on the Imperium?

>>55748138
You know, the official schemes may be just what humans see. Eldar themselves may very well see the colors differently, or, as you've noted, see different shades in what looks like a single color to a human (something similar was used with tau in the second Last Chancers book. Humans couldn't really tell difference in colors on the ship's walls, but to tau, it was some form of complex art form.)

>>55751974
I’m certain there are sections on both of these things on 1d4chan, if not on the main page then in the notes.

Speaking of which, what on the notes page is closest to being ready to move to the main page.

>>55752178
There must get even be elaborate motes or patterns in their wraithbone armor that humans can’t perceive the subtleties of, or even tell from the base color. It might be a semi-psychic adaptation in their eyes or ocular nerves, letting them perceive the unusual refraction of light off warp based pigmentation.

The wild colors and eye-biting patterns of Crone armor would work by a similar principle, not just using pattern, but warp pigment that reflects and refracts light in strange and horrible ways, and producing patterns and optical effects otherwise impossible. This would be really fucking horrible for other, saner Eldar, for which the patterns were meant, but with sufficiently potent warp based pigments even humans optic nerves will detect the colors out of space.

>>55753282
Believe it or not, there isn't. Not beyond the Dark Carnival and Ceggers' general view on the Imperium.

Ceggers seems to spends a lot of his time involved in the Dark Carnival, but Ceggers being a Warp God means he can be in as many places as he wants to. When he manifests in the Carnival, it's either him doing it himself or temporarily piggybacking off a willing Harlequin (sort of like how individuals in tribal ceremonies play the role of a deity, only more literal in this case) to experience mortal sensations.

From what we have in passing Cegorach loves giving cryptic, unhelpful answers, though sometimes they turn out to be profound. That said he is as much a player in the poker game of Just as Planned as Eldrad and other Imperial figures.

It's was suggested he may not have an axis of conventional morality so much as seeing things in terms of ethical hedonism. As in, how do we make things the most fun for the greatest number of people. In a way, it's the opposite of Slaanesh, who is all about pleasure in terms of sensory stimulus as emotional well-being. Slaanesh is pro-pleasure. Ceggers is pro-happiness. Specifically...

>It's possible Ceggers isn't really up on the whole concept of Winners & Losers so much as his guiding principle is "how do we make things more fun for as many people as possible?"

I can't find it, but there was also a mention that he's a little protective of Isha, seeing as she's the closest thing he has to a sibling (other than Khaine, but...it's Khaine).

>The Imperium to the Laughing God is a playground full of friends. Also infinite potential for free drinks
>the Emperor is a gleaming young golden lad that's lucky to have married into the family

That said there is still a lot of room for expansion and stuff.

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Finally got around to making some of those changes to the Adepta Sororitas sketch. This version's final, if you guys approve.

I started a crappy upper-body sketch of Farseer Eldrad communicating with other Imperial figures, but there's not a lot of reference pics of him without a helmet(to make a human on the other end have a face to connect with in a discussion), and it's been harder than expected to portray someone as old and wizened.

Bump

>>55755729
I like it. If this is the finished version I'll put it o n that 1d4chan page.

>>55754710
>>55751974
How I see it is that every Troupe is lead by a Great Harlequin who is Cegorach for a given value of Cegorach.

The Laughing One escaped Slaanesh by running away via the web-way but Slaanesh can reach into the webway as evidenced by the withering of the Dark Eldar. To go one step further Good ol' Ceggers exited the web-way into the realm of mortal men. Deamons can do it for a while, Greater Deamons for less of a while. The bigger you are the harder reality pushes you out. How therefore to stay? Make self smaller. Hack off all that can be spared and keep it by spreading it into the followers. All Harlequins get a small boost to their natural eldarness but the Great Harlequins take this far further. They are Cegorach here and now and can not only speak for him but speak as him.

The thing that heads the Dark Carnival is what was left after he had dismembered himself, the "original" Cosmic Jester.

The Tropes are arranged in that each is headed by someone who is enough Cegorach for it to be as if Cegorach was leading all of them on some level, thus they all have equal legitimacy. It is worth noting that the people heading the tropes are not a hive mind and are very much individuals. given the strong independent streak in all elder and especially the Harlequins this has lead to trope on trope conflict that is usually settled in bizarre duels between either Trope Masters or their chosen champions in what can only be called a "clown off". All though bow to the Joker King of the Dark Carnival form which all power and authority derives, the living god, the ragged white faced clown.

The hierarchy is almost flat in it's structure, the tropes almost autonomous.

Despite beliefs of others they are not the Black Library, merely very strongly associated with it.

>>55759394
Cegorach despite all appearances does not have a plan but he does have an end goal he is working towards and manipulating shit in the direction of. He hates Chaos. Back in the old days they coexisted to an extent and lived and let live. The Eldar Pantheon didn't have to. They were top dog, they could have gone to war against them once upon a time and won but for Asuryan's decree of non-interference.

Non-interference despite Chaos infecting their societies, taking their followers, weakening them, turning their children into monsters. Chaos was given too much tolerance and took even more and then killed almost all of his family, almost all of his people and almost all of his friends.

Cegorach, like Isha, Oscar, Eldrad and Khine, is playing the long game now. Probably no other being has done as much to stack the deck to bring about Rhana Dandra as much as he has. Why? Because he would see it all burn and rebuild from the ashes as a phoenix civilization before he willingly let Chaos survive.

He is in favour of the Imperium as it is his best bet of seeing this happen and acts as a good shield for his people and people by adoption although he doesn't believe in the Imperium for the sake of the Imperium. If there weren't so many threats floating around he would happily watch the Imperium collapse and although he wouldn't do anything to stop it he wouldn't do anything to cause it.

He was the only other option for being the husband of Isha had Oscar not been available and so for that if nothing he is grateful to Oscar, and he would never call Oscar Emperor. He sees Isha as sister in that they belong to the same order rather than because they are true siblings. Despite this he had no interest in Isha as a partner due to incompatible personalities.

Given that Isha is all about healing as much as fertility would it be out of place for an Apothecary to be a follower of hers?

Also are there any humans that follow the eldar gods? Are there any eldar that follow human faiths? Promethean eldar would be amusing, especially if they were within Vulkan's life time given that Vulkan was racist against eldar.

>>55759566
It could be that Ceggers doesn't trust large governments or galactic civilisations anymore considering what the ones he has seen have done.

Imperium tolerated due to its necessity and hands off attitudes.

>>55761107
How racist was Vulkan?

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Well this was the picture that started it all more than a year ago.

It seems that this project is winding down. We are at page 10 again and the bumping is getting ridiculous.

Should we let it die, if only for a while, or is anyone else still interested?

If it is time to die I won't say I'm not sad but all things end and it has been fun

>>55764531
Well for what it's worth I'm still around and will continue until I finish Angron. Also have one piece of other writing that's almost done that I'd like to post.

>>55767027
All I can say is that I look forward to it. Your work is reads better than some people who write professionally.

>>55762729
He could recognize the differences between Craftworlders, Crones, and Commoraghies, hated the last with a burning passion and the third with an almost unbelieving rage and willful incomprehension, and wouldn’t let the craftworlders go distancing themselves from their cousins in his presence. Afrique was raided by dark eldar before unification and absolutely fucked, and Vulcan was predisposed to see dark eldar as the eldar norm. Even when introduced to the craftworlders he still saw their similarities to their kin over the differences, and while he could cooperate with them he didn’t think of them as good or fair or honorable. He would be the first to remind humans and eldar alike that the majority of living eldar live in Shaa-Dome, followed by Commoragh, and that those places are far more like the Old Empire and eldar traditions than the craftworlder way of life is. He’d be the guy to say that craftworlders are good for turning the strengths and deceptive nature of eldar agains their viscious kind, or argue modesty should be foisted on Isha to keep her from becoming Slaanesh like. He’d be a fan of exodites and encourage eldar to live that life, specifically because it means giving up their technology and other power bases.

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>>55767947
>modesty should be foisted on Isha
She's wearing a dress most of the time what more could he possibly want?

>>55768226
Active reduction of her fertility goddess aspects and the desexualization of her rites and rituals, simplification of her associated aesthetics.

Isn’t he essentially a fire worshipping space baptist? He thinks the katholians need to turn down the worldliness, a naturalized fertility goddess is by her very nature immodest in his eyes.

>>55764531
I have at least one more story in me that I'm determined to get done if it kills me. Beyond that I don't know.

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>>55762729
>>55767947
There's also the question of what point in time we are talking about. Vulkan was active for something like seven-to-eight millenia, that's a lot of time for people to change. Post Age of Apostasy Vulkan would be a lot different from Great Crusade-era Vulkan. Even at his best he was probably like an old politically incorrect grandpa who can't help but say things in not quite the most polite way, as much due to being millennia older than anyone else than anything.

I keep having this vision of Vulkan calling one of the Phoenix Warriors a credit to their species and the PW goes "You what mon-keigh?"

>>55761107
Someone suggested the idea that there are human worshippers of Khaine, mirroring what you see in Fantasy. The same might be true of other active Eldar gods. Eldar pantheon worship probably is probably a minority on near every world, but it's there.

>>55755729
Eldrad is depicted as looking like Eldar Hugo Weaving in official GW art. Seriously.

>>55764531
I’m still gonna finish fulgrim when my computer is working again, and said I’d redo the caper of the Indigo Crow and that I’d write something about the Taskmaster since I seem to be the crone guy since the person who wrote Arrontyr returned to anonymity.

Also I’m tempted to write up something involving the Raid on Cthonia since it’s one of our prominent War of the Beats battles and hasn’t been revisited much, so any thoughts on it would be appreciated.

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>>55768997
Storytime!

“So what exactly happened during the Raid on Nurgle’s Mansion, anyway?”

The Emperor was glad for his enhanced reaction time at that moment, else he would have spit up the wine that he was drinking. To be honest he always considered himself more of a vodka person, or one of those "tanna" drinks the Valhallans always raved about having originally come from Earth. However, Sonoma was a planet known for its wineries, and that meant wine-tasting was the order of the day.

The government of the planet was a plutocracy, which meant that in practice the person with the largest voice in government was the who owned the largest percentage of the wineries on the planet. It was a world that had been part of the Imperium for some time, having been unified by one of the primarchs during the Great Crusade (Fulgrim, he immediately recalled), but one he had never been to personally, being on the far end of the Segmentum Tempestus. So when the Travelling Court was due to pass through that region of space, it was a lost opportunity he wanted to make sure to rectify.

The plutarch, as was often the case, was overjoyed that the Travelling Court had decided to visit his world, and immediately insisted on a stately dinner where he could introduce the Emperor and Empress to the other major shareholders in the vineyards on the planet. The Emperor was personally not that interested in a fancy dinner with the heads of state, but he didn’t want to turn down such hospitality. Now he was kind of wondering if he should. Isha was the epitome of civility as always, though the Emperor knew she was probably at least a little bit bored. Despite her demure nature, she always said she liked visiting former feral worlds more, claiming that the people there weren’t as repressed as these high society types and as such they knew how to live a little more.

>>55770690
The Emperor wasn’t surprised that the plutarch would ask about that story, it was probably one of the two stories he was asked most often to tell, but he was rarely asked about it so bluntly and while Isha was with him no less. He didn’t mind telling the story, but when Isha was around he always felt slightly guilty because it always made her seem like a damsel in distress. Granted, she had been had been held captive by one of the most powerful entities in the universe for thousands of years and tortured in ways only a god could truly comprehend, but sometimes it seemed like the story made her look bad.

“That old story?” Isha said from across the table. “Come now. You've told that story from Ultramar to Xenobia. Everyone probably knows it by heart at this point."

The Emperor internally sighed, he was privately grateful to Isha for that. In part because it meant he didn't want to dredge up the bad memories that represented, and in part because he didn't want to embarrass Isha in front of the plutarch with one of the low points of their life.

"Here's an idea. Why don't you tell them the story of what happened down on Sarosh."

The Emperor almost choked on his wine again.

“Are you sure?” the Emperor deflected, “Most of that story is rather dry, and I don’t think this is the kind of crowd who would be interested in that kind of thing. Besides, you know everything that happened there already. I wouldn’t want you to get bored, too.”

"Oh you can tell it. I don't mind."

Isha positively glimmered, her upper teeth like little fangs as she bit her lower lip.

"I'm sure you wouldn’t," the Emperor grumbled.

“With all due respect, your majesties,” the plutarch said, slightly red-faced, “Would someone please just start saying what happened already? It sounds like there’s a juicy story to be had and the rest of us don’t know about it. It just isn’t right to have a good wine without a good story to go with it.”

>>55770707
“Very well,” the Emperor sighed with resignation, “But in order to fully understand the story you’ll need to be familiarized with the planet of Sarosh. Sarosh was discovered near the end of the Great Crusade, but the War of the Beast broke out before it could be incorporated into the Imperium. After the war fully integrating Sarosh into the Imperium became top priority. This wasn’t merely for charitable reasons. Sarosh had managed to survive the Old Night with much of its technology intact. They had lost some of their most advanced technology and were behind us in other areas, true, but they retained technology that most of the rest of the galaxy had lost and it’s possible they may have even had STC printouts on their world. The Saroshi even claimed that their government was the same as it had been all the way back before the Age of Strife. If Saroshi technology could be reverse-engineered and exported to the galaxy at large, the standard of living in the Imperium would have jumped dramatically, and it would have gone a long way towards reparing the damage done by the War of the Beast.

When the Imperium first discovered Sarosh during the Great Crusade, the Saroshi welcomed us with open arms, and eagerly joined the Imperium as a Survivor Civilization However there always seemed to be problems whenever someone tried to integrate Sarosh with the rest of the galaxy. Attempts to build infrastructure to connect Sarosh to the wider Imperium were sabotaged. Funds meant to improve standards of living were embezzled by government officials. And any efforts to figure out exactly who was mishandling things was stymied by a bureaucracy that was downright labyrinthine. As is so often the case, I heard that there was trouble on Sarosh and set that as the next destination for the Travelling Court to get things straightened out once and for all.

>>55770725
I ran into the exact same problems that all the people before me did. I even met with the leaders of Sarosh themselves, who tried to assure me that things were progressing as fast as they could. On top of that the Saroshi ambassador, who was my primary contact with the Saroshi government during my time there, seemed to have a dislike for me that was borderline pathological. I tried to read his mind to figure out what his problem was, but his thought process was too oily and muddled to get anything out of him without breaking something. Not exactly unheard of in a politician. At the time, I merely chalked it up to him thinking I was just another two-bit warlord here to try and take away Saroshi sovereignty, rather than a potential ally greeting another survivor of the Long Night. It turned out to be something rather worse.

>>55770738
The Saroshi ambassador had come aboard the Bucephalus every day for nearly two weeks straight with nearly nothing to show for it. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the Saroshi government reported to me that they had a major breakthrough in the integration problems, and they wanted me to come to the planet’s surface for the first time since I had initially came to Sarosh to tell me in person. They asked me to meet with the ambassador who was arriving on a low-orbit shuttle, and would escort me to the Saroshi capital personally.

The first sign I noticed that something was wrong was when Constantin Valdor came up to me and asked if he could stand in front of me when the doors opened to meet the Saroshi ambassador. I asked him if something was the matter and he just replied that he had a funny feeling about the whole thing.

When the doors to the shuttle bay opened, the ambassador entered the Bucephalus the same way he had for the past two weeks, surrounded by his nine bodyguards. Except of course, this time the bodyguards had their weapons unholstered and their rifles levelled at us. The ambassador had this wild look in his eye, ranting about how my hour of reckoning had at last come at hand. One moment the ambassador was having his moment of megalomaniacal ranting, spittle flying from his lips.

The next thing I knew, the ambassador had a handmaiden standing behind him, one of those thorn-swords jutting out of his chest. I'm used to the speed at which Eldar move and even with that in mind, I have to say, the followers of Isha and Cegorach are fast.

>>55770790
While I had been meeting directly with the leaders of Sarosh, the Handmaidens had made their way to the planet's surface by their own means and had been discreetly conducting their own investigation of the planet's population. What they found was rather disturbing. The inhabitants of Sarosh were, to put it bluntly, Chaos worshippers, and they were itching at the opportunity to take revenge against the man to openly defy the Ruinous Powers and the goddess who would spurn the affections of the Plaguefather. The ambassador himself had a minor Tzeentchian blessing, which not only prevented anyone from reading his mind, but made psykers think it was absolutely normal that they couldn’t do that unless directly told otherwise. It was part of the reason he had ascended so far in politics.

“The Handmaidens reported their findings back to their mistress and their leader told the whole story to Constantin, which is how the Custodians knew. Those two always shared everything with each other.”

“Pardon me,” the plutarch said, “I don’t mean to interrupt a good story, but that reminds me of something. Where, might I ask, was the Empress during all this?"

"Ah, funny thing about that. She was down in the cargo bay, disarming the bomb. See, the insurgents had realized they needed a back-up plan in the likely event that Plan A failed. So they sent a re-wired cyclonic torpedo aboard, tried to disguise it as one of our own. While we were focusing our attention on the assassins, the torpedo would have detonated and killed us all. Crude but effective. It might have worked, if not for one thing."

"Which was?"

"It turns out the capacitors of a cyclonic torpedos don't work so well when they have a solid centimeter of Eldar rinnweed growing between the two conductor plates."

>>55770804
“The story, unfortunately, doesn’t have that happy of an ending. The Handmaidens and Custodians dealt with the intruders easily enough, but the planet was another problem. The Saroshi were gearing up a massive Chaotic ritual designed to pull a massive number of daemons into realspace. We ended up having to Exterminatus the planet to stop it in time. No amount of ancient technology was worth creating a massive, active Warp rift right in the middle of Imperial space. And even then it was hard to tell what tech and what were really “blessings” from the Ruinous Powers. I have my suspicions that the high level of technology the Saroshi had were either Chaos-derived or due to their leaders bargaining with the Ruinous Powers for sanctuary during the Age of Strife.

I learned two things from the whole debaucle. The first being you can never be too paranoid when it comes to diplomacy with unknown powers.”

“And the second?”

>>55770923
“Never underestimate your wife,” the Emperor said flatly.

Milady," a voice said from behind the plutarch, "the inspection is complete."

"What the devil?" He exclaimed.

"Ah, Galadrea," the Emperor said. "Glad you could make it".

He should have known Galadrea would have chosen that moment to intervene. Galadrea had always been as humorless as Valdor but she did have a bit of a flare for the dramatic. He had noticed the green-clad Eldar enter the room, but aside from Isha he was perhaps the only one to do so, the rest of the occupants too fixated on his story to notice. The fact that she had entered from the one direction where no one else could have directly seen her only furthered the Emperor's suspicions that she had chosen to make her entrance as dramatic as possible.

>>55770948

“Plutarch,” the Emperor said, watching the man continue to sputter in confusion, “I would like to introduce you to Galadrea, Head of the Handmaidens of Isha. Now, Galadrea, I believe you said you had something to report?”

“We found no signs of Chaos corruption. No worship of the Ruinous Powers. There are the usual issues, crime, poverty, but no more so than any other Imperial world. The world is clean.”

“Well, there you have it,” the Emperor told the plutarch, “A clean bill of health from the acolyte of a literal goddess of healing. You have nothing to worry about.”

"Thank you, Galadrea", Isha said, "You may go now."

The Eldar gave a curt bow and then left as silently as she arrived. The source of his shock eliminated, the plutarch gradually managed to calm himself back down.

“Well, that was a bloody good story, but that doesn’t really answer my initial question. Sorry for asking, but you don’t get answers of what happened during these things straight from the horse’s mouth every day you know. You hear so many rumors but it’s hard to believe even half of them are true. I’d still like to know what really happened during the Raid. And what about that whole hulabaloo with the ork diplomats during the War of the Beast?"

Internally, the Emperor sighed. It was going to be a long day.

>>55770971
Great work, hits pretty much everything really well. Only thing I’d note is that Oscar was originally meant to be a sector scale psychic communication hub and system scale translator between humans and the Iron Minds, so it would probably take more than a minor blessing to keep him out of your head. He was purpose built to safely dump the thoughts and lessons of unspeakably fast and mighty machine minds into the brains of humans without breaking them, from several AU away. Even if he can’t actually easily do that since he was only partially written, he could probably read any baseline human in his presence like a book without serious dampening from another psychic powerhouse.

Personally I’d reconcile it just by saying the ambassador was given a pretty major blessing, and was put through tons of ritual preparation and pact making to be ready for his role in the plot.

I came up with the idea for this when I noticed that while we have the Raid as a major event in this universe, we don’t have a lot of awesome events for Isha herself despite her playing a much more significant role in this universe. Everyone in-universe and out knows the story of how the Emperor saved Isha, this is the story of when Isha rescued the Emperor’s ass. A little bit of what Isha is like when she isn’t the damsel in distress.

>>55771126
The issue I ran into about halfway through writing this is how in the world the Emperor wouldn’t see this coming in a way that wouldn’t make him look like a dumbass, especially given telepathy. That’s what made this take so long. I like your idea better.

If anyone’s wondering, Xenobia is the capital of the Interex in canon. So far west to far east.

I was thinking rinweed is essentially the Eldar equivalent of ragweed or dandelions. Isha was making a statement. She destroyed the Saroshi’s plans with trash because she thought they were trash for their sneak attack.

>>55771237
Before anyone asks, my take on it is that Valdor and Galadrea weren’t having a thing. They were merely good platonic friends, having similar personalities and a similar hobby in being crazy prepared for any possible assassination contingencies. Valdor wasn’t into Eldar and Galadrea wasn’t into humans, and even if they were duty would get in the way. This is exacerbated in Galadrea’s case by the fact that in the event that Macha-Isha would ever die, Galadrea would be Isha’s next host. The connections the Handmaidens get to Isha doesn’t come without consequences, you know.

Galadrea’s been the Head of the Handmaidens since the beginning, one of the few people from the “old days” that the Emperor still has around. She owes her unnaturally long life to her connection to Isha, though she’s only about as old as Macha-Isha.

Constantin’s replacement after he passed away shortly after the Age of Apostasy is convinced that Galadrea hates him. She doesn’t. It’s just that every time she sees him it’s a reminder that her old friend is no longer there, and she’s having a hard time getting over that. Also he’s several thousand years younger than him and she feels he needs to respect his elders.

>>55771126
To elaborate on what I liked, the story does really well to show how a visit from the Emperor of the galactic Imperium makes the head of a world controlling government feel like he’s the elder of a tiny provincial hamlet, being visited by the most august, glorious prince of power and renown that could be imagined. He doesn’t strip away the Plutarch’s dignity, but he demonstrates the vast power differential in an entirely casual way, and one can imagine the Plutarch thinking about all the times he visited a little, barely noteable vineyard, tasted the vintner’s prized wine, told a dull story, and went on his way. He’d probably give his left nut for a single cyclonic torpedo, and here’s the emperor mentioning one getting smuggled aboard in a hope to pass it off among many others. He might roll through a town on a luxury train worth more than it, but the Emperor shows up with a fleet worth more than the fucking star his planet orbits.

I was wondering, could Oscar fight his way out of the warp if hit with a vortex grenade? I can imagine some assassination/kidnapping attempt by a less than ingenious cult early on, trying to deliver the Emperor directly unto their master, only for the living gellar field to rip and tear back into the real and take away their thinking privileges.

The only time I can think of for a shot at him to be taken like this would be during unification, before he was behind hundreds of extra superhuman bodyguards. It seems like something Ursh would try, not knowing enough about the warp or Oscar to see why it would fail, because their few prized vortex grenades always made difficult foes disappear forever in the past.

The Despot that would become Doombreed might not have believed his rival in Eurasia was a greater sorcerer than himself, let alone greater than Magnus the craven deserter, before this. Afterwords he would begin to conceive of the magnitude of the treat, though he still wouldn't fail to underestimate it.

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>>55771599
Within days of him being found he kept the Warp from overtaking a ship during a Warp Storm by looking at it funny.

I think in our discussion of power levels we said that Oscar (at least pre-Emperorhood, at which point people disagree a little) is death for any Warp entities that aren't Chaos God level or thereabouts.

So he probably could tear his way out of the Warp, though it would probably incapacitate him for a while. And make everyone who sees the event go "what the fuck did I just witness?"

>>55771800
In that situation could he contact Magnus or Malcador to invoke him for further aid returning? An experience like this would probably be a big factor in his subsequent view of the warp, but also something that would give him some small bit of reassurance when it came for the raid, a hope that even if the portal fell he could lead the forces of civilization out of their doom.

>>55769127
That's actually really helpful, thank you. I'm guessing it's Hugo Weaving from The Matrix?

>>55770971
Not nearly as good a writer as fulgrimfag, but this is a really nice piece of writing, providing a window into what happens when the Traveling Court visits a planet in the Imperium.

>>55772718
Not the anon who this was directed to, but wouldn't invoking Oscar be uncomfortably close to invoking the power of a religious figure? The other thing is, powerful psykers like Magnus and Malcador could probably assist Emps in getting out, but they're both long dead by the 41st millennium.

New to this Nobledark 40k thing, and am currently on an archive-binge, but while it's fresh in my mind, I have an idea. So I have to ask, has anything concrete been fleshed out regarding the Orks, and why some of them have sided with Chaos, when by vanilla 40k standards that's kind of impossible to happen on the scale that it is?

Because what my idea boils down to is a simple idea; what if the statement about Gork and Mork getting more cleverer when they get bonked on the head is more-or-less true? What if the Orkish dieties are pulling a massive "We wuz juz' pretending t'be Squig-heads!" on the rest of the galaxy?
Gork and Mork are letting Chaos use Orks as their vanguard, because it's letting the Orks spread into the Warp. They've got a perpetual war between Orks and a disabled hive-ship; if Orks start getting Genestealers, and the other Orks believe this means you can loot parts from the Tyranids and make yourself harder and spikier, then over time the distinction between Ork and Tyranid starts to fade, as the Orks become more tyranid-like while the tyranids, feasting on Orkish biological matter, start to develop Orkish tendencies...

The point of all this is so the galaxy can be filled with an eternal, never-ending war, as in nobody ever starts shooting. This is the first step for Gork and Mork to come closer to achieving a state of "enough Dakka." Alternatively, they want to make all of Reality and the Warp more Orky, and are playing the long game to do so.

>>55773051
No, fucking Elrond.

Also, the idea with the vortex grenade attack was that it would be agents of Ursh during unification, on earth, before the Great Crusade. Magnus and Malcador would be right at hand, and it would be one Oscar’s early experiences with the war, hence coloring subsequent foundational interactions with the warp.

>>55773088
There is more Gork and Mork in the Origin of Khorne story in the forces of chaos section, and discussions of chaos orks under Ghazkul and the Beast’s descriptions.

>>55773163
Much obliged.
>GorkaMorka got stomped by Khorne in the War in Heaven
It makes sense, though it also gives potential motivation for why Gork and Mork might be waiting for a chance to screw over Chaos and everybody else, and achieve this by fighting each other off in their own corners of the universe, which both keeps them out of focus and thus ignored while also making them progressively smarter and stronger, preparing for their rematch with Khorne.
After all, Orks love fighting, but they hate losing.

>>55770971
Beautifully done and a pleasure to read. It conveys the right image of a humble Emperor.

>>55771126
It could have been that Oscar doesn't habitually read people beyond the most surface level tor reasons of respecting their privacy

>>55773382
I read it as Khorne getting shown up by the Gorkamorka and fucking up the Orks to get revenge/save face.
Also, I forgot to mention the assault moon lecture, it goes over the high end of base ork tech and low end of Brainboy capabilities, that being a small planetary engine designed for combat. The Beast was going to crash his, once the moon of Ulanor, into Old Earth when he besieged it. When it fell back into the warp after Captain Pious inserted the prow of a warship into its helm bridge currents carried it to Armageddon. One of Ghazkull’s goals has been to reclaim it and return it to fighting capacity. There are assault moons and other planetary engines being built up in the unknown reaches of the galaxy in the dark millennium, and the Gorkamorka’s prophet is nearly as intent on smashing the Crones as he is on wrecking the Imperium.

>>55773941
Is it only the famous WAAAGH!!!!s that are headed by Brain Boyz or is it now reaching the state that most are?

>>55773706
On the mind reading, fair enough, but even on a surface read of a mind he ought to have a very sharp eye for the nuances and subtleties of thoughts. Where the canon Emperor was meant by the gurus to be a spiritual guardian and director of humanity, ours was engineered to understand both humans and vast, alien minds far beyond their comprehension, and reconcile these natures. It’s his very nature to perceive the truth of human thoughts and warp entities, so even a cursory glance should be revalatory unless there is a significant force obscuring his perception. Also, I’ve tended to imagine a bit more licentious with his mind reading, though benevolent, seeing the worlds around him through the lenses of his people’s thoughts and feelings. Usually this would be felt as a passing warmth and a feeling of acknowledgement, but a chaos worshiper would probably feel otherwise. The Emperor is known for his hands off government style, but in person he’s always come off as deeply interested in his people and their affairs.

All I propose is that it would take more than a minor blessing to hide direct chaotic influence from his sight, and it’s not like the gods wouldn’t offer serious boons to a planet that comes beseeching them for the power to assassinate the biggest ever thorn in their side. Khanfag was out to make it a story of Isha’s strength’s protecting her husband, so upping the threat level seems perfectly valid.

>>55768450
Then there was never a hope of their relationship being one of friendship. Sex is part of her job and a religious service in her temples.

Idea for Tau Regiment of renown:

The 104th Daemon Busters: formed shortly after Kai's uploading of his head-cam on the shit he went through, as a black-ops group formed by the most elite (but expendable) specialists available to investigate and root out further threats of Chaos (think X-Com, but with Chaos and Tau). After the joining into the Imperium, went to Cadia for further knowledge just as a Black Crusade hits. (12th?)

Got wrekt. Still, got it better than most regiments on Cadia at the time due to Tau's innate resistance to Chaos-bullshit.

The strike group returned home with new wounds, and more importantly, new lessons. Finally got the Etheral Council to properly care of the threat of Chaos, and from the remnants of the original team the 104th was birthed. And more elite expendable guys. Lots more. This time with 'several' members of the Grey Knights and Farseers went along as 'Advisors'. And Doomguy when he has the chance.

After cutting their teeth on the world of [REDACTED], their reputation was only enconcreted by their achievements during the Badab War, with an average Deaths-to-Daemons (minor) as 2-1 for the average men. Been on constant deployments across the Imperium whenever and wherever a major Chaos-incursion is on-going. Still awaiting their chance of revenge in the 13th Black Crusade, which is coming.

>>55773941
I thought it was Ullanor itself, not Ullanor's moon.

>>55776340
You’re right. We actually had some comment about the tidal forces fucking up the earths geological processes to the extent that postwar stabilization projects were necessary, and were the basis for later large scale subsurface engineering

https://youtu.be/O2Fh9VuLbno

>>55777102
>>55776340
This could also explain the apparent techtonic deadness of Old Earth.

Life should be impossible on a geologically dead planet. Build up of shit on the surface due to no plate subduction should, I've been told, turn Earth into a slightly cooler Venus.

The technological nature of the Hives and the increased artificial nature of the biosphere would have gone hand in hand to offset the dying of the world.

Also the only ground movement would be the gradual settling of the crust. With no real earthquakes anymore the building of greater archologies becomes far more reliable.

Also then existence of the Daisy Chain heavily implies that the crust has stopped moving.

>>55773088
There are Chaos Orks in vanilla!40k, they just aren’t common. Chaos Orks are like Chaos Dwarves in Fantasy: They can’t be unwillingly corrupted into joining Chaos, they have to choose to do so. Case in point, one example of Chaos Orks in vanilla was a WAAAGH! that ended up worshipping Nurgle because they saw pictographs of him and realized that he was the biggest and greenest, and therefore the boss.

It’s just in this timelime the Chaos Gods have put a much greater effort into getting the Orks to fall now that they can’t get their fingers on humanity as easily. Most Orks aren’t Chaos Orks though. Most Orks are only interested in fightin’ and krumpin’, and don’t really care how they go about doing it as long as itz proppa orky. Chaos’ influence over the Orks is more manipulating the WAAAGHs into acting as cannon fodder by pointing out where the best fighting is, and buying guarantees of (relative) safety by doing so. Think how in canon the Eldar subtly nudge the Imperium into getting into wars that benefit the Eldar (*cough*Armageddon*cough*). On top of that, it sounds like the Crones don’t usually wade into battle alongside the Orks. The Battle of Terra had them showing up separate from the Beast’s forces.

>>55778241
I see. In that case, my idea about Gork and Mork being "merely pretending to be retarded" is still possible. They still love fighting and Dakka and Orky things above anything else, but they're actually very cunning and intelligent, it's just that the goal they've decided to work towards is so silly/stupid that nobody else realizes there's actual method to their madness. Worse, if their goal is to eventually make the entire universe 'orky,' then they're actually succeeding to an extent- Chaos being invested in steering WAAAAGHs into being their vanguards means that Orks have spread into the Warp, and spread even further in realspace. Each WAAAGH is bigger and more numerous than the last, even if they never go as far as they made it during the first Crusade. According to some reports, they've even isolated a Hive mothership, and are engaged in a constant war that may or may not be making the Orks more Tyranid-like, and the Tyranids more Orky...

Part of why I like this idea is because in this Nobledark setting, having the Orks actually having an endgoal and a realistic chance of achieving it makes them more dangerous, while said endgoal is still silly and Orky enough to not suck all the fun out of the Orks.

>>55779329
The Gorkamorka being ingenious but apparently fully focused on krumpin each other is already part of the setting. We’ve been having them encourage and aid the orks, and the Gorkamorka’s will is to see good for the orks, but having a subtle secret plot or even a specific goal isn’t their style. It’s not a lack of intellect on their part, it’s a preference for improvisation and perfectly formed reflex. Their genius is the genius of the Mek and Wyrd, innately knowing and able, able to wildly guess the answers to complex questions with nuances and contextualizations that seem to have gone over their heads entirely. Their will is set against Chaos and the Imperium and the Necrons that commandeered the whaaagh into their own power to pin down and enforce their preferred physical laws and constants, but the Gorkamorka is a force with its own nature, brutality and cunning in perfect combination and proportion. They are not plotting decievers, though they lie in wait, they are a pouncing force, that simply knows with utter inborn certitude when best to destroy their foe entirely.

>>55779656
Okay, yes, that's a pretty good implementation of what I had in mind.

One thing that was brought up in earlier threads, about how Cain is essentially an ambassador to the Eldar in this setting. There's an added little bit of hilarity that this provides that I think didn't really get brought up or focused on: the Eldar are a race of psykers. This would mean that they're at least somewhat aware of Cain's internal monologues.

What if they like it and see it as a form of mental discipline and devotion, where he has suppressed his self-satisfaction to the point where he interprets his natural instincts as cowardice? As for his part, he thinks his mental walls are firm and that he needs to constantly uphold his masquerade lest the eldar turn on him, and thus sour relationships with the Imperium.

>>55774876
It could be they that Starkzahn of the Black Legion 10th Cohort got sent to. Presumably as part of the training staff, assigned by the Inquisition after his time in the Deathwatch.

>>55774876
I like it, the only thing is the name sounds a bit close to the Daemon Breakers.

Would the Tau even think of Daemons and Daemons? IIRC, the canonical Tau interpretation of daemons is that they're just energy beings native to the Warp (which is technically correct).

That said maybe things are different here because the Tau know firsthand what daemons are like from their own encounters and the rest of the Imperium. Still, the Tau might be able to take a step back from things and see daemons for what they are, rather than buy into the whole "we are eternal, endless, a fundamental force of the universe" schtick the daemons try to sell you. They don't have the primal, culturally-reinforced fear of daemons that humans and Eldar do, and see them the same way they see tyranids: nightmarish enemies that are worth fearing, but ultimately ones who are constrained by the fabric of the universe just like everyone else.

>>55774246
It could be he was trying to be helpful and came off as not understanding and insensitive. Promethean Creed was all about family, but it's idea of sex would have been more an expression of love between married individuals than an act of passion. Isha's domain covers some of that, but that isn't all of who she is.

>>55781665
I think that by 999M41 they understand, have been made to understand, the full depth of what they are fighting.

If they do see them still as mere energy beings from another dimension then they also see them as hideously malevolent and infinite in number. They would also have noted the interaction between the psychic citizenry and and the warp and warp based things.

>>55768226
I think that he probably wanted her to wear underwear with the dress.

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>Don't mind us, just getting a glimpse at this timeline

>>55779848
Who knows how they see it. Some might see it as some form of self-devotion akin to a Path. Despite having these thoughts and self-doubts, he's obviously gotten shit done, which might suggest to the Eldar that he suppresses them in order to succeed in a manner like the Eldar would.

As a bonus, they never get the thoughts from him that he is out to exploit them or manipulate them, just general thoughts of "not getting myself killed".

The Biel-Tan autarchs know the truth: Cain is both a coward and a skilled warrior. He'll do what's expected of a warrior while screaming internally in fear the whole time.

How good is 40k telepathy? I know the vanilla!Emperor is so good that he can suck your brain dry to the point that you can't even remember bowel control and put it back (mostly) intact even as a sofa skeleton, but how good would your average Eldar or, say, Magnus be?

IIRC Eldar use a bit of telepathy with High Speech to indicate third person. Like if they say "go stand by that rock", an image of the particular rock pops into your head so you know exactly which rock they are talking about. Vocalized High Speech sounds stilted. But two-way communication is very different from mind-reading someone who isn't trying to be read.

>>55786866
Ordo Chronos, go home, you're drunk.

>>55788768
Or it's possible that Cain's ability to lie combined with species differences make him hard to read passively and actively trawling through a man's mind would cause a diplomatic incident.

>>55789276
It might even be that they think his manipulative or selfish thoughts aren't unusual. They're used the thoughts of humans, and Cain is actually pretty good compared to the average planetary governor or diplomat. Unlike human culture, they're used to and well adjusted to being privy to each other's impulsive thoughts and lesser aims. In the Crones and the Dark kin this would be a feedback loop of id and malice respectively, but the Caftworlders tend more towards aiding each other in pursuit of refinement and purity.

So is Cawl in this AU a Heretek who figured out how to get in contact with the Void Dragon (possibly its warp reflection) and started fabricating the stuff all the other Mechanicus were warned about?

Maybe he has some chapters (Red Scorpions) that he kits out with Mark II Cawl rifles, Primaris gene-seed and enhancements.

>>55788768
>>55789276
>>55790064
Maybe they find it funny and will deliberately egg him on, saying just the right thing to make him start shitting himself without ever fully giving the game away.

>On their latest suicide mission with Cain
>All the Eldar are really cheerful and upbeat, bringing up how great this mission is going to be
>Cain is half-certain that they're doing it on purpose
>They ARE doing it on purpose, both because he's more effective when he's nervous and because teasing the high-strung Mon'keigh is practically a pre-mission pastime now

>>55790446
I think someone did a write of Cawl a thread or so ago, he's more of a grouchy Biologis type.

We decided pretty early on to veto canon Primaris Marines in this AU, as most people agreed having "extra"-Marines was dumb and we already had an established progression of Mk I, II, III MP, III S Marines. (IMO Primaris is shitty lore for GW to introduce true scale marines without squatting people's armies, and more disturbingly they have ugly greaves.) The Primaris Project is now Captain Titus' (who is acting commander of the Ultras) attempt to build a new legion for the End Times, to great controversy and resistance.

My own headcanon is that bolt rifles are the main battle rifle for the Marines and standard Godwin bolters are the carbine variant for closer quarters, but I dunno what others think.

>>55790658

Maybe bolt rifles can be a controversial innovation that causes REEEEEing by the mainline Mechanicus, leaving the only source of production distant Forge Worlds from Mars.

>>55790808
So long as it's similar to the old design and they can see how he was inspired they won't mind too much.

But it won't be old man Cawl coming up with this as he is strictly biological expert

Have we done anything with Logan Grimnar yet?

>>55790064
Cain has the added bonus of showing thr Eldar virtue of not wanting to be in a position of authority. We mentioned in the past that the Eldar in general seem to not like to be in a position of authority, at least in part because it means sublimating part of their individuality (especially with the two most prominent positions for Eldar in the galaxy, getting closer to Isha or Cegorach means cutting off ties to your Craftworld). Eldar seem to serve, but out of a sense of public duty, and power-hungriness is seen as bizarre. It seems to be a species thing: most humans would jump at the opportunity for power. Or at least an uncommon one, given some of the people in Shaa-Dome and Commorragh.

Also, I just realized Cain is having problems because Khaine is on the same Craftworld as him.

Bumpin while the Americans are asleep

>>55794544
Would Cain be aware of the Avatar or would he just be perplexed as to why one day all the locals started to act madder than usual?

>>55795759
He'd probably consider it to be just his usual luck. He doesn't know the Avatar was active but the Craftworld of Proud Warrior Space Elves getting an even more hair trigger temper a few decades before he showed up? Just the typical Cain luck.

>>55788768
>Ordo Chronos, go home, you're drunk.

Well, they went somewhere.

>>55790507
It doesn't help that the Avatar is turning all the local eldar's dials up to Max.

They are fighting harder and more eager, drinking and partying harder between missions and the Bail-tan Isha temples have had to call the other craftworld temples for reinforcements.

The dream of conquest is burning bright once more. Once more they are Eldar, real eldar, as they were in the days of Eldernesh and Ulthernash.

Cain's job now is mostly putting brakes on the train and directing the aggression because you can't stop something like that.

>>55798491
And still the Avatar waits for his chariot and blade

>>55796628
Knurd er'uoy, emoh og, sonorhc odro.

Ylsuoires.

>>55798591
https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Knurd

>>55798581
Farsight has his blade. The Tau government is holding what might be his chariot in secret. He is probably going to have words and with the Tau when the dust has settled.

>>55799965
Khaine says he stole the blade and chariot back in the war, and it's unclear if they are separate things. He might or might not have have taken the Nightbringer's Scythe for a joyride and crashed it somewhere hard to find.

>>55799965
Not sure if it's the same blade. Farsight's is Anaris, Vaul's masterwork and the one he didn't get done in time to give to Khaine. Did Vaul ever try to give Khaine Anaris other than pointy end in?

Khaine probably has other favorite swords he uses. Though I thought the blade thing was when he threw Nightbringer's scythe into the Warp, depriving Nightbringer of a big chunk of his power. It was debated whether it was a literal scythe, the ship the big chunk of him was imprisoned in, or the ship he was imprisoned in that also had NB's favorite Necrodermis scythe.

Bump for incoming writing

did the events with the Crimson Fists go down any different?

>>55798491
>Cain's job now is mostly putting brakes on the train
Knowing Cain's luck, that means more often than not he ends up whipping them into even more of a frenzy before sending them off in the other direction, goading them into pushing farther than they would have otherwise- and putting more distance between himself and the craziest of the crazy eldar, while he takes the more level-headed ones in the opposite direction.
And then uncovers a sleeper nest of tyranids, or Chaos-Worshippers, or Necrons.

>>55804976
Or Chaos-worshipping Necron genestealers.

Hey, with Cain's luck, it could happen.

>>55804941
Nothing's been said about the Crimson Fists thus far, if you want to go for it. The only difference I can think of is Dorn didn't put his legion through a meat grinder to get them to split up.

Given the nature of the Crimson Fists, it could be that Alexis Polux was one who constantly (with respect) questioned Dorn's orders, given how the Crimson Fists tend to be the most flexible and adaptive of the Imperial Fist descendants. Dorn rages at him for his apparent insubordination. Upon Dorn's death Polux finds a letter addressed to him.

Polux,
You always acted like you thought you knew how to run the legion better than me. Now prove it.
-- Dorn

showing that Dorn did care about him, even if he wished he could drill some more respect into that skull. Only thing is we don't have how the IF broke up, since it's implied it was a bit more gradual than some of the other legions.

Some of their history might go a bit different, since the Scythians fall into the same category of "don't start nothing, there'll be nothing" as the Tarellians and the Fists aren't going around exterminating Exodites.

>>55805240
I can actually see a way for that to work:
The necrons are looking, as usual, to regain biological bodies. However, this particular subset has struck upon the idea that the Tyranid's unique genetic properties makes their organic matter perfect for the task of constructing new, modifiable forms.
However, they are having trouble getting the part about transferring their souls into new vessels bit. So, they turn to the experts on matters of the soul; Chaos. They're even making strides toward success; the forces of Chaos like the idea of having such warriors to throw at whatever they wish destroyed.

Enter Cain and the Eldar warriors.

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One thing you always seem to see in science fiction is that humans are represented by a variety of cultures and/or subspecies and aliens rather, well, aren’t. 40k is a little better about this than most, because the Eldar cultures are well-differentiated, but still. Because the Tarellians have been explicitly described as having multiple different cultures united under one Confederacy (and indeed are in the same “age group” as humans), I thought they would be a good place to show variation in an alien species, inspired by Warhammer lizardmen and real-life reptiles.

Typically, the words "tropical rainforest" and "major urban center" don't go together in the popular lexicon. Not so with Tikal. Tikal is a warm and wet world, with a climate resembling that of Old Earth more than fifty million years ago, such that tropical rainforests extend from the equator to the poles.

Because of the thick rainforests and mangroves that choke most of the world, Tikal’s population tends to be concentrated in a few heavily urbanized areas, as it is easier to expand outward by hacking away at the jungle surrounding a city than to try and build an entirely new city from scratch. The largest city on Tikal, Itza, covered nearly 20,000 square kilometers even before Tikal made contact with the outside galaxy, and is a veritable hive now.

>>55806472
Natives of Tikal tend to be rather short for Tarellians, with heights ranging from 4'8" to 5' on average. This is a useful feature for moving through cramped quarters, whether it is the dense undergrowth of a rainforest or the crowded streets of a city. To compensate for their smaller size, the Tarellians of Tikal supplement their usual ranged weaponry with poisoned darts, developed from the poison of a native creature, which they use to sap and slow their foes. By the same principle, the Tarellians of Tikal are not very proficient in close-quarters combat. The Tikaleze also have much brighter and more pronounced markings than other Tarellian nations, a useful feature for differentiating individuals in the cramped and often underlit confines of cities.

Tikal’s main contribution to the Tarellian Neo-Confederacy is precious metals, which is why the Tarellians settled there in the first place back before the Age of Strife. Tikal is known for its high density of precious metals, not just gold and silver but more precious metals like adamantium. Tikal is the biggest producer of electrical contacts in its region of space. The Tarellians of Tikal used these precious metals for ceremonial purposes back in the days after the Age of Strife before anyone knew their worth, and still use them for monuments today. Some have tried to steal from the Tikaleze, which often invokes their wrath if they try to steal from public monuments or memorials.

Tikal is one of the more literate worlds in the Neo-Confederacy, owing to its massive urban population and therefore massive bureaucracy necessary to organize it. Tikal’s libraries contain thousands of scrolls and codices, mostly written in the Tarellian script, though the most important documents are carved into soft metal in the event that Tarellian civilization collapses as it did during the Age of Strife.

>>55806485

Like all Tarellian worlds, Tikal prides itself on being economically self-sufficient, despite benefiting from interstellar trade, its people don’t need it to survive. Tikal’s people primarily live off aquaculture grown in massive farming operations in the planet’s inland lakes and ponds. Indeed, many Tikaleze cities are built right on the edge of large inland lakes specifically to be closer to food. Some of these farms are actually old impacts of meteorites that have subsequently filled with water.

Did the Old Ones ever havena homeworld?

>>55806504
I'd have it where Tikal is the last of their core worlds that was either overlooked or was just next on the list for the Tyranids.

Due to its location now being surrounded by dead worlds and it's inability, without large scale agriculture, to support a Hive population it could have been a big contributing factor in getting the normally highly independent lizards to join the Imperium. It was either that or their last repository of all they had lost would fall.

But whilst it would have been necessary it would not have been popular. Going to outsiders for help is a betrayal of all they stood for in exchange for tinned food. Although Tikal could get the other worlds to join by the oaths that bind they could not maintain authority for much longer.

Tikal could be made to support Itza. There must have been some 'Nid contamination as the once lovely but vibrant jungle turned into Catachan.

>>55808883
presumably, but we agreed its long lost, possibly swallowed by the warp, but even more likely just devastated to the point of ruin and forgotten