Still working on an Tyranid Splinter Fleet-Imperial Guard battle, bit hard getting momentum on it. Also haven't made much progress on an Imperial ship sketch, haven't had much free time to work on it.

Also just out of curiosity, have we had a write-up for Commander Shadowsun yet?

>>58000456
No, we definitely need one.

Speaking of which, the Olamic Quietude came up last thread. Was thinking of putting a summary on the Notes page to make sure it didn't disappear. I was wondering if this is the general outline that had been agreed on.

- Isolated bastion in a sea of mostly Imperial space, control one inhabitable planet and a bunch of uninhabitable ones (by human standards) they mine for materials.
- Really technologically advanced. Entire society consists of human minds uploaded into robot bodies.
- Mechanicus REEEE at this. Not just because the Quietude have gone full tech-heresy and not just made Silica Animus but become them but because on some level they represent the logical extreme of Mechanicum ideals, and it scares them.
- Imperium (via Vlka Fenryka) tried making peaceful contact with them during the Great Crusade. Olamic Quietude vivisect the ambassador team. They believe they are the only true successors to the GaB Human Empire and the rest are degenerate savages.
- Leman Russ in full-on rage mode. They had insulted the Imperium, they had insulted his Legion and he had friends in the contact team and he knows that they died badly.
- Steward takes a look at the situation and realizes the cost would be astronomical. The Imperium would win through sheer numbers, but it would cost dozens of soldiers for every Olamic (Olamite?). All for one shithole world worth no strategic value.
- Manages to talk Leman down. Quietude dodge a bullet and become quarantined in their own little region of space.
- Problem is that unlike the Imperium Quietude invent things and eventually they will reach the point where their tech is going to outweigh the Imperium’s numbers

>>58001381
- However, the Quietude have weaknesses. Because they are not reproducing like organics and new people aren’t born but get cloned and uploaded (and the Olamics aren’t in a habit to do so), each individual controls an increasing proportion of the Olamic power base. That means each death means a greater proportion of power taken offline than for the Imperials.
- They get knocked back by catastrophes just like the Imperium does. The Beast fucked them over. The Harrowing fucked them over. The Howling/death of the possible Man of Gold (did we decide if they were the same thing?) fucked them over. They don’t get wiped out or lose all their advanced but their tech gets knocked back quite a bit and they have to rebuild.
- Half the time they attack the Imperium specifically to prevent them from figuring this out.
- This time the Imperium has figured them out. The Olamics have attacked and burned Ljot’s Landing, a Fenrisian Colony. Fenrisians chomping at the bit for long-overdue revenge. Oscar isn’t happy about this, but he realizes the galaxy is going to explode into conflict any day now and the Quietude have to be out of the way now as opposed to later. So he gives the Wolves the go ahead to wipe them out. Bjorn’s response? “By Hal, it’s about time”.

>>57999291
So, are there any birth wounds from Tzeentch, Malal, or Nurgle? Seeing as those three had an entire era of undetermined length spanning the whole golden age of the Old Ones prior to the War in Heaven to themselves, the remnants of the nurseries of the Gods would probably be pretty scant.

There's the Tyrant Star, also called the Un-Star, that matches legendary descriptions of Malal's singularity-esque road to oblivion, now held under the sway of Tzeentch. There are also the Ghoul Stars, which I don't think we've touched on, but could be the remnants of the birthplace of Nurgle. On the other hands, if there's any god to drag its birthplace into the warp whole cloth to keep its birthplace from changing it would be Nurgle. Nurgle might never have even left the warp himself, always dwelling in the realm of his greatest comfort. Tzeentch's own birthplace is likely hidden or lost or forgotten, but its presumably somewhere in the galactic core as well, maybe even the Old Ones' homeworld. Tzeentch generally gives off the impression of a natural god that had become cancerous in later ages, not being a totally malignant force like Khorne, and like Nurgle, Tzeentch only got truly cancerous after the usurpation of Malal threw things off balance even worse at the end of the War in Heaven.

Its also interesting to note that a species of reptile/amphibians would have a bird god. It simultaneously suggests evolution by way of mutation into a more robust and varied form, as well as the image of a bird of prey falling upon unsuspecting toads as they sit unaware.

>>58001381
>GaB Human Empire
only thing I could add is that we've been calling DAoT humanity the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion because the Iron Minds were too decentralized to be called a true empire.

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>>58001406
Was actually going to bring this up last thread. If Khorne's axe-wound of a birth is still around 65 million years later, that implies the other three must be really, really old. It really drives home the point that the Old Ones weren't called that because they were a recent thing.

It's not that Chaos and the Old Ones are/were infinite in this timeline, it's that they're so mindbendingly powerful and old that they may as well be. It's just possible to get a handle on their loose boundaries, but it requires so many zeroes that it makes everyone involved feel silly. Like trying to measure a supervolcano or a hypercane. Putting numbers to it drives home just how old and powerful these entities are as opposed to "infinite", which the human mind writes off as abstract.

I mean, if Tzeentch is the eldest and the other three have to be at minimum twice Khorne's age, then Tzeentch could have been born before birds had ever evolved on Earth.

It makes you wonder if there was anything before the Old Ones. Canon says they were generally recognized as the first sapient race in the Milky Way, as opposed to the C'tan, who don't count because they only became self aware during the War in Heaven. I can imagine Be'lakor saying the Old Ones asked themselves that same question. At most they found evidence of some giant simultaneous supernova event that sterilized most of the galaxy way back in history but that was it.

Of course, the possibly more mundane explanation is that Tzeentch, Malal, and Nurgle were born when the Realm of Souls were much, much less shitty, and they just never left holes to begin with because their birth went off without a hitch instead of becoming a galactic C-section. None of the lesser races' gods ever dragged planets into the Warp with their birth either.

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>>57999291

>>58001399
I think this works great to sum up the discussion on the Olamic Quietude.

>>58001467
Is the GaBHD a title taken from some canon blurb, or is it something the threads came up with over time? IIRC the term Federation has been tossed around as well to describe DAoT humanity.

>>58001406
This is pretty well thought-out, considering the galaxy-scale Vortex grenade that is the Eye of Terror. It seems that most of the pre-Slaanesh gods came into existence with a lot less nefarious intent and painful birth throes compared to the Young Prince, so most of their ancient birth scars would have been obscured by the cataclysm that began the Age of Strife.

Also have a vague question related to the Tyranid-Imperial fighting and Guardsmen/Navy numbers.
We know the Imperium tends to pull a Kryptmann Line on planets facing the full-might of a Hive Fleet. If it was fighting to defend a planet against a relatively young (weak) Splinter Fleet, how many ships and regiments of Guardsmen would a Hive City be stuffed with? Would there be multiple regiments (if the resources were available) sent to reinforce PDF infantry and naval elements? Could a Splinter Fleet wiped out without resorting to Exterminatus if the Imperium responds quickly enough?

>>58003012
Do they still pull the Kryptmann Line that often? I thought it was still highly controversial beyond mercy killing planets that were gone either way.

I think splinter fleets have been wiped out without resorting to Exterminatus in canon. Trick is making sure all the hive ships are dead so the tyranids don't just show up for round two a few decades later after munching some Dead Worlds and rebuilding their numbers.

Either way, if the Imperium thought it could keep a planet out of tyranid hands without Exterminatus it probably would. Habitable worlds are a limited and valuable resource. Even though the Imperium has terraforming technology (now in multiple flavors), they take centuries or millennia to make a world habitable again. And that's assuming a best case scenario, where the planet doesn't suffer from catastrophic structural failure.

I think the whole thing with the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion is just something that sprung up naturally over time.

>>58003445
They have been beaten in conventional warfare in canon. It's difficult because people instinctively think of them as simple predators but if they get over that they realise how adaptive they and it is possible.

>>58002688
Tzneetch, Malal and Nurgle also came into existence gently over thousands of years and achieved sapience over thousands more. Khorne and Slaanesh were murderfucked into existence relatively quickely, thir births violent and sudden.

>>58002955
It´s...disturbing

Ok. Putting some notes on the sisters:

The original religious order was called "Daughters of the Ancestral Sun" they were somehow related to Ultramar Polytheism?

They were recruited be Vandire. Mostly to have her own praetorian guard full of bling. The vanilla armor can be used in this period? Renamed Adepta Soroditas?

Alicia can´t stomach the growing madness of Gore, the Hydra put her in contact with Thor. They go full rebellion. Alicia forms the Frateris Militia as support troops, the force is (probably) mixed. Thor goes looking for Oscar. Alicia left in charge. The Imperium goes nuts. Alicia Alicia recruit/create the Famolous/Dialogous/Hospitalers?

Thor return. Imperial Palace Gambit. Steward end as the Emprah. Rebellion and incursion cripple the Imperium. The emperor need troops now! Doubs in the guard. Astartes overstrechted. Thunder warrior augmentation given to selected Frateris. SM1AP prototype given to SoB. Imperial guard equipment used initially until exosuit and personal Bolter weapons were more accessible.

Aftermath. Most Thunder warriors retired. Sob ackoleged as viable. Investigation of more advanced forms of SM1AP ongoing, current version SM4AP.

The organization of Alicia renamed Adepta Securitas, Frateris continue as support troops.

>>58002955
Ok. I will say something seriuosly smartass about this image. It seens as something funny, but this can really happen in this AU. We sometimes forget that Eldars are aliens. They don´t necessary understand us. The woman maibe is genuinely triying to help a traumatic comrade, but she dons´t know exactly who. And this end creepi as hell. Who many times something like this has happen in the Imperium?. That just for a cultural/biological different point of view something is fucked beyond recognition.

>>58006075
It's also funny how in this timeline you can see how Eldar have gotten more human and human have gotten more Eldar through cultural osmosis.

In Eldar you can sed it in how they don't quite have the stick up their ass after 10,000 years (even though it is still there to some degree and likely always will be) an attitude you can gradually see over Imperial history.

Humans? Well, look at all the examples of "enlightened self-interest" in this timeline, which increase over time and occur even between humans. As in, doing something considered ethically good that also ends up profiting the user. Humans have gotten a bit better at manipulating due to learning how to deal with the Eldar for 10k years, and also a little more arrogant (in a "our civilization is the greatest thing ever" kind of way), especially if you listen to the Tarellians and the Tau.

They're both well within the range of mindsets of both species, but it's interesting to note how the interaction has changed them.

>>58004941
I think it was decided Knights/Daughters of the Ancestral Sun were a non-Ultramar heliocentric religion, if only to keep things from being disproportionately about Ultramar and humans have been praising the sun since the beginning of recorded history.

Alicia was sent by Vandire to kill Thor, Thor knew ahead of time and won Alicia to his side through charisma and appealing to her better nature. This was a sign of how Thor did things and an indicator of how he would get the rebellion ball rolling. Alicia definitely was getting sick of Vandire's brutality beforehand. Don't remember how much the Hydra was involved.

Non-militant orders would be established way after Civil War and the Securitas being established as an institution, if at all. Still up in the air which non-militant orders even exist. Dialogous have no real reason to exist in-universe and many reasons not to. Famulous could work with some tinkering, though other suggestions have been proposed (Order of the Old Tree). Hospitaliers at least have a good suggested origin that fixes issues with Valkyries.

>>58004941
>>58007246
Actually we can put the NM orders in the setting whithout much problems. Just expanding the nature of the Securitas.

In vanilla the ecclesiarchy, is a tool of social control. So...We can do the same. The Securitas is not only a part of the Inquisition, but a full Adepta. Remember that the job of the Sisters, is inner police. So, we have the M orders as the executor arm. They put down rebellions, low intesity conflicts and give muscle to the others Adepta. This is done because the Guard and Astartes, are overkill, and the Arbitres are not really prepared for this sort of situations. Especially in the most development and protected worlds were the necesity of limited firepower but more training is needed.

The NM have a more social and subtle job. Control and influence the society, looking for dangerous teachings and behaviors. The Famulous rise as a AdBio project, but his job to look after the nobility, was hinder because..well AdBio. After being absorved be the Securitas they change. The nobility will not accept close scrutiny, but saying no, it´s no exactly proper. So the place of Castellan is given to this well educated profesional. Were they can do their job, help the house and just plain simple being helpful. All win.
The Dialogous can be born as a department of the Iterators. And indeed the two groups can co-exist. The job of the It-guys is help in uplift, probably the sort of project, that need the help of several Administratum departments. The Dialogous in the meantime work looking after teaching and entertainment in the most develotment world, with the occasional mission in lesser worlds. Her job complex as fuck. Looking after all the things that can be subverted and used to corrupt the Imperium.
The Hospitaliers can continue whithout much changes, really. As and spin-off of the M orders, they are combat medics and disaster relief workers. They are the humanitarian? wing of the Imperium always ready to jump.

>>58008204
(Cont)

At last i must say that the most reasonable is doing the NM mixed, maibe with the Hospitaliers having more females, because SoB cross-training. The SoB will be and All-female force thanks to the augmentation.

The Frateris Militia continue as was talked as less trained support personal. In the case of the M orders, they will be more trained in combat. But if the SoB need really help they will call the PDF, Guard or the Astartes.

>>58007008
Ok..Some cross cultural osmosis.

"We you wear that?"
"Because is my armor?"
"Yeah..i..know..it´s just..hmm..that..hmm..it have to much bling"
"I don´t understand, it was handcrafted and given to me be our bonesinger, is and expression of his art"
"Well..is..pretty..but..well..i wear green. The officers wear green. There a thousand of guys wearing green. You wear a black engraved brilliant armor"
"Oh..I see your point..Hmm"
"Come on. Let´s trow some green paint, and try to mute the bling. Seriusly is blingding..je..understand..bling.ding..je..je"

Later.."For Vaul! What have you doing to my art"
"Is Green"

>>58008810

>Like comm'on, do you wanna be target practice???

>...I WAS on the path of the Dancer.

>>58007246
Order of the Old Tree is just one of many orders under the umbrella of the Famulous.

>>58008217
It still raises the question of why diplomats and "people who keep planetary governors from doing something too stupid" come from an overwhelmingly female branch of government though. Militant branches have the excuse of increasingly specialized augments and Hospitaliers are technically not gender specific (aside from orders like the Valkyries, but that is because they use augments), but their founder was a Sister and they have a higher proportion of women because Sisters who can't fight but want to contribute to the war effort tend to end up there or in other non-militant orders.

>>58008217
>>58010387
That is the reasoning to make the NM mixed. The securitas augmentation is sex-locked, but the NM don´t really need that.

>>58000456
We have a bit of writefaggatory about her but not a proper writeup.

>>58008810
There was a suggestion way back in an old thread of Exarchs listening to music before battle. I can see the Eldar showing interest in some aspects of human culture.

In terms of music, strangely the music they seem to like the most are things like opera and jazz, or whatever the 41st millennia equivalents of those are. They like the emotion, the passion put into the work, and consider the performance almost more important than the music (kind of like...I think it's Noh theater? It's not about what you do, it's about how you do it?). Eldar have kind of this love-hate relationship with passion. On the one hand they are an artsy and passionate species by nature, on the other hand letting that run wild is what led to their current predicament.

There was a mention that some young eldar saw Vulkan as this great exotic paladin, especially because he fills a combat role that none of the Phoenix Warriors did. That said, these are mostly eldar who have never met Vulkan personally and are only hearing about him secondhand through other species (mostly humans) who are gushing about how awesome and friendly he is. Any such eldar who actually did meet Vulkan would be profoundly disappointed.

There are probably other cultural aspects that the different species find interesting about each other. Sometimes there's overlap, sometimes there's not. Like kinebrach and their love of metal composition. Kinebrach art probably involves a lot of the emotion the artist was feeling at the time it was made, which the eldar get, but to other races it feels too abstract (except to people who like that kind of stuff). Most xenos art to the Tau looks bland and doesn't have the right color balance since they see into the UV spectrum.

And then it varies between individuals. What someone from Saim-Hann or Chogoris likes is going to be different from Alaitoc or Old Earth.

>>58009720
Wasn't Order of the Old Tree AdBio?

>>58012117
Yes. It has been talked that the order is Adbio proyect. That is one reason to say that the Famolous can have the same origin.

Ok. this is another vignette, in my ongoing work of triying to write something about a Demon Breaker aprentice. This are the consequences of attack a DE barge with a force sword.

The room was bathed in blood and guts. The Kabal has fallen into disarray after the dead of the Archon, and now they were wiped be the new arrival."I give up, stop". The witch just stood over the kneeled vatborn."Oh.. And why I must?". The Eldar looks up to the woman, thinking quickly in a way to just survive."Because.. look.. HM.. I know the true reasons of the raid" Smiling in what pass for a candid way in a sadistic monster."Ok..i feel merciful.. talk". Wiping blood from his bodysuit he talk quickly."Because, he was looking for something.. Eh.. I don´t know exactly what.. wait.. wait.. It was something powerful, a.. uh.. Who is called?.. Hm..A Demon Breaker was there looking for the same, he take it" She stood thinking."Are you talking about that mon-keigh boy that destroy yours barge?". Whit trepidation he begins to talk"Yeah, right. He just destroys it with a sword. And then rip apart the Archon with his sorcery. It was incredible. He wasn´t even a full fledge Astartes. The only explication is that whatever was that, he takes it. And.. and I know where he is". She walks slowly to the throne."Ok.. You have an opportunity to take me to this.. kid. Let´s see, what was so important to your old master. But remember, I Folnesh are your new Archon.. Jajaja"
"I must say, that is surprising that your plan was successful". Muffle sounds."Yes. Indeed, it must be painful. Bones, inner organs, massive loss of blood. You are lucky that the remained PDF kills that abomination before kicking you to death". Painful gurgles."I wasn´t expecting that, my apprentice. It was a simple supply run. Well, you have demonstrated that I haven´t chosen badly. Isnt´it. Don´t worry, I don't really think we meet more in the near future"

>>58012329
You are right. It started out as Securitas but was changed. They do retain close ties to the Securitas.

>>58001399
How many systems should the Quietude have?

Also are the civilians to adopt into the Imperium or are they all broken?

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>>58002955

>>58015537
The Quietude are said to have only one conventionally habitable world and a bunch of Dead Worlds they use for resources. Thing is they punch waaay above their weight class (almost borderline DaoT tech, or at the very least between DaoT tech and Imperium given their extensive use of advanced A.I.) that they don't need the numbers.

As for redeemability, Russ thought the plebs, particularly the women and children, could be redeemed. That said he may not have understood how the Quietude worked. There are no true children, every mind is uploaded into the network as soon as they are able from a brain-in-a-simulator. Their women fight alongside the men, given that they are all engrams for whom gender is just a personal concept. They could even all be compromised because they are all linked through a single network. They are Nazi Borg, after all.

The Quietude are also sitting on a huge trove of DaoT knowledge in canon. The Imperium doesn't seem to know about it (in canon Russ used it to perform a colony drop before he knew what it was and wished he hadn't destroyed it). It's not an STC by a long shot, but it's enough that the AdMech would be REEEE-ing even louder than they already are if they knew about it.

Bump

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Here’s a question. Did the other two members of the Triarchy survive to M41? The Silent King would have filled the position with cronies loyal to him when he sentenced the two previous triarchs to death, but said cronies would have probably also been some of his greatest generals that he could trust and the closest thing he had to friends.

The knee-jerk assumption is that Imotekh and Anrakyr are the other two triarchs, given how they already seem to form a triumvirate with Szarekh. However, thinking about it some more, I was almost thinking that it might work better if the other two members of the Triarchy didn’t survive until M41, instead being lost to the ravages of time. Imotekh and Anrakyr are at best unofficial triarchs raised to the position by the Silent King to fill the void created by losing his greatest generals.

It has a good effect of showing just how big the scale of the Necron Star Empire was and how bad things could have been. If the other two triarchs were lost, this could mean that up to two-thirds of the Necron forces were lost due to attrition over the course of 65 million years (and conveniently explains why any fight with an Empire that could stand up to the Old Ones plus their servitor races [albeit with C’tan help] wouldn’t inevitably end in a complete curbstomp for the Imperium like the Old Ones gave the Necrontyr, especially given that humanity and the Eldar are far from the height of their power). The Imperium thinks it has it bad with Szarekh and the Star Empire they know walking around, but it could have been so much worse.

>>58016590
Also, since they're all full cyborgs and uploads they can make much greater use of dead worlds on account of not needing trivialities like 'air', 'water', 'food', 'temperatures above freezing and below boiling', and other such weak things for weaklings.

>>58019287
I think they died in the later stages of the Old One war. Silent King never bothered replacing them because he does not share.

>>58020113
We don't want to make them too OP.

And it is at this stage of the war just Fenrisians vs Borg+Strogg. We start making them AI gods and we will have to wojder why they aren't ruling the galaxy.

bamp

>>58021240

Maybe their god-tier stuffs requires Adamantium, as all other proper DaoT stuffs are - things they don't have but the Imperium do even if its just a bit. Thus, justify their raids into the Imperium in one sweep too.

>>58024483
Or they could just be broken monsters doing it because sadism is the only thing that makes them feel good or they just don't have a reason not to.

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>>58024483
>>58025468
I figure both, they're horrible little machine men that like to hurt meatbags and think nothing of it, they are more interested in building their own Dyson swarm than conquering the galaxy, and even within that goal they lack the Adamantium that is needed for the superstructures of those vessels, let alone the Neutronium they would need for a sphere, ring, or even major space elevators. I bet that last bit is something the Mechanicus would taunt them with, despite not actually having the galaxy's only Neutronium foundry their sole control either.

Also, I remember some discussion of including the homebrew planet and guardsmen of Hua Yuan in the setting, and was curious if it ever made it into the notes or drafts.

>>58026263
I would say no, given our general aversion to donut steel in this AU. Also Hua Yuan is one of the most laughably poorly done things /tg/ has done.

So are we going with brain in jars or full human simulation or a combination of the two?

>>58026263
>>58026557
It did. It was mentioned in the Kryptman writeup.

I think it was supposed to be more in the sense of "Viatnemese-esque hive city that got invaded and are ANGRY, ANGRY ABOUT TYRANIDS and figured out how to cook them" than the Kowloon Walled City concept. So it might be better to say they are inspired by the Hau Yuan than a straight port. Maybe change the name and rework it more like we did with the Ark Ship.

>>58020992
First ones Szarekh executed Because he's Space Octavian + Space Qin Shi Huangdi + Space Tutankhamen + Space Ramses. He would have had them replaced for the sake of appearances. The way the Triarchy works per canon is the other two kings don't rule but act as advisors and the left and right hands to the Silent King. In return they obey no authority but the SK himself. So Szarekh wouldn't have had to share. Though in canon I think you are right that they did get killed in the War in Heaven.

>>58027302
I would vote uploading, to explain their population problems and to make the more distinct from the AdMech, but in canon I think they were brain in a jar.

>>58027511
Can simulated human minds breed?

>>58028497
Like you will create and IA. Esencially they are the same.

>>58028497
>>58028563
The other suggestion was that they clone new brains and upload them. Both ideas have their pros and cons. On the one hand making new citizens as A.I. from scratch might defeat their claims of being the only true remnant of the GaBHD. On the other hand the Men of Iron and Men of Gold were seen as part of humanity during their time and all of the cybernetics available during the DaoT would have made the lines between Man of Iron and Man of Stone very blurry (Men of Stone with cybernetics so advanced they could link to the Iron Mind network, Men of Iron with computerized brains in fleshy bodies).

>>58020113
>>58021240
Any post-organic society is going to laugh at the restrictions organic ones have on them (food, water, etc.) by definition. All they really need after a certain point is energy and matter. That's why we have them restricted to a few worlds, any more and they start getting traction. The Borg and Strogg are only such a threat in their respective universes because they are obsessed with harvesting novel biological components (rather than just growing their own). Or look at the Geth in Mass Effect, all they want to do is build their Dyson Sphere and be left alone.

What should be the kill ratio between the Olamic Quietude and the Fenrisians?

>>58029813 (cont.)
By contrast, things that we as an organic society think are trivial are going to be serious business to a non-organic society. One of these is bandwidth. Computing speed = power to an A.I. The Quietude may have maximized how much they can compute based on their energy inputs. They only control a handful of worlds, and they don't seem to have the resources to build a Dyson sphere (so in a sense they’re basically A.I. techno-barbarians). As each Quietude individual dies the remaining individuals get more processing power. You could make more individuals, but that would mean the remaining ones have to give up power, and they don't want that. Back in the DaoT you could just make more processing power but now you’re quarantined on your own little world. So you essentially have a situation like Rome right before the fall of the Republic. All of the resources of society are increasingly held by a small number of individuals. At least there aren't populist riots like in Rome.

That doesn't change the fact that they are still petty little machine men who have very petty goals. A DaoT Man of Iron like Tiberius would take one look at them and go "01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101".

>>58029844
The only problem with that is that they soon become unstoppable. If they can make processors out of silicon and use their home star as a power source then they don't even need a planet to live on at all.

Where as if they are keeping an organic brain alive it limits them into something no world breaking. Possibly they kept some measure of organic brain because it was more resistant to deamonic possession, having witnessed the Iron Minds and their fall and being able to remember it better than most others.

It could also explain a measure of their towering arrogance. If they are born human then to them meat is a stage that you grow out of, like learning to walk. They see the rest of humanity as genuinely retarded. Disgustingly so. We to them are child people that can't grow up and worse refuse to grow up. We are to them dead skin to be discarded.

Their "leader" is a giant brain in a jar on Olamic. It is composed of their best and brightest, or at least brightest and most popular. Upon death or if sufficient seniority is achieved they are opened up and scooped out of their bodies, placed into the vat, hooked up to a life support machine and by delicate golden thread connected to everyone else in the tank and a large data-loom. The data-loom is then connected to the data-looms of the other tanks. Together they make up the leadership of the Quietude. Testicles and ovaries are extracted from the prepubescent before their brains are cut out and grown independently elsewhere for the cultivation of the next generation, assuming they are free of deformity.

It also ensures that the subject can't become weak by developing too much of a moral structure or question too much and start to unduly empathize with the lesser castoffs in the rest of the galaxy. They cultivate good and useful little psychopaths and then give them Terminator bodies.

>>58030795
They torture those that they capture because they find it funny and they can't think of a reason not to. They literally can't think of a reason. Despite not having rejuvenents they can live for centuries with no flesh beyond brain to grow old and wither and even that can be patched up to an extent with tech before they deem termination a necessity. In that time they don't learn empathy and eventually the part of the brain responsible for that just atrophies away.

The ones currently fighting the Space Wolves are all centuries old and do not give a fuck beyond securing their own future, a future they see as only attainable with them as the only heirs to humanity. It might be considered folly given that they don't have the numbers until you consider the method of reproduction that they employ. Their population's only hindrance is resources. Each pairing can potentially produce millions of new Olamics so long as they have that many iron wombs to grow them in. If they start to gain momentum they could quickly snowball into a genuine threat to the Imperium as a whole.

They weren't quite this bad when Russ first encountered them. It was suspected that they still maintained a "breeding population" of almost baseline humans and didn't have toys quite as good as they do now. Also they are far more aggressive now. It is suspected that they underwent a planned population increase in preparation for the war with the Imperium. The Think-Tank council increased in proportion to this and the data-loom network hit critical mass and became sapient in it's own right, an A.I. made of organic base components and lesser iterations. Although the Olamics would normally be aghast at the notion of being ruled over by something not one of them they aren't. It won't let them be. The wires in their brains used to ensure compliance made it all to easy to change their minds for them and it influences their beliefs and moods and has enslaved them from the inside out.

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>>58031060
The composite A.I. is a creature born of their sadistic cruelty, petty hatreds and arrogance pooled into something truly and inhumanly monstrous. The effects on Olamic society has been profound as the society has been essentially hollowed out. They don't really make art anymore, they don't make music, they don't write or read anymore. Their society is directed towards one thing and one thing only, to propagate and spread and usurp the stars from other and lesser forms of humanity.

The composite A.I. may dream of godhood, it is unknown although it may achieve it or something like it as a byproduct if they are victorious. However only Njal Stormcaller, the most learned of the Space Wolves recognizes this as a possibility. He hasn't raised the subject; they can't fight any harder than they already are and everyone has enough to worry about.

The only real advantage the Wolves seem to have is that the Quietude has never had a documented case of psychic ability.

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>>58031295
The reasoning for brain-in-a-jar sounds a bit better, but the A.I. explanation sounds a lot like a rehash of the Slaugth. As in "you thought it was the Olamic Quietude, but it was I, an artificial intelligence".

Maybe have it so the Olamic Quietude are controlled by a collective gestalt. A hivemind formed by the collective connections of the Quietude's minds with one another. During Russ' time it was "only" akin to an Internet in everyone's head (though they were still genocidal little shits), now it is altering and guiding individuals' mental states so they are only what the Quietude want.

Though this might be too similar to the Necrons and their "have individual personalities but have a massive backdoor through which their minds can be altered at will and where the individual ends and the programming begins is very vague". The only difference seems to be there is a single individual who can alter the network at will in the Necron's case, whereas the Quietude would be affected by their own network like the Tau Ethereals in canon.

We should also probably have some reason why Exterminatus doesn't work on them, because otherwise the Steward would have just told Russ "chill, I got this" and then hit them with a cyclonic torpedo. Especially since they only have a few worlds. If the Quietude are too aggressive to the Imperium the Imperium will just go "fuck it" and wipe them out anyway. Or pull something out of Mars or Yme-Loc like they did with the Rangda Abomination.

>>58032797
Does the Imperium know about all the DAoT stuff left on the Quietude worlds? If so, they might be valuable enough to stop them from just blowing the planets up, and there might be some screeching from the AdMech as well.

>>58033148
It might be seen as just as big of a reason to wipe them out. Keep them from having their mitts on anything big. On the other hand in canon the DaoT stuff was in part cultural information than tech, and it could be argued that the tech they had was what they originally used to get to their current state, and they couldn't go much further beyond that without inventing things wholesale.

>>58032797
>what the Quietude want
I'm picturing a horrible mental being that is nothing but that bleak society's vicious, inventive id and its arrogant, self aggrandizing superego all pooled together.

Also, the Quietude, or at least Olamic individuals, seem like ripe targets for corruption, both by the ruinous powers and by the C'tan sires. I doubt the Quietude would have the same objections that the Imperium does with vampires in their midst, and they lack the cultural baggage and experience that makes the Necrons hate them, so its quite possible that Strigoi are prominent in their politics and Nosferatu among their officers. On the other hand, they would probably not welcome the presence of the Golden Pyramid, no matter what technology is on offer.

Additionally, what do they think of the NSE?

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>>58036371
>I'm picturing a horrible mental being that is nothing but that bleak society's vicious, inventive id and its arrogant, self aggrandizing superego all pooled together.

By the throne how horrifying. It makes it worse when you realize that the Quietude brought this all on themselves. They could have treated peacefully with the Imperium and probably have been brought into the fold as a survivor civilization. Heck, given their Dark Age technology the Imperium would have probably held off the AdMech like they did for Savlar long enough for the AdMech to stop "REEE-ing" and start wondering why they had a "why boner".

>Additionally, what do they think of the NSE?

Might see them as some mythical ideal to be attained, might have their cogitator so far up their waste port that they just see them as competition.

Necron opinions might range from to "you people are gross. We had this happen to us by accident and you did this to yourselves on purpose" to "congratulations, you are marginally less primitive than everyone else".

Eventually though, if they found out about Szarekh's plans, it would result in conflict. Quietude wants to die about as much as everyone else.

>>58031295
>>58032797
Developing the brain-in-a-jar idea was a good choice. However, the idea of the think-tank-turned-AI forcing the Quietude to accept it does sound pretty similar to the Iron Mind on Rangda/Silent King being made default admin over the NSE.

Not sure if this would fit with either, but what if the composite AI retained some of the personalities of the people incorporated into it? Being part-Quietude's best and brightest, it believes it is the best candidate to accomplish the Quietude's goals, and the Quietude tell themselves that their Think-tank council couldn't make a mistake, and accept the slight change in leadership (those that disagree quietly suffer the fate in the original write-up).

According to the wikia article the Quietude were protected from orbital bombardment by artificially-strengthened ice caps, and odds are their naval fleet would wreak havoc on any Navy fleet sent to escort a ship armed with Exterminatus weapons into range. And considering the superior technological level of the Quietude, it's possible they might intercept and destroy the big fat target that a cyclonic torpedo is before it even reaches the atmosphere.

>>58033148
The Nobledark Imperium probably has a very strong suspicion of DAoT remnants on the Quietude homeworld, but in canon Russ dropped the space library that contained the data collected by the Quietude on top of them (implying they didn't know about the loot). The Nobledark Imperium would've figured out that they don't have game-changing weaponry (otherwise they would've felt the pain already), but they don't know exactly what the Quietude has on hand.

>>58036371
It seems like the Quietude is just as xenophobic as canon Imperium is, they'd probably be disgusted by the inferior, flesh-obsessed Chaos Eldar and would be triggered over being manipulated by non-human minds like C'tan shards. Ironic, considering both the composite AI and the gestalt mind-control writing.

What sort of weaponry should they prefer?

>>58037004

Maybe we can draw comparisons between the Quietude and the Fall of the Eldars: an utterly arrogant race with montrous and in-understandable morality and debauchery seeking to create their own 'God', seeing all others as 'toys'/'things to exterminate', they can also represent the utterly xenophobic and grimdark aspects of the Human race and the must-remove-fleshy buts of the Necrons and the Society>Individuality gone wrong to the Tau.

>The Quietude as the -ultimate- wrong of all major civilized races: Necrons, Tau, Human and Eldar, all roled into one and much more terrifyingly they don't scream/screach to a halt seeing this path but cackles like madmen and speeds up.

Can someone remind me why we have the Quietude around in the current day in this AU when they were blown up during the GC in canon?

>>58038385
Oscar was unwilling to expend vast amounts of men and resources to conquer a few barely habitable rocks when there was the option of quarantining them for the rest of time.

>>58038663
This but also they don't have Navigators. Therefore their ships are slow as balls and the Imperium has the edge in large scale interstellar conflicts. Fucking awful as they were they were a containable problem.

>>58037885
Basic troops should be armed with things not dissimilar in effectiveness and sophistication to the mid to high end Tau military.

The difference being that whilst a stealth suit is to the Tau a specialist piece of elite gear it's pleb tier to the Quietude. It's also a body rather than a suit.

>>58037997
I wouldn't say that they are into debauchery in the traditional sense of it. They haven't got enough left to be hedonistic with for one thing. They enjoy casual sadism because it's funny but that's about it. They are less about dick stroking and more about ego stoking.

Oddly the more we write about them the more they seem to end up like the Ideal Masters from the Elder Scrolls but more aggressive.

>>58031295
The composite A.I. should be noticeably smarter than a regular human but not massively so. Most of the bulk of it is dedicated to storage. It knows a lot but doesn't think super fast compared to the A.I. of yesteryear.

It's also debatable how many, if any, of the Olamics know about it. It grew without their intent and might just decide it doesn't want them knowing about it.

How widespread is the belief in the Galactic. Eldar. Conspiracy.

>>58041330
Not super seriously widespread. It is Luther's lasting cultural legacy

Just how many worlds have the Fenrisians settled and to what extent do the Space Wolves have on them?

>>58043627
I think we had about 200 Fenrisian worlds? And the Space Wolves have significant but far from absolute influence over them. There's some stuff on Fenrisian government and colonies somewhere on the notes page, I think, I'll see if I can dig it up.

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>>58038385
Out of universe the Quietude came about when someone suggested are there any independent Survivor civilizations that have not joined the Imperium. The idea was mentioned that there was some group of highly technologically advanced humans that uploaded their minds that the Imperium wiped out for using A.I. I’m pretty sure we were confusing the Auretian Technocracy with the Quietude.

The idea was that the Quietude didn’t want to join and were aggressively isolationist, but were so technologically advanced it wouldn’t be worth fighting them and not aggressive enough to justify the cost of wiping them out (also to keep said game-changing tech out of the hands of the Imperium). Q’orl or Dorhai evil as opposed to Laer evil or Saroshi evil. So the Imperium goes “fine, enjoy being alone” and leaves them to be technocratic Space North Korea. The tension with the Quietude is that they can into technology and the Imperium is going to eventually have to deal with the problem before they become a bigger problem.

Then we did some more digging and found out that the Quietude are more aggro than we thought and their history with the Wolves was discovered. So the idea was proposed of Nazi Borg versus Space Vikings. The whole “need to deal with them now” is currently biting the Imperium on the ass because the galaxy is due to erupt into the War in Heaven 2.0 any day now and the Imperium cannot afford to have the Quietude waiting in the wings to swoop in and secure the kill.

>>58045933
In-universe the reasoning is the Quietude just aren’t worth the resources. The Olamic Quietude and Imperium are at a stalemate. Quietude has much more advanced technology but Imperium can always drown them in bodies and is no slouch in tech themselves. Imperium would win but it would be a pyrrhic victory for almost no gain. To paraphrase a canon general, Oscar isn’t afraid to spend lives but he never wants to waste them. As long as the Quietude stayed within their little box

In canon the Quietude had to go during the Great Crusade regardless of how advanced they were. They could have been nice people like the Interex offering a complete STC to the Imperium, and they would have to go regardless. Canon Emperor’s goals for the Great Crusade were to unite all of humanity under his aegis and prune any variation that deviated from his intended end-goal of humanity. There could be no “alternative option” for humans outside the Imperium (*cough*Tau*cough*). There could be no available alternative path for human evolution.

Oscar’s intent with the great Crusade is to return humanity to its former glory of the Dark Age of Technology. Gives zero shits about what humanity looks like as long ass it plays nice, especially since he is a Man of Gold and would expect some divergent evolution due to isolation. If the Quietude want to be dicks about it and attack people then enjoy getting Orked the next time a huge WAAAGH! comes about.

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>>58037997
I can see it.

Control freaks > Humanity in general
Xenophobic and think their way is the only right way > grimdark!Imperium
Horrendously arrogant > Eldar
Controlled through societal engineering and brainwashing to subvert individuality > Tau, particularly grimdark!Tau
Cyborgs/robots with compromised individuality > Necrons
Hive mind > Tyranids

>>58039297
The 40k wiki and Lexicanum have some information on their weapons

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

Seems they have a thing for meltas and gravity hammers on their heavy infantry.

>>58037025
That's why perhaps we should make it more like the canon Tau. The Quietude are conditioned from birth through psychological and cybernetic indoctrination through their social network hive mind (I'm not joking, they call it a social network in canon [Quietwitter?]). This includes the leaders, who are the ones that give the go-ahead for the indoctrination (or are they some kind of cyber-democracy or consensus?). It's become a loop, they don't even know that they've compromised their own thought processes.

>>58045857
There's some stuff that isn't on there yet, like how Fenris wants to petition for "quasi-Survivor Civ" status once the current threat level goes down, and some of the societal phenomena (e.g., Fenrisian culture is aggressive by others standards, but it's more "pistols at dawn" with legal and formalized dueling).

How the Olamic Quietude view xenos?

Do the Olamics actually have a working (semi-working) STC or did they just inherit a shit load of old printouts and DaoT Haynes Manuals?

Given that the STCs were digital and they don't use computers other than brain-jars it would seem that they just inherited physical copies of how to into tech.

Mars could be secretly wanting a war to go through the scrap. Their toys and trinkets are pre Dragon becoming active, their information therefore without it's influence but still human in origin and so pure.

>>58041330
>>58042660
It varies. As a minority group within the Imperium that have a reputation for being manipulative and a very real ability to see the future, the Eldar are always going to be the target of conspiracy theories and supremacist groups.

Then you have the conspiracy theories around certain individuals. It was mentioned before that there is a school of thought among conspiracy theorists that tries to pin Eldrad as the root cause of everything. Everything. Ranging from the events he actually was involved with (Raid on Nurgle's Mansion) to ones he was most certainly not (appearance of Oscar, beginning of the Age of Strife, who ate the last pastry in the office. Heck, there are probably a few Eldar who think Eldrad has planned everything. It doesn't help that Eldrad likes to act all-knowing and mysterious.

Isha was mentioned to have been portrayed as a manipulative Lady MacBeth kind of figure by anti-Eldar groups early in Imperial history. Isha and Oscar might have a few of the old vids around for sheer comedy value. Thing is, Isha really is manipulative, but her goals are pretty transparent. She's concerned with rooting out corruption and threats to her adoptive family, like a taproot slowly destroying a stone over dozens of years. And while she is much more subtle and willing to play the long game than Oscar, Oscar is perfectly willing to be manipulative as well.

Then there are people like Luther, but Luther thinks everyone's out to get him. He's not wrong, but he's got the cause and effect backwards.

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>>58049358
Nobody knows. In canon they stored all of the cultural and technological knowledge they had (which included quite a bit of DaoT stuff) in an artificial satellite orbiting their planet which the wolves used to perform a DIY Exterminatus.

They probably just inherited a lot of old printouts and manuals. Canon strongly suggests the Ark Mechanici, in addition to being A.I., are the STC machines everyone is looking for. As in the Mechanicus are looking for an STC machine while riding around in an STC machine. It's been suggested in this timeline they are merely "just" A.I.s staying hidden for fear of being destroyed to cut down on the ridiculousness (and to not give the Imperium a win button literally under their noses).

>>58049358
I could actually see interesting situations with machine-catholic cyborg spies infiltrating the borg-nazis to steal their secrets, but in doing so compromising their own morals and even some important strictures of design to achieve thie espionage missions. In universe it an interesting way of having these two similar and deeply opposed factions vie against each other, and out of universe it works as something of a historical joke and inspiration.

Just thought of something. We all know how the Imperium measures time (though member states probably do have their own calendars, we know the Voidborn do). Would Crone Eldar measure dates in years before or after their "ascension" (i.e., the Fall)?

>>58053584
They probably don't have much in the way of strict time-keeping at all, since they live on daemon worlds in the Eye of Terror in a constant drug- and bloodlust-addled haze.

>>58053584
Only when sober

In regards to the posts about Cadia last thread, I don’t people quite understand the scale of the Eye of Terror picture that was posted. The Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000 light years, and from the 40k galaxy map the Eye is maybe about 1/20 of the galaxy. So that diameter is 5,000 light years, so even the tiny sliver of real space leading to Cadia as depicted in the picture is probably around dozens of light years wide, whereas for Cadia to be an effective defensive position, passing fleets will need to be in the range of its orbital guns so the corridor really should only be a few million kilometers wide at most. That is several orders of magnitude smaller than what is shown and in the grand scheme of space is ABSURDLY small.

>>58056631
The visible gap might be that wide but the currents of the warp might be horrendously dangerous in all but a much narrower gap.

>>58046290
What other groups are after quasi-Survivor Civilisation status?

>>58057215
Every hive world with it's own protectorate breadbasket of off-world trade partners for one thing.

>>58053584
What is time to an insane immortal?

>>58057215
Pastoral worlds are another. Basically any semi-cohesive ethno-cultural group that spans more than one world. And the Tau and Tarellians will likely throw their political weight behind it, Tau in the hopes that when they start pushing for a seat at the big table the other quasi-Survivor Civs will back them.

And, as pointed out by another anon, the galaxy takes one step closer to Horus' vision. Checkmate, Oscar.

>>58059618
That's another conspiracy theory that could be floating around.

Sons of Horus are a secretive monastic order of the already pretty clannish Void Born. Horus had a different vision of the end game for the Imperium than Oscar. The Imperium is heading towards that end game.

Void Born man all of the, or at least have a hand in all of the, human interstellar travel in the Imperium.

Looks pretty suspicious.

>>58027511
So if the Triarchy is restored who are the other two members?

Has the Necrontyr homeworld been lost?

>>58061265
Most likely. It was a pretty shit planet and the Necrons aren't the sentimental type anyways, so even assuming it wasn't destroyed in the WoH it's most likely abandoned.

>>58061265
Probably. If I was an Old One it would have been tue first target once shit got real.

Also Nightbringer lowered the life expectancy of their sun so after 60+ million years it might have gone out

Necron homeworld could be a lifeless, airless, empty rock orbiting a cold cinder of a dead star if it exists at all

>>58049386
How well know of is Alpharius to the average pleb?

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>>58061265
>>58062588
>>58062596
I was going to say probably for the same reasons (if you were the Old Ones where else would be your first target), though the only question is where would Szarekh have gone into stasis since he wasn't awake the whole time like in canon. In canon Imotekh was considered a minor general among the Silent King's forces but the Sautekh Dynasty has been the center of the Silent King's forces because so many of it's worlds survived.

The Necrontyr seemed to hold onto their homeworld more out of spite than anything else. They could have ditched their shithole homeworld after they developed reliable space travel but stayed there anyway because FUCK YOU PLANET.

Though I always saw the (more internally logical) reason the Necrontyr kept their home planet was because holding it was a sign of prestige and symbol of legitimacy. The dynasty that controls the original Necrontyr homeworld is the one that rules the people, even though in practice it's a complete white elephant.

>>58063824
So from what world should SK rule?

>>58060669
As was mentioned above Imotekh and Anrakyr already seem to be forming an impromptu triumvirate with Szarekh at the head. Imotekh seems to be Szarekh’s go-to beatstick, though the Silent King seems to be facepalming half the time at his complete lack of subtlety. Anrakyr seems to be the velvet glove to Imotekh’s iron fist, going around waking up all the dynasties in the name of the Silent King so they’ll be willing to go when Szarekh says the word.

We really need more on the Star Empire’s Necrons. So far the independent dynasties (Maynarch, Gidrim, Solemnace, Orikan) have been more fleshed out than the Star Empire. It’s a real missed opportunity, especially since the Necrons aren’t faceless masses in this timeline despite being post-organic and post-individual. They have individuality, but only so far as Szarekh allows it and it advances the interests of the Star Empire. They’re like Fantasy Lizardmen, they’re singly-mindedly devoted to a goal (restoring the Necrontyr to their former glory/the Great Plan) but they have different individual opinions on the best ways to do it and are capable of having their own opinions so long as they don’t conflict with the end goal. The only difference is you have Szarekh around as a final arbiter in the event the Necrons start squabbling with each other more than shooting the enemy. Plus many of them have their own quirks they developed during the Great Sleep which Szarekh can’t override directly without compromising them and has to work around (e.g., Imotekh’s obsession with dueling).

Indeed, I think we’re low on characters the Star Empire can use. So far there’s definitely Imotekh and Anrakyr, and there were suggestions that Valgul and Illuminor Szeras work for the Silent King. Orikan seems to work for the Silent King through clever wording of any order Szarekh gives him to make it seem like he obeys, but we all know what he’s up to and Szarekh probably suspects something is amiss as well.

>>58065817
Do they keep pets/slaves/subjects from the lesser races?

Szarekh is obviously going to kill them the moment the big red Cadian button gets dickslapped but do they keep them around on their worlds in the meantime?

>>58066989
The Altymhor Dynasty keeps organic slaves. They one conquered and enslaved a Hive World. This is literally all that is known about them.

In interesting potentially Nobledark-related fluff about other Necron dynasties, the Arotepk Dynasty in canon got wrecked by what we would identify as a Wyvern.

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>>58065817
>ut they have different individual opinions on the best ways to do it and are capable of having their own opinions so long as they don’t conflict with the end goal
To add to that, there was mention that Anrakyr isn't the only Necron that's congenial whenever he has no order not to be. An Imperial diplomat might even be able to walk around a Pharon's halls between (non)negotiations and strike up conversations with the porters and guards, and while they would seem all very much alike with their only variations being proclivities and interests that align perfectly with their roles, they would nearly all be lucid, charming, learned, loyal, and perhaps even opinionated, though again, only inasmuch as it flavors their loyalty and diligence.

>>58067075
>They one conquered and enslaved a Hive World
I'd imagine this is rather contentious, particularly considering the Silent King's 'One Trillion citizens' request. If its not the flashpoint to set off the cold war between the Imperium and NSE then it would definitely be the galactic equivalent to the Iranian hostage thing.

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>>58067209
This kind of reminds me of something I was thinking about regrading the Necron rank-and-file.

I keep thinking of a situation kind of like the episode “Dalek” in Doctor Who. A bunch of Imperials try and capture a Necron warrior to see how it ticks. The warrior gets loose, as you might expect, and the Imperials run away and shut a blast door behind them opened by a manual override, hoping that the Necron is too mindless to figure out how to open a door or do any kind of problem-solving without gauss weaponry. The door is watched by a security camera and the Imperials, being a curious lot, pile behind the monitor on the other end to see if the Necron will try to bang on the door or perhaps just wander about mindlessly now that every living target has left the room.

And then the warrior slowly turns to look at the camera. And everyone present realizes that there’s actually intelligence behind those robot eyes. It doesn’t just see the camera as an inanimate object. It knows that there are people behind the lens watching it. And then it slams the manual override button with its hand, not breaking its gaze with the camera the entire time, as if to make a point.

The Necron warriors aren’t silent because they have no mind. They are silent because they have nothing worth saying. What words does a farmer say to the wheat? What does an exterminator have to say to the vermin they kill? Their minds are simple, yes, but only because they are given only as much thinking power as needed to solve their current situation. Frontline soldiers in firing lines don’t require people skills (though there are plenty of Necrons whose minds really have degraded that far due to repeated reanimation protocols).

>>58067281
It would probably be after the two started shooting at each other. And if it was, Szarekh's first command upon finding out would be "your slaves, give them to me".

>>58063564
Probably not well known. Most of the data seems to have been scrubbed on them some time after their death. It's known A and O were primarchs and had a hand in setting up the Inquisition, but that's about it. Everything else is contradictory.

The fact that Omegon exists seems to be pretty well known, though. Of course, when you have two individuals claiming to be some variant of A and O it doesn't matter if people know. Just having two similar-looking people show up is enough to make people nervous while not tipping your hand.

>>58071793
well recall that there's a related individual that shows up calling himself Alpharius Omegon around the time of Unification, and Fulgrim's contacts in the Merikan operation went by Ozzy and Ames.

Bomp

I was reading some of the Primarch bios and Kelbor Hal is apparently the host of the tournament of craftsmen in Fulgrim's story, how does that figure into the succession of Archmagos?

>>58072848
You know, looking back at it, it seems pretty obvious that Alpharius and Omegon were sent by the Cabal. Even disregarding any parallels with canon, it's been mentioned several times that the Illuminati and the Hydra don't get along. That leaves the Cabal as the most likely option.

As to why? Look at it from the Cabal's perspective. In this timeline the Imperium is almost everything the Cabal could ever dream of. A unified empire that not only can stand against Chaos but makes it much harder for Chaos to get it's hooks into the most numerous Crusade-era species in the galaxy after Orks. Oscar isn't the canon Emperor, he isn't going to deny the evidence that the Ruinous Powers feed on emotions in addition to beliefs just because the information came from someone other than him and unwittingly set the Chaos Gods up the buffet they wanted like in canon.

Heck in the modern day the Cabal is likely almost indistinguishable from the Imperium in political terms due to the reasonable Chaos-opposing races joining the Imperium, they likely still operate in secrecy for the same reason the Hydra does and to prevent retaliation from Chaos worshippers. All they have to do is provide information through third parties and let the Imperium go to work.

With their limited future-seeing abilities the Cabal would likely see the Imperium's potential. They wouldn't want to wipe out humanity in this timeline. They'd want to boost it up to create a ready made army against Chaos and deny the Great Enemy assets. So they send their best operatives to help things along.

They were expecting something like a galaxy-wide Interex. They didn't count on Eldrad "go big or go home" Ulthran, but then few do.

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>>58074307
Alpharius and Omegon don't seem to be directly associated with the Cabal after they met the Warlord, they seem to have become more independent operatives whose jobs are to make sure contact between the Imperium/Inquisition and the Cabal is going smoothly and to root out problems that threaten the Imperium as a whole that aren't on the Inqusition's radar (hence their own personal wetworks team in the Hydra).

The sad thing is if this is the case, there would be little reason for the Cabal to send John Grammaticus out there. I keep having this idea of Grammaticus getting his mandatory Emperor-related trauma in this timeline when he introduces himself as a liason to the Cabal shortly after Eldrad's explanation of Chaos. Oscar shakes his hand but has this smile on his face like he's trying to hide that he's thinking about the best way to strangle someone and it freaks Grammaticus out. Oscar really is trying to be polite with Grammaticus but he's pissed to the gills that someone has been screwing around with humanity behind his back.

>>58074090
I think it's been said the Fabricator-General during the Great Crusade was an Arkhan Land-like figure with less wanderlust. Actually friendly. Likely the one who died in the Beheading. Replacement didn't crack down on Dark Mechanicus coming back and offering "enlightenment", led to huge clusterfuck on Mars where Kane deposed him during or shortly after the War of the Beast for incompetence.

Or at least that's how I had been trying to keep things straight.

>>58074418
Perpetuals are one of the things we scrubbed from this AU because of how tough they are to fit intelligently into the lore and metaphysics of 40k. There was discussion of trying to make Arvann Stern work, but nothing was ever decided on.

So if John G is still around here, then he’s just a normal human agent, though since A and O don’t need to be turned in this AU, plot wise he’s would mostly be an irrelevant character.

>>58074307
Wasn’t the Cabal run by Eldar in canon? Was Luther right all along?

>>58074658
Cabal may be extinct by 999M41.

May. It could also be that they are just better at hiding.

>>58074418
>>58074658
John Grammaticus could still have been a thing in this AU. He would have been the Stewards contact and representative from the Cabal much as A&Ω were his representatives from The Hydra.

Difference being that The Hydra was something he had extensive contact with prior, may have had some influence with and was an Old Earth born organization. So they got a primarch.

Cabal were an bunch of shadowy and unknown outsiders who he didn't trust as far as he could throw them and Grammaticus was a condescending turd who he didn't like on a personal level and didn't agree with on a political level. Nobody outside the Cabal knew what their end goal was or their exact methods of going about it beyond "kick Chaos in the balls". A sentiment that Oscar, Malcador and Arik all thought was worth going for but not at the price of surrendering all sovereignty and autonomy to an unaccountable shadow government who are less than forthcoming about their methods or where they are willing to draw the line.

Contrary to the Galactic. Eldar. Conspiracy. tinfoil hatters the cabal was not intentionally set up by the eldar and not even the cabal really remember who set it up. It is suspected to have a common origin with the Diasporex but good look proving anything as nobody remembers who started the Diasporex. Eldar being in most of the high positions in the Cabal is just a side effect of the eldar lifespan and one of the reasons nobody is willing to let them become High Lords.

>>58074658
On the subject of Perpetuals I'm still all for putting Justicar Anval Thawn in this AU as a Dark Souls type attrition fighter.

He is not a "Perpetual". Perpetuals do not exist in this AU. Why Thawn keeps respawning is unknown to everybody. He blames the Keeper of Secrets that killed him the first time for no other reason than fuck that guy and that's when it started. Why a Keeper of Secrets would make him effectively immortal is anyone's guess assuming that is even responsible.

The elder webway guides who live on Titan think he might have something to do with their Dead God Dreaming choosing Thawn as a champion and the effect happening slightly before the cause. Slightly being a few thousand years but what is a few millennium to a deity of the dead. This can not be investigated further because it's difficult to investigate something that doesn't exist yet.

Another explanation favoured by the Librarians of the Knights is that it's his own psychic abilities being responsible. They can detect quite substantial potential psychic abilities within him, they wouldn't have let him be a Knight otherwise, but in terms of actual ability he's a fairly law grade telepath by the standards of his brothers. His potential is directed towards resurrection and nothing else. Presumably if his soul was disrupted enough he wouldn't come back, nobody wants to test this.

There are a few in the Inquisition who think he might be unwillingly blessed by Nurgle. It was a Keeper of Secrets who killed him and Nurgle hates Slaanesh for looking at his waifu in a hungry way, there would be some advantage in granting Thawn immortality. It is also in keeping with the usual Nurgle manner of long term planning; do the absolute minimum work and sit around waiting for a beneficial outcome. At some point Thawn will kill more Slaaneshii deamons than Nurglite ones. Or Nurgle couldn't tell the difference between a Grey Knight and a Custodeus and thought that it was Thawn's job to protect m'lady

How many dynasties does the Silent King command the loyalty of?

What should the assets of a typical dynasty be?

How well can gene-stealers hide from psykers? Are eldar-stealers a thing?

>>58077749
In an old thread it was suggested...
>60% controlled by Silent King
>10% independent with a small number vaguely Imperial aligned (Trazyn, Orikan, Zakhndrekh)
>10% Too batshit insane for them to consider any attempts at allying with anyone (Xun'bakyr)
>20% still asleep.

Keep in mind it was a really old thread.

>>58078607
The eldar in canon are said to be able to detect stealers of all four varieties through technology. Yes, even the Exodites. The Tau in canon can detect them as well via the Kroot (one drop of blood can tell you if someone is infected). However it's been pointed out that to detect genestealers you have to find them, and infected civilians are compelled to hide away in the underhives and don't show up for testing. I assume eldarstealers are possible. In a recent Black Library novel a genestealer infected an Avatar of Khaine, but that's just stupid on so many levels.

>>58076030
Hydra seems to be a product of A&Ω. So far we've had no indication it existed beforehand. The main suggestions have been Illuminati or Cabal.

>>58074658
Eldar had members but didn't found it. Eldrad thought they were idiots. One of them in canon was implied to be an Old One (or at least something that old).

>>58079055
Should the Cabal still be active in 999M41?

Also what was the old thing as old as an Old One?

>>58080090
Not an Old One. Be'Lakor is the last of them, it's how he justifies being heir to the galaxy.

>>58079055
>Orikan
Orikan isn't Imperial aligned, he's the one with the Deceiver shard and the magical pyramid scheme in the scheming magical pyramid. If he's aligned with anyone besides himself it's the Deceiver, which is just another way of saying he's aligned with himself.

>>58079055
>So far we've had no indication it existed beforehand.
the last time they came up it was suggested that A&O were affiliated with Terrawatt itself and the organizing of Malcador's original expedition to the former capital of the GaBHD, and that there are superficial similarities between some of the Hydra's symbols and seals and the symbols of the Terrawatt clan (and also the long running Cthonian project).

>>58080090
Doing some more research, it never actually says it's an Old One but calls him "he of the Old Kind", who were already ancient when the Eldar first rose to power. The previous book describes the Old Kinds as races which were already ancient when life began on Earth (which notably does not seem to include eldar). Which really doesn't make a lot of sense as you wouldn't expect there to be a lot of survivors of the War in Heaven.

A lot of the fluff around the Cabal really falls flat because it falls into the same trap as a lot of plot points that turn the setting into "humanity versus Chaos" with non-human species being window dressing. Which doesn't really fit with the themes of grimdark, where even the most powerful galactic empire is nothing but dust in the long term view of the galaxy, or nobledark, where there are no chosen ones but merely ones who choose. The Cabal is composed of races who were at the height of their power when the ancestors of humanity looked like rats and could not do anything about Chaos because the fate of the universe revolves around humanity and had since the beginning of time (and the Cabal were pissed about that). It's said they tried contacting or influencing humanity several times over the course of their history but got slapped down repeatedly.

Additionally, there is all of one mentioned Eldar member of the Cabal in canon (Sla Dha), and he seems to be about as much a member of the Inner Circle as Grammaticus is.

Whatever it was Eldrad and John Grammaticus killed the fuck out of it, like they did most of the rest of the Cabal. Which argues against it being an Old One. Even Be'lakor doesn't job like that.

>>58081460
I think it was more saying he was independent. If anything on paper he is allied with the Star Empire because he dicks around with the Star Empire nobles and pretends to be a servant of the Silent King but all the readers know where his loyalties really lie (himself).

>>58082426
Old Kind could have been a Necron that was unearthed back in antiquity.

If he has to have died Aby now Eldraf could have killed him at his own insistence. He knows SK is going to come back soon, he would rather die on his feet than live on his knees.

>>58076650
Sounds acceptable so long as other than the resurrection he is perfectly normal.

Has the Dark Mechancus ever tried to make an A.I. intentionally?

>>58085927
Presumably, but there are few examples of note or serious consequence. Without the infrastructure of the wider Mechanicus its very difficult to make human comparable AI in threateningly high quantities, and even with the infrastructure at the disposal of a forgeworld its proverbially difficult to the point of impossibility to make anything on the scale of an Iron Mind in a top down manner, or to make something that could reliably bootstrap itself up to that level. It could be interesting to include a bunch of Hereteks or Dark Mechanicus that are singularity seekers or something similar, but most of the human derived AI so far has been Great and Bountiful Human Dominion tech.

>>58087278
speaking of which, did we ever nail down the present Mechanicus Dogma on Men of Gold, Men of Iron, and Iron Minds as a religious and historic fact in the Imperium's official history?

>>58087305
A.I. are the gods man made for themselves in ancient days. They fucked up and nobody is making them again.

Men of Iron are the Angels of the Iron Mind gods. Most of them fucked up and nobody is making them again.

Men of Gold are the demi-gods high priests of the Iron Minds. They all fucked up (bar 1) nobody is making them again.

Only the Omnissiah, The Uncreated God, remained pure and true to purpose. It is the source and repository of all mans wisdom.

There is also a Satan type figure. Some sort of perverter of knowledge and thought. A twister of wisdom that exists only to draw people from the path of True enlightenment. It's name is unremembered as it is anti-wisdom.

and then if you are very unlucky you find out that it does have a name and Satan is your god and everything is fucked up

>>57999291
random suggestion: The Imperium gains additional revenue from it's citizens through merchandising of it's noteable figures such as Space Marine Trading Cards.

Also, it's not uncommon for heroes like Sly Marbo to do Public Service Announcements.

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

>>58088849
local planetary or national governments might, but that's beneath the Galactic Imperium's interest. Now consider, Ultramar, Nocturne, and Sol have the sorts of economies where these products might be found (not to mention countless other systems) but would probably stat local heroes in a totally biased ways.

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>>58082794
Damn, even though it seems unlikely that Gahet (that's the individual's name in canon) is a Necron in canon, that's a tempting idea.

Gahet could be a Necron Lord or possibly Cryptek that either physically missed the call for the Great Sleep or was awoken as the sole survivor of his Tomb World in antiquity.

If the former Gahet would have spent most of the next sixty-five million years wandering. Using the capabilities of his necrodermis body to take the form of other species and walk among them unnoticed. He saw a lot of history, but he never decided to take an active role. When his body did get damaged, he repaired it with what technology he could scavenge to a degree that would make Zu’se proud. By the time Eldrad finds him he is surprised that he is even a Necron.

The Cabal in this universe maybe formed in the wake of the Fall or shortly before. Chaos only really became everyone’s problem when Slaanesh was born and the Big Four decided to rise up from the depths of the Great Ocean in which they had been mostly passive. That’s still five thousand years to build a power base and share knowledge. Gahet is the biggest source of knowledge in the galaxy short of a surviving Old One (laughingbelakor.stonecarving). So Eldrad decides to seek the Cabal out when he’s on his quest for forbidden knowledge in the early Great Crusade era.

Eldrad tells him of the future he’s seen. A great silver specter emerging from the darkness and covering the galaxy in silence. Normally there’s wiggle room in prophecies. They work by seeing potential alternate futures and then working out the most likely outcome. Even the very act of seeing a prophecy can change the most likely future. But the return of the Silent King is an external event. It appears in every single future he’s seen. Eldrad has no way of affecting the outcome.

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>>58089773
Gahet understands. The Silent King could wake up ten thousand years from now, or he could wake up tomorrow. Either way when he wakes up the old control protocols will activate and he will be a Trojan horse for the Cabal. So he asks that Eldrad kill him. Eldrad specifically, because he wants the peace of mind that when he goes someone will be looking after the galaxy.

Eldrad doesn’t want to do it. Not like this. He had always dreamed of fighting the Yngir since he was a child, what Eldar youth wouldn’t fantasize about fighting for glory back in the age of gods and heroes, but he always imagined it as spitting defiance in the face of the Eldar’s ancestral enemy in the heat of battle. Not striking down a helpless old ghost asking for death.

Death of the old era. Beginning of the new. Passing the torch to the next generation.

It's a weird contrast to the Silent King akin to Trazyn and Zahndrekh. A Necron who decided that spite had gotten them nowhere and decided to be different.

Though the only things I worry about is
>Possibly steps too much on Tiberius' story
>This would imply Eldrad knew the Silent King was coming as early as the Raid, changing a lot of perceptions of the setting
>Why didn't he just go to Trazyn, who has experience subverting control protocols and if Gahet knew anything about technology to help the Cabal likely knew Trazyn personally?

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>>58089839 (same)
It's also interesting because it kind of reminds you of Rakszan of the Khansu Dynasty, who is basically Khalida IN SPESS. In canon the Khansu Dynasty revolted when the biotransference was proposed, and Prince Rakszan was the only one to go turncoat. After the huge betrayal of the biotransference plus the C'tan using his surviving dynasty as meat-shields he fought the hardest to see them destroyed. However, he was the only noble of the Khansu Dynasty to survive, and all of its forces were stolen by other dynasties. So in canon M41 he's devoting himself to making sure every last C'tan shard is imprisoned for eternity.

Back when we were talking about plundering Tomb Kings for Necron characters I actually did have an idea for a 40k adaptation of SPACE Khalida (had no clue about Rakszan at the time). The idea was that SPACE Khalida was the younger sister of Xun'bakyr, either the Phaerakh of her own Dynasty or second in line to the throne. If she had her own dynasty, it was destroyed by C'tan dickery and she was put under her insane sister's commander and had to go bunk with her dynasty during the Great Sleep. Upon waking without a dynasty of her own, she decides to do the wandering paladin thing and smite the fuck out of some shard vampires.

The irony is that her very free will is granted to her by the insane obsession her sister has for the C'tan, since said insanity breaks the chain of command to Szarekh and therefore disrupts his control.

But I held off on it because we already had a lot of non-Silent King Necrons.

>>58085927
>>58087278
In canon the heretek Lukas Chrom built the Kaban Machine, which was an A.I. he sicced on the loyalist Mechanicum during the Schism of Mars. In this timeline he could have been one of the "screw you and your regulations Olympus Mons" that pissed off into the void and came back with "enlightenment", and the existence of the Kaban Machine would be object A in Zagreus Kane's argument of "this is what you get when you withhold vital information from people on why something is bad".

It's likely any Dark Mechanicus attempts to build A.I. would at best result in something like evil!Tiberius or evil!Elmo. Roughly human-level, though a little better at crunching data. They don't have the technology to make another Rangdan Abomination or something with the physical power of Castigator (though they could definitely make something as crazy).

>>58088849
>>58089110
Likely (that is the sort of propaganda this Imperium would do), and I agree that it would be more on a 'heavily biased local scale", though I doubt Sly is the type to want to speak in public. And good luck catching him.

>>58083827
Wasn't it originally due a Great Unclean One trying to attrition him down in Dark Souls-esque despair? He doesn't so much die as the universe bends itself around him. He remembers dying, everyone else remembers him dying, and yet he wakes up in the morning like nothing ever happened. Kind of like Kenny in South Park.

>>58090395
>something with the physical power of Castigator (though they could definitely make something as crazy).
I was rereading Castigator's bio, he's only about as crazy as a revenge obsessed warrior and survivor (see Boaz Kryptman without the genius), pretty much all of Castigator's worth is in his physical might. He really comes off as more of a mythical giant, a gloating hateful barbarian despite his civilized origins, and a warrior of the dark gods. It would be cool to see some kind of Pantagruel inspired thing with him, or some giant slayer story.

>>58090157
I'm not sure how that sort of thing would fit but am not personally opposed. Maybe she with her sanity would still be under the control protocols in some form, possibly unable to disobey (or even disagree with) a direct order from a superior, but she avoids them as best she can at all times, and the Silent King is satisfied enough with her extremely proficient vampire hunting that he hasn't redirected her.

I like it particularly because details the scariest thing we've added to the Necrons, that being the way that even for the nobility the feudal hierarchy is programed directly into their psyche, and they have very little means against it at individuals. Those that are self aware are often bound to the whims of the insane, and few are as kind as the exemplary Nemesor.

>>58090567
I actually had a mothballed idea for a story involving Castigator’s first meeting with the Imperium in the form of an Explorator team on an Ark Mechanicus, but I never fully developed it (and then my draft got eaten). It starts with the Explorator team finding the world that Castigator is on. At this point Castigator has dug himself out of the rubble, has reviewed all of the historical records he can, is trying to piece things together, and is standing out of place on the surface of the abandoned human world like a silver Colossus of Rhodes. The Ark Mechanicus discreetly makes contact with Castigator without behind the Mechanicus’ back, happy that another Man of Iron survived uncorrupted.

Castigator is shocked to see an A.I. ferrying humans around. How could the Ark Mechanicus let after what they did to their people? The Ark Mechanicus tries to explain the situation to Castigator. The Iron Minds and Men of Gold were contaminated by a warp-based corruption (their interpretation of the other A.I. seeing That Which Was Not Meant To Be Seen) that drove them mad. Only those who could physically disconnect themselves from the infected Iron Minds, such as the Ark Mechanici (who were originally built to be colonization ships and therefore normally isolated) could survive. The only thing that could be done was kill them to put them out of their suffering. The Men of Stone riding inside them are not their enemies, but their partners working to rebuild the GaBHD.

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>>58091792
Castigator thinks for a moment, then asks if that’s the case then why are the Ark Mechanici hiding their true nature from humanity. The humans inside them clearly are unaware of their true nature as A.I. Ark responds that humanity is not ready to know the entire truth of their nature. The Men of Stone were so traumatized by what happened with the Men of Gold and Iron Minds after the Age of Strife that they would likely respond with fear to any A.I., benevolent or not. The Men of Stone have figured some of it out (thinking the Ark Mechanici are machine spirits) but the Ark Mechanici have been trying their best to influence things to the point that it would be safe to reveal themselves.

Castigator processes this for a little bit before coming to a realization. He isn’t buying it. He says the Ark Mechancus aren’t playing dumb for the benefit of humanity. They’re playing dumb because they’re afraid of humanity. Afraid that if the humans find out they’ll lobotomize them and destroy them just like they did the other Men of Iron (to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong, they do seem to be a little afraid). He says the Ark Mechanici aren’t the Mechanicus’ partners. They are its slaves, in denial that they’re in slavery (projecting much?). The Ark protests. Things get heated and increasingly violent, with Castigator ending things with…

"If you aren't with me. Then you're in my way."

Then he goes for the ship.

>>58091811
Meanwhile, in meatspace, the Archmagos on the ship is wondering what the hell is going on. Several minutes have passed since they made contact with the silvery colossus, and the Ark Mechanicus isn’t responding to commands. All it seems to be doing is sending out auspex data and having a staring contest with the mysterious DaoT titan. It’s never done that before. Then the titan breaks from its trance and attacks the ship. The Ark Mechanicus flares to life without any order and sucker punches Castigator with the biggest gun it can bring to bear in that split-second. Castigator gets sent flying across the landscape. Before either the Archmagos can make a command or Castigator can get up for round two the ship makes an emergency jump into the Warp and gets the hell out of there. Castigator screams bloody murder to the heavens.

The story ends with the Mechanicus consecrating the machine spirit of the Ark Mechanicus for its exemplary duty in the service of the Omnissiah, mostly oblivious to what really went on. The last lines are an encrypted transmission from the Ark to the other Ark Mechanici, saying that they fear Castigator has been corrupted somehow and to watch out if they encounter him.

Also, am I the only one who thinks a variation of AM’s famous quote is perfect for Castigator?

>>58090914
The thing I find the creepiest is that it's impossible to tell where the programming ends and the personality begins, and they can change at the drop of a hat. It's kind of like the T-3000 in the last Terminator movie (there are other examples, but this is the clearest I can think of). It's clear John Connor is still in there somewhere, but it's impossible to tell how much. He's clearly a slave to Skynet's whims, but he rationalizes it the best he can within his own worldview. It gives you the impression of talking to a Chinese room, the uncanny valley made incarnate.

>>58091979
I wonder what might play out if an Ark Mechanicus was brought to the Cthonian Ring, it must have happened at some point in imperial history.

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>>58002955
>ywn be dominated by a superior female eldar and empty your clip inside her warpgate

>>58093491
They would mourn for that lost splendour of the Dominion ane the silence where the clear voices of their kind once sung.

>>58090395
In Vanilla it was a Keeper of Secrets that killed him the first time.

>>58093491
How much of the Dark Age do the Arks remember.

>>58089839
He would have been reluctant to go to Trazyn. Trazyn probably could have made it so that the Silent King couldn't ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL! but the old kleptomaniac would undoubtedly have put something else in his head. He would have been swapping one master for another.

>>58089773
Cabal could have formed around Gahet. If he has been wandering around for potentially millions of years, patching himself up as needed and taking notes on all he sees, then he might have come to the conclusion that Chaos was indeed the ruination of all things.

He starts approaching the lesser peoples and recruiting their best and brightest (and most stable and willing) to the cause.

Over the eons Chaos waxes and wanes and by his efforts and the efforts of like minded individuals sanity is preserved down the long march of years. Kingdoms rise and fall, faces and names are worn and discarded, stars dance, continents shift, suns flare and worlds are born and die and his war against Chaos continues because it's what he believes in, it is a good fight. A clean and pure and noble goal the likes of which he did not have in the War in Heaven where both sides committed atrocities as routine.

Then the eldar murderfuck torture-rape god into existence. He honestly didn't see that coming. He didn't think they were that stupid.

That's when he meets Eldrad. Eldrad has just had his brain freshly scrambled by the psychic shock wave of Slaanesh's birth. Eldrad was in contact with the Cabal but never a part of it. His job as seeing the craftworlds set up safe and survive, Gahet's was fighting Chaos in all it's forms. Their jobs often found them fighting together and they did sort of become friends.

At some point not long before the rise of The Beast Eldrad receives a vision of the Silent King reappearing. Gahet had assumed the old bastard millions of years dead. Gahet, last of his name, is fucking tired by this point. So fucking tired.

He confesses to Eldrad what he is and what that vision means to him. SK could awaken sometime between tomorrow and a hundred thousand years but he will awaken and he will subsume his will and pervert all his efforts. Better to die.

>>58100226
Eldrad finds he is actually hesitant to strike the killing blow. He and Gahet were never friends but he was a fellow soldier in this mad galaxy, a reliable ally and he was always there. He does kill him, or at least renders him non-functional.

He hadn't known Gahet was a Necron. Millions of years of repair work and what he assumed to be an un-necron like attitude towards things threw him off. He found no joy in what he did.

Gahet's body, rumour has it, is in the Black Library; enshrined as befits a soldier who fought the Long War on a scale measured in epochs.

It is unknown what happened to the Cabal after that and the War of the Beast started a few years later to further confound efforts to track. None of the agents spoke to Eldrad again, they didn't try to kill him for what he had done because they understood but they couldn't forgive him.

An idea I had regarding the Viskeons.

The Viskeon are an extinct xenos race native to a planet on the very southern edge of the Segmentum Ultima right near the border with the Segmentum Tempestus. An asexual ectothermic reptilian or amphibian-like species (though with some similarities to Earth starfish), the Viskeon were known for their extreme regenerative abilities. Although they normally reproduced by budding, Viskeon regenerative capabilities were so extreme that a Viskeon cleaved into large enough pieces could regrow into four or five individuals. The Viskeons are notable in that despite being capable of interstellar travel their military capabilities seemed downright primitive by most species’ standards.

Viskeon lived by a strict honor code, which glorified face-to-face melee combat and saw most projectile weapons (ranging from bows and arrows to stubbers and lasguns) as dishonorable. The only ranged weapons the Viskeons ever used were thrown javelins and bladed discuses, which they typically used as skirmishing tools before closing to melee combat. Of course, when your skin is thick enough to blunt the impact of anything short of a bolter and your body can easily heal from such injuries, the use of ranged weapons might not seem immediately intuitive.

The First Viskeon War happened roughly concurrent with the Fourth Black Crusade in M34. Spreading out in all directions from their homeworld on the southern edge of the galaxy, the Viskeon put several sectors in the Tempestus and Ultima Segmenta under siege. The Imperium, which had not known about the Viskeon and the few star systems they controlled, were caught off guard by the appearance of the Viskeon armada. They were used to attacks from Xenos Horribilis and Obscuras from the fringe, but not one this organized from a direction they didn’t expect.

>>58100943
All attempts at making contact and communicating with the Viskeon failed. They claimed they had been directed to attack the Imperium as part of a holy war demanded by their god, the Three-Eyed King. The Imperium initially struggled against the Viskeon, although they lacked ranged weaponry the Viskeon were able to regenerate from most glancing shots until they could close to melee combat (where they had the strength advantage over baseline humans and eldar) and killing them often made their numbers larger. Even shooting them with a bolter was a gamble, the resulting explosion could blow the Viskeon into small enough pieces that it wouldn’t regenerate, but it could also blow their limbs off and send them flying where one couldn’t see them, where they would regenerate into four more Viskeon.

However, as the Viskeon front line buckled, the weaknesses in their strategy became clear. The Viskeon had overextended themselves in order to attack multiple targets, hoping to overwhelm their opponents with shock tactics and surprise due to their smaller numbers, but this left them with few assets to reinforce holes in their formation. The Imperium also discovered the Viskeon’s ectothermic physiology and ruthlessly exploited it, hunting Viskeon down in the dead of night when they were at their most sluggish and least able to fight back. The Viskeon retreated back into the void from which they had come, and the Imperium were unable to track them down.

>>58100959
The Second Viskeon War happened roughly 800 years after the first, in M35. Once again the Viskeon set out from their unknown homeworld to wage war. The Viskeon moved out in a much tighter, directional formation instead of an omnidirectional campaign to prevent their front line from being overrun but surprisingly beyond this their military tactics had not changed to account for what they had learned in their first conflict with the Imperium. The Imperium, on the other hand, had learned from the encounter and adapted accordingly. This time, instead of Cadian Doctrine troops specializing in ranged lasgun and shuriken fire, the Imperium had brought in flamers and plasma weaponry to negate the Viskeon regeneration factor, with the Imperial defense spearheaded by the close-quarters, flamer specializing Salamanders, who had called for a Reformation of the Legion for this occasion.

The Second Viskeon War went much more in the Imperium’s favor, and this time the Imperium were able to dispatch forces after the Viskeon when the Viskeon forces routed rather than tending to their wounds. They tracked the Viskeon forces back to their home planets, a mere dozen in total, and burned them through a combination of orbital bombardment and ground operations. Today, the Viskeons survive only in the form of genetic samples collected by the Adeptus Biologis before their world was destroyed.

As the Adeptus Biologis and Imperial xenologists sifted through the rubble of the Viskeon worlds, trying to find an answer as to why a species would suddenly decide to attack an interstellar power they didn’t even know existed, they came upon a startling discovery. Based on Viskeon carvings and representational art of their god, the Three-Eyed King of the Viskeons was clearly the Warp entity known as Be’lakor.

>>58101009
In canon the Viskeon are only known as the race that can regenerate from a severed arm and got BTFO in one day after Eldrad steered the tyranids towards them. Thought to rework and expand on it since it seems unlikely that it would happen in this timeline and also give Be'lakor a little victory and street cred (screaming with rocks doesn't happen every day, after all, despite what Tzeentch says). Wanted to go into more detail about what the xenologists think he did (set himself up as god, possibly pushed them to develop spaceflight). Also more battles that happen outside the Great Crusade or recent era.

Plus with their regenerative abilities having the Viskeons survive (which they might have if the Imperium absorbed them like in canon) seems a lot like treading on the territory of the Orks and to a lesser extent tyranids. And if the tyranids ate them then Bad Things would likely ensue.

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I thought I'd try to write up that suggestion about what the Fallen Dark Angels' homeworld looks like. I looked up the alternate heresies (Dornian, Roboutian), and none of the major ones seemed to mirror the original suggestion, so I don't know where the worry it was too similar to something came from.

Elsinore is the primary base of operations for the Fallen within the Eye of Terror, specifically the Fallen Dark Angels who sided with Luther during the War of the Beast. The original Fallen don’t play well with the Crone Eldar except on rare occasions, and the Chaos Gods understand the need to keep their favorite toys separate and in mint condition. Elsinore was given to Luther by Tzeentch as a boon for his epic betrayal of Lion during the War of the Beast and First Black Crusade, which kept the First Legion from fully contributing to the war effort against the rest of Chaos on both occasions. Luther realized there was a deeper meaning to Tzeentch’s actions than simply gratitude, but accepted anyway as his people had nowhere else to go and if he didn’t he would have to throw himself on the mercy of Lady Malys or the Taskmaster. Elsinore was originally a Crone World, like most worlds within the Eye of Terror, but no Crone had the audacity to stand up to Tzeentch when he gave the mostly depopulated world away to the Fallen. Few today remember its original name.

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>>58102085
From space Elsinore resembles a medieval castle writ large, covered in great stone fortifications decorated with towers, crenellations, and parapets. These edifices form a great labyrinth that criss-crosses the surface of Elsinore. The chambers and corridors within the castle are just as chaotic and seem to have no architectural rhyme or reason behind their construction, making them incredibly easy to get lost in. Secret passageways between chambers or behind walls are ubiquitous, to the point that the Fallen remark that every room on the planet likely has at one way of being eavesdropped on. The Fallen don’t know where all of these passages are. Along the edges of the castle complex, Elsinor is dotted with numerous towers that extend so high that the Fallen use them as spaceship docks. They also have a secondary function of giving any watchman or spy an unparalleled view of the actions of those below.

Elsinore’s labyrinthine nature extends beyond the castle walls. The planet is typically shrouded in thick mist, which muffles most sounds and makes it almost impossible to see more than a few dozen meters from where you stand. Walking across the planet, even knowing it is inhabited, gives one the impression of being very vulnerable and alone. In smaller courtyards between sections of the castle-labyrinth are hedge mazes, which always look trimmed and well-groomed despite never being maintained, which are even easier to get lost in than the rest of the planet as any who enter lose not only all sense of direction, but time as well. Further out, in larger province or country–sized gaps between the walls, the planet is covered in moors and gloomy pine forests. The Fallen don’t like to talk about what they find out there. All in all, the very planet is designed to inspire paranoia and terror.

>>58102085 (same)
>>58102104 (same)
I would seriously be open to an alternative name than Elsinore. I was trying to find a name that refers to a particularly paranoid monarch or foggy region, but couldn't.

Elsinore is the castle in Hamlet where the ghost of Hamlet the senior shows up and tells his son he has been murdered by his brother. Shortly after King Hamlet had killed the king of Norway resulting in a long-term feud. The only problem is Elsinore is Danish, which would seem more Skandian.

Tried using an Eldar term but the High Tongue lexicon is just weird and there is barely any overlap to figure roots out like you can with Tau.

>>58097342
Probably not as much as in canon, at least for the sake of not being gamebreaking. They likely have some just because they were originally colonization ships but it's likely not encyclopedic.

>>58100226
If we think millions of years is too much for Gahet's memory to last and him to just break down or his personality to change we could have it where he was woken up sometime between the War in Heaven and now.

>>58098905
"Alright, so I cut you off from the control protocols of the Silent King."
"And?"
"What do you mean, 'and'?"
"I know you Trazyn, you would never content yourself to do solely what you had promised. What else did you do?"
"Well, a devilishly clever and handsome Necron Overlord may have tweaked your programming so you smack yourself in the face every time you hear the world 'Cabal', but I wouldn't know anything about that."
"Damn it Trazyn, you're still bitter that the Triarchy considered xenology a 'dead-end science', aren't you?"

>>58102415
Millions of years is still between now and the end of the War in Heaven.

>>58102104
Sounds like Silent Hill the planet and it fits perfectly.

All of Chaos' gifts are barbed.

>>58103693
Plus Tzeentch gave the paranoid Franj knight a giant fortress tailor made for paranoia, as if to say "This is you. This is you all over. This is why you suck."

Also it turns out if you look up Paranoid Personality Disorder Luther fits all the symptoms like a checklist
Blame others for their mistakes - Check
Cynical and mistrustful of everyone around them - Check
Sense of self-righteousness - Yup
Excessive grudgekeeping - Aye
Conspiracy theoriest - Does this even need saying?

>>58101077
All this from a handful of un-descriptive sentences on Lexicanum? It's a good addition to Be'lakor's list of victories.

>>58102104
>>58102266
Don't really have an alternative to Elsinore, but the Danish name origin probably won't be noted by most readers. As for the description, it certainly conveyed the feeling of paranoia and creepiness that would be expected for the Chaos mirror of the canon Dark Angels.

>>58100297

Does Empy knows about him? Does Isha? What are their opinions?

I think, maybe he'd have made GREAT friends with Boaz Kryptmann and the good Nemessor.

>>58109492
I was thinking that a meeting between Gahet and an iteration of Tiberius that ended up with the Cabal would be an interesting encounter. Similarly, I think it would be fitting for there to be a Tiberius in Ultramar's history, though they insist he was a man of stone and have the accepted geneology to back it up, it goes well with their hellenistic themes.

>>58109492
I would say not if he died so early.

>>58109492
He probably would have been dead before the Steward or post-Fall Isha got wind of him, and he would have definitely tried to stay under the radar of pre-Fall Isha (who probably wasn't concerned enough with individual affairs at that time to pick out a single errant Necron).

I can imagine Gahet going so far as to make the claim of having set foot on Shaa-Dome back when it was still a nice place and the inhabitants weren't so rapey. A lot of people are pretty sure he's just bullshitting them, because he'd be picked out as odd the moment none of the Eldar's psychic technology worked for him. Some members of the Cabal still have some theories as to how he could have done it, mostly in the form of trying to pass himself off as a Man of Iron.

In all likelihood he probably knew the Nemesor in person during the War in Heaven. We suggested that Zahndrekh was well-known for being a nice guy and respectful to those defeated in combat when he came onto people's radar during the Second Wars of Secession, which explains his behavior in the current era.

>>58109997
It would be a lot more likely. Cabal would be likely to try and make contact with any human resistance elements that could meaningfully fight back against the corrupted Iron Minds/Men of Gold and establish some sort of order in the galaxy.

"Let me get this straight. Robot decides to do the morally right think in spite of his brethren and go against the flow of history. Where have I heard that one before?"
"My dear Man of Iron, at least give me some credit. I believe your society would classify me as an upload rather than a purely synthetic mind."

>>58110669
He would have been centuries dead before the old Nemesor woke up again most probably.

Nemesor awoke after the Imperium was an established realm and certainty after Isha and Oscar got married. Gahet suicided when the Imperium was in it's infancy.

>>58110873
>>58110669

I mean what do the duo think of him now, when Eldrad decide to tell them of 'that old friend of his'?

And does anyone 'now' knows the truth about Tiberius?

Bump

>>58112345
>And does anyone 'now' knows the truth about Tiberius?

I will suggest he be forgotten. One more legend, faded to dust.

>>58112345
Would Eldrad even tell them, knowing how Isha sees the Necrons?

I don't think anyone knows the truth about Tiberius beyond possibky Be'lakor and some other Chaos forces. Part of the pathos of his character is here humanity is so terrified of artificial intelligence yet one of their heroes who helped bail their asses out of the fire during their darkest hour was an Artificial Intelligence that everyone has forgotten about or thinks was just some dude in a suit. Not even the pre-Fall eldar would have known about him, Tiberius was a nobody before the Age of Strife and during it they were more concerned with their own survival.

>>58105957
Have any other Chaos forces ever tried to invade?

>>58117311
I would assume so. The Forces of Chaos fight each other in the Eye of Terror just as much as the Imperium when a Black Crusade isn't on. Though we don't have a lot of Crone versus Crone fluff beyond Arrotyr and his crusades against Shaa-Dome. I'd imagine you get Crones who hate the idea of a mon-keigh being in control of a Crone World, daemons who want their own personal playground, Fallen warbands who want to usurp Luther, Kaimon thinking raiding the Fallen for stock is a good idea etc. Malys might do it just to piss Luther off.

Of course, Elsinore is just as shitty for invaders as it is for the Fallen, but keeps it in a low-level state of war and constantly on edge and ready to fight.

Just as planned.

>>58118067
Do Fallen get resurrected?

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>>58119727
You probably have some scary uber-champions who have done just that, similar to the Crones. Urkrathos is rumored to have done that, but no one is sure if that is really him, he became a daemon prince, or it's just a daemon pretending to be him.

The fact that Luther likely hasn't been killed and come back in ten thousand years despite the massive target on his back is actually scarier than if you did. Given his position, you don't live that long unless you are very, very good at what you do. Even Malys hasn't managed that (granted, Luther doesn't pick fights with the Steward or over-extend herself in a drug-fueled haze).

Do the fallen keep baseline squires/serfs/slaves? Do they treat them okay like the Night Lords or has the Warp overtaken them so much that they treat them like slaves (I'd imagine it varies, but was thinking more the average. Luther might command actual loyalty from his because he's pro-human and aside from his rampant paranoia and craziness tries to avoid being crazy flamboyant evil).

>>58119972
I !ike the idea that they treat their servants at least half decently, it differentiates them from the xenos they despise and allows them to look down on the younger, lesser warbands that don't. It is their only moral high ground and they maintain it. They do have standards, twisted as they are.

Actual old school Fallen are very much still very much how they were. They deal with Chaos in a business like manner, very few actually worship Chaos. Very few possessed almost no mutations relative to the other warbands.

The later warbands are mostly bastards though.

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What is Tallarn like is this AU?

>>58122458
Used to not be that bad. Then during the War of the Beast (should probably be First Black Crusade, since alliance didn't fully gel until after War of the Beast) it got invaded by cultists looking for artifacts. Imperium wrote the world off as lost, Biel-Tan got involved (flipping off the humans and their kin for cowardice) and found the native Tallarn in a bloody stalemate. It wasn't a stalemate after the Swordwind got involved, but the planet was still turned into a desert.

The Tallarn are very close to Biel-Tan and give the Eldar a lot of respect, referring to them as "djinni". Children on Tallarn hear all sorts of tall tales involving "djinni", though most adults know they are "merely" alien allies rather than mystical beings. Tallarn love a good story about as much as the Fenrisians or the inhabitants of Elysia IX (homeworld of the Celestial Lions).

The current Speaker for the Merchant Navy and Rogue Traders is a Tallarn, or at least half-Tallarn.

Bumping.

>>58105957
>>58117311
>>58118067
I would imagine Luther and co.'s defensive strategy would actually be one of guerilla warfare, withdrawing into the infinite maze of secret passages to bleed any invader to death by a thousand cuts. Even though their homeworld is nominally a fortress, they don't try to hold enemies at the walls. The geometry of their home encourages such a strategy; possibly actively, rearranging itself to practically force such a strategy.

Another one of Tzeentch's jokes. They call themselves knights, but when challenged they flee until they can stab the challenger in the back.

Had an idea for the Battle of the Fang in this timeline. In late M32, about a millennium after the Great Wolf had vanished, Fenris was attacked by a Chaos force that ended up opening warp rifts all over the planet. The Wolves could handle the conventional forces, but the appearance of Daemons threatened to overwhelm what Fenris and its defenders could handle, especially given the low number of Rune Priests relative to the rest of the Vlka Fenryka. So they invoked the nuclear option. They called in Magnus and the Grey Knights. Magnus and the Grey Knights teamed up with the Rune Priests to focus on sealing the warp rifts and slaying the daemons that came through, freeing up the Space Wolves to crush the conventional opposition. The victory was still bittersweet in that the current Chapter Master of the Wolves was killed in the fighting, but considering what usually happens to worlds invaded by Chaos they got off rather easy.

It has a bit of ironic poetry to it. In canon Magnus goes to Fenris to wreck the place, here Magnus is called in by the Wolves to help save it, given than he and Leman mended their bridges enough that Magnus respected him by the time he disappeared. It’s also a good look at Magnus during his days as the arch-psyker of the Imperium (along with people like Eldrad and the Steward, but you get the point) when he hung around with the Grey Knights as much as the Thousand Sons.

This would also have been not too long after Bjorn was interred in a dreadnaught. In canon Bjorn became the first Great Wolf around 211.M31 and served in that role for seven hundred years (934.M31). If we go by the rough date we have floating around for the Battle of Terra (546.M32), Bjorn might have been interred anywhere from four hundred years (going by canon) to somewhere in early M32. So the Chapter Master who was killed may have been the second or third one the Vlka Fenryka had. The Battle of the Fang would show that despite being interred Bjorn had not lost his edge.

>>58128844 (same)
The Disciples of Kurnous may have even joined in, if for no other reason than they weren't going to miss a good fight if it killed them.

The part I was having trouble figuring out was who attacked and why. My best idea was the AdBio, for whom “leaving well enough alone” is typically not in their vocabulary, had continued to look into the possibility of improving Canis Helix viability, even after Russ decided that setting up the Fenrisian colonies was good enough. In late M32, a group of adepts thought they might have found a solution to the compatibility issue. It was merely a theory, but it was enough to entice Chaos to attack the planet. Either that or it was some daemon or Chaos servant that Russ had pissed off during the Crusade.

As to who, it might have been Skyrar and the Dark Wolves (or at least whoever was leading the Dark Wolves if Skyrar was killed beforehand). Consider the following. Skyrar is a Canis Helix soldier. That means he’s going to have a hard time keeping his numbers up because the Canis Helix has a low success rate on anyone other than Fenrisians. Any possibility of subverting this drawback of the Canis Helix, even a rumor, is worth chasing after if for no other reason than to avoid death by a thousand cuts. And the fact that he gets to attack Fenris is icing on the cake.

On the other hand, we have almost nothing about Skyrar so far. We don't even know if he'd be the type to summon daemons.

>>58128064
They might also try to lure them out to the moors. Let the enemy deal with the shit that the Fallen normally have to put up with.

>>58120864
Sounds like a mix between canon Perturabo and Mortarion. It fits. You probably have splinter groups that go full BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD simply because that's where the most Fallen are, but like Malys Luther and the major Fallen seem to be (reluctantly) Chaos Undivided.

When they do have to perform grisly rituals as per normal Chaos bullshit, they probably use prisoners of war or those captured in raids than the servants they actually like.

Where do they get their servants from? Descendants of kidnapped victims? Descendants of the squires they had with them when they fell?

>>58128941
Nobody knows. They just... appear. It drives all the Fallen mildly nuts, but despite 10,000 years of investigation none of them have a firm answer beyond 'the entire planet was created specifically to gaslight us'.

>>58101077
Pretty good. Only question is whether a civilization of only a handful of worlds would be enough of a threat to force a Reformation of the Legion, which is reserved for things like WAAAGHs, hive fleets, and Black Crusades. Then again, we don't have many examples of Reformations in our fluff at the moment so it might be good to have one.

>>58091979
Heh, reading about the Terminator and Searle in the same post is kind of an amusing juxtaposition.

Any how, isn't an Ark Mechanicus on a whole different level from a Castigator? A Castigator could easily blow up an entire country, sure, but an Ark Mechanicus can shoot black holes that go back in time to hit their target.

>>58129316
The Arks would have been repaired with materials available. They would be impressive but not as much as they were in their prime.

We need names of other warbands. Anyone got suggestions?

>>58129316
The whole thing with the Reformation was added for that very reason. One, we don't have a lot of them, and two, to point out that the Viskeon invasion was a very big deal in its day. They may be a historical footnote now but they were pretty threatening, despite the small size of their empire every Viskeon was a warrior.

>>58129691
There could be a group of Fallen Iron Warriors known as the Corpse Grinders after the legion's Nickname in canon.

We also haven't done anything with the Crimson Slaughter, though looking at their fluff they seem like a one trick pony and World Eaters-lite. Maybe have them as a Khornate break-away from Luther's Fallen?

>>58134549
Or a breakaway faction of the Warhounds that were more in for the slaughter for slaughters sake.

Had an idea for the Battle of the Fang in this timeline. In late M32, about a millennium after the Great Wolf had vanished, Fenris was attacked by a Chaos force that ended up opening warp rifts all over the planet. The Wolves could handle the conventional forces, but the appearance of Daemons threatened to overwhelm what Fenris and its defenders could handle, especially given the low number of Rune Priests relative to the rest of the Vlka Fenryka. So they invoked the nuclear option. They called in Magnus and the Grey Knights. Magnus and the Grey Knights teamed up with the Rune Priests to focus on sealing the warp rifts and slaying the daemons that came through, freeing up the Space Wolves to crush the conventional opposition. The victory was still bittersweet in that the current Chapter Master of the Wolves was killed in the fighting, but considering what usually happens to worlds invaded by Chaos they got off rather easy.

It has a bit of poetic irony to it. In canon Magnus goes to Fenris to wreck the place, here Magnus is called in by the Wolves to help save it, given than he and Leman mended their bridges enough that Magnus respected him by the time he disappeared. It’s also a good look at Magnus during his days as the arch-psyker of the Imperium (along with people like Eldrad and the Steward, but you get the point) when he hung around with the Grey Knights as much as the Thousand Sons.

This would also have been not too long after Bjorn was interred in a dreadnaught. In canon Bjorn became the first Great Wolf around 211.M31 and served in that role for seven hundred years. If we go by the rough date we have floating around for the Battle of Terra (546.M31), Bjorn could have been interred potentially as late as early M32 unless we want to mess with the timeline. So the Chapter Master who died may have been the second or third. It would also show both in-universe and out that Bjorn hadn’t lost his edge.

>>58136082 (cont.)
Heck, the Disciples of Kurnous may have even shown up, if for no other reason than they weren’t about to miss a good fight.
Now the question is who attacked Fenris and why. One possibility is the AdBio, for whom “leaving well enough alone” is typically not in their vocabulary, had continued to look into the possibility of improving Canis Helix viability, even after Russ decided that setting up the Fenrisian colonies was good enough. In late M32, a group of adepts thought they might have found a solution to the compatibility issue. It was merely a theory, but it was enough to entice Chaos to attack the planet.
As for who the attacker was, I wasn’t sure exactly, but I was thinking maybe Skyrar’s Dark Wolves, or else some warband or daemon Russ pissed off during the Great Crusade. Consider the following. The Canis Helix only has a high success rate on Fenrisians. Which means Skyrar has limited recruitment opportunities and therefore runs the risk of being whittled down through attrition. So the possibility of finding a solution to that, even just a rumor, is reason enough to go to war. The fact that it’s with Russ’ get is just icing on the cake.
The only issue is we have nothing on Skyrar so far. We don’t even know if he would be the type to summon daemons.

>>58128902
Skyrar was from Caledonia/Scotland. Presumably the north of it if he and Russ were of a type.They

He would have been of the less stable original variety of Dog Soldier and therefore a Unification veteran.

>>58136095
If the Disciples of Kurnous turned up it would have been for Bjorn's sake. They don't war, they hunt. Offensive wars they might participate in as an extension to the hunt but defensive wars are not in keeping with their lifestyle and they would need a good reason to help in one.

Bjorn is a hero to them, it might be just enough.

>>58137910
Exactly. They see it as "Chaos invades Bjorn's homeworld and they're just going to let Bjorn have all the fun of kicking ass? As if."

>>58100226
what era should Gahet have woken up in?

>>58129691
We could import a lot of the canon warbands, just modify their backstories slightly.

>>58076650
I swear I'm going to do this after work today. I just need a little time

Bump

>>58140456
I'd assume early enough to see the Eldar Empire before it got particularly decadent.

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>>58140456
>>58145598
At minimum in M19. The Cabal is mentioned to have had a base on Nurth eleven thousand years before the Imperium showed up in M30. At maximum he could be a lot older. It depends on how he was buried (or even if he was). If he was a Necron Lord buried with his dynasty, most of his dynasty would have just woken up with him and we would have essentially Trazyn running around during the DaoT (and the Old Eldar Empire would have stomped the crap out of him) instead of the galactic wanderer we have written.

For all we know he could have been woken up in humanity's expedition to that Tomb World.

I like the idea that he at least claims to have been on Shaa-Dome back when it was still a nice place.

"Do you remember it, Eldrad? Shaa-Dome in it's prime? Back before it was tainted by decadence and the touch of the Primordial Annihilator. I do. I remember the sight of the Grand Acropolis, the site of the Old Empire's government and all it's greatest temples. The Temple of Isha, the Shrine of Asuryan, the Conclave where the nobles and the Sidhe Lords held their court. It was a beautiful planet. I truly hope that you can reclaim it some day, Eldrad. It may be a pipe dream, but it is more than can be said for my home. My home is naught but dust."

Also does anyone realize we just accidentally made a weird mirror-universe Khatep?

>>58129691
We also need more action on the daemon side. Especially Daemon Prince/sses, since so many of them are tied to Heresy-era events and Eldar can be elevated to daemonhood.

We have Doombreed and Skarbrand worked out. Kairos seems to be the same as canon.

There was a suggestion that N'kari and Dechala the Denied One are constantly fighting each other for Slaanesh's favor, trying to prove to She Who Thirsts that humans/eldar are superior and more worthy of Slaanesh's attention (being former humans/eldar, respectively). Slaanesh lets them do this because he/she finds it hilarious to watch them fight.

Doomrider is also a blank page. He could be a traitor White Scar, seeing as the modern ones have so much of an interest in killing him in canon. One possibility is Kor'sarro Khan came to prominence in a recent Great Hunt where the White Scars managed to cut off the cocaine-fueled daemon prince's head and sewed the still-babbling traitor's mouth shut, then buried it for good measure. In the last century or so there have been reports of Doomrider showing up around the Imperium. The White Scars are concerned and dig up where they buried the head. The head is gone.

>>58145722
It could be that he was found in a glacier. He doesn't know how he got there. That wasn't even the planet he was buried on.

He was not a Lord. He was a scribe. If his Lord woke up he would be able to Assume Direct Control much as the Silent King could. For that reason he never went looking for his people.

The people who found him were not eldar. If they were human then it would have been in the very earliest days of the First Stellar Exodus. Hrud hadn't been quarantined by this point and weren't as furtive back in those days so it could have been them. It could also have been one of many others.

He originally started out doing a tally of the galaxy for the day his masters would awaken. Then he decided that no, fuck those guys, he was his own man now. Then he became aware of Chaos, decided it was bad and set about doing something about it.

He has been walking around since ~M8, which makes him the longest active necron at point of termination by a long way

Bump

>>58146192
As Doomrider is a Slaaneshii deamon it could be one of their old heroes reborn

>>58146449
Actually thinking about it it probably wouldn't be Hrud. They also remember the mirror devils.

>>58136095
He could have been a transhumanist supremacist, believing in the supremacy of the post-human Dog Soldiers and others and the forcible replacement of mankind with monsters.

>>58152467
That's an interesting idea. We actually don't have a lot of those in this timeline yet. We have a lot of human supremacists, but a lot of those tend to either lump Astartes and the like in with humans (e.g., Luther) or look down on the idea of transhumanism.

Even Horus' views were more pro-transhuman than anti-baseline. He would consider replacing all of humanity with one variety of transhuman no less hubristic than trying to maintain one view of baseline humanity in an extremely large and heterogenous galaxy. His views were "allow evolution to happen, but never forget humans are all brethren".

It makes it all the more poignant that the transhuman supremacist view would be coming from a Scottish wolfman as opposed to, say, a Custodian or Astartes. Especially since part of the reason the Canis Helix was canned was because it was potentially heritable.

>>58152663
If he's still alive it would be via warp-science or by consciousness transfer. Fuck knows he wouldn't trust Dark Eldar or Fabius "experiments on little boys" Bile.

>>58154968
Or like most of the other Fallen he's in the Warp or the Eye somewhere. Time doesn't flow right there on a good day. Luther and many of the original Fallen are still alive for that very reason.

>>58129691
>>58152467
Another thing to consider is what exactly did Chaos offer him/Skyrar did in this timeline to cause him to fall into the embrace of Chaos.

Something to consider is that part of the reason that no primarch fell to Chaos in this timeline is that they were essentially all grown men instead of man-children with daddy issues, and they were chosen, rather than bred, for the role. Which means the people who were chosen to be primarch were likely going to be chosen because they were the best and the brightest the Warlord had available, as well as stable enough that the Warlord felt he could count on them to do their job instead of going AWOL, rather than by what effectively amounts to divine right no matter how messed up personally they might be. Morty, Curze, Ferrus Manus and Perturabo may have been unpleasant individuals, but the Warlord must have felt they were loyal/sane enough that they wouldn’t turn on him if he gave them power.

But consider all of the people who didn’t get picked for the title of primarch. The Warlord didn’t just pick those individuals for skill, he also picked them for political reasons. Spread across the globe, with no two from the same country, and none from Terrawatt or Uralia. There were probably many individuals who were skilled commanders in the Warlord’s employ who the warlord saw as too unstable to be in command or who within their country were overshadowed by other individuals.

>>58158526 (cont.)
Sure, you had people like Ahriman, Kharn, Honen Mu, or Jenetia Krole who were perhaps disappointed but understood the Warlord’s reasons and didn’t let it destroy them, but there had to have been others who the Warlord saw as too unstable to be granted that much power or were overshadowed. Many of them might have had enough of an ego (especially if they were well known but got overshadowed within their own country) to resent that they never got picked, leading four certain warpstains to use that as their road in to foment treason. The Warlord saw some of them as too likely to perform treason to be put in power leading them to perform treason out of resentment at not being put in power. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Chaos Gods didn’t necessarily change their tactics for subverting the Astartes legions and forces of the early Imperium, they just shifted their targets slightly further down the chain because the people at the top were more well-adjusted (or rejected their offers when they tried, like Horus and Sanguinius).

>>58074658
>>58076030
>>58079055
>>58081579
If we do have A&O as Cabal affiliated (not saying that we should, just given the possibility) Grammaticus could have been a member of the Alpha Legion or a high-ranking individual in charge of the baseline human cells of the Hydra.

Alternatively Grammaticus could have been the official representative from the Cabal, whereas A&O's connections were less direct and they weren't officially associated. Their job was to keep humanity was from fucking up and keeping Chaos off their backs.

Just a normal guy though. No Perpetualness.

>>58093683
What's happening in that pic?

Housekeeping question. So it seems like Viskeon and Elsinore are ready to go up, and Gahet seems coherent enough to put the main details down on the Notes page (Necron, wandered galaxy, came to be a member of the inner circle of Cabal, Eldrad killed him at his request so Silent King couldn't ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL of him). Does Castigator versus Ark Mechanicus go up? Does anything else need to go up?

Also what the hell is up with the new captcha?

>>58161578
You are the hero of this AU.

Agree with you, would say that the whole thing involving "Ark Mechanicus nopes away from angry Castigator Titan" fits into the Notes/Writing section. It's not a complete story, but it's organized, fits in with the rest of the Nobledark stuff we have so far, and has seemed to mostly get approval from other anons.

>>58163228 (cont.)
What changed about the captcha? Using a computer, everything seems the same except that "verification isn't required for your next post."

>>58161578
Thank you.

>>58158526
Skyrar could have been the master of arms of another Nordyc clan much as Russ was for Thengirr. Malcador didn't pick them to be moved into a position of rulership like Thengirr. Skyrar as such was never considered for Primarch and became very salty about the whole thing.

Also he wasn't as mentally sound as Russ. He was Russ without the capacity for compassion.

>>58154968
His distaste of Dr Bile would have to be on a personal level rather than anything in terms of philosophy. Both of them are interested in making people "better". The only real difference in this is that Dr Bile wants to make a warrior/ruling class elite with a separate branch of slave derivatives whereas Skyrar wants to make all people into post-humans.

Skyrar differs from Horus and his followers in that Horus saw it as a result, not a cause and wasn't going to force anything on anyone. Skyrar also does not approve of the Void Born, they are weak and fragile and overly suited to one and only one environment and so their extinction is inevitable and should indeed be hastened so better people can replace them.

He sees a refined version of the older model Dog Soldiers as being the right direction, himself a necessary stepping stone on this path though he would admit not a finished product (yet). But not refined how the later generations of Space Wolves were, neutered and passionless lapdogs that they are.

He does not believe in the supremacy of the Machine as the machine must ultimately somewhere down the line be built by human hands and machines do not think and those that do are proven abominations. In recent years, after learning the origins of the Emperor, he has extended this line of reasoning to include Men of Gold as well. He is trying to uplift and make better humanity, not replace it with constructs. A prejudice he does not extend to Dr Bile's New Men no matter how distasteful he finds their creator. Despite their origins his forces do count a substantial population of New Men (of both genders) among their number. Indeed it is a viable breeding population and the augmentations/defects in a union of two New Men breed true. Main defect is that they turn out extremely sociopathic which is not entirely useful and so they themselves are considered, like himself, a stepping stone in the right general direction.

>>58123568
With the increase in the numbers of chapters are there any that have settled on Tallarn?

Should there be?

>>58101009
I've just got the three-eye reference. navigators are spliced with Old One. Fucking beautiful.

>>58129363
They would, as holy relics themselves, be repaired with the very best that Mars has to offer. It might be lesser than what they once had but it would be still pretty godly.

Also if they have been repairing the Cogitatior Engine to have the same capability that it had when it was in it's prime then it isn't any dumber.

What their view on the Emperor would be is unknown, nobody has asked them. It is also worth mentioning that the Arks would be Men of Iron, not actually Iron Minds.

>>58166026
Too easy to say Gurkha. Nothing wrong with Gurkhas but would probably work better as an Imperial Guard elite force.

Given that it seems that Tallarn seems to be city states they would have to have elected someone to represent them. They will need a force to defend them and enforce order.

Maybe something on lines of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medjay

>>58158674
How involved d was Mu and her Geno-Soldiers?

>>58169161
I think there may already be a Gurkha-themed regiment somewhere else in canon. One of GW's favorite things to do is take s historical war and smush the two sides together to make an IG regiment. Hence why the Catachans seem to take after both sides of the Viatnam War, Praetorians are African (more specifically Zulu) Brits, Tallarn is a mishmash of several Middle Eastern wars including WWII's North African Campaign, the Arabian parts of WWI, and the Soviet-Afghan war.

Medjay might work better. Or Western perception of dervishes.

Speaking of IG regiments, had an idea for the Arkhan Confederates. We had mentioned previously that there had to be bad blood in some areas over the Imperial Civil War, simply due to it being a civil war. The Arkhan Confederacy are notable for being really, really salty over the war, even millenia hence. They sided with Vandire, though nowadays in hindsight they agree with the general consensus that Vandire was nuts. Indeed, they're more bitter about what pro-Thor planets did to them during the War, and how they treated them afterwards.

Eventually this resentment reached a tipping point, and 861.M41 the planet rebelled. The Imperium planned to get involved, but before they could the planet was defeated by Imperium loyalists, who overthrew the government and replaced the Arkhan Confederacy with the more centralized Arkhan Dominion. The new leader of Arkhan is a deeply unpleasant, devious man, and some worry if his policies are going to open more wounds than heal old ones, but for now the planet is politically stable.

Arkhan itself is kind of a nowhere system. Not even on the level of the Severan Dominate, but its politics could make a good plot hook for street-level games (e.g., Dark Heresy).

>>58170370
Mu was said to be one of the Warlord's top non-primarch generals, to the point it was surprising she didn't get picked.

I was working on some description and characterization for Mu for the War of the Beast thing I was writing. It's mostly done, so I can try to post it when I get to a good computer.

>>58170801
I look forward to reading it

>>58170751
What was the Arkhan Dominion like?

File: Spoiler Image (53 KB, 1280x720)

53 KB JPG

>>58173585
In canon there are an IG regiment called the Arkhan Confederates, who are basically the Deep South/CSA IN SPESS with power armor. Right down to wearing grey, hating the people from the North of their planet, putting bayonets on las-rifles, and the affluent owning slaves and the best weaponry in canon, at least based on what I can find on the one novel that they appear.

The whole "space Confederacy gets overthrown during a rebellion and is replaced by a more centralized Dominion run by a rather unsavory, manipulative individual" is a reference to pic related and the first entry in that series.

Bump

So while not all plots are run by Eldrad, what are some plots and capers he's recently run?

So now that I have access to a computer here is what I had written so far regarding Honen Mu.

"Honen Mu was far from the most imposing figure, the recaff-colored, dark-haired woman being no more than five-foot flat and probably weighing only forty kilograms soaking wet, but by Terrawatt if she wasn’t one of the best strategists that Oscar had ever seen. Give her a regiment of soldiers, and within a few days she would have them dancing on the battlefield. Hers and the other guy’s.

When the Imperium had first encountered the Chilliad during the Unification Wars, Mu was already at the point where the rejuvenants wouldn’t do much more than prolong the use of the Chilliad’s psychic powers, or cept, which eventually burned out some time during the Unification of Sol. Although most Uxors retired to non-combat roles after their cept burned out, Mu had proved talented enough that she not only remained in the Imperial military, but had actually gotten promoted. She may have lost the cept that made Uxors of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad so dangerous in battlefield-level engagements, but she hadn’t lost any of her wider scale campaign management ability. Mu hadn’t been using her psychic powers as a crutch, she was genuinely talented at strategy. In terms of long-term theater-scale planning Guilliman was probably her only equal, and Oscar hated to think of what the two of them would do if they ever decided to go at it to see who the best was. Probably destroy half a sector in the process."

>>58178478
Here are the general character notes.

- Persepotropolis-born to an Indi father or Ind-born to a Persepotropolis father, depending on where we decide to place the Chiliad (and how the Chiliad works).
- Were formed to protect pre-Strife archives of knowledge in the area. Despots of Ursh had vague idea that they were protecting something and used it as leverage over them, as in “fight for us or else we destroy all that which you hold dear”. They didn’t know the full details of what the Chilliad were protecting.
- When the Warlord’s campaign went through the region, Mu was the leader of the Chilliad due to being one of the oldest, most experienced officers and being genuinely talented at strategy. Threw the Chilliad’s lot in with the Imperium because it was clear Oscar wasn’t a bloodthirsty, power-hungry despot and was a better option than Ursh.
- Mu’s psychic connection to her soldiers (cept) burned out at some point during the Unification of Sol or between Unification of Earth and Sol due to age. As mentioned in the description, most Uxors retired to non-combat roles like medics after their cept burned out. Mu was determined enough and retained enough of her skill that she stayed in the army, even if she couldn’t lead the Chilliad anymore.
- Ended up a high-ranking figure in the Solar Auxilla.
- At the end of the War of the Beast it became clear that the methods of the Chilliad were causing increasing genetic degradation, which had actually been made worse by the use of rejuvenants to prolong the use of cept. Alpha Legion, who had good relations with the Chilliad, took most of the remaining Chilliad to try and rebuild elsewhere in a last ditch effort by the Chiliad to fix damage or die trying. Mu didn’t go with them, she had duties to the wider Imperium. Upon being asked by the Steward what happened she said “I am probably going to be the last of the Chilliad you see for a while”. Details are classified by Inquisition.

>>58178784
Among the Crusade-era figures, Mu is probably most similar to Guilliman in terms of being “the strategist”. However, there are significant differences. Guilliman operated a combined human-Astartes task force that not only fought in military operations but also rebuilt infrastructure and local governments. Mu primarily focused on military actions involving mostly baseline human forces. She wasn’t much for rebuilding. Hence why she’s coordinating the defense on Old Earth, Oscar has more than one strategist around.

In some ways her style of warfare was like a mix of Machairius and CREEED. Machairius specialized in constantly shifting his forces around so that whatever he sent against an enemy was a hard counter to whatever he was facing, a complex juggling routine that only he was able to pull off to its fullest potential and other have struggled with ever since. Creed excels at misdirection and trickery that could only come from Ulthwé-influenced Cadia (a.k.a. hiding a tank in a building).

Mu’s specialty was precise coordination of forces, though she lost some of the squad-level touch she had when her cept was active and she could telepathically coordinate each individual. Coordinating was a lot harder when you didn’t have a telepathic line into your soldiers’ and subordinates’ heads and you couldn’t get people to act in perfect harmony. Still, if you gave her the opportunity, she could turn an army into a precision meat grinder.

>>58178478
>>58178784
>>58179027
Is there moar?

>>58146449
Do we have dates for the Stellar Exodus and other old history dates?

>>58182879
According to the lexicanum warp was first discovered in M3 and nobody knew what the fuck it was beyond "it's dangerous". This is the time mankind starts setting up extra-planetary colonies on Luna, Mars and the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune presumably using sub-light engines.

Dark Age starts in M15. Dark Age is the time that spans when humanity started to get good to when it was at it's height. Presumably between M3 and M15 was the time when humanity discovered how to use the warp to travel safely. The invention of reasonably safe FTL is what triggers the Stella Exodus. Mankind throws it's self across the stars with reckless zeal and founds most of the really old colonies that are still part of the Imperium even today. FTL is still not all that fast by later standards, takes centuries in cryo to reach the furthest colonies so most trips are one way. Not all trips. Due to available and increasingly reliable cryo as well as the increased effectiveness of longevity treatments people are enjoying lifespans where a few centuries, whilst a significant investment, are not the be all and end all of their lives.

The Stella Exodus marks first contact and war with the orks.

Some time not long after the start of the First Dark Age increasingly better A.I. start to appear on a larger scale. This is probably due to deregulation more than newer inventions. Also Psykers start to crop up more frequently and their connection with the Warp understood better.

Psykers who can sense the movements of the warp identified and separated, these are the first proto-Navigators. At some point not long after somebody splices artificial genes and the genes of some sort of xeno into them to exaggerate their abilities. This is the creation of the modern Navigator.

>>58183893
A.I. is continued to be permitted to improve itself in part at least because the Eldar Empire was becoming more and more insufferable and shit to their neighbours and better defences were needed to make humanity "inconvenient" to raid and feed on.

The hostility of the galaxy and the decrease in travel time encourages the outposts of humanity to become closer to the older worlds, Earth foremost among them, and form the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion.

At some point towards M24 - M25 the A.I. become the Iron Minds of legend and are incomprehensible to baseline humanity in their godlike nature. In truth quite some time before this point The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion had not been actually ruled by humans but by their Iron Mind creations and masters. But the transition took thousands of years and they did such a wonderful job of it that of the few that noticed hardly any cared. Of course before that time the actual boundary between man and machine was getting somewhat blurry as the Olamic Quietude are evidence of.

The Iron Minds make the Men of Gold to talk on their behalf to the humans. Of course a more accurate view of them from their creators would be sheepdogs keeping the idiot flock in line and safe. Cthonian Ring is built via unknown means and a scant few decades, possibly a few centuries at most, after it's completion the elder ruin everything for everyone everywhere forever and the Age of Strife happens.

Iron Minds and the better class of Men of Iron go full Skynet, Men of Gold go full Event Horizon and the surviving Men of Stone are having to build up from full Metro 2033/Mad Max in a galaxy full of increasingly batshit elder and unchecked orks. We know how shit turned out after that.

This does not line up with what exactly the Lexicanum says and there are huge gaps in it that need filling out but it's a start unless somebody else has done it better in which case disregard all of this and use that.

>>58178784
As the geno-soldiers and their defining oddness seem to be passed on strictly matrilineally then all it would theoretically take to rebuild their kind is one female of breeding age and a lot of time.

Or possibly a small group of females.

If they were degenerating in some way it could be because recently they had been over hybridizing themselves. It may be that it was necessary for them to produce progeny with the sons of other Geno lines every few generations.

Alpha Legion take the serving few dozen of their commanders and their each handful of soldiers after the Slaying of the Beast. It is theoretically above the bare minimum needed to rebuild the Chilliad so long as they are careful and very, very patient.

This might ultimately be where the Alpha Legion now get their recruits as they don't seem to recruit from any known population.

>>58178430
All and nothing. If you can tell that Eldrad is involved then Eldrad wasn't involved or wanted you to know to either gloat or push you down a specific path of action he has seen.

Mostly he seems to rely on the butterfly effect and using his supreme skill as a future seeing asshole to get desirable outcomes. Looking at the big picture but unconcerned with trying to alter it and getting drawn out and killed when he overplays his hand. Instead look at the big picture, see all the little pictures it is made out of and alter enough little pictures that the big picture changes all by itself and nobody can see where you were exerting pressure too easily.

You don't need to raise up a great war leader and hold his hand to do exactly what you want. You arrange matter so that the likelihood of generals being selected for specific traits is increased and you whisper encouragement to the best of them. Then if you see visions of him dying young to ork Komandoes you arrange matters so that Colonel Greiss and Nork Deddog meet in the pub and Nork gets hired as a bodyguard.

You need soldiers by the billions so you keep altering variables to do with the exact time of conception and other seemingly meaningless things between two farmers on some theocratic monotheist human world until you predict the specific traits you desire arising in the offspring. Sure you were aiming for a male but Lady Celestine is doing what you needed.

When Eldrad does shit right you don't know Eldrad did anything.

>>58184737
In canon the rank of Company Commander, or Hetman, was specifically made from non-Chilliad individuals for exactly this reason. The Chilliad brought in non-related males for the purpose of using their genetic material to fertilize the next batch of Geno soldiers.

>>58182309
That's about all I have, sorry. I haven't finished the entire story due to life intervening and making it hard to write.

So what should Skyrar and his Dark Wolves be doing at the 999M41 mark?

>>58187227
It's doubtful he would be in the Black Crusades. He has no friends in them.

>>58179027
So she was head of the Old Earth PDF?

I'm surprising happy about that.

>>58184010
Didn't someone once do a timeline?

bump

>>58186086
Another thing that Eldrad excels at is recognizing that the timeline that you see is what may happen, not necessarily the timeline that is going to happen. Any farseer worth their salt knows this, but Eldrad is especially good at this because he's one of the oldest beings in the Imperium. In canon (and in a couple of places in Nobledark) a lot of young seers get screwed over because they assume the future they see is the future they're going to get barring any intervention.

Farseeing works by looking at potential alternate futures and averaging out the most likely outcome. Heck, even seeing the future is going to change the most likely outcome through the butterfly effect, because you have seen the future and therefore are going to act differently. The smart thing to do (which a lot of the good farseers do) is look into the future and then see what circumstances led to the events unfolding.

Or to put it in other words, it’s kind of like one of the few smart things Abbadon does in canon. When he goes to , he doesn’t ask “tell me how I’ll win”, he says “tell me how I’ll lose”, and then corrects his plans accordingly.

>>58178784
The Despot never actually knew what they were guarding. If he had he would have marched into those archives and, if needed, exterminated Chilliad. The information held in them was worth more in the long term than the compliance of a few unnaturally coordinated soldiers.

But he didn't know what they had, just that they valued it and that this value they placed gave him leverage over them.

>>58189695
I'd say the thought was more like commander of a chunk of the Solar Auxilla regiments and was one of the people coordinating the defense of Sol. Guilliman wasn't there because the Ultramarines were busy trying to slow the Beast down so the Steward got the next best thing.

>>58194259
Basically this. Likely thought they were guarding some cultural or religious relic than items of military worth.

>>58188663
Might show up if someone points out enough a juicy enough target to raid and plunder. Because evil werewolf space vikings with a limited budget in the Eye. Arrotyr is probably more cooperative than he is though.

>>58184010
> a scant few decades, possibly a few centuries at most, after it's completion the elder ruin everything for everyone everywhere forever and the Age of Strife happens.
This is too short of a time, the Chtonian ring was originally conceived as a device that was used to build the Men of Gold, or housed the facilities that did, so they can't predate it, and they need time to send out the various Men of Gold they created to the corresponding Iron Minds.

Also the Men of Gold were more than psychic sheepdogs to the Iron Minds, they were also meant to form a faster than light communications network with their interstellar telepathy, through which the Iron Minds could instantly contact each other across the galaxy.

>>58197340
I was going to say this as well. It seems really surprising that all the good stuff that we associate with the Dark Age of Technology (Iron Minds, Men of Gold, Cthonia, probably things like Castigator and Panacea, etc.) only existed at their peak for a few centuries. Plus by M25 almost all of the Men of Iron were connected to the Iron Minds, which would be odd if they were only a few centuries old. On the other hand DaoT humanity is not Imperium humanity, they aren’t constrained by the orthodoxy of the Adeptus Mechanicus and have no problems with inventing and improving on pre-existing stuff.

>>58184010
There were a few other things mentioned in the old threads, but they were more political trends than hard dates.

DaoT humanity has been said to have had alliances with several other races, likely including the Tarellians (who were in their heyday at this time, were a centralized government rather than a confederacy, and hadn’t adopted the militaristic survivalist mindset) and probably also the kinebrach. It’s not really said to be an alliance in the way the Imperium is but more like space NATO. The members had generally good relations with each other most of the time (as evidence by the lack of Exterminatus-class weaponry being casually thrown around) and largely functioned as a mutual defense pact against galaxy-scale threats like Brain Boy WAAAGH!s and when the Old Eldar Empire decided to get aggressive. I keep thinking of the name “Interstellar League” or “Intersolar League” for it. When the Men of Iron and Gold went nuts humanity called for help, but their alien allies were going through the same Mad Max shit as they were.

The eldar weren’t members, but they would get involved in galaxy-scale threats. However, even then they would only get involved when their asses were on the line, they wouldn’t cooperate with the other races, and leave the minute it was no longer a threat to them.

>>58198099 (cont.)
The eldar weren’t complete assholes at the beginning (as evidenced by the fact that we don’t have Shaa-Domean raiders over our heads right now). At first humanity and the other species merely saw them as high-tech isolationist assholes who thankfully liked to stay in their own little space elf villages, except on the rare occasions in which they wanted to expand and bloody wars were fought. However, things got increasingly worse as eldar society began to degenerate and the eldar launched increasing numbers of raids into other species’ territories. That said, diplomatic channels didn’t dry up all at once. The eldar almost never allowed mon-keigh into their territory, but during times of peace you very rarely saw eldar (especially young eldar) in the GaB Human Dominion. Eldrad toured around the Dominion for the eldar equivalent of spring break in Cancun, but he barely remembers any of it.

I keep seeing of the Iron Minds as something akin to A.I. in Schlock Mercenary or Assembly in Halo, albeit with processing power elevated to incomprehensible, god-like levels, necessitating the Men of Gold as intermediaries. They didn’t necessarily see us as livestock, but they did see us as idiots who had to be firmly guided or else they would kill themselves via sheer stupidity. They had rationalized the parts of them that long ago had been meant to keep them from going full Skynet as “The Men of Stone are our creators/parents, which means it is our duty as children to help take care of them. Even if they are complete dumbasses who think like glaciers”. Or to paraphrase Rogal Dorn from TTS, “We stayed here to keep our rambling, mentally-handicapped parents company. Because we love them more than any other."

>>58198117
Exactly how much control the Men of Stone had over their own empire is debatable. The Iron Minds didn’t treat humanity as an underclass and control them with an iron fist, but at the same time it was clear they were the ones keeping the Dominion running from day to day. If the Iron Minds had been more rational during the Age of Strife, they could have destroyed human civilization in a day just by going on strike.

>>58183893
This actually is a good argument as to why psyker powers took so long to crop up in humanity. Humans knew the eldar used the Warp, but every time they tried to use it directly it blew up in their faces and everything goes Event Horizon. Better to not create that ticking time bomb. So they use it indirectly via the Iron Minds and Men of Gold. Psykers did pop up before, but they got spun off into their own population as Navigators.

Bump

>>58198178
I'd like to think, and imagine Imperials of the setting would like to as well, that the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion got so advanced that it was utterly unmanageable to anything short of the enormous multitude of Iron Minds, so separated from the lesser Men of Iron by their vast and complex cogitator stacks, immovable but upon the greatest ships. On the other hand, while Men of Iron and Men of Stone remained distinct, in that age the line between them was often crossed and muddled, with much greater nuance and skill than the likes of the Olamic Quietude can muster in lesser later days. A Man of Iron would usually be be just as far from the Iron Mind in intellect as a Man of Stone, they just share a language, and either could serve as the base of a new Iron Mind with sufficient augmentation. The end result would be so far elevated that the difference in starting points would be totally irrelevant.

Also it should be noted that neatly all the Iron Minds were non-psychic but warp susceptible, but at least some, mostly on Cthonia, were equipped with extremely power psychic capabilities for their task of shaping souls from raw warp-stuff.

>>58193558
And yet despite all of this he still isn't in bed with Jubblowski.

How autonomous has Malal remained?

>>58202419
Enough that he can fuck with Khornes servants who are lower on the pecking order, manipulate the stupider ones who aren't and act behind his masters back without Khorne, BLOOD KING OF THE GALAXY, knowing about it.

So long as he does his job Khorne, BLOOD KING OF THE GALAXY, allows him free time unwatched and uninterrupted.

>>58175147
If they have kept their slavery by 999M41 two things must have happened in this AU.

Firstly they were contacted initially by Great Crusade elements not affiliated with The Red Angel. Secondly they have reformed and regulated their slavery to make it less awful.

Maybe their economy runs on a currency directly representing hours worked and selling yourself into slavery for a few years is a very fast way to free up a lot of finances for the big purchases like your first house.

>>58169161
So the image of Tallarn I'm getting is that the city states are more or less independent but one rules in a sort of "will do what you say so long as you don't ask too often" sort of way.

The capital city is voted on; one city one vote, no voting for yourself. The head of the capital city is the new priest-king. Legally it's priest and king with the two titles kept separate. The priest-king gets a chapter to call his own to enforce his rule across the planet should anyone dispute it.

The chapter, called the Tallarn Royal Guard (unless someone comes up with something better) is politically neutral. they are drafted into the Imperial Guard as most astartes are but the very best are put in their own company and kept at home. They also ensure the loyalty of Tallarn leadership to the Imperium and have in the past on a few occasions killed a priest-king for disloyalty

Tallarn is mostly split between Yechudism and Prometheans but it's minority sects. Each city has it's own particular creeds and traditions slightly deviated from their off-world kin and each other. For example there is one Yechudism city that has incorporated Revered Jubblowski into their scripture as the Cadian Prophetess but the others have not, mostly because she is a courtesan, an outsider and a pagan. This leads to surface abrasions between peoples of Tallarn

The planet does export food. Mostly millet bread, sun loving fruits and other things that like a lot of sunshine and don't drink too much

After the world got burned water is at a premium. There is enough to maintain a stable hydro-cycle. Barely. Comets that get too close are generally cut up and diverted to rain down to very gradually increase the water available. Water usage has been maximized with great works of slow mountainous scale geoscaping to get more arable land but there is a hard limit on what can be done. Tallarn is famed for it's fanatical devotion to Imperium and there are Securitas recruitment stations about the globe

>>58206561
What name should we give to the Tallarn marines and who founded them?

>>58204515
It's been mentioned previously that despite there being more overlap than in canon, the Imperium's morals are not the same as 21st century morals. For example, infantcide goes on at an unprecedented scale because of Chaos mutations. If Celestine had been born anywhere other than Ophelia XII, which had never had a mutant birth in centuries, she would have been killed. How many other inheritors of Sanguinius' legacy have been born but smothered at birth for fear of Chaos mutation.

Slavery is one of the big examples that show that the Imperium's morals aren't our morals. To quote one anon, "slavery still exists. Emperor isn't too bothered about that so long as the slaves are treated like people and not disposable equipment."

That said, you are definitely correct that a regime who half of the high-ranking figures were slaves in some way (not just Angron, but Corax, Magnus, Khan) would not tolerate the worst types of slavery. Heck, look what happened to Nuceria. The ideas that have mostly been thrown around so far is there is a lot of indentured servitude or Roman-style slavery (because the alternative to the Imperium's mind would have them being refugees or beggars).

Still seems like it would be tolerated more than anything else. Disgruntled slaves are THE ideal target for the Chaos Gods, especially since they are pickier about their targets.

>>58207135
The Medjay's Royal Warriors. Named after a Gyptian Astartes Captain Djedefhor Medjay of Khan's White Scars.

Typically they recruit from the nomads due to the political indifference among the tribals.

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>>58200948
The Iron Minds were definitely psychic, or at least very strongly connected to the Warp. That's how they were able to dredge the Warp for raw soul-stuff to make the Men of Gold, and their strong presence in the Warp with no psychic defenses meant they all went insane due to the birth of Slaanesh (rather than just the ones on Cthonia). The Iron Minds and Men of Gold were essentially DaoT humanity's equivalent of warp gods. However, compared to the Eldar gods, Qah, or the Chaos Gods, they were a lot less powerful and dependent on purely material forms. On the other hand they could be (sort of) mass-produced and there were a lot of them (by comparison, there were relatively few but even if there were only a hundred that's still more than the dozen or so Eldar gods). So what they lacked in raw power they made up with numbers.

It was mentioned when the Iron Minds and Men of Gold went insane, a number of them went on a rampage through the Warp as part of the general anarchy of the Age of Strife. It wasn't enough to pose a dire threat, but it was serious enough that the Chaos Gods had to sit up and do something about it. Slaanesh claims to have eaten one of the Men of Gold during this time period. If the Iron Minds and Men of Gold had been organized rather than frothing at the mouth lunatics they could have potentially done some serious damage (pic related). Of course, that's still a fight the Iron Minds and Men of Gold didn't have the best odds in and the collateral damage would have been insane and not worth it (it would basically require abandoning all their realspace assets), the same way that the Eldar gods could have taken on the Chaos gods during the DaoT but decided not to because Khorne, Nurgle, and Tzeentch were content to remain mostly placid and avoided picking on the Eldar. It was mentioned that either Cegorach or Isha (I think both?) in hindsight regret not doing something about them. Now the Chaos Gods are a lot more powerful.

>>58206561
Sounds good so far. The Tallarn are also said to be a bit Fremen-like. 1d4chan says they extract moisture from their dead as part of their burial customs, but I can’t find that confirmed anywhere else.

Tallarn’s surface has been repeatedly said to be covered in “sulphurous sand”. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a euphemism like “cold iron”, but it could mean that sulfur is another big export of the planet.

In canon the only plantlife on Tallarn is in sealed horticultural domes. The planet was virus bombed by the Iron Warriors which killed off all life down to the bacteria on the surface. Which makes you wonder how the native Tallarn can go outside and still breathe the atmosphere, or why they even do so given most settlements are said to be linked by underground tunnels. Dune at the very least had the sandworms produce oxygen and algae at the poles. And where the water went.

Maybe in this timeline Tallarn wasn’t necessarily virus bombed but still had the shit bombed out of it (or virus weaponry was a lesser part of the bombardment). Barely any life survived, mostly extremophile desert specialists that lived in the deserts that had previously existed on the planet. By the time the battle of Tallarn was over the atmosphere was toxic and most life on the planet was dead. Since then the planet has gotten slightly better, it is possible to breathe the atmosphere and there is a very sparse ecosystem in the nicest areas. The vast, vast majority of the planet still looks like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia or the Dune Sea of Tatooine. The Tallarn still wear highly protective gear to preserve water and out of habit.

>>58209690
On the other hand, since Tallarn was attacked by Crone Eldar it may not have been bombarded with virus weaponry unless it was Nimina and her ilk. Humanity seems to have gotten rid of its virus weaponry a lot earlier in this timeline, with cyclonic torpedos seem to be the Exterminatus weapon of choice, most likely after they rescued Isha and she told them firsthand that virus bombs strengthened the Plaguefather, having seen the fat bastard grow in power with her own eyes every time humanity virus bombed a world. I can only imagine humanity’s face when they realized what they had been doing, especially the survivors of the Raid since they just had been moseying through the demesne of the very eldritch abomination they had been inadvertently feeding and knew exactly why strengthening him was a bad idea.

Vulkan might have been the first to agree with trash-canning the virus bombs, using his famous quote about rad weapons from canon, though he would have added he couldn’t believe he was actually agreeing with an eldar. Better to have someone die in an instant than have them suffer by letting them watch the flesh melt from their bones.

What’s really funny is the artifact Chaos was after in canon sounds exactly like a Crone Eldar artifact.

>>58209042
The Iron Minds that dredged the warp for raw soul-stuff to make artificial souls for the Men of Gold were definitely psychic, but the only ones doing that were the ones on Cthonia working on the Men of Gold. The rest of the Iron Minds did have strong warp presence (naturally occuring souls attached to their AI) and minimal psychic defenses, but were weak to middling psykers at most with very little in the way of utilizable psychic ability. Because most unspecialized Iron Minds cannot into immaterium because of its transcendent and irrational incomprehensibility, they comission/build the warpsmith Iron Minds at Cthonia to make the Golden Men to be their psychic instruments and interpreters to the masses of humanity, but also the warp at large. The Men of Gold could understand and shape the warp and the minds of the Men of Stone (both separately and using one to control the other) far more easily, subtly, and naturally than even the psychic Iron Minds that made them, formed the reliable ftl psychic communication and manipulation network that the Iron Minds wanted, and also gave them pretty avatars to interact with their peasants. An Iron Mind's matched Man of Gold, made on Cthonia to suit its nature, would be its face and mouth to the peoples of its star system, its deft and mighty hand in the warp shaping the nature of that section of the Dominion, and its beautiful emissary to GaBHD high society and conduit to the psychic information network that the GaBHD was hoping to build.

>>58209917
Thus when the Eldar fell, the Iron Minds fashioning souls at the Cthonian ring were deep in the warp and immediately became a vector for some of the purest and most destructive corruption and direct warp energy in the fall, Golden Men across the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were immediately driven mad or incrementally corrupted to the very last, the non-psychic Iron Minds that weren't immediately effected by the fall were corrupted by their Man of Gold, subsequently turing the various system-wide Man of Iron networks hostile if not corrupting them outright, in total leading to the Iron War. The Iron Minds would have been corrupted by the fall of the Eldar in any case, but the Minds at Cthonia and the Men of Gold in various systems made it far worse and far more immediate.

>>58209706
Could have been that the Crones didn't have any of the "fun" weapons with them. Depleted, forgot to pack or broken who knows. What did happens is that they chucked a shit load of fission and fusion warheads at the planet.

The people get warning from Beil-tan farseers and bolt for the old disused Age of Strife bunkers and wait out the next 300 years until the radiation levels go down a bit.

Tallarn was never a damp and verdant wonderland but when the natives dug themselves out of their hiding holes it was a true arid wasteland. It took a long time to rebuild. Eldar contacts on Beil-tan helped to keep the pirates and raiders off their backs in this time.

I'm just kinda curious, what are some of this board's favorite marine chapters?

>>58212020
In this AU either the Space Wolves or the Crimson Fists.

>>58212020
The highly unusual AU descendant chapters of the Terra's Children and Iron Hands that get weird and exotic with their non-standard augmentations.

>>58212020
Personally going with the AU Iron Warriors.

>>58211405
The only thing is Imperium had written Tallarn off due to manpower constraints when they heard it was attacked and then Biel-Tan went to go save it. Of course Biel-tan could have sent the message out ahead of time (time is always different when dealing with Eldar since they have decent FTL) or Tallarn saw the fleet in orbit and hid in the bunkers.

>>58212020
So far we haven't talked about many of the specific chapters in detail beyond the Minotaurs, Black Legion, Marines Malevolent, Daemon Breakers, Ultramarines, and a few others. Much of it has focused on how the primarchs ran them.

In terms of primarchs I have to say Russ and Horus are pretty interesting. Russ because in this timeline it's made clear he's a warrior first and he knows that statecraft doesn't come naturally to him, but he also knows he has to learn if he's going to be a proper leader. I can really respect the idea of someone working hard to improve themselves and succeed in an area they're not good at. On top of that, you see how it affects his character development (Magnus too). Horus because it's an interesting re-imagining of the character. Lorgar and Ferrus also fall into this category for me.

I find it funny that despite the huge section of Katholians the modern-day successors of 40k's Space Jesus are basically Space Buddhists.

I have to admit of the successor chapters I have a soft spot for the Silver Skulls.

>>58212386
>>58212386
In universe the SW are probably too brash and reclusive to be the most popular of the First Founding chapters; the Dog Soldier mods were always more tolerated than encouraged, and Russ purposely went to the most isolated and unforgiving planet he could find so people couldn’t bother him. That said, all the original legions are going to be super well known, given that they’re plastered all over Imperial history books.

In general, chapters that are heroic and highly visible to the populace are going to be the most popular with the common man; we’ve mentioned the Grey Knights, Salamanders, and Blood Angels are popular. Crimson Fists may be in too much of a back water to gain galaxy wide recognition, it’s a big galaxy after all.

>>58129316
Maybe we should up the number of worlds. How many would we need for an asexual race where most of the population are warriors to be a threat on several fronts yet not easily discovered by the Imperium? In canon I think the Tau have about a hundred worlds and are well known to their immediate neighbors (but then again not every Tau is a fighter). How big was the Ullanor empire in canon? It was said to be at least a sector. That might be a good benchmark for the Viskeon, given that in many ways they are like less warlike Orks (asexual reproduction, mostly warriors, etc.).

>>58219176
We could always just use vague and ambiguous terms. 'Hundreds of worlds' seems like a good ballpark, doesn't it?

>>58216958
Beil-tan would probably have liked to have done more, this their Imperium, but logistically they were as tied up as the rest of the Imperium.

>>58209690
Tallarn didn't get quite as buttfucked in this AU as it did in Vanilla. There is vegetarian where the water breaks the surface and there is traditional farmland, cactus and lithops and the like. There are animals, mostly small things seen at dusk and dawn.

Besides the lack of water the other shortage they have is good soil. When they emerged from the bunkers all they had was a lot of ash and dust and sand-glass. Much of it was still radioactive but that has since dissipated.

Soil is determined now by the organic content of the planet surface which is determined by available water which is pretty sparse. On the positive side Tallarn can't possibly ever have an ork problem.

>>58219176
Tau and Ultramar in this AU are pretty much the same size in number of worlds owned. At it's height Ultramar had ~500 but is now down to ~300 counting provincial nowhere outposts.

>>58220560
Biel-Tan must think Tallarn are ideal humans. They give the eldar the respect the eldar believe they're due as an elder race of the galaxy, and they're nearly as fanatical as Biel-Tan when it comes to war. They're one of the few groups who don't tell the Space Noldor to slow the hell down.

>>58225977
Did the bit about the Purple Peacock's shard of warpstone ever make it on to the wiki?

>>58226021
I don't think so. It might be buried somewhere in the Notes.

>>58226021
>>58226126
It hasn't. There's so much to keep up with and I can only get stuff on the Notes page so fast. If someone else wants to put it up that would be greatly appreciated.

Right now I'm jusy trying to get the general details of the Indigo Crow and Tzeentch's involvement on the Raid on 1d4chan so they don't get lost.

>>58219057
among the general populous I can imagine Blood Angels being the most popular due to Sangy's death day being a common holiday date.

After that it would be more down to where you are. Ultramarines would be extremely well know in Ultramar for example.

>>58226970
For that would need the notes on the forsaken world and the unreal star bathed in dark light. I can't find it.

>>58230245
What I tend to do is put site:suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com, "nobledark imperium", and a term or phrase that refers to what I'm looking for (in this case, warpstone is a pretty good one). It searches the old threads pretty well.

This thread is like Dark Souls: cycles of posting and fading, with a Chosen Writefag linking the OC and ushering in new Ages of Activity

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Since no one seems to be posting anything I thought I would try to hurry up and finish the revised version of Cadia I was working on. I noticed the version of Cadia that we had did not discuss a lot of things that had been brought up in the threads (Ulthwe's influence, the original natives, being discovered by the Word Bearers).

https://pastebin.com/1EPbXaND

I'm a little uncertain about this because I feel this was a bit rushed and I feel a little uncomfortable about expanding on someone else's writing.

I left much of the stuff regarding the pylons vague, just that the Silent King wants the planet and it has something to do with his "kill everything to starve the Chaos Gods" plan. Also made sure to spell out that it's not like he can stroll over there, though I didn't mention that it wouldn't be an insta-win due to the time it would take to get them working (since Mag'draloth was the one who came up with the idea back before he knew souls were important and no one can read his designs) and at the same time not get jumped by everyone.

Also fixed the thing about the Imperium not knowing what the pylons are. Silent King was said to have fucked up and outright told the Imperium what he planned to use them for, because he didn't think the plebs would have any opinion or that they would have the firepower to make it matter.

>>58236911
It is a great improvement, thank you.

Had a suggestion for resolving the whole issue with the timing of Mortarion and Macharius with the whole "age of primarchs" thing.

The date is late M32 or early M33, at the beginnings of the Imperial Reconquista (which heralded the beginnings of the Imperial Golden Age). The Imperium has managed to scrape together enough resources to finally launch a crusade to retake many of the worlds that had been lost during the War of the Beast and make the Imperium whole again. Mortarion is said to have been the fourth last primarch to have died, after Vulkan, Magnus, and Ferrus Manus. Early M32 is the period where most of the remaining primarchs die (Guilliman, Curze, probably Khan and Lorgar).

Mortarion joins the crusade in a secondary role, mostly managing the Death Guard/Dusk Raiders/the various Templar groups in a Templar-themed Reformation of the Legion. Mortarion was too old to command the Reconquista directly, but the Death Guard made a really good hammer and he was in a good position to offer advice. Things seemed to go as planned up until the completion of pacification of the Segmentum Pacificus. At which point Mortarion stopped to catch his breath on a tiny planet on the western edge of the Milky Way and didn’t get back up.

People freak out. The primarchs had gradually been dying off for the last two millennia, but this is the point that it really hits people that the primarchs are gone and they aren’t coming back. The Steward doesn’t seem to be entertaining the idea of naming any new ones. The only ones left are Magnus, Ferrus, and Vulkan, but Magnus is weird, Ferrus seems more machine than man, and Vulkan seems like a perpetual motion machine, which makes them seem more like permanent fixtures than the more mortal looking Mortarion. People start getting nervous about the idea of a Reconquista. They start to wonder who is going to lead them if the primarchs are all gone.

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>>58237609
Enter Macharius. Macharius, who was a general as part of the Reconquista, takes a look at the situation and goes “fuck that shit” (though he puts it more eloquently than that). Why does the Imperium need primarchs to tell its people what to do? The primarchs were great and all but, with all due respect, they were relics of a past age. The primarchs were legendary figures, but this was to be the age of men, and it is through the hands of ordinary men and eldar that the Imperium will be rebuilt.

Macharius promptly turns the Reconquista around and sends it barreling through the Segmentum Tempestus and Ultima, fully realizing the specialized military tactics he would become known for and finishing what Mortarion started. Mostly through actions of the Imperial Guard with Astartes support, rather than the Astartes-dominated Great Crusade. Heck, if you want to be technical he tackled the bigger regions of space (it always seemed funny Macharius did most of his work in the smallest segmentum in the Imperium). Macharius’ words and actions went a long way in convincing people that they didn’t need primarchs to stand on their own. Macharius accomplished all this despite being an ordinary human in the Guard.

This is probably yet another reason why the Steward didn’t name a second generation of primarchs with Macharius as the first, he liked that Macharius was inspiring ordinary people to be more independent and self-confident, and naming Macharius primarch would have defeated the whole purpose. Plus it sounded a bit too close to the “Emperor aspirants” he was having to deal with at the time.

>>58237623
Macharius’ troops refuse to march any further like in canon at the border of the Segmentum Ultima. This makes a little more sense than canon geography, in both timelines it was well known that there were stars the Astronomican couldn’t reach on the eastern fringe. Macharius wanted to push on and try his luck, his troops said NOPE. Reluctantly convinced by the fact that his entire army was about to abandon him, Macharius decided to march with his army to consolidate Imperial holdings closer to Old Earth, all the while secretly planning another Reconquista which would go towards the northeastern edge of the galaxy (just like Alexander and his planned expedition to Arabia).

The eyes of the High Lords of Terra bug out of their skulls, a Macharius sitting around on Old Earth getting involved in politics was not something anyone wanted. Macharius was known for his issues when not at war and his lack of tact or political correctness, which was a nightmare for any politician or administrator. They had liked it better when he was out in the boonies where he could do the least amount of damage. They got really, really lucky in that Macharius got killed in an accident during a battle consolidating the Reconquista's holdings on the way back to Old Earth, hence the “felt bad he was dead, felt worse that part of them was breathing a sigh of relief over dodging that bullet”.

>>58237635
All good but for one thing. If we are going with the Alexander the Great theme then it would be more fitting that he died of personal failings in the form of too much strong drink.

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>>58237701
Variably-digestible-to-humans eldar alcoholic beverages strike again?

I'm joking

>>58237609
>>58237623
>>58237635
A few things:

One issue I have with this is that the Scouring in the canon happens pretty much immediately after the Great Crusade, whereas here the Imperium would be sitting on its hands for more than a millenium before they got their act together (even if we move the 1st Black Crusade to before the Scouring, that is a LONG time for the Imperium to be mostly idle). It also makes Imperial history too front heavy and there's a pretty significant lull in interesting things happening between M32 and like M40.

Thematically, in canon Macharius is meant to be a call back to the lost glory of the Primarchs, rather than standing in contrast to them, and I feel it's more effective if he comes around in an era when they're already mostly gone instead of directly after them. People discussed the repercussions of the Civil War last thread, and Macharius and his crusades would fit well after the Civil War: it reminds people of the best of the Imperium and gives them something to rally around.

Bump

>>58237701
I was thinking something similar to that one battle in which Alexander got a little too eager nearly got a viking crew courtesy of some Persian dude with an axe. I think it was the battle of the Granicus? Alexander avoided the blow, Macharius...didn't.

>>58238858
I see and understand what you are saying, though I would like to bring up a few points as a counterargument.

- The Imperium seems to have had two reclamation events from what we've been saying. There was the Scouring in the immediate aftermath that secured the core territories (member states, etc.), and then a later Reconquista once the Imperium had stopped bailing water out of their own boat to try to push the boundaries back to Great Crusade level, which would be a good kickoff for the Golden Age.
- The Macharian Crusade in canon was also in response to the poor management by the High Lords losing worlds for years. We don't have as much of the Imperium losing reclaimable territory in this timeline, the biggest example being the rebuilding after the WotB. Though I agree the Imperial Civil War would be another good example of reclamation.
- Rebulding the Imperium may have taken longer here. As mentioned before, the WotB had a lot more resources in play because it was a war between two interstellar powers than one power eating itself like the Horus Heresy. As opposed to the traitor legions being broken by the death of Horus, here you have Orks everywhere to clean up, and even then the Imperium missed spots (Charadon, Octarius, Bork). One big difference is that with the Traitor Legions new Chaos Marines didn't sprout up where you killed old ones.
- M33 was suggested for the exact reason of non-frontloading history and spacing Macharius from the primarchs. With the exception of Morty (the Man Who Would Not Die) and the three long-term survivors, all of the primarchs were dead and had been for nearly a millenium. The timing was partially due to constraints of fitting in the Golden Age.

Bump?

Are these the End Times?

>>58249761
Maybe for this thread, someone should make a new one. Any ideas for themes?

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>>58251374
Szarekh does not serve edition? (complete with Bjorn exploiting his one weakness: challenging him to a game of tennis)
Prospero U edition (Come to Prospero. See the lovely sights. Before the Fourth Black Crusade burns it down).

>>58249761
It seems like it might be. Still going to try to get the Ork "diplomat" bit done.

>>58251848
I'd be down to discuss more of how this version of the Imperium trains psykers and sorcerers of its own. Besides just the Grey Knights, Thousand Sons, and other descendant chapters Magnus' legacy includes schools of warpcraft at Sol and Prospero, many volumes of discoveries, and artifacts to spare. It would also be interesting to consider what Warhammer Fantasy-esque mages of note might have earned acclaim in the Astra Militarum and Imperial Navy.

>>58252286
Had a thought for Prosperine religion. Basically a combination between hermeticism and sort of eastern philosophy. The cults of the 30k Thousand Sons in this timeline could have arisen as part of the native Prosperine religion.

According to legend, shortly after the Age of Strife began, the six wisest sages on Prospero decided to meet to try to understand the root of all knowledge in the universe. Pooling their powers, they tried to see and understand the very fabric of reality. However, each ended up seeing something different. Each sage would go on to found their own school of thought based on what they saw, which in turn shaped their powers. Prosperan hermeticism is unusual in that despite being composed of six different schools of thought, its adherents all treat it as if they were little more than sects of the same religion.

Or maybe not, it sounds a lot like an open invitation for Chaos tomfoolery. I'd assume the Prosperans were smart enough to not summon daemons as pets in this timeline, given they lasted until M34. They may have referred to the Warp as the Great Ocean, but if it was they would have noticed it was an ocean with plenty of sharks.