>>60097512
>Iron Minds writing

Wanted to mention this last thread but it went down before I could say anything. It looks good.

Was going to mention the need to account for the fact that there were occasional, but rare, tourists from the Old Empire to the Dominion during the Dark Age of Technology (the Old Empire being mostly like Sankoku Japan instead of entirely Sankoku Japan), but then I noticed you already accounted for that by mentioning the occasional chilly diplomatic channels the two empires made with one another.

I’d say the eldar probably hadn’t gone completely cenobite by the time of first contact, as if they had done so they would either wiped out humanity or were so far gone they would have tried to by any means necessary. Yet, showing that there were already Slaaneshi tendencies at the time of first contact is good because it shows while it wasn’t terminal yet there was a real cancer at the heart of the Old Empire that would only become worse as time went on.

Building on what >>60098472 said, in a straight up fight between the two the Old Empire would have definitely won. The Old Eldar Empire versus the GaB Human would be like a bear versus a beehive. Yes the bear can destroy the beehive if it really, really wants to, but the bees can make the bear seriously think twice.

On the one hand, if the Old Empire entered a system with a Man of Gold or Iron Mind they would be walking into a death trap, as every single device with a computer system could in theory either be controlled or communicated with to fight the invaders. On the other hand, humanity couldn’t hold eldar worlds unless they tracked down and destroyed every Webway gate for the simple reason that Shaa-Dome was one city spanning multiple planets and the eldar could just walk reinforcements onto the battlefield. If the Old Empire decided they really wanted a system and damn the costs, there wasn’t a whole lot that humanity could do about it. This would ultimately create a stalemate.

>>60121553
The Old Eldar Empire would have definitely have been able to destroy humanity if it wanted to, but that would require apocalypse scale weaponry the eldar usually kept in the basement for shit like Brain Boyz or the War in Heaven. It wouldn’t have been worth it. The eldar were mostly content to stay on their own worlds, and neither group could invade the other without the home field advantage.

It’s worth mentioning we don’t know exactly what the eldar considered to be ideal conditions for a world. The eldar picked and chose the world that they deemed the best for colonization and left the chaff for everyone else, but their criteria are unknown. All we know is that Earth for some reason wasn’t a good fit, since the eldar didn’t colonize it in the 65 million years of their history. It’s possible that earlier in their history they were doing so out of some perceived belief in the last will of the Old Ones, but even that has holes in it as for most of that time humanity was nowhere near sapience.

>>60078904
I would argue that it wasn’t Tiberius who flipped the switch. Tiberius was a glorified security guard at one of the interstellar communications nexi who talked the operators into forking his mind as many times as he could handle, and after society went all Mad Max ended up in charge in many places because he saw it coming and he had his shit together the best. Kind of like Eldrad. Yet there were a bunch of other notable resistance members who in their day sometimes overshadowed him, Tiberius just tends to be the best known because he was literally in multiple places at once.

>>60121526
On the subject of "Rednecks vs. Xenos," I'm finally back from the family thing that got in the way of writing an epilogue. I'll probably end up going through it, rearranging certain paragraphs, and then put it up on the wiki.
Any suggestions on which page in the wiki it belongs?

Since primarchs are essentially ascended people rather then being grown in a test tube, why was the Primarch rank discontinued? any writing or information on that?

>>60123856
Because the galaxy wasn't the same. Primarchs were appointed for a role in history and the building of the Imperium. That was over. The equivalent rank for the new era was Warmaster.

>>60121567
He was though a very well placed security robot.

It could have been the Cthonian Man of Gold that threw the switch.

>>60125572
Who flipped the doomsday switch should be left a mystery. It might have been an Iron Mind that believed that it would achieve godhood (deamon-princedom) on the pyre of a trillion dead and the sacrifice of it's own lesser A.I. godlings. It might have been right as not all of the deamon princes are accounted for or it might have been Chaos convincing an A.I. to shoot itself in the head for giggles.

It could have been the Man of Gold or a lesser artificial creation driven mad by recent events or as a last ditch effort to die free/get even/make the screaming stop.

It could have been a Man of Stone or an earlier Man of Iron who knew that their side was about to loose and wanted to contain the situation. An insane Iron Mind or Man of Gold or a group of Chaos worshiping Men of Iron or Stone with access to the wonders of The Ring would have been a horrifically bad thing for the entire galaxy and would ensure that nobody survived anywhere except as thralls of things to horrible to name.

It might have been an accident. There might not have been a doomsday device and this was some unforeseen consequence of the reality bitch making weapons deployed in the early days of the Age of Strife.

>>60122148
Society and Culture is where I would put it to be honest. It's seems to be more about the effects of two incompatible societies meeting than the actual battles or planet.

>>60122148
>>60127153
Imperial history would be another, since it is a historical event.

DO the Demiurg still trade with the Tau? They wouldn't have to be with them exclusively this time but how close are they still?

>>60124868
It was also that the Steward/Emperor was the only one that could appoint them and Oscar associated the title with those people in his early days before all his friends started dropping dead.

>>60123856
>>60124868
Also because a lot of the Primarchs were anomalies. Magnus in particular was an outlier, being Primarch-level without any gene-modding or Astartes augmentations, due to his dicking around with warp-stuff. Others, like Horus, were in unique positions of their own creation; Horus forged the connections and alliances that united the Voidborn based on his personality and unparalleled business sense.
To put it another way, the rank of Primarch was not something you were elevated to, but an official recognition of the position you had already achieved. As such, it was not so much a conscious decision to not have any more Primarchs, as it was the simple fact that nobody could measure up or reach that level.
There's probably been many who have sought to make themselves into new primarchs, but none have succeeded, because the scale of the Imperium in which they must prove themselves has changed, yes, but even moreso because they lack the vision and drive and dreams of the original Primarchs. None of the original twenty set out to be Primarchs, they set out to make a better world for their people, or to pursue a dream of Humanity Ascended, or to ensure that nobody suffered as they did. It's like saying you want to be the next Jesus, or Julius Caesar, or Tsun Tzu.

>>60128098
It is highly likely that they conduct trade with the Tau, and probably Ultramar and the other "Survivor Civs" that don't let Admech dictate technology restrictions to them. Anybody who lacks the production power of the cogboys and is still obstensibly independent likely work closely with the others in the same position in order to keep competitive, or just to indulge with kindred spirits who don't want to stop learning and inventing just because of some jerks who replaced their brains with tape-recorders.
It's not openly malicious, of course, but the Admech can't be everywhere at once, and even if they find out afterwards they can't really do much more than sputter and renew the tariffs and bans already in place.

>>60130781
The Imperium still produces such extraordinary people. It's just that the pond is bigger now, not that the fish are smaller

>>60128098
Not as close. Tau aren't as powerful and the Imperium doesn't shoot them on sight. The number of potential markets is as wide as the galaxy

>>60133619
The Demiurg and Nicassar actually threw their lot in with the Imperium, the former during the Imperial Civil War. Ion cannons are a common sight on ships provided the tech-priest overseeing it happens to be particularly radical (or if it's Ultramar and the like who just don't care). The Demiurg trade with the Tau, but they aren't close allies like in canon.

>>60135544
What do the Nicassar look like?

bump

>>60135832
Flattened polar bears. Seriously.

>>60135832
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Nicassar
Says that:
>>Though models of their ships are available, no models or official artwork of the race has been produced, though Jervis Johnson described them as "sort of like very flat polar bears". Which is certainly different. Anon doesn't care if this is correct, because it's pretty fucking funny either way.

Which seems to be the most reliable information regarding their physical appearance.

Bump

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One thing I've thought of regarding this map; the Tyranids were supposed to have been diverted through Tarellian space in order to avoid the Dyson Sphere. However, according to this map, the Tyranids would have had to cross most of the galaxy, not to mention gone through Ultramar and the Tau, to ever reach Tarellian space.
Maybe the Tarellians are on the other side of the Tau/Ultramar? It still raises the question of where the Tyranids are coming in from, and how the Dyson Sphere is a relevant-enough obstacle to have diverted them into Tarellian systems.

>>60141628
Leviathan was the one that dodged the Dyson Sphere, Kraken was the one that chewed through Tarellian space thanks to Be'lakor. The location of Tarellian space is more due to the location of the Tau (who the Tarellians fled into in canon) and the fact that Kraken also threatened Iyanden, Malan'tai, and Halathel, the latter two of which are in the northeast corner of the galaxy. I should try to post a modified version with Hive Fleet movements.

>>60141628
Looking at that, the Swarmhood should be way smaller. Also, a dot for Cthonia would be nice to see.

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Alright, I've been out of the loop and haven't been in these Nobledark threads for very much a year and a couple of months.

Tell me, what has happened so far in a nutshell or abridged version?

>>60144036
Can you tell us when what was happening in the last thread you were in?

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>>60138501
flatbear

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>>60144036
Going to need more information than that or we're just going to say a lot.

>>60138491
Flattened in which direction? Oglaf Flatbears or woolly pancakes?

It says that they are all psychic so that at least would give an explanation as to where the Tau sends it's human psykers for training. That and Myrmeara.

>>60141628
Hubworld League encircles the hub like a halo

>>60144036
Where is that art from?

>>60141628
The Praetorian Royal Estate would be south and slightly west of the Hubworld League.

>>60144036
Um, fairly recently we've gotten some writefagging done, like the whole "Ork Diplomacy" incident during the War of the Beast, some musings on the motivations of Farsight's rebellion, how Marines who've been interred into Dreadnaughts are treated when not on the battlefield, healthcare standards, battlefield cleanup, and so on.
Most recently (as in last thread), we had a writeup of "Tau tries to work with Rednecks and lose their minds," some expansion on the Octo-humans, from canon, and speculation as to how the AdBio would see the Tau's caste system and wonder "but what if we made a Tau with ALL the caste's traits?"
Fulgrimfag's been one of the more prominent writefags, and last thread he posted his Historical Species entry for Men of Iron/Iron Minds, and most threads probably have at least one of his writings in them.

There's probably more within the timeframe you've been gone, but I can't think of them off the top of my head, at least not chronologically. Were you here when somebody came by and wrote up a bunch of stuff for the Tarellians?

>>60148149
Also on the primarch side of things Lion got completely done.

>>60148873
Also Legienstrasse and Jaq Draco go on wild adventure when they escape the Vaults of Ganymede.

>>60122148
One potential side-effect of the campaign was the Tau's later collaborations with Ultramar; the disciplined, regimented and well-equipped Ultramar Guard were a much more palatable and familiar face for the Tau, and while there were still initial issues with posturing and rivalry, there was also respect and appreciation of Ultramar's professionalism. For their part, the forces of Ultramar was more than willing to provide advice and guidelines for interacting with the less "conventional" forces of the Imperium, which likely influenced the reforms the Tau would implement regarding cooperation and acclimitization with Imperial forces. It is politely disregarded that much of this advice had been given before the campaign on Happalachia, with the only difference being that the Tau were now willing to listen.
In all, the campaign was a success for the Tau- however ungraceful it may have been. Their objective was completed far ahead of the initial projections, and the lessons were learned with a relatively forgiving people who would not hold grudges or resentment against the Tau for their behavior, unlike how worlds like Vostroya or Catachan may have developed centuries-long grudges against xenos who looked down on them. Instead, they now have eager and willing allies, whose Regiments have often been deployed to assist the Tau in times of need (In spite of frequent requests from the Tau to "please send anyone else;" the Imperium's armies are not unlimited, so you take whatever is available. This is most definitely not the clerks of the Administratum having a laugh at the Tau's expense.). The Tau have ultimately improved as a result of the lessons learned on that backwater planet, and despite the jokes made at their expense, it was a learning experience that ultimately helped them better integrate into the Imperium- if mostly by showing them how maddening the universe can be.

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>>60150115
and there's that finally done. Now I'll go ahead and pop this onto the Wiki under "Imperial History."

Sorry for taking so long for the last little blurp, and thanks for reading!

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>>60150140
And done for real this time; the whole thing's been put in the Drafts section of the wiki among other historical events, specifically just below "Sha'Galudd and the Nagi."

And holy frick I did not realize how long the whole thing really is; the only thing on the page that seems to come close to matching it in length is the writing for the First Damocles Crusade. I'm not sure if that's just because I went so in-depth on the events of the campaign, or if it's just unnatural bloat that should really be trimmed down. Let me know if it's too wordy, and I can try to trim it down to a more manageable length.

Speaking of people who came back to the thread after an absence, what happened to Assassinfag? He dropped in a few threads ago to catch up, I wonder if he’s been posting/lurking.

>>60150694
Don't touch anything. It's perfect.

>>60148873
Khaine also got a writeup. And the "armor paint" incident of the canon timeline was rewritten to be less grimderp and more nobledark, with an interesting meta-look at how the reader interprets winning versus the people who actually have to suffer through it.

>>60144973
I'm guessing flat bear. But only so I can imagine big bear reading to little bear in the big bear cave.

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>>60150694
That's what the expand and contract headings are for.

>>60144531
>>60144973
>>60138501

I had some thoughts on Nicassar physiology and culture. The Nicassar sound like some kind of gasbag sophont, sort of like the Oafans from Schlock Mercenary or Peter Ward’s “zeppelinoids”. Through an unusual quirk of evolution life on the Nicassar homeworld evolved in such a manner that their physiology produced hydrogen gas as a waste product. At some point an organism developed a way to capture this waste gas in bladders rather than just release it and a whole evolutionary radiation of floating organisms evolved (lightning strikes are fun on said world). The Nicassar homeworld’s gravity is higher than Earth (which actually improves flight ability for large animals due to denser atmospheres), and the Nicassar also supplement their natural hydrogen buoyancy with their psychic powers.

This fits a bit with what is known in canon, the Nicassar in Battlefleet Gothic have this really “breathy” voice that makes them sound like they might be gasbags.

Nicasssar basically look like furry UFOs with bear-like heads and six arms spaced evenly around the “disk” of their body. Their belly is covered in tough plates of skin kind of like an armadillo carapace when they want to drop to the ground to rest or hibernate. They actually give birth kind of like marsupials, the baby is born small and crawls into the mother’s pouch during their frequent hibernation bouts, where they will suckle while the mother’s deflated body hangs from the ceiling like a bat until she wakes back up.

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>>60154587
Nicassar are driven by an insatiable curiosity and are compelled to travel and seek out new experiences. This is as much rooted in biology as anything else, since as large airborne organisms it encourages them to disperse everywhere. Between their psychic powers, hibernation, and 3D thinking, it was rather easy for the Nicassar to develop space travel. They had spread out pretty widely (but thinly) over the area near Ultramar and the Tau cluster, and were well-known to the Imperium before they started letting alien races in.

Even after the Imperium started letting other species in, the Nicassar were almost deemed Xenos Independens because of their wanderlust and curiosity. When the Tau were an independent power of the Imperium, it was hard to keep them out of Tau space. They were kind of like the Hrud, except unlike the Hrud you could get the Nicassar to sit down and negotiate if you really had to. The primary fear was that the Nicassar would go to a Chaos-corrupted system that was put off limits, get corrupted, and then spread it to the rest of the galaxy. Some even worried that their curiosity and desire for new experiences was a ready-made gateway for Slaaneshi corruption. And indeed, there are Chaos Nicassar, like there are Chaos everything else, but the isolated nature of their conclaves makes it difficult for corruption to spread.

Overall, they’re kind of like the Diasporex, but the Diasporex are in the northwestern corner of the galaxy and the Nicassar are centered on the Eastern Fringe.

>>60150140
What sort of religious traditions would the Happalachians have?

>>60156904
local flavor of promethean fire worship

>>60156904
Like all humans, they probably have some degree of psykers, though due to the spread-out nature of the population as a result of the terrain, psykers that become corrupted and/or chaos cults would always be small and relatively easily contained. One result of this would be a very strong tendency towards superstition, in the veins of old Puritan depictions of the devil and European paganism- stuff like spreading salt over your doorstep or "corrupted" areas (a somewhat-viable means of retarding the growth of Orkspores), knocking on wood (originally knocking on trees to listen for any evidence of rotting or embedded metal), and killing songbirds bringing bad luck (more removing one of the things that keeps bugs from destroying your crops, plus anybody who intentionally kills a bird that makes pretty noises and isn't hurting anybody is a dick.)
Another thing regarding symbolism is rising/falling; "rising" is good, as when your chute opens or you reach the top of a mountain it is usually a good thing, whereas "falling" is often negative for obvious reasons, though there is interplay with using a fall to reach wind-currents, and bungie-jumping is popular, so controlled falls are distinct from uncontrolled falls.
>>60157287
Also this to an extent. Fire runs their vehicles, powers their weapons, and cleanses land infested with Ork spores. Considering how forest fires are a natural part of the life-cyle of many trees, there's also a bit of a rebirth-cycle thing going on.
Their interesting twist on it is that water is just as important in symbolism as fire; rain waters their crops, the rivers and streams running down the mountains give them fresh water to drink and run their stills, and the oceans of their planet teem with fish.

>>60157701
(cont.)
Water also has some negative connotations, with the oceans being deep dark places you disappear into and are never seen again, but this makes the duality important. Fire without water leaves only destruction, water without fire chills and washes away the land.
To put it another way, they would associate Oscar with Fire, and Isha with Water.

>>60157701
I like the idea of them kind of having old Deep South stories about devils in such. Of course this might inevitably lead to a "Devil went down to Georgia" story in their culture about some apocryphal hero who banished a daemon incursion to their planet through trickery.

>>60135544
>>Ion cannons are a common sight on ships provided the tech-priest overseeing it happens to be particularly radical
I thought it was only the more staunchly conservative techpriests who objected to all alien technology? Isn't the mainstream Ad-Mech opinion that you can make use of alien tech provided that it doesn't break other taboos?

>>60159745
Their OFFICIAL opinion is that you can make use of alien tech provided it doesn't break other taboos. That doesn't mean they like it, or that they won't try their damndest to come up with reasons why it wouldn't work, or that it is in fact breaking taboos, or generally REEEEing because it's weird and not-their-patent and only they are allowed to technology.
Put another way, the staunchly-conservative techpriests are in the majority. The only reason they allow aliens to keep using their own technology- and obstensibly for everyone else to use that technology- is because the consequences of trying to enforce what they want would involve Oscar coming down to Mars to give them a message ranging from "stop that, children" to "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING YOU LITTLE SHITS" depending on how hard they pushed and/or how many innocents ended up getting hurt/dying because of their assholery. Or he might just decide to go see whatever it is they're keeping hidden on Mars.
So yes, technically they're supposed to be okay with you using Ion cannons or other alien tech, but in practice they'll usually do everything within their power to stop you from doing it without officially stopping it. This involves parts disappearing, plugs suddenly not fitting, and generally acting like kids throwing a tantrum when they know anything more overt will land them a paddling over daddy's knee.

>>60159268
Actually fairly likely, considering their entire strategy against the Orks is, on some level, trickery.
They send out a bunch of boys in Technicals, whooping and hollering and acting "proper Orky," and so all the grots and gretchins and nobs come running for the good fight... and then the fifty or seventy other humies hiding in the bushes open fire and ruin the whole thing for the Orks, and then the technicals drive by and hose the survivors down with Promethium.

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>>60141628
>>60143224
>>60143811
Okay, second try. Now with more Orks.

Realized the movement of Kraken is a bit weird. Kraken was supposed to be stopped at Iyanden but to get there it would have to go through Tau space. And the Tau were exposed at this time. While Kraken is the source of the splinter fleets that mucked the Tau up, they probably wouldn't have survived a full force Kraken. Possibly move Iyanden or say it moved? I mean, they are Craftworlds. They can do that.

Also, I found out the Vidar Sector, which is next door to Halathel and a bunch of Exodite worlds (lets call it's sector the Ybaric Sector since they're called the Ybaric cluster in canon), has a LOT of Tomb Worlds. Carnak, Mandragora, Damnos, and Sanctuary 101 are all located here. Things are going to get "fun" for Halathel in the future.

The dotted line for Leviathan is supposed to represent its movements below the galactic plane before it popped up right in the middle of everyone.

Cthonia is on there. Turns out based on the scale Regulus is only about 5-10 pixels away from earth despite being 79 AU away. The galaxy is big.

The Q'orl swarmhood size is taken directly from the map in canon. Big enough to be seen from outside the galaxy (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/File:QOrlSwarmhood.jpg). I have an idea as to where the Q'orl got the chance to get that big, hopefully I'll get a chance to finish writing it in the near future.

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>>60162457
That is beautiful. I can't get near that level of shading with a set of pencils, never mind a single pen. Trying to replicate the iconic poses would probably also end in disaster.

After reading the description of Mont'Kau battlesuits as "bulkier XV8s optimized for CQC," preferring gear like blades, flamers, and Edge Of Tomorrow-Pattern claymores, I came up with this rough line-sketch of a Mont'Kau suit. Armed with a burst cannon (thinking of adding an under-barrel bayonet attachment for pinning Killa Kan limbs and the like in place), a shoulder-mounted flamer, a Fusion Blade (definitely not inspired by the traitor Farsight), and the ever-popular reactive armor/flechette projector bricks (will be added on the chest/torso area).

Capable of shearing through through blobs of infantry that get too close to friendly units with sufficient flailing of the burst cannon and lightsaber, boxing in Dark Eldar and riddling them with shrapnel, or spewing promethium within shattered armor, this Mont'Kau suit, like the rest of its class, is a flying kill-zone that protects fellow guardians of the Greater Good and the Imperium from anything that tries to engage them in close combat with the vicious fury and honed (for a Tau/Gue'vesa) reflexes of a veteran.

Thoughts? Hoping the anon who made this request approves of the direction this is taking, and that this design matches up with what was already written up..

>>60163102
Ironically, this does seem to bear a few similarities to the Tau's own ambush tactics against Orks. Bait the enemy, then wipe them out with superior firepower. Also, have the Happalachians upgraded from their old-school uparmored trucks/space Humvees to stuff like the Taurox, Venators, and the like? Happalachians seem to fit the light mechanized infantry niche very well already, their regiments would probably get on the list for upgrades for the political effect they had on the Tau.

>>60163242
Maybe Iyanden moved to a safer spot to recover post-Kraken, so that's why Tau space is now a giant buffer zone for anything coming from the galactic edge. I was also going to comment on the enormity of the Q'orl Swarmhood, that's starting to look like something that's either really off-scale or would have a full Crusade on the way to driving it back (even with the more Cold War-attitude of this AU). Or perhaps the Q'orl aren't being given enough credit.

>>60163260
Also would like to mention this is a WIP, as the title says. It's planned to scan it up and attempt to digitally paint it, and the ERA/shotgun bricks still need to be added.

>>60157743
> Isha with Water.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that Isha is constantly wet

If thread is still up this evening I'll try and redo the High Lady of the Psykana. I'll try and make it not shit this time.

>>60163260
DIdn't make the request, but I'd say this drawing is coming along nicely anon. Good work.

I would wonder though if there is any preference to altering the helmet/head area? That is to say it fits perfectly well with an XV8 model, but I would think that the bulking up of the model could include that as well. Perhaps provide a wider angle of viewing while plating it up to make more resistant to up close blows? Stop me if I'm not making sense, but it could be interesting to see it have influence of a design of a Space Marine or just general Gue'Vesa helmet given how much it was the humies that brought this variant to life.

>>60163260
Is looking brutal and good.

>>60163242
I like it; definitely an improvement on the previous one.
>>60163457
They probably do have Tauroxes, Bike squads and the like now, but I don't think they'd ever give up their Technical-Es ("On what level does this count as 'mechanized'?! What do you even call these deathtraps?" -a Tau general's inadvertent naming of the vehicle type)
Happalachians love them because they're fast troop transports that practically ignore most terrain obstacles, let everybody inside keep shooting like normal, and are easy to bail out of if you start taking fire (yes this is actually something they do, they use their parachutes/grav-chutes if they have them to survive bailing out of a vehicle going 80 mph, with varying success. Imagine it like a check that if failed causes the unit to take 1 wound, and these are guardsmen). Everybody else tends to ignore them because holy shit those things are fragile, holy shit who considers bailing out of a moving vehicle and maybe not dying to be a viable combat maneuver, holy shit what the fuck is wrong with these hicks?
>>60164258
God damn it, I can't even contest that.

So I haven't been able to find a solid answer. What exactly is Oscar? What were the Men of Gold?

From what I've been able to infer they were genetically created supermen made possible by the most advanced gene tech in the golden age of humanity. right?

I get they were all psychic, and intended to be the connection between humanity for FTL communication, and also to help connect us better to the Men of Iron servants, right?

Am I wrong, or missing anything? I didn't any page about it in the 1d4chan page, so maybe someone could add it in once we get it nailed down?

>>60169533
It is debatable if they were ever extensively modified human or something created from whole cloth and 100% custom made artificial genes had made from the atom up by the Iron Minds.

It's debatable if they are organic so advanced as to be mechanical or machine so intricate and strange as to be organic.

>>60169533
The Men of Gold were created by the Men of Iron to act as FTL communication and connect base humanity with the Iron Minds better, yes.
Of course, the question of WHAT the Men of Gold are is deliberately vague; the divisions between Men of Iron, Iron Minds, Men of stone, and the other varieties of humans were getting blurry at that point in time.
Oscar reflects this blurring. He's got DNA and biological functions, but a lot of his physical form is clearly synthetic upon close examination, with stuff like "living plastic" being a large part of why he's effectively immortal, plus the skin that, while permeable like normal skin, is capable of repelling small-arms fire without so much as getting marked. His bones are probably a mix of ceramite, metal-composites, and technological wiring or something similar.
This is why humanity isn't even close to being able to recreate the Men of Gold, and why Astartes don't even compare to Oscar. Astartes are examples of how far Gene-tech can take the normal human form; Oscar is an example of gene-tech mixed with AI tech mixed with who knows what else.

>>60169696
>>60169710
Interesting. I assumed he'd have to have some form of biology just to use the psychic powers so strongly.

Do we know how Oscar compares to the OG Emprah in terms of strength? Probably a tough question because his powers aren't perfectly defined either...

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>>60166060
I thought it was more the Orks that did that. Though the humies would be another factor.

>>60169533
Genetically and spiritually engineered humans (ish, they have several parts that are completely artificial and made out of plastics and whatnot but their bodies are designed to grow them rather than be repaired) created during the height of the DaoT to act as FTL communicators and bridges between humanity and the incomprehensible Iron Minds (and the more advanced Men of Iron, but mostly the Iron Minds).

Had artificially created souls "born" out of spinning raw warpstuff gathered in the deep warp into souls. Ridiculously psychically powerful as a result of their creation and purpose.

>>60169909
I think our consensus was that Oscar has stronger psychic senses, inbuilt instincts to make sense of the warp, and more fine control at cosmic ranges, but canon Emps has much stronger direct combat abilities and higher sheer psychic power. They're both in the same ballpark, but it's like the difference between a high grade communications laser that can also be used for point defense and a teslapunk lightning death-ray that can also transmit information.

Did the stuff about Lady Celestine's squire get saved?

>>60171189
I'm not seeing it on the wiki; do you remember which thread it was in?

>>60172304
Found it
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/57661171/#p57733859

>>60163242
That's a beautiful map.

Just one question. Is that Tanith or New Tanith?

>>60169909
Nobledark!Emperor’s strength is hard to gauge. The strongest feats the Nobledark!Emperor has been shown doing are the following:

Fighting the Beast (who easily killed Sanguinius, who was somewhere between canon and Grey Knight/Custodian-level strength).

Winning against a wyvern, the same kind of thing that devastated a Necron dynasty and took Ferrus Manus and three cohorts of elite Skitarii to subdue. And that was less a fight and more the wyvern wouldn’t stay down after he kept pulping it. However the strength of a wyvern is extremely variable depending how much they’ve eaten.

Stopping two fleets of warships with his mind. Note that this is actually physically stopping, not just psychically flicking the off switch, especially since they were eldar and tau warships and the eldar warships likely would psychically push back against any such attempt.

Oscar’s explicitly stated to be a lot stronger than an Avatar of Khaine, seeing as an Avatar needs a lot of backup to take on Malys whereas Oscar has done it one on one. He’s as strong as Macha-Isha (and more optimized for combat), but that doesn’t mean much because Isha dumped most of her power in the Warp to be able to exist in realspace without burning out her host. Interestingly, this would mean the Beast is stronger than Malys, since Malys and Oscar are about equal but Oscar needed help to take down the Beast.

The “most likely a time displaced Man of Gold” from M34 blocked out a huge chunk of the Astronomican and killed thousands of psykers with its death scream. That might give an idea of how strong Men of Gold are.

>>60175730
It’s also been mentioned that Oscar would be considered crippled compared to DaoT Men of Gold. Like an eagle that was raised by humans and still know how to use their talons but never learned to fly. Oscar learned how to use his powers from Malcador, Magnus, Isha, and Eldrad, who were all talented psykers but did not work the same way the Men of Gold did. The Men of Gold’s main strength was interfacing with machinery. If Oscar was a fully realized Man of Gold the Siege of Sol would have been very different with almost everything of human make conspiring to kill orks.

>>60173900
Ah, right. That is something that could do with somebody doing some writefagging and bringing all the things brought up in various posts into one comprehensive thing about who Quintinus Othonos is, and how he came to be in her service, and what his dynamic with Celestine is like.
I would do it, but I'm going through a bit of a cold at the moment, and can't seem to keep my head in one place for long. Maybe I'll try my hand at it if nobody else does before this cold clears up.

>>60175754
Men of Gold were designed to interface with Great and Bountiful Human Dominion equipment. The stuff the Adeptus Mechanicus use in the era of the Imperium is a watered down imitation built in the image of the glories of the past. It might be similar but that doesn't mean that the Men of Gold would be able to interface with it in any meaningful way.

>>60162457
>Update
Are there eldar biker gangs?

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gonna post bits of scifi architecture that works for our Imperium

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actually a lot of Moebius' scifi art would work for the Imperium's frontier

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Jakub Rubelka does stuff that works pretty well for high-tech feudal worlds and survivor civs

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saved this when it was posted with the early Savlar ideas

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Something for my thoughts on Crone architecture as well

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a portion of Syd Mead's stuff would work well for survivor civs or other advanced worlds.

Speaking of which, how much is the Mechanicus willing to change in ornamentation and other stylistic matters for Imperial patrons? If you want a luxury clipper for in-system trips, do you need to pick form a dozen or so orthodox compositions of ornament/fuck off and import if from Ultramar/Necromunda/Sol if you want something different, or will the cogboys let you dictate if you pay enough in donations to Holy Mars?

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I know the Imperium's ships have slightly altered designs in this AU, but this is still a damn nice image.

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>>60179306
Probably the cogboys would make you pay out the nose if you wanted to make too much of a change from the norm. A "tithe" to placate the machine spirits. Of course most Imperial ships in the setting are AdMech made and don't have the Gothic appearance that characterizes AdMech ships.

>>60179090
Wayne Barlowe's Inferno and Requiem Vampire Knight are also both really good references for Crone architecture as well.

>>60176231

If there are, they'd probably be from Saim-Hann.

>>60175272
It's the canon location of Tanith, but it might be better to make that New Tanith, since Tanith here got burned by the Blood Pact (which in this timeline has been moved to be closer to the eye as a reason why the Imperium has trouble completely wiping them out).

>>60183598
Bloodpacts longevity is also because Doombreed refounds it.

>>60178667
That's a very good depiction of what an Old Earth city would look like after Pert had to rebuild everything.

>>60173900
That is a character that could be explored, could be an interesting one given that it's possible not even he knows which is the real one.

How far westwards have the Kroot travelled?

>>60183115
And the Eldar Enclaves of hive worlds. Lots of nice big roads in a 3 dimensional maze. Also the opportunity to have a police chase

>>60179306
How common is anti-grav tech for the civilians?

>>60178667
What is this from?

>>60189627
Considering the Ciaphas Cain novels talk about civilian grav-cars and the like, the canon Imperium has some grav-tech, it's just that none of it's military-grade- kind of like how cars were a thing for a long time before they finally developed to the point of being practical for military use.
Since this universe's Imperium never lost it's gravtech, it's fairly likely that civilian-grade grav-vehicles are fairly common among the the middle and upper classes.

>>60190466
Doesn't the average citizen of Ultramar have hovercars in canon as well?

>>60154609
Also to keep in mind is that the Nicassar are all psykers, a phenomenon that the Tau don't really understand properly. The Nicassar would have known about Chaos from the very start as Chaos is everywhere all the time and only a shadows width away. They didn't need to go and visit it in some far off system, they had looked upon it already and presumably at least most turned away.

As they are curious by nature it could be more on the nature that they need interesting stuff to think about and they exhausted the potential for this of their homeworld. To this end they like stories and due to their psychic nature consider people to be walking storybooks. They travel a lot through Tau space not because they consider the Tau to be more interesting than any other group of people in and of themselves but because their homeworld, and their primary breeding ground, is on the border between Tau Empire and venerable Ultramar. It's frontier space for both peoples but the novelty hasn't worn off for the blue-skins yet where as their ships in Ultramar space barely get mentioned because of how often they have been seen down the long years.

Tau have used them as a method of training the human and others psykers when no alternative can be made, the problem with this being that the Nicassar are unreliable and although they will let you on their ship they won't usually stop the ship so you will complete your training on the other side of the sector more than likely. The ships aren't all that fast but they are extremely efficient and low maintenance and so never have to stop.

A positive of the Nicassar psyker training is that it's free. The presence of the new person on the ship is a new book to read and a new ear to listen. The Nicassar love to tell stories as much as they love to hear them. However they are made happy by gifts of sugary food. Honey in particular.

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>>60190400
no idea
>>60190466
>civilian grav-cars and the like
Looks like another spot for Syd

Have we developed Necromunda much as a Survivor Civilization? I think we established it as a Hiveworld with its resource colonies on other worlds in its home system prior to contact, and as a Survivor Civ it presumably had either interstellar trade or travel. It also was where Sigismund's troops fell to Nurgle in the War of the Beast, and I think it has one of the Great Crusade era flagships crippled in its orbit, and turned into a star fortress. Necromunda could be a pretty cool location to have run the scifi gamut from optimistic futurist upper cities, military scifi industrial areas, and cyberpunk inner/lower hives. I think we also had it that after contact with the Imperium their environment was partly (re)terraformed to be somewhat fertile, and they imported a lot of alien flora to have a backup food source.

>>60192314
The ships of the Nicassar are not the most advanced in the Imperium, they are built for efficiency and rugged durability over most other concerns. For much the same reason they aren't the most well armed or armoured. They don't typically go very fast because the inhabitants like to run them on the equivalent of not much more than tick-over. When startled they are more likely to run than fight, they might as a people look somewhat frightening in a bizarre way but they are not naturally aggressive or fighters. Their ships when commanded to do so do have a surprising turn of speed as the inhabitants shape their minds and psychic shape into something like giant sails and plunge deeper into the warp than most will go to get the deeper currents.

The technology that allows for this method of warp travel is non-transferable as it is linked directly to the Nicassar's psychic ability in some way. Attempts by both commissioned adepts, hereteks and earth caste specialists to build an analogous system for human or other species have met with only failure.

>>60192314
I'm picturing Nicassar locomotion as a sort floating walk, assisted by rippling of their thick fur in an odd sort of telekinetic air traction, with something like gas expulsion reserved for fight or flight responses.

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>>60192084
I think it varies a lot depending on author.

>>60175730
I don't think it was time displaced. It may have been on that space ship for a very long time, utterly insane and chaos corrupted.

>>60194478
That looks like a good picture for some sort of resort planet.

>>60192363
IIRC modern Necromunda was said to be kind of like a deep-sea vent Monaco/Vegas. Sleazy and with a dark underbelly but puts on a good veneer for the tourists. That said if you go down to the bad parts of town you are going to get mugged.

Necromunda during the Great Crusade had limited space flight but they didn't have the economic base to regularly get off planet due to the feuding upper houses and the huge number of plebs in poverty.

I do remember saying Necromunda is terraformed is assuming a lot. Most of the species there are spliced with DNA from deep sea vent organisms and microorganisms from "Cold Venus" type world, and they taste godawful. Necromundan cooking is considered horrifying even to Guardsmen and is just one step above corpsestarch in terms of edibleness.

Well, I just got fired by my lunatic blowhard boss, he says for lacking work ethic, I say it was because I asked if it would be ok for me to trade a shift with someone later in the month to go to my little brother's graduation, and because he's a manic asshole that thinks everyone should be grateful for every day they get to come in to work for him.

Anyways, I'm gonna try to finish the Conquest of Laer this weekend, since my schedule is suddenly clear.

>>60198525
Oh shit man, sorry to hear about that. It sucks when you try to work with your superiors to get off the time you really need off and they get upset about it.

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bump

>>60198525
Shit, sorry to hear that.

What are the Vespid like in this AU?
I'm assuming the Tau didn't brain rape them in this AU.

>>60196136
Or it could be Moloch capital city

>>60192363
I think the flagship was the Terminus Est

>>60169710
They were created by the Iron Minds, not the Men of Iron

bump

>>60204214
We haven't said too much about them. They were one of the few races that joined the Tau prior to joining the Imperium due to being native to the Tau cluster, and along with the Kroot were one of the few client races of the Tau to have actual teeth. As a eusocial species they readily accepted the Tau'va due to it meshing well with their pre-existing beliefs and worldview, which might be part of the reason the early Tau thought converting people to the Tau'va was going to be so easy.

I don't think there are any named Vespid in canon.

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Would it be a step to far to have archeotech ships be something closer to rotating designs with crazy powerful engines?

>>60198525
Shit man, that's horrible. Here's to hoping things get better, and that your old boss is hit by a bus.

>>60202203
I think this is the perfect pic to represent a Nobledark hive city- it somehow manages to look extremely clean, yet I swear I can smell the exhaust fumes from here.

>>60211172
Not having the usual artificial gravity seems like an odd thing for what you'd expect to be a more advanced design than the Imperium's usual fare. Especially since they'd probably need that artificial gravity to compensate for the engines.

>>60211172
Those would be the super ancient ships of man's first steps in the days of the First Stellar Exodus when everything was bright and wonderful and innocent.

Or maybe the property of younger people trying to carve out a life in a hostile bloodbath of a galaxy.

AdMech have a few old shells and ruined hulls in their orbital museums. The technology they found on-board was important from a cultural and historical point, massively so, but it was all so very primitive.

>>60211172
>>60211676
>>60211702
Yeah, one thing to bear in mind is that even the Imperium's most basic tech is way more advanced than those of mankind's first early steps into space.

>>60212088
They may have found a clockwork music box.

>>60210246
What sort of names should they have? How individual should they be?

>>60212088
So they're things that you might find at the heart of a space hulk, not suitable for modern use.

So between a Man of Gold, an Iron Mind and maybe a Man of Stone/Sload hybrid from which the Navigators would descend, would it be possible for the Golden Man to transit the warp alone, say from Cthonia to Prospero? Not quite replicating the Old Ones' "walk between the stars" but traveling the warp with relative ease?

>>60216421
Oscar was able to hold the Warp at bay by looking at it funny. He's too big of a fish for anything in the Warp other than the Big Four (and the Eldar gods and the "regular" Slann, but not Be'lakor). You could probably give him a jetpack and he could jetpack there, assuming the local laws of physics allowed it.

The Iron Minds could trawl the deep warp for material to use. Granted this was pre-Slaanesh and the other three were more sluggish in a "crocodile at the bottom of the pool" way instead of a "giant piranha on meth" sort of way.

>>60214459
Being eusocial they might not have names. They might refer to themselves as "this drone", have nonsensical names like the Yanme'e, or nicknames beyond rank like the Qunari so you don't have issues distinguishing between drone 20001 and drone 20010. Or maybe some of those would be Q'orl things.

Of course, they talk mostly in pheromones. Without communication helmets (which I'd assume don't mind rape them but just translate their speech, and even then it *early-warm*s with non-applicable concepts like the Orz) they can only really talk with psykers and maybe the Tau (who only have rudimentary pheromones in this timeline, so don't expect a complez conversation).

>>60217349
Would they have writing?

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>>60218965
They might "write" in pheromonal ink, which means the pages look blank

On the other hand, Vespid have really good vision. Probably some of the best in the galaxy. One set of eyes sees in the ultraviolet spectrum, one set in the infrared, and the other in the visible spectrum. As mentioned by 1d4chan, this isn't how multispectral vision or light really works. It could be that the three eyes are actually three separate lenses of one eye, and the other two eyes have been rewired to send different signals to the brain kind of like how the stoplight loosejaw so each set functions differently but is attuned to a different peak, and then the three sets of eyes overlay the same image three times on the brain. So they may use a lot of visual signals like writing.

They also do something with their wings that might be echolocation, they use it to modulate and control their crystalline technology. Their brains must be crazy looking, but I'd bet a huge chunk of it is devoted to sensory perception (pheromones, echo-chittering, vision).

>>60211676
>>60211702
>>60212088
<spoiler>I know it is totally non canon, but I always pictured the inhabitants of Odysseus and the Skavos cluster in “The End, But One of Many” (am writefag of that story) travelling the stars in rather ramshackle (by the Imperium’s standards) spaceships using rotational gravity and Orion drives, and seemingly held together by nothing more than enthusiasm and duct-tape.

It doesn’t help that the Skavos cluster had a shit-ton of uranium and other radioactive isotopes that made Orion drives and nuclear technology in general a very practical idea. Indeed, Odysseus was divided into a number of warring states until one invented nuclear weaponry and forced the others sit down, stop fighting, and unite together as a council.

Humanity and the eldar look at them in horror like someone trying to ride a bicycle on the freeway. Which only adds to the general horror of a species who basically fanboys them as the mythical precursors who they thought extinct. The Tau look at them and go “is this how we looked to you when we made first contact?”</spoiler>

>>60219332
It could be that we haven't seen the majority of Vespid. It could be like ants with morphologicaly different Vespid for different tasks. The big hulking tanks everyone thinks of when you say Vespid is just the soldier form.

There is the breeder and child raising form that are rare and highly valued and seen only by the most trusted of water caste in high pressure suits as they never leave their homeworld.

The leadership and diplomat form that administrate and go on state visits.

The worker and technician type who form the backbone of society.

And other more specialist typse.

>>60221161
If they were the 2nd sapient species the Tau encountered then the designated roles would have meshed well with their philosophies and given them a confidence boost in the viability of the Greater Good on a galactic scale. The only other people they had had contact with were Proctoon remnants and a passing AdBio team and they could never be sure if the Proctoon were signing on for genuine faith or a mix of desperation and gratitude.

Then along come the Vespid who are each and all utterly dedicated to their native nation

>>60219760
>“The End, But One of Many”
Man, I wish that story was as 'canon' as things could get with this AU; the thought of starry-eyed Skaven of all creatures just makes me giggle.

And yeah, Tau historians (the whole race being much more experienced with how the galaxy works by that point) would certainly look at the Skaven with a kind of embarrassed familiarity, while in some corner of the galaxy, the Wraithlord that is Eldrad just shrugs his shoulders, grins figuratively, and says "Here we go again!"

>>60221745
For Eldrad at such an age in such an environment it would be the best thing ever. All his old bullshit and tricks would be new again.

>>60219332
The writing is almost impossible to read by other species. Their eyes can focus on three lines of text at the same time which interact with each other when interpreted as information/sound analogue. Music and poetry also has a coloured component which is further complicated by their much wider spectral range than every other sapient race.

Poetry and song are typically between one hive/nation and another as each nation is best to be thought of as a single entity.

>>60217349
They might have names built around their role like "drone-that-tends-the-driftyfish-shoals" that for shorthand ease of use get's abbreviated or combined with a distinctive trait and then abbreviated. If drone-that-tends-the-driftyfish-shoals had one antenna he could be known as Unbalanced-Fisherman or Lopside-Fish.

All Vespid of a nation are by their own admission interchangeable with others of their function. they are quite happy about this so long as the nation prospers.

>>60205023
Trees aren't big enough. Moloch is some fucked up Avatar/Pandora + Lothlórien wonderland full of custom made weirdness because the AdBio use the planet to showcase their latest creations and also a collective dick measuring contest between the various brotherhoods.

>>60221745
It's as true as any vision of the future

>>60219760
>“is this how we looked to you when we made first contact?”
To which the Tarellian Neo-confederation replies with a resounding 'yes'

>>60221659
Would individual Vespid be able to have a conversation?

Bump

>>60227197
I'd say so, but they'd need a communications helm to talk to anyone who isn't a psyker.

>>60222789
This might be why the Vespid had trouble recognizing the Tau as sentient at first. Their language seemed too simple. Even the Tau, who can speak to the Vespid better than almost any other species, would sound like barking dogs to the Vespid. They would look at us and think "oh, they can't be sentient, look at how simple their communication is. Gas-floaters have more complex communicatiom than them."

>Eldrad: "It begins"
The general cultural paradigm among eldar historians is that history is cyclical, after all.

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>>60179317
AU you say?

>>60228643
It also would be that if the Vespid are interchangeable within their nation then their language would be different at a very fundamental level. For one thing they wouldn't be interested in discussing feelings. They would have them but in any particular set of circumstances and environment every Vespid would feel the exact same.

This isn't typical of native lifeforms on their homeworld so they assumed it was a prerequisite for sapience. The Tau confused them a lot as each seemed a nation unto themselves and only allied with their companions.

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>preliminary stages to the creation of a Hive city

Here’s an interesting idea. Why did the Necrontyr change their names to Necron after the biotransference?

It might be due to the way the Necrontyr saw life. Life on the Necrontyr homeworld, even after they became a starfaring species, was seen as a short, brutal, nasty affair. The only purpose of life was seen as being accomplishing worthy of being remembered for in death. Which is why the Necrontyr nobles were always so ambitious and constantly erecting massive monuments and burial complexes during their lifetime.

It’s not that they were waiting for death to take them, though they did live in the shadow of massive tomb complexes trumpeting the glory of their ancestors, it’s that they thought the dead were the only individuals who mattered. Only after death could one evaluate an individual’s accomplishments and what kind of person they truly were. Kind of like a really morbid version of Herotodus’ quote “call no man happy until he is dead” meets ancient Egypt, only instead of prolonging one’s afterlife it’s about leaving an impression on the world even after death. We’re not even sure if the ancient Necrontyr religion had an afterlife (even a “Babylonian donut hell” one), though it seems by the time of the War in Heaven a lot of Necrontyr were atheist.

Hence the names Necron versus Necrontyr. Necrontyr basically means “living Necron”. The Necrontyr saw being alive as a transitory state between non-existence and being dead. Death was the true state of existence. It has some logic behind it. You only exist as a living being for a few decades, but time goes on for millennia long after you are born and if you do things right your memory can live for ages (inb4 Ozymandias). After the biotransference the ex-Necrontyr knew full well what they had become. They knew they were essentially the walking dead and changed their names to reflect that.

>>60233718
Did the Necrontyr change their names though? I'd think it would be more of a case of everybody else just using a shortened version of the "correct" name for the assholes who want to kill everyone, in which case they still call themselves Necrontyr, but everyone else calls them Necrons. Kind of like how some humans would shorten "Eldar" to "Elves."

Good brainstorming though!

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Any stories about the local regiment taking the Tau auxilary unit out partying? There's fun to be had with the human's attempts to get the Tau to "loosen up a bit" and indulge.

>>60235929
I' dunno man, it kind of seems that the Tau are being made a butt monkey when it comes to dealing with the wider galaxy. I mean, I like the thought of their worldview being shattered again and again, but any more after M'arc and the Happalachians would seem a little excessive.

That said, I suppose taking it in another direction would be cool- maybe some Tau factions are really keen on integrating with the Imperium, and set out to learn as much as they can about the wider galaxy. They don't have to be military, even; I'm thinking Tau media, anthropologists, scholars, maybe even artists and the like constantly getting underfoot and asking the Space Marine next to them "Yes, but what DOES shooting that hentacle beast accomplish, exactly?" and annoying Inquisitors when they insist that their right to free speech and inquiry trumps the Inquisitor's right to tell them to not touch the skinbound book that keeps whispering to your soul's innermost depths that it's gonna do your mom.

>>60237359
Yeah, this is a good point. A lot of the reason that stuff happened to the Tau is it was when they were younger, a lot more naive, and hadn't grasped the scale of what people with millions of years of technological development and a galaxy's worth of resources at their disposal could do in their free time.

Heck, the Happalachian Hill Race only happened the way it did because the Tau cadre was a bunch of relative greenhorns who blew off local intelligence and then started to panic when the locals actually started to do well, destroying their previously held dogma about the followers of the Tau'va being able to do no wrong. Which ironically rattled them and put off their aim. Put a more experienced commander who had worked with the kroot, vespid, or poctroon (especially the kroot) and you probably wouldn't get as bad of a result.

And half the reason M'arc wasn't believed is Old Earth was really far away, most Tau couldn't make the trip, and the Ethereal council believed the Imperium was putting on airs since day one to posture at how great and cultured and ancient they were (you have met the eldar, right?) And we've mentioned M'arc's voyage was probably more of a Lawrence of Arabia/13th Warrior thing where things might have gone off the rails at times and the ambassadors didn't just sit around.

>>60235929
That images got me wondering; does the Imperium have interplanetary beauty contests?

>>60238375
they have interplanetary aristocracy, which is essentially the same thing

>>60238432
But is there a bikini event?

>>60239235
How could there not be.

>>60228643
Eldar saw that history went in cycles because for millions of years they were the galactic driving force and they believed that history went in cycles.

>>60227197
Probably but it would not be a fun experience. They would defer any hard decision to a higher authority if at all possible and once you have spoken to one you have spoken to all others of their nation in effect. It's not that they don't have a personality it's just that they all have the exact same personality unless something horrifically traumatic has happened.

To this end they consider Chaos worshipers to be insane to the point where they aren't considered sapient.

>>60231458
That would be the Mega-City stage of the Hive-City. Next stage is it building up like a big ant-hill.

>>60237359
Your idea does sound more fun; the Tau are the ones dragging the humans around trying to enjoy all the local entertainment, with the humans desperately trying to keep up/steer them away from the more embarrassing sources of human entertainment, like explaining that the lady on the street corner offering "a good time" is not talking about tea and relaxing games of Go, then having to field questions about why hookers are even a thing in the first place.

>>60243118
I think the Tau would be familiar with sexual services and the like, but as exactly those- services, performed by a certain subsection of a caste to relieve the tensions of their fellows, no more or less honourable than any other service. If anything, puritanical attitudes might throw them for a loop- then again, considering how varied Imperial culture can be, and the duties performed by Isha's servants, perhaps puritanical ideals are rare even in the Imperium proper.

>>60243629
On the other hand, this would mean that they're expecting it to be a somewhat professional sort of interaction, meaning they'd not know that human hookers are prone to stealing your shit and running if they can get away with it.

and Puritanical ideals are at least decently common within the Imperium, considering that Katholianism was still around and strong during the start of the Great Crusade, and thus had it's ideals spread to a lot of the worlds of the Imperium.

>>60243629
Trying to explain the difference between a whore, a courtesan, a concubine and a discipline of Isha to the Tau would be fun considering that a lot of humans have trouble with the distinction.

Also Katholians are still around and very strong in 999M41. With ascent of Lady Celestine there has been a call for renewed Crusade. Ophilian Guard contributions are staggering as a result. It may have changed since the Great Crusade but it is still recognizably Katholian.

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>>60239235
It's corsetry, but sure

>>60240913
Not just that, but even their little knowledge of the Old Ones might contribute to it. To them it must seem like there is a constant rise and fall of gods and their associated people, of Ragnaroks and Titanomachys. First it was the Old Ones, with the eldar and their gods being subordinate. Then the Old Ones were destroyed and the eldar and their gods took power. Then the Old Empire was destroyed and the current "pantheon", as we know it today, is made up of those few survivors (mostly less powerful ones), possibly a foreigner demi-god (who even comes with his own mythic Moses in the bullrush story), and then the four brain tumors that overthrew the old order. A lot of eldar historians might be getting worried about if we're due for a new cycle.

>>60238375
>>60238432
>>60239235
>>60239907
It would also vary between cultures and species.

For example, I've been thinking that for eldar long hair might be considered masculine in the same way it was in many Native American, Celtic/Germanic, and east Asian cultures. Shaven heads are typically taken as a sign of mourning or sorrow. Eldar don't bald like humans do and their hair tends to produce oils that make long hair easier to manage. So when humans see eldar with long hair they often consider them feminine when eldar see it as manly as hell (I'm trying to remember if this was the case with Warhammer elves as well).

Catachans would have trouble seeing anyone who isn't capable of killing a vicious predator with a knife as attractive. Tarellians have trouble seeing how humans court one another without neck frills and dewlaps. There would be exceptions, but it would be attraction based on mutually similar personalities, not physical traits.

>>60243860
>>60245002
Somehow I forgot about Katholianism still being a thing- I blame a lack of sleep, derp.

Anyway, to get back to the subject, I think the whole naive Tau concept's a good one. It just needs to be spun differently to showcase the notable aspects of the Tau (such as their relentless optimism), instead of constantly making them a cross between a perpetually offended old man and a country girl spending her first day at the big city college.

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>>60245108 here
Also on a COMPLETELY UNRELATED subject, if anyone wants to drawfag a Tau college chick in a tight t-shirt and short shorts gawping, I wouldn't say boo.

>>60245119
The Tau would definitely be some of the best diplomats out there alongside the Interex. The fact that they tend to be optimistic and assume the best in people tends to win people over as long as they don't go too far. Cynicism may make you immune to disappointment, but it also closes the door to a lot of opportunities.

They also are a lot more realist than the Interex (who tend to avoid fighting unless they absolutely have to). Just because someone is acting nice doesn't mean you don't keep your pulse rifle within easy reaching distance. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, pulse fire to the face.

Plus in this timeline they were smart enough to recognize the Dark Eldar were bad news.

>>60243629
The fact that the Tau understand Isha as the political empress of the Imperium, and not a god, would make contrasting the work of the "nurses" at her "public health centers" with the services provided elsewhere in the city, either at the hospital or bordello even more of a culture shock.

>>60237549
If we need another outside observer perspective to delve into imperial culture, which seems to be the main reason we've been using the Tau in these misadventures, we could use one of the Necron lords semi-friendly with the Imperium. I think Trayzn would be a good pick for stories exploring the Imperium from without, since he's a mix of doctor doom and a victorian (xeno)anthropologist.

This might just be because I'm remembering a question asked about how Trayzn paying a surprise visit to the Bucephalus and Traveling Court would go, and the discussion of the subsequent diplomatic audience. He might even insist on a dinner, since the Nemesor was given the honor, and assuming the fleet wasn't passing Solemance he would be traveling at the time as well so his ship might be full of artifacts.

>>60245414
How would the Tau explain Kinebrach blades?

>>60245108
>>60238375
>>60239235
>>60239235
Would such a contest be an addition to the Feast of Blades or would the Space Marines throw an autistic bitchfit and claim it as unseemly?

>>60247848
This is one of the more moronic things I've read; literally why would it be part of the Feast of Blades? Is there a beauty pageant at the Olympics?

>>60248405
There isn't a machete fight at the Olympics either.

>>60245414
I remember this. I could totally see Trazyn demanding a dinner just to be able to put one over on the Nemesor and to try and troll Isha and see if he could cause her to lose face. She wouldn't, but while she's playing pretend nice she would be giving Oscar looks behind Trazyn's back about how much she hates this and how much Oscar is going to be sleeping on the space couch tonight for not just bombing Solemnace when he had the chance. Trazyn wouldn't even care if he got the Empress to flip out and try to kill him over dinner, because Trazyn is as much a master of the body double in canon as Doctor Doom.

Trazyn would probably have a lot to say about any such visit. To him it would be like a Victorian European anthropologist being invited to dinner at the court of Montezuma II or Mvemba a Nzinga/Afonso I, fancy yet according to them uncultured.

>>60246359
I would say few tau have met them, given they are on the opposite side of the galaxy, but at least one kinebrach colony world was close enough to get munched by Leviathan. They might try to explain it the same way that they explain Nicassar abilities. Of course, by M41 they would know it's some kind of Warp effect, which they kind of know what it is and the theory behind it even if they don't grasp the nuances (and to be fair, no one alive except Be'lakor and maybe the Big Four do, and I'd debate even those five).

>>60249053
Their loss.

>>60249261
Honestly it’s closer to a Victorian scholar getting dinner with a Bourbon king, or a Borgia, if we’re to go by historical analogy

bump

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bumping with Drunk Isha/Macha

Okay, so it looks like we need some new material and write up that partially explains the Q'orl's expansion doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so I might as well put the basic gist here. The reason the Q'orl expanded so far doesn't have to do with the Imperium. It has to do with the Yu'vath.

The Yu'vath were a Chaos-worshipping xenos race that controlled a sizeable area during the Age of Strife. Describing exactly what the yu’vath looked like is a surprisingly difficult task. On the one hand you had the “core” yu’vath, which are thought to be what the race originally looked like. “Core” yu’vath were a strange combination between human and crustacean, with a bipedal, four-limbed body. Each long, robust arm ended in three clawed fingers and each digigrade foot ended in two forwards and backwards pointing toes, giving their feet an “X”-like shape. At the center of their torso was their head, which contained numerous sets of insectile mandibles.

As a silicate-based species, the yu’vath were experts in cybernetic alteration, their bodies more readily adapting to the addition of cybernetics than flesh and blood, much like the Demiurg. Yu’vath bodies were often heavily modified for various purposes, their cybernetics growing like living tissue based on what was needed and the role an individual needed to perform. Despite both being silicon-based, however, the yu’vath are no more closely related to the Demiurg than humans are to any other carbon-based sentient species like the Tau. There is some debate, however, as to whether the ambull found across many worlds are devolved descendants of the yu’vath, or else some kind of sister species like humans are to the great apes.

>>60253732
On the other hand, you have the “lesser” yu’vath. Slaves from other species forcibly implanted with yu’vath cybernetics and turned into war machines. Yu’vath technology is weird. The yu’vath were capable of downloading their souls into their cybernetics, then if the main body died simply scooping out the host soul and replacing it with the augment’s original owner when attached to a new body. In theory, one could simply bring an individual yu’vath back to life by stripping the cybernetics off of them and implanting them in a new host. Eventually, the cybernetics would grow to completely cover the new body, growing and modifying themselves to whatever role necessary. However, in most cases these cybernetics gradually turned its host into a form similar to a core Yu’vath.

It is not clear where the Yu’vath came from. Certainly, there are no records of any such Chaos worshipping civilization in what few records remains from the Dark Age of Technology. The eldar Harlequins speak of a race that sold their souls to Chaos, damning their brethren that refused to follow, but whether this is support for the “devolved into ambull” theory or if those that refused to follow were just eaten by daemons is unknown.

The Yu’vath had a fairly sizeable empire during the Age of Strife, mostly encompassing areas on the far side of the Eye of Terror like the Calixis Sector but also holding sway over territories to its immediate south. In addition, the Yu’vath had feelers elsewhere in the galaxy. A raiding party of Yu’vath even went so far as to have an outpost on Pluto during the Great Crusade, though they were eventually driven from the system by the time of the Unification of Sol by the actions of [DATA EXPUNGED].

>>60253742
The Yu’vath were one of the more notable threats faced by the Imperium during the Great Crusade, and unlike many the Yu’vath front remained a long-term issue, but eventually the Imperium managed to force them back to a rump state. The Yu’Vath participated in the War of the Beast, but as with the Crone Eldar and all things non-Ork the species took a backseat to the green tide that assaulted the galaxy during this time. However, the Yu’Vath did manage to retake much of their holdings during this time. They became a thorn in the Imperium's side, but not a threat to the degree that the Crones or Orks were.

The resurgence of the Yu'vath was clearly a problem, and the Imperium hacked away at it in a series of on-again, off-again wars interspersed with Black Crusades over the years. Eventually, the Yu’Vath were finally eradicated in a major battle in the galactic northwest either just before or as revenge for the Fourth Black Crusade.

Today, the Yu’Vath themselves mostly confined to the pages of history. The people of the modern galaxy should be thankful for it. Although they may not have been threats on the level of the Necron Star Empire or the tyranid Hive Fleet, the Yu’Vath were terrors in their time. Aside from their technology, all that remains of the Yu’vath are the few members of their race that were raised to daemon princedom or escaped the slow, inexorable march of time by hiding in the Eye of Terror, mostly associated with the Soul Forge.

>>60253787
Although the Imperium were the ones to finally wipe the Yu'vath out, the source of the loss of their southern holdings was a bit of a surprise. The Q'orl, who as a race had only recently spread out into the stars from their homeworld of Loq’qit, drove the Yu'vath from these worlds. Years of fighting the Imperium meant that the southern worlds were generally poorly manned due to the low number of Yu'vath.

Additionally, as a eusocial species, the q’orl were surprisingly well-adapted to dealing with the Chaos corruption spread by the yu’vath. If an individual drone became corrupted, it was simply destroyed at no great loss to the Queens. The q’orl also found the Yu’vath’s technology and artwork to be insulting to their xenophobic sensibilities and often had it destroyed in a hail of orbital fire. Being much more willing to take losses than the Imperium would, the Q'orl were able to take control of many of the former Yu'vath worlds.

>>60253825
Despite being an all but extinct species, Yu'vath artifacts are still a problem today. The problem with Yu'vath artifacts is they never really break down naturally. They can lie unused for millenia until rediscovered by some unsuspecting sod. As Savant Preem said, "If it does not rot, if it can lie like this here forever...is it truly dead?"

Yu’Vath cybernetics have been known to physically spring to life and drag themselves to attack a particularly desirable host, typically some variant of psyker. Tech-priests refuse to go near anything Yu'vath, as the Yu'vath were masters of Chaotic scrapcode that presented a very real threat of hijacking their cybernetics.

There are some concerns that the Spyrer battlesuits, purchased by Imperial nobles as self-defense weapons (and status symbols) on black markets across several Hive Worlds, are actually derived or reverse-engineered from Yu’vath technology.

>>60253861
The Yu’Vath were notable for their methodical, detached methods of worshipping the Chaos Gods. To the Yu’Vath, Chaos and the Warp was something that could be measured, quantified, and studied, a worldview that was baffling to species like humans and eldar, who perceived Chaos as something much more irrational and unquantifiable. The Yu’Vath had found answers to questions that no one else would dare ask, such as how many sacrifices it took to summon a daemon or how much favor it was necessary to empower a given daemon machine. It is thought that the Yu’Vath had emotional centers of their brain that were vastly subservient to their logic centers, allowing them the emotions necessary to worship the Chaos Gods but filtering it through their rationalist worldview. Or perhaps quantifying Chaos was their way of worshipping it, showing devotion by obsessively seeking literal answers to the question of how many daemons could dance on the head of a pin. This allowed the Yu’Vath to be reliable in their production of technology, whereas other groups of Chaos worshippers with a significant industrial base, like the Crone Eldar, Dark Mechanicus, and the Laer, tended to be more subject to flights of fancy.

>>60253870
FIN

So, there were several reasoning behind the ideas for the Yu'vath. First, more Chaos-worshipping xenos species. Other than the Yu'vath, Laer, and Loxotl, there aren't a lot of options.

The main schtick of the Yu'vath is the whole "what doesn't live may never die" thing. This way we get to keep that as a planet-level threat as well as use them as part of pre-M41 Imperial history. It also shows how the political landscape of the galaxy has changed since the War of the Beast. I'm thinking the pre-AoS empire might be a bit too big, maybe they were just in Calixis and then bit off a chunk during the WotB like Charadon and Octarius did (the Pluto thing was supposed to be a Mi-Go reference as well as fleshing out the reference we had to Chaos-worshipping xenos raiding the moons of the gas giants).

Some of the inspiration for bits of the Yu'vath came from the Fimir, Chaos Dwarves, and Dragon Ogres. Indeed, if we need more bits for Chaos Xenos, Fimir and Dragon Ogres have stories that mesh surprisingly well.

And the Spyrer battlesuits, well, given that it's implied the Tau built them in canon, I don't think it's likely they would do the same here, as it either implies incompetence or too much naivete (which we've mentioned we're trying not to overdo) or outright maliciousness. Instead, I was thinking it falls into the same category of twit as the nobles trying to indoctrinate the orks, only one with a bigger potential to blow up in people's faces.

>>60253950
It's a good little read and fits in well. It also drives home the age of the Long War and the scale of it when an interstellar empire can genuinely be called a side show

>>60253950
Should Loxotl still be associated with Bloodpact?

>>60253950
Just like everything else you have done it's very good and a delight to read. It also increases the likelihood of people finding fucked up shit and gives the Soul Forge some much needed love.

>>60253950
What are Fimir?

What other interstellar empires were there in the Age of Strife?

>>60252550
Can she even get drunk given her regenerative abilities?

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>>60257217
Former favorite race of the Chaos Gods in fantasy in the days before the Vortex collapsed, got thrown aside for shinier toys when the gods lost interest in them after they sold their race's souls to Chaos. Now only a few survive, mostly in the far North where they tag along with northerner warbands in an attempt to get sempai to notice them.

It's a tragic cautionary tale. It doesn't mattee how important you think you are, the gods will get bored of you and throw you aside when they can't get anything more out of you.

>>60255468
They'd probably be mercenaries for just about anyone Chaotic (plus those they think they can corrupt). Loxotl tend to not work for other Chaos forces in canon because the "face" of Chaos are the Chaos Space Marines who are still all about not suffering the xeno to live. Whereas the Cronedar are dehumanizing as hell but don't mind more meatshields...I mean allies, and even some of the Fallen might be able to grit their teeth and put up with them (they're not eldar, for one, and neither side is expecting to be friends with the other). Their relationship with Huron might be interesting because they are two potentially competing groups of mercenaries.

>>60260682
Are all Loxotl all corrupted or are the pockets of pure Loxotl remaining?

>>60261594
There's no answer in canon. The Imperium doesn't even know where their homeworld is.

>>60253950
>Chaos Xenos
And the Saruthi, don't forget about Saruthi.

>>60262812
Would it be too far of a stretch to have a remaining pure surviving colony of them?

>>60264800
We could, but we kind of already have that with the Saruthi. The Loxotl might be another good example of what happens when you play too much with Chaos: eventually Chaos owns your species, body and soul. You might be able to hide a pure colony of them away, but in that case the number of pure individuals versus corrupted ones means its more likely the Chaos-corrupted ones are going to survive.

Unless we have a really good idea of where to take any surviving non-Chaos Loxotl.

>>60259560
Who knows. Who gets alcoholic beverages as part of their portfolio in the Eldar pantheon seems to be evenly split between Hoec, Isha, and Slaanesh. Hoec as the god of travellers and hospitality, Isha as the goddess of crops and fertility (who also tend to be god/esses of beer and wine), and Slaanesh...well that should be obvious.

>>60256475
Didn't we have something written in the older threads about the Forge and it's failed master?

>>60267545
I think we just said that Nemeroth was it's champion and its current goal is to try and avoid getting stomped on in the inevitable event that the Chaos Gods forget they put their differences aside to make the Soul Forge for the purpose of fucking the Materium up and one god tries to seize it for themselves.

Bump.

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Should we add a story about a relationship between a Custodes and a Tau diplomat or general?

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So, any thoughts about how the average meeting of commanders at the start of a Black Crusade would go?

Presumably it would be on whatever vessel Malys has claimed as her flagship, and lets say Arrotyr, the Indigo Crow, Nimina, The Taskmaster (looking back at the thread with fulgrimfag's notes on him he's named Iygonesh), Luther, Erebus, Huron, Sigismund, and Doombreed, are all present and have agreed to contribute resources, ships, and warriors (am I missing any major chaos players?
Would Bile participate as an envoy of Vect in favor to his master's lover? Which Chaos Warbosses, if any, would get a seat in the war room?).

Assuming things don't all devolve right then and there and result in an aborted cluster-fuck of a shoot out just within the Cadian gate, how does the opening salvo play out? My assumption would be that the Scions would insist on drawing first blood, either with an attack on the fortress world or blitzing past it to start curing a burning path through the Imperium. Nimina would try to lag behind the main front to sow Dragon's Teeth and marshal more shitty troops for the grinding, possibly with Sigismund and the Rotten Fist beside her to fortify any gains the more aggressive forces make. The Crow and his various sorcerers would either keep to their regular capacities as seers and advisors, or again go out ahead to spy, sabotage, and conduct malicious rituals. Malys probably keeps the Crow itself on a tight leash when they cooperate lest he get any really bright ideas like the Raid, which it chafes under and would probably cause it to spread dissension in the ranks.

>>60272443
Not sure about the Taskmaster, but we know he commands the most ground and space forces, so he would probably end up directing the main invasion of Cadia and so on and so forth. But on the other hand, every mention so far has him perverting a given plan to serve the interests of Slaanesh alone, so every contribution to the Black Crusade on his part comes with the caveat of other forces ordered away from strategic objectives to spread general corruption and debauched mayhem to strengthen Slaany's warp presence, and on battlefields where his soldiers actually do show up they're liable to get in fights with the Scions, Conservators, and Sorcerers to gain more power back on Shaa-Dome. Probably The Taskmaster commits trillions of grunts and cheap ships to support Malys' strategic goals, and keeps his better forces and ships for pursuing his and his master's goals while the Crones are abroad in the Galaxy.

Malys would probably take her retinue and go seeking targets of choice and ones she couldn't trust to the idiots that work for her. If Vect sent Bile to expedite her plans when he may, he would probably need to trail a ways behind her at a minimum safe distance, and would essentially serve her as he does Vect, if she has a use for him in a given plan. Luther would also likely be skulking in Malys' shadow, gunning for the same targets marked by the Ruinous powers as the queen of Shaa-Dome, and treading his same paranoid knife edge trying to balance his attempts to upstage the favorite with a need to remain a useful tool to the dark gods in his own right, flitting off to destroy for them and warping back to Malys' wake. Erebus would also likely be orbiting Malys when he isn't hassling the Imperial forces himself.

We had something about Malys humoring less of Arrotyr's teamkilling gloryhound bullshit now, with the Fallen slowly proving themselves comparable to the Scions as shock troopers, and Luther being much more cooperative than the Marshal.

>>60272701
Huron would be busy marauding, pillaging, and generally being piratical, Doombreed would be flanking around the Eye and supporting the beachhead at the Cadian gate, kept well away from the unification era Fallen leaders he might butt heads with, who are up with the vanguard. After the initial breakthrough at the gate, Arrotyr would probably need a directive that takes his forces well into enemy territory, against foes he considers worth his time, and keeps him out of the midst of the Taskmaster's forces (thus the bulk of the fighting) and also keeps him from bolting into the galactic northeast to find and challenge the Stormlord. He and Nimina would probably be the ones directing whatever Ork auxiliaries could be amassed, thus working with whatever Warboss joined the fight as their gods' decree. In Arrotyr's case that means a tide of Khornate Orks tagging along behind, which he might himself incinerate, defeating the point of the spores they bring with them. Nimina would seed Nurglite Ork spores in the areas the Black Crusade held at the time, but would be just as prone to gather the Conservators and try to recapture Isha wherever she may be working to respond to the crisis as Arrotyr is to abscond for a rematch. Letting the Chartreuse Goose spend too much time on espionage, and thus as the Changeling, really ups the odds that it will get a bright idea and try to execute it, with or without informing any other commanders of the Black Crusade, but Malys keeping him close just means giving the Crow and Tzeentch more direct influence over the other gods, and doesn't really decrease its idea quotient. The Taskmaster is motivated to seize all he can (for Slaanesh), but is liable to just pay Malys lip service as a campaign goes tits up to bleed everyone else of resources while he pursues that goal to the detriment of the others, and being the cult of Slaanesh's only sane man, he needs to rush back to Shaa-Dome whenever the cenobites run out of coke.

>>60272937
And eventually Malys drops the balancing act between these forces, or one or all of these eventualities happen, and the whole thing breaks down and is forced back by the Imperium.

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>>60272955
I realized I'd been forgetting Lucius, but then remembered he's a C'tan vampire and isn't welcome at Chaos parties.

On that note, I'm assuming he's an space-armstrong level Nosferatu combat monster, not a Strigoi. On that note, did we ever put a date on the beginning of Orikan and the Deceivers' Pyramid scheme? I assume after the Silent King awoke, but this being Orikan he might have decided, then jumped back a few millennia to have some room to grow without the Silent King around.

>>60272937
This needs to go in the Forces of Chaos section. It's a very nice overview.

Random thought: would Dante the most respected commander in the Imperium? Compared to canon, Calgar is in a coma, and the Space Wolves are abrasive and somewhat marginalized as usual so Grimnar's reach is limited, while Dante has been doing his tragically noble hero schtick for 1000+ years. It seems like the only ones who could match his depth and breadth of experience are the Phoenix Lords, and from their portrayals in canon it seems like they're more interested in killing things and leaving the leadership stuff to the Autarchs/Farseers.

>>60273083
I know Armstrong's name as come up before as a comparison for Lucius, but as a power level nerd I want to make clear that we've agreed Lucius is not equivalent to Armstrong. If you taken Armstrong's feats explicit and implied from MGR, his sheer physical stats are on a different level than even the top tier individuals in 40k. For example, canon Angron is a pretty strong Primarch, and his best strength feat is barely squatting a Warlord Titan; Armstrong could throw a Warlord with one arm while bragging about his college football career. The only ones vaguely on his tier are Oscar and Malys and only because of Warp hacks, physically his stats would dwarf them.

To me, Lucius would probably top out at named Bloodthirster level, which is already pretty much as powerful as you can get in 40k as a melee combatant without getting into the ridiculous characters (though they unfortunately get worfed a lot in their canon portrayals to pimp the hero of the week).

>>60273083
>>60273965
Urkrathos is also another major Chaos character, and would be critical because space supremacy is vital to any Black Crusade.

>>60274356
Dante in this AU isn't a vain prettyboy. The ork Wyrd Boy burning one half of his face with warp fire and giving him a melted-wax Glasgow Smile didn't bother him overly much. If he was really that bothered he would have had some reconstructive surgery done. With his super human astartes biology it would have been an afternoon on the slab, no anaesthetic and take it easy tomorrow. As it stands he wears a Phantom of the Opera porcelain half mask when on formal occasions and parade and enjoys looking like a heavily scarred badass the rest of the time.

The bottomless pit of white hot fury he unleashes in battle is just him being Dante. He's always been like that. He hasn't taken the Oath of the Black Rage simply because you aren't allowed to hold high office and follow that oath for obvious reasons, though once and earlier in his career he was very tempted to do so. He is as close to Death Company as you can get without having to repaint your war-plate. He had seen visions of the Lady in the Red Dress which is more common in the Death Company than other branches of the Baal military.

Out of actual Space Marines he is probably one of the more respected as a military leader and a commander of armies. His personal ferocity hides a keen mind much like it did with Angron in an earlier age. This puts him as somewhat of an outlier among the astartes as most Chapter Masters aren't all that high up the chain of command in the Imperial Army for the simple reason that it's not their job and every Space Marine in a command tent/bunker is one less in the field doing what the Imperium has expended quite an investment in them to do. In this regard he is a mixed blessing. He can visualize a quite large and complex theatre of conflict in his head from nothing but reports over a comm. bead whilst wading through fields of freshly cooling corpses.

>>60274560
However it all too often makes him harder to reach and there is no grantee that his subordinates are as respected or capable as he is.

He is approaching the upper limit of how old a Mk3MP Astartes can remain active for. He looks older now and it's suspected that in the next few centuries he will start to experience a fading of performance. He gets along with the eldar Autarchs better than most. Partly because they are often of a similar age and have experienced much the same life which gives them a common point of reference but also because they share a very similar experience. They have both felt the building of bloodlust and the allure of giving in to it. They have had to fight the draw of becoming lost on the path and he has had to resist taking the Oath of Black Rage and they have all had to look upon this temptation every single day there is a war to fight and say no again and again and there is always a war to fight.

>>60274356
Urkrathos would probably be the one with the ships. His primary job being transporting soldiers from one warzone to another and tying up the Imperial Navy to keep them from getting the Guard into place or nuking shit from orbit.

The trouble with him is that he hates everyone else on the Chaos side, human and xeno alike. It's just that he hates the Imperium more for it's betrayal of him and wants to get even. The idiots on his boats are a means to that.

>>60273083
I always assumed it was before on the principle that if the Silent King was around before it started to gather steam then he would have eradicated it as a potential threat to his authority and sovereignty. By the time SK woke up and realized what was happening it was already too widespread to do anything about until after total victory. Maybe started the project in the upheaval of the Civil War, there would be an abundance of willing test subjects wanting some way of getting a leg up on their rivals. Becoming a vampire would be tempting to them.

>>60258910
Not that many. Warp travel was difficult. You had to make deals with every devil or be a very powerful psyker.

>>60273083
>>60276750
If Orikan had a hand in creating the very first C'tan vampire, and it was an AdMech Magos who was tricked by him with the prospect of an undying metal body, and Lucius also contracted C'tan vampirism, that would make the origin of C'tan vampires Great Crusade-era or post-WotB at the latest, depending on when Lucius went off into the boonies.

>>60258910
See this is part of the reason I suggested to maybe restrict the Yu'vath to the Calixis sector originally. Most Age of Strife empires weren't that big. Ullanor and Randga, both of which were serious shit, were little over a sector in size. Most were much smaller. Ultramar was a bit bigger, but then again it was a chunk of the GaBHD that avoided getting completely chewed up. Same with the Tarellians.

>>60278458
Vampires might have been older, the pyramid scheme could have been hijacking and using something that already existed

>>60274560
Not sure where your misconception is coming from but Dante isn't a vain prettyboy in canon, his portrayal is actually fairly interesting for a big name chapter master. He rose through the ranks initially not necessarily because he was the best, but because he was one of the few left after the Blood Angels took massive casualties, and has some survivor's guilt because of it. In Devastation of Baal, he's incredibly tired, kind of depressed, and wants to die, but keeps on going because of his sense of duty, and if that isn't nobledark to a T then I don't know what is.

Also the guy with the half-melted face and mask is Captain ErasmusTycho, Dante isn't mutilated (and I don't think he should be in this AU either).

>>60278955
My mistake. I'm getting the two mixed up.

>>60278955
So in this AU he's a clinical depressive and tactical borderline genius who puts great value on loyalty and duty.

>>60278927
Well, we had it as a Deceiver aligned Cryptek or Lord (not specified to be Orikan AFIK) that sired that first major vampire line in the Imperium, but that would specifically be Strigoi vamps, not Nosferatu. We also had the Deceiver effectively atomized by the Silent King, with no significant shards left to deal with in their time before going to sleep, and these presumably scattered spinward into the galaxy, towards Shaa-Dome and eventually Segmentum Solar, taking in faint starlight the whole time and slowly regenerating to the point at which splinters on occupied worlds could embed in hosts. So it would be possible for Strigoi to predate that trick with the Magos, but sires would be pretty disparate and rare before that point, and would probably lack the benefits of the Deceiver's reflection on the warp until later lines more tied to his nature emerged (Orikan foremost among them).

Nightbringer wasn't as successfully destroyed, and the fight between him and the Silent King's forces produced shards and the Nightbringer's mostly whole form, reduced just enough to be contained, as well as splinters which were not contained. Nightbringer was entombed Void Dragon style somewhere in the galactic east, g-south of the NSE, and was eventually freed by unwitting Ultramarines. The Nightbringer's original slivers would be rarer, but he retains more overarching coherence, so his shards occasionally raise worthy harbingers to vampirism, and Nosferatu are more prodigious in siring subsequent vampires to propagate the shadow of the Nightbringer, as their master wills even before he was set loose.

>>60279722
There are also the orphan shards. Not all are Dragons.

bamp

>>60281467
I was gonna mention the Lahmia slivers but ran out of character count, presumably they correspond to the Burning One, the Endless Swarm, and Moulder of Worlds. If I remember right, those three are sharded and labyrinthed, with the potential to have slivers drifting around the cosmic region they were defeated in. Llandu'gor got removed from the universe, and has his own thing going with the flayer curse, and all the other Star Gods got eaten by the Outsider.

The three sets of Lahmians wouldn't have much of a psychic presence since their sires never cultivated Warp reflections in the minds of mortals, which means neither having the boons of their sire to influence the world around them, nor their attention and influence upon them by that vector. They would still come to resemble the mentality and fixations of their sire, but the sire wouldn't have the same directive power over them. Lahmians would probably be a bit more esoteric than charming Strigoi and murderous Nosferatu, with powers and obsessions tending towards pyromania, grey goo, and mega-engineering.

I can't think of a classic Vampire thing involving burning things down, but exploding into a swarm of bats/rats/scarabs or building elaborate spooky castles would be very Lahmian things to do.

>>60262812
Presumably their homeworld was engulfed by the formation of the Eye of Terror like the Demiurg homeworld.

The Kroot's sense of humor tends to revolve around making people uncomfortable, but does that work in reverse too; do they find it funny if you manage to make them uncomfortable, like when you're the butt of the joke but you still laugh because it's actually pretty funny?
I'm imagining some humans or Tau feeling a bit sore after their Kroot buddies pulled one of their "join us in cannibalism or else" pranks or something similar deciding to get back at them by telling them they have to come to this cultural exchange event and join the others in a bonding ceremony that is very important.
In reality, they're taking the Kroot to a massage parlor.

>>60279722
>>60283177
The Gege story had about the best description for the three types of vampires I'd seen so far.

There are probably some other minor C'tan that have shards out there, since the Outsider and Nightbringer weren't able to nom all of them, just enough that they were a nonfactor. If they had gotten all of them, there wouldn't be any C'tan shards to use in the vanilla timeline.

>>60286283
Oh myyyyyy...

I'd say they'd probably laugh. At least in a "touche" sense. If everyone in Kroot society got angry over their species' sense of humor there wouldn't be many Kroot left.

>>60283177
>I can't think of a classic Vampire thing involving burning things down, but exploding into a swarm of bats/rats/scarabs or building elaborate spooky castles would be very Lahmian things to do.

That definitely sounds like something a C'tan vampire of The Endless Swarm would do. Go full vampire Imhotep with a swarm of Necrodermis gray goo or Necron Scarabs.

>>60272255
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XzLeQs6jZEM

This would exist possibly as an in-universe trashy romance series.

>>60274605
>>60274560
So that is not Dante but is Captain ErasmusTycho

>>60246359
>>60249261
Some Tau must have met some Kienbrach. Tau water caste missionaries, traders and spies have a lot of freedom to travel the Imperium and the list of planets that won't accept aliens with cash to spend is much, much shorter than the list of planets that they can land on. Kinebrach are prized for their unique skills and will be invited to make things on commission from quite highly placed members of society. They have also set up colonies well outside of the traditional Interex sphere of influence. Also the Kinebrach are present to some degree in the Inquisition as are the Tau. There is nothing stopping the Kinebrach from becoming Inquisitors although given the rarity of Inquisitors and the rarity of Kinebrach it's possible that none ever have.

To this end although they originate around distant stars Tau and Kinebrach will have encountered each other. Inquisitor "2,000% AHAB" Kryptman employs at least one of their swordsmiths and he operates extensively on the Eastern Fringe because that's where the biggest concentration of Bugs are.

It is not out of the question that Shas'O Shadowsun has been given a "ceremonial" sword by one of their kind. Most of the Tau just assume it was a good will gesture and that any supernatural claims are just Imperial D20 Katana claims.

Aun'Va isn't dismissive of such claims. When he was a lad he remembers the Heliocentric universe model coming into popularity, he has had his belief in the shape of things called into question too many times to be surprised at slightly odd knives.

>>60286283
Kroot humour could also be telling really huge and obvious lies too obvious for anyone to fall for and seeing if they can deliver it in a way that makes people believe it.

>>60260682
So the Loxotl are a potential Age of Strife era empire. Maybe there were technologically very primitive and relied heavily on deamonic shit to get anything done. Bloodpact can survive on their own in theory, they do have a functional society with working infrastructure and a quite good technology and industrial base. Loxotl not so much.

They managed to amass an interstellar empire on the multi-sector scale with fusion engines, hydrogen missiles, no void shields, no artificial gravity and no actual warp-drive.

All of their tech was saturated with warp corruption and everything they did relied on the blessings of the gods.

Question: is Calgar an idiot in this AU or is he someone truly worthy of being the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines?

Maybe he sacrificed himself to save the 1st Company, or he actually won his dual with the Swarm Lord, thus saving Ultramar but gets coma'ed in the process?

>>60292335
Nothing written yet beyond beat into a coma by the Swarmlord. Presumably he wasn't an idiot. You don't get to be head of the Ultramarines by being stupid. Presumably he thought death was worth holding the position for and his sacrifice was a calculated loss.

>>60229028
We've had some estimations on the numbers of human and craftworlders. How many Dark and Chaos eldar are there?

>>60292145
That's a great image. The equivalent of cavemen with laser guns. Once they were sharks back in the days but now they're just scabby little remoras.

>>60292792
I think he was the one that set the greatest shard of Nightbringer loose, a power only below the Void Dragon due to the latter’s position as Omnissiah. This was arguably done in ignorance, but ignorance that lead to catastrophe isn’t a good argument against being dumb.

Would the Nightbringer try to copy death cults?

>>60293705
I can’t remember what the population estimate in the demographics of Shaw-Dome was, but it’s fairly high. While much reduced from the multitudes of the Old Empire, Crone have absolutely no shortage of bodies to throw at problems, and are by no means a dwindling population.

>>60290866
I was thinking, when Kryptman’s very very old body dies there’s a good chance he’ll elect to become a Servo Brain, which as far as I understand is an Imperial demi-lich. The description says they usually have very one track, specialized minds zeroed in on their area of expertise following conversation, which would bump Boaz up to 4000 % Ahab. Picture Kryptman’s wrathful floating skull draped in tyranid skin cloaks, screaming bloody murder through a scowling golden death mask, and shooting jets of flame and biological agents from its mechadendrites as it chases genestealers through the corridors of some underhive.

>>60292335
>>60292792
Yeah, he wasn't an idiot by any means. He took the 1st company and went to hunt down the Swarmlord to follow the time honored tradition of "shoot the big one first", cut off all four of its swords and threw them away, and had it cornered and bleeding. He expected it to be dangerous, but weakened and possibly beatable if he played things right.

Then the Swarmlord bumrushed the 1st company to go straight for Calgar and then mauled him and beat hum into a coma with its fists. It took the rest of the first company sacrificing themselves and Cato freaking Sicarius to drag him away, and that was more because Cato was enough of a slippery bastard he could avoid the Swarmlord.

>>60295291
That was Uriel. Again got hit with an outside context problem. Assumed the Nightbringer's husk was some souped-up C'tan vampire. I think it was that Kasimir De Valtos' men held Uriel's at gunpoint so they wouldn't stop him from opening the labyrinth. Thinking it was just a super-vamp Uriel's thought process was "Yeah, go ahead, be stupid. I'll be sitting here when you need me after the screaming starts."

>>60293705
>>60295339
I recall from a previous thread it was there are about 1.1 Dark Eldar for every Craftworld+Exodite combined (or was that the other way around), and about 9 Crone Eldar for every Craftworld+Exodite Eldar. It used to be worse but the population of Imperial and Dark Eldar has doubled since M30 whereas the Crone Eldar's has remained stable due to (literally) insane birth rates (plus Daemonculaba, etc.) but also insane death rates.

The fact that technically the rest of the galaxy outnumbers them (though the vast majority of those are civilians who don't know the right side of a lasgun, whereas all Crones are fighters to some degree) is one of the reasons they like using humans, Fallen, Orks, Loxotl, horribly gribbly beasts, and anything else they can get their hands on as auxillaries, shock troops, and cannon fodder.

>>60295291
He would claim that they are copying him. His original following started in the late Cretaceous Period. Given the superficial similarities it's probable that his vampires would infiltrate and propagate using the Religio Mortis, not helped by the Death worshippers being a secretive bunch.

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>>60296157
That might be a significant issue for the Synod. Not only do you have Chaos potentially hijacking local religions, now you got this vampire bullshit you have to worry about. Which death cults are really death cults and which are Lahmia-style dens of Vampirism.

Actual Lahmia would tend to be even worse, since they tend to be aristocrats and it's pretty hard to nail one down unless you notice a particular noble won't go into the sun and people are going missing. And even then on many Hive Worlds the smog is enough to cover the first one up.

How much does the average pleb know about C'tan vampires anyway? They don't seem to be as widespread as genestealers, which everyone and their grandmother seems to know about for health reasons. But at the same time few if any plebs know of the AdBio's fuckup with the project that created Legienstrausse (we really need some kind of ominous sounding codename for it).

>>60297321
Vampires getting involved with death cults in the name of the Nightbringer would be Nosferatu, which only us subtlety as a last resort, but can control their bloodlust enough to stay just under the radar.

While some Lahmia would be aristocratic in bearing, its the Strigoi that tend to fill that niche as vampire socialites. Of note is that the Deciever's brood are talented but totally compulsive liars.

Lahmians correspond to the Burning One, Endless Swarm, and the Moulder of Worlds. If a Lahmian were to infiltrate an Imperial religion, it would likely be Promethianism, and it might be hard to tell a Vampire of the Burning One from a particularly fanatical and obsessive, but mundane, fire worshiper. Vampires of the Endless Swarm might be very prolific in siring and organizing their offspring, and might be the only strain prone to actually create whole nations of worlds of vampires, with mixed results. Spotting Moulder of Worlds Vamps might be as easy as asking "why did this hive city sized castle of stone and living metal suddenly appear on this feudal/primitive world?", but actually assailing such a vampire would be a matter of costs versus rewards, since Moulder Lahmians might just want to build their spooky castles and lurk there, only ever emerging to feed.

>>60297321
Synod knows about vampires but aren't ready to start spreading the information before the Inquisition does to prevent panic. At least the high ups know.

>>60295689
Was it the current Uriel that let the Reaper out of the box or was it his ancestor?

>>60300981
an ancestor, the Nightbringer has been out for a few thousand years

>>60300981
>>60302687
I would have thought it was the current Uriel. Nightbringer getting out is probably something that happened within the last thousand years. Especially if that's what the Hrud in the story "New Neighbors" is referring to. Calgar may have come to prominence in the Badab War or around that era (given that Badab and the 12th Black Crusade are seen as the "start of the modern day" in-universe.

Even if Uriel is younger than Calgar, Nightbringer getting out could have been five or six hundred years ago. Nosferatu had clearly been around before then, especially if Uriel mistook the Nightbringer's husk for a particularly strong Nosferatu before it got out of the box. Indeed, Nightbringer getting juiced up by Nosferatu and using that to call out to the governor and tempt them may be what started the whole affair in the first place.

>>60297580
Miserablepileofsecrets.jpeg

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Under the watchful eyes of the Imperium's finest, the XV8 Battlesuit: Mont'Kau edition design proceeds as planned. It's now a digital painting complete with coloring and shading, and this is what's been done so far. Not sure if it'll be taken much further, might just end up adding more details to the feet and fixing some shading, but hopefully this looks good and accurate to the Mont'Kau suit write-up.

>>60166060
I tried out a few alternate sensor/head designs, but none of them really looked right. One would suppose the head doesn't need too much protection considering that it's not a Dreadknight and doesn't have the actual pilot's head sticking out from the top, so additional torso-mounted augurs and a "neck"-guard will hopefully be sufficient to make up for the standard XV8 head design.

>>60299195
Which branches of the Inquisition and/or the Imperium would be in on the secret operations to deal with the shards? Ordo Xenos is a given, but what other Imperial organizations would be looking to root out the various vampire cults?

>>60303995
Securitas and whatever the reorganized Assassin temples are called might get involved if the vampire and its brood have gotten into government or the Imperial command structure beyond their home planet.

>>60303655
So Uriel is older in this AU and accidentally releasing the Nightbringer was an early career blunder?

If so it could be that which gave him the Eye of Terror penance crusade rather than playing fast and loose with the rule book.

>>60305002
I think it's too small for a dedicated branch

>>60306512
Agreed, so vampire hunting is primarily an Ordo Xenos operation conducted with the assistance of other branches of the Inquisition or the Imperial Government as their specialties pertain to the situation. When the vampire is in the church, they work with the corresponding members of the Synod, when its in the nobility they work with the Famulous, in the military; with the Securitas, etc. Actually hunting Vampires in the Religio Mortis might be a weird joint operation between the Ordo Xenos, Assassins, and Synod, with the assassins working not as killers, but rather unusually as mediators between the Inquisition's inquisitiveness and the death cults' secrecy.

>>60303655
Gothic War is too early for that to be Calgar’s rise; it takes place in M41.150 and if Calgar is already a tactical marine then he would be close to 1000 years old modern day. Dante is pretty much the only non-dreadnought SM that old, in canon it says that most of his fellow chapter masters were raised on stories of his heroism when they were still aspirants.

500 I think seems a bit old for Uriel as well, he’s supposed to be (relatively) young hence his canon disregard for tradition.

>>60306786
Then I would vote for the Uriel Ventris of current times being Uriel Ventris II and the grandson or great-grandson of Uriel Ventris I. The First being the one that let the C'tan getting out being a result of the antics of the predecessor and an event that took place towards the end of his otherwise exemplary career.

Current Cpt. Ventris is an up and coming star of the chapter, it's youngest captain and despite his age a legitimate contender for Chapter Master if Calgar actually dies and Titus get's booted out of the job.

Not that he actually wants the job. He didn't want the job as Captain either, he was just the best of what was left in the company when his predecessor died.

The whole incident with the Daemonculaba was not an exile in this AU but was in fact and Inquisitorial mission. There was him, an inquisitor and a small taskforce of oddballs from other chapters that intentionally went into the Eye of Terror to fuck up a Fallen Stronghold that some craftworld farseer had predicted would rise to terrible prominence.

>>60306949

Say, what do the Tau and Kryptmann think of Titus?

The increased demand for Warp-skimming ships ought to be good for trade, while Kryptmann, obviously...

>>60307242
Titus they would see as a prominent Ultramarian military leader trying to push forward absolutely insane military reforms against popular opinion of the masses and the will of the Senate. But they would understand a little more than the citizens of ancient Ultramar the need for it. They are further east and so are a little more aware of what is coming. So presumably the Fire caste Shas'Os would really like him and most of the Aun'Os and especially the high ups ones would approve of his actions and intents up to a point but would be nervous about a potential military takeover of their closest neighbour.

Kryptman they would consider to be dangerous monster that you shouldn't be left alone with. They would look art the Kryptman Line and wonder what the Imperium was thinking and why the man wasn't carted off to a padded cell for even suggesting it. The Kryptman Gambit they would more easily forgive and wonder why the Imperium gave him official restrictions after than rather than the other. Other than a few radicals they do not approve and on the occasions he has travelled in their empire they have kept a very, very close eye on him and trailed him with a kill team "just in case". Kryptman knows that they're keeping tabs on him. So long as they don't actually interfere with what he is doing he doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything very much.

>>60295534
Kryptman is one of the few people where being reduced to a Servo Brain will probably not alter his personality all that much.

>>60303995
Understandable about the head bits, and I do find myself enjoying the details of the reactive armor sections on the chest. I think any Space Marine would be glad to fight side by side with this in honorable Melee.

>>60303995
My only slight criticism is that it looks like he has a water pistol. Other than that it looks awesome.

>>60307651

What does Kryptmann think about Titus?

>>60307651

For the 'kill teams' trailing Kryptman, there's a chance that he thinks them as firepower that he can rope into help him in the more... conventional stuffs. Hey, a gun aimed at his back or not the moment the Tyranids come all they're going to is OHMYGODGETTHATGIANTGODDAMNEDBUGCHARGINGATUS -DIEDIEIDIEEE!!!

>>60308676
Loves him. He's read the reports and can actually do maths and shit and knows what needs to be done and is trying to do it. He would have given his wholehearted public approval and support to the plans for the military reforms which, sadly, will not have endeared any in the eyes of the Senate or the people.

Titus used to think Kryptman was nuts. Now he thinks he's nuts for a good reason.

What would Tau think of the Zoats?

>>60308761
His retinue would also probably enjoy trolling the shit out of them. Working for Kryptman your opportunities for fun are probably a little limited.

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>>60306786
We have people living a bit longer in general, due to rejuvenants. Heck, maximum lifespan for un-augmented humans is "about 1000", with a lot of error bars and most people struggling to reach six hundred or so. Space Marines as a whole reach that easier, and with the Grey Knight and Custodes there has really been only one generation of overturn (in practice there has been a lot more due to casualties, but you get the picture). Asterion Moloc has been Chapter Master of the Minotaurs for 800 years after his predecessor died in the Badab War.

I would certainly vote moving Dante's age back to whenever it need be to keep his core theme of "oldest and angriest motherfucker not a Mark III S, in a dreadnaught, or made of mechadendrites", though.

>>60310066
An entire species of Kryptmans, once they realized what they were.

>>60310066
At first they would approve. Many working together for a single goal. Then they would learn what they are and would back away slowly with horrified expressions.

>>60306949
Which Inquisitor should it have been?

>>60306949
>an inquisitor and a small taskforce of oddballs from other chapters that intentionally went into the Eye of Terror to fuck up a Fallen Stronghold that some craftworld farseer had predicted would rise to terrible prominence
That reminds me of stuff from past threads where one of the prime examples of an Omega Legion operation is maintaining a FOB in the Eye of Terror and sabotaging the Fallen's operations there, with the cover being that they're just a deeply confused and disoriented chaos warband.

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>>60314676
The mission could still have been an Omega Legion one. The composition and organizational traditions and structure of the Omega Legion is unknown even to those who believe that it might exist. Even to those in it. It is not unreasonable to assume that one or more people were Omega.

Was the Inquisitor? Was the farseer who persuaded the Inquisitor to go on the mission? Are any of the Space Marines in the raiding party? Are all of them? Ventris almost certainly isn't but what of his best friend Pasanius?

All they knew is that for all practical concerns of the mission the Inquisitor and the mismatch mavericks scooped from a dozen chapters seemed to be on the level. They all dressed up as Fallen from a neighboring warband and caused a Chaos civil war that prevented the traitorous Warsmith Honsou from amassing a force big enough to become a real problem.

When they got back to Ultramar they were informed that the only Inquisitor by that name and description had been dead since 673M33. They had tried to contact him to tell him but they couldn't get a message to him after they went to warp. The Inquisitor had seemed so genuine. In the months that they had traveled together they had gotten to know him, he told them of his family, of his ancestral clan-hold, of quite a lot of the shit he had done in his centuries of service, they could tell you his favorite food, his devotion to the Katholian faith and a hundred other things. All of which were true for a given value of true. More or less everything stacked up with what was on record about him with the exception of the dates.

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>>60315486
Was he a confused victim of time distortion? A clever actor? Someone subject to a very good psy-graft? Nobody will ever know. He waved a tearful goodby to Ventris and Pasanius, two men who he had become great friends with, on the dockyards of some frontier system a few light-years from the Ultramar border. He said that he had recieved some news about a suspicious activity on a minor wet agri-world a few parsecs Spinward and he was off to investigate it. No further sightings were ever had of the Inquisitor. The other members of the party, the ones that could be contacted, reported something similar.

The farseer that had suggested the mission had been residing in world-circuit of Colchis for thousands of years although he had met the Inquisitor back in the old days when they were both alive, he had even been in the employ of him for a few decades before settling down to get married and start a family. He claimed to never have suggested attacking a world in the Eye of Terror to anyone and had no idea who Warsmith Honsou was.

Eventually it was decided that no further time or effort should be expended in searching for him. He would be one more mystery in an old galaxy riddled with old mysteries, forgotten but as a curiosity in the records by future generations just like all those before him.

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>>60311533
Skin should be blue

hrm... i remember someone posted a pic of a group of kids playing make believe next to a half buried titan here.
and i cant seem to find it anywhere

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>>60317357
This one?

>>60306949
>>60315725
Did they still get a ride on Thomas the Deamon Engine?

>>60318589
One thing that's possible given the nature of the Daemonculaba being used for eldar births in this timeline is the Unfleshed may not have just been thrown out to fend for themselves. They might have been given to the Dark Eldar for experimentation. After all, this would have been after the Dark Wedding, and the Haemonculi of Commorragh always need more subjects for producing Grotesques.

>>60319582
I'd assume the Crones themselves would be just as interested in that source of raw materials

Bump

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not sure how well this fits the mega-deco imagery

>>60323853
That would be the spire of the Imperial palace in the Moskgród Hive.

How are the Raven Guard doing in this AU?

>>60324836
Presumably they set up shop on the industrial moon of Deliverance in orbit of Kiavahr. As both are inhabited and both seem to have more or less the same gravity I'm going to suggest that they are twin planets with Deliverance regarded as a moon because it's marginally smaller and politically not all that important. Chosen as the place where the core of the old Raven Guard Legion set up because the rent was lower and Corax didn't have all that much emotional attachment to Old Earth, that was where he was a slave and his wife and kids died.

>>60325869
If they had a presence there before they settled in the post-Beast era then it was almost certainly because they had a military campaign there. In vanilla Corax was part of a slave rebellion there. In this AU he was not and much like the homeworld of the White Scars and others the events that the vanilla primarchs were part of happened without them. In the case of the White Scars they settled on an uninhabited world and only after they landed did they learn that there used to be people living there before they got wiped out by over exposure to chaos. In the case of Deliverance the slave rebellion failed without Corax to command it. and the CEOs that ran Kiavahr and surrounding environs would have come down heavily on the upstart slaves.

Corax rinds the worst excesses of master-slave injustice when he and his friends arrive in the Great Crusade. He does something about it and it's not until some time later that the board members of the mega-corps realize how lucky they were. It was a coin-flip on whose flight plan their world landed; Stormcrow or Red Angel.

>>60324836
I think we had the Raptors as one of their descendant chapters. Skilled at ambushes and tactics evden compared to other Astartes chapters, and big nerds who spend a lot of their time philosophizing when not. Close with the Tau empire, since their homeworld is not too far away from there.

>>60314105
After so much time it could be a matter of making up a random name and going with that. Dude's been dead for nearly 4 whole Roman Empires, nobody is going to remember or care who he was.

>>60317378
Ah yes that's it!

>>60327131
>>60325869
So Deliverance and Kiavahr were megacorp hell? Sounds good. Presumably with the Raven Guard setting up shop they have cleaned up their act to acceptable minimum standards.

>>60323853
Does anyone have anymore of this sort of pic?

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>>60333342
only other sketch I have

Do we have much on the average PDF in the Imperium?

>>60335108
Much as in Vanilla. PDFs are all local affairs equipped with local gear and trained to whatever standards the local brass thinks is acceptable or attainable. They would vary to an insane degree.

These pics:
>>60323853
>>60333805
make me wonder- do you guys think that with all the advancements and knowledge the Nobledark Imperium has, that hive cities are a lot more organized and planned, as opposed to the clumps of metal and stone that canon Imperial hive cities are?

I can certainly see some amssive AdMech ship just plonking down a massive art deco obelisk on a planet, one that stretches to the stars, with its interior all neatly laid out and planned thanks to layouts that follow ancient sociological and architectural optimization plans. Sure, there'll be some organic growth here and there, but on the whole a nobledark hive could be a well-regulated, self-sufficient machine, both figuratively and literally.

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>>60336485
Yes. The modern hives are all derived or inspired by the designs Perturabo made after he got booted from his Legion. Perturabo was a broken genius.

They are extremely well laid out internally and externally and were designed to endure a long siege in the event of another Beast.

>>60336485
I remember in early threads we were talking about how a lot of the older hive cities, designed by Perturabo in Old Earth Deco style, are now pretty overgrown outside and in, with the original construction obscured under millennia of additions and fixes done in native aristocratic style, AdMech gothic-brutalist, or the style and tech of the nearest Survivor Civ. Other notable features in Perty's designs were massive natural light shafts and reflectors to light the interior of hives on worlds with breathable atmospheres, also made to be highly defensible vertical funnels for attackers set up to easily allow defense against descending or ascending enemy forces, with colossal bomb bays and murder holes at the top and similarly colossal flack defenses at the bottom and along the sides. All of his designs featured much better waste management infrastructure, and legacy design that was meant to predict and help deal with the long term subsidence problems that would eventually create underhives. This means on the whole the areas beneath and around hives are significantly less toxic, on par with a massive ancient industrial zone as opposed to a toxic landfill/Savlar vacation hotspot.

Also, since Old Earth had no hive cities at the time of unification they're presumably something adopted from various worlds found during the great crusade. Some of the biggest of these pre-Imperial hives were built around the bases of broken orbital tethers, using the remaining pillar of neutronium as a structure to build around, or in the rare case of a surviving tether, all the way to geostationary orbit, at some point switching to spin gravity.

Now that I remembered this, any thoughts on the Necromundian Palatine being one of those ancient hives? I wouldn't have it be one on an intact tether, but after one of the big bastards (can't remember which) is crippled in orbit and turned into a star fort they might have salvaged its neutronium keel, since it didn't need it anymore.

bump

Also, anyone have ideas for the next thread's theme?

>>60338761
Necromunda was said to be one of the ancient hive worlds from which Perty drew his inspiration. As a result the conditions on Necromunda are a bit shittier than average due to not having been built in the 30th millenium.

I think there may have been one proto-Hive in Hy Braseal going by canon, but it was "merely" mega-city sized rather than a full hive.

>>60341487
I think Fulgrimfag referenced Fulgrim getting the neutronium to make Forgebreaker from equatorial scars caused by falling tethers, and it would make sense if it had been what would later become the isthmus uninhabitable zone that served as the battleground between Hy Braseal and Merika, if not somewhere slightly more equatorial on the southern continent, since it would have fallen eastward into the sea and many of Fulgrims operations for the Merikan Junta were in the Atlantic.

>>60341684
By the time of the forgeoff with The Gorgon Fulgrim was a primarch and would have had access to the while world and more.

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>>60340250
How far away do you think Voyager 1 and 2 will have made it by the 41st millennium, assuming they haven't crashed into anything?

Do you think it would change anything if one were found again by the Imperium? Or would whoever found it just laugh at how naive early humans were, if he recognized it as human at all?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-on-voyagers-golden-record-73063839/

>>60342729
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPxCN8pNxWM

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>>60342729
Fuck

>>60342729
With the creation of reasonably reliable warp travel in the First Stellar Exodus it is almost certain that these historical artefacts were recovered and placed in a museum for posterity. At the time that museum was undoubtedly on Old Earth as the cultural and political capital of the newly emerging Great and Bountiful Human Dominion but were probably moved many thousands of years later when the capital shifted to the far more prestigious Cthonian Ring.

The artefacts in that onset of the Age of Strife would either have been forgotten and left to gather dust as man had things of relatively comparable antiquity or would be forgotten soon. Cultural artefacts would not have been a priority in the Iron War when survival of the species was far more important. In the Age of Strife that followed, assuming anybody remembered them, they would also have been considered unimportant. Such things are only of value in a civilized society that sees them as part of it's legacy or has an interest in them for what they represent. Nobody would have intentionally looted them.

So assuming that they survived time and upheaval they are still somewhere in the vastness of The Ring. Probably still in their glass cabinet gathering dust. At some point the Imperium, if it survives, will discover them if nothing else but as a side effect of the planned restoration efforts. But given the scale of the undertaking that could be in another ten thousand years.

I'd like to think that they survived. In Vanilla there was an ancient human artefact owned by some planetary governor with CCCP stamped on it so it's very possible. Also there is aofficial artwork with the head of the Statue of Liberty in the background because of course there is.

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>>60336678
They were also designed to be actually nice to live in. Perty had no intention of creating prisons, it's just that after 10,000 years of varying degrees of war economy cuts had to be made to other budgets and many of the hives are looking a bit grubby. THey are for the most part nowhere near as shit as Vanilla 40k but things could be better.

>>60340250
More of a request than a theme, but I'd love to see some goes at creation of propaganda for the likes of the Imperium. Instead of the Ecclesiarchy and grand revivals of faith for the citizens, how does the governor of a planet whip his population into a frenzy? What kind of tactics might be utilized as a default?

>>60342729
Assuming it kept the same speed and didn't get picked up in something else's gravity, a whopping 2.2 lightyears.

Space is big.

>>60344379
>Space is big.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Which is why it's either still out there unfound, drifting slowly through the inky blackness or people overtook it, scooped it up and put it in a history museum. The chances of it ever accidently running into anything are astronomically small.

>>60342896
It's possible that nobody knows how to read that (except possibly Elmo) by 999M41

>>60346247
Elmo was created thousands of years later than Voyager as a gardening tool. It's doubtful he knows ancient language.

>>60347469
>>60346247
Just about everyone in the DaoT spoke High Gothic, which is said to be a mix of Chinese, Russian, English, Japanese (remember 40k was first created back in the 80s, when the "Japan takes over the world" trope as seen in Blade Runner was in full swing) and a few others (I'd add Spanish and Hindi among others). Low Gothic is the degeneration of High Gothic into a million different trade languages as a lingua france over the 5000 years of the Age of Strife. Low and High Gothic are just represented as English and Latin for viewer convenience (and to keep the Gothic-medevial vibe).

So English is probably about as intelligible to Elmo as Latin is to any speaker of the "Romance languages" is today. Most people less so, since High Gothic is a borderline dead language used in government documents and to look fancy.

>>60349194
It might have been the official language of the GaBHD but if the first colonies were founded predominantly form national or national group efforts then there would be at least strong regional variations. Variations that would only get deeper as time went on in the days of slower warp travel and no FTL communication.

Just listen to someone from Newcastle

>>60349194
I was thinking about the inscription on this tower >>60323853, and I'd imagine it would be present on the Palace spire as "To The Glory Of The Imperial People" or something similar, but I'm conflicted as to whether it would be in high or low gothic.

>>60350791
If it's to the Imperial People as a whole it would be High Gothic. Low Gothic would be for uplifting words above a planetary governors palace or a local parliament as that would be for the benefit of that patch of the Imperium in particular.

>>60350331
Well yes, though just about everyone would have had to learn Gothic as a second language simply because it was the trade tongue, unless you wanted to be a complete hermit kingdom. We've even implied this already, the Emperor's first language was some Finno-Ugric tongue which no one else speaks anymore (and the only people who know many words of it are Isha, the Handmaidens, and the Custodes, mostly because the Emperor tends to swear in it when angry). Similarly, the nomads spoke their own language and Khan's Gothic accent was so thick you could have made soup out of it. Both spoke Gothic as a second language.

Indeed, even the Hubworlders likely speak Gothic, as they started out as mining ventures into the sparsely inhabited (except by Orks, who can survive just about anywhere, because Orks) galactic core. They didn't intend to become isolated, they just did because they were out in the middle of nowhere and society imploded. Indeed, this kind of implies they had no Iron Minds, which sort of explains why they have some of the highest tech base of the Survivor Civs.

So was the Rangdan Iron Mind in a giant neutronium shell like the Iron Mind Fulgrimfag described, or was that just the form of space based Iron Minds?

>>60351655
I think that the Emperor's origional language was called Finno-slavic.

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>>60352563
>>60351655
>Oscar tends to yell "PERKELE" at particularly annoying nuisances

>>60351888
Who knows. It kind of sounds like the Rangda Abomination was planet-based, and there were several Iron Minds on Cthonia. It could have been that the Iron Minds took whatever form they wanted, though in their case form wasn't as big of a deal as how safe it kept their minds and processing power. Or the Rangda Abomination moved planetside to lay low during the Age of Strife. I think we said Oscar had to take to the field in person to shut down the Rangda Abomination but that could be poetic license.

>>60338761
You mean the Terminus Est? A.k.a. the flagship and unofficial headquarters of the Black Templars and the Templar Movement, who even in this timeline aren't the most reasonable people and refuse to believe that the Terminus Est could ever be crippled, insisting that she still has a few battles in her?

Yeah, there's no way they're getting that keel off.

>>60352619
In the early days, Oscar picked up on some of the idiosyncrasies of his adoptive people, including their love for a phenomenon known as "memes." One of these was to add the word "Benis" to the end of a statement.
In Gothic, this bore similarities to "Bene," which means good fortune. As a result of some overheard instances of Oscar joking around with his companions, people started using the phrase as a way of wishing someone well, similar to wishing someone good luck. This phenomena is now rather widespread on Terra, and has managed to worm it's way into the Imperium at large.
Oscar is incredibly embarrassed about how he has managed to make what he knows as slang for penis a common and accepted turn of phrase.

>>60355295
Honestly I love the addition of the addition of the neutronium keel/ramming point to the big bastards. As if their absolute bulk and insane firepower, fighter and bomber compliments, etc. wasn't enough, they have the option of ramming with a multi-kilometer long spear made of a material that can carve adamantium like cheese.

On the old question as to whether the Old Empire or NSE could produce GaBHD neutronium, I'd want to say its something like Damascus steel is to modern society. We can make something close, and plenty of things that are better, but the exact material still eludes us.

>>60340250
Sex, drugs and ear rubs

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>>60360721
Holy fucking shit dude this is blue board.

>>60352619
I like it. I think we already mentioned that Malcador wore a ushanka and had a kvass heavy diet.

>>60351655
It's possible that Bjorn the Fellhanded knows a few words and phrases in that language for no other reason than the Nordyc tribes had a very porous border with Clan Terrawatt