>>62597893
When did we switch from needing more weebs to more crons?

>>62598046
The Old War.

>>62597893
Is last thread's Lynn Mywin stuff good enough to go up?

>>62598367
I'd say so.

>>62597893
Does Khorne know that people are taking the piss when they say BLOOD KING OF THE GALAXY?

>>62599087
Yes.
He's secretly happy about it, because it gives him more reasons to kill people.

>>62599087
>taking the piss
Stealing urine? I dont understand

>>62598046
When we got more weebs and the crons became the least written about.

>>62597893
DO the building inspectors have to go into Hrud-Town and how do they cope with the extra-dimensional architecture?

>>62597893
Appart from khorne those are the worst interpretation of the chaos gods I've see since "khorne followers don't kill non combatants."

>>62600011
It's from a sonic + 40k parody comic.

http://exterminatusnow.co.uk/2003-09-29/comic/meet-the-crew/dirty-harry/

If you ignore that it's furries it's sometimes quite funny.

>>62600011
Yeah just needed a related pic of Chaos Gods at a gaming table and surprisingly no onre has ever seen to have done one, which is weird considering 40k's popularity here.

So gift baskets . what would rogue traders put in one?

>>62600822
Potentially it could be absolutely anything. Like holy shit so much variation is possible.

I'm going to try and attempt finishing Dorn off again tonight or at least getting shit a bit further on.

>>62599971
Presumably not. They would be unqualified to comment or make suggestions on the structures.

The would have to go into the deepest tunnels of Old Earth, the Dark Tunnels uninhabited by humans. Where the Watchers in the Dark dwell and they don't talk about that.

>>62601681
Awesome. Looking forward to more Dorn

>>62603235
Also, the ambient entropic effects of hrud in large numbers would make it a very unhealthy task. More so than poking around at the dark corners of the underhive usually is, even.

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So to bring up the conversation from the end of last thread, we were talking about fluffing out and expanding the geography of the Eye of Terror last thread and what goes on between the Crones, Daemons, Fallen, and whoever else vies for control of the Eye.

So far we have Shaa-Dome (and its moons) and Elsinor. Altansar is also floating around the Eye somewhere being ruled by the Crone Eldar equivalent of Steve Jobs. Huron is probably off building not-Outer Heaven as well. L’Oquis has been mentioned a couple of times in the form of Cronefleet L’Oquis. That sounds like L’Oquis might have some importance to Crone space power (either as a prime drydock or some sort of migrant fleet of Crone “locusts” kind of like Forge World Graia in canon). Does L’Oquis have any information in canon? How much was it described in Broadsides?

IIRC, it was mentioned that Shaa-Dome and Elsinore are the primary homes for the Crones and the Fallen, respectively, as Shaa-Dome itself can hold ridiculous amounts of people due to being a shellworld and Elsinore is where all of Luther’s Fallen are. But other groups would likely be found on the other worlds and we’ve said Luther’s host looks down on the non-WotB veterans because they tend to be your typical crazed warbands with no standards and because the younger warbands are more likely to be infiltrated by Omega Marines.

We were also mentioning maybe using a Nautilus/20,000 Leagues Under the Sea theme for Luther’s allied forgeworld, seeing as it is populated by military exiles who hide beneath the surface of the Warp using machinery.

>>62605700
It makes you wonder how the Imperium and hrud would react to the War in Heaven-era hrud the Necrons trapped in a singularity to power the Breath of Gods. As in, swole Chad hrud with maximum Old One genetic engineering, analogous to an Aspect Warrior on steroids compared to modern eldar.

>>62606208
Possibly with pity or revulsion. The Hrud are borderline obsessive record keepers and might not have the same view of the Old Ones that the eldar have. It's also unknown how much the modern Hrud were altered from their pre-Old One state. It might be that the Hrud trapped by the Necrons were the Hrud equivalent of super soldier elites. Certainly they are not the same as the Old Ones left them as their god's last action was to exaggerate their sneakiness to keep them safe.

Also Nautilus isn't a forgeworld. It's a space dockyard with extra shit glued onto it. It has a population of possibly as little as a few thousands if you don't count servitors as people.

>>62607046
I'd imagine much more than that. Given how large ships in 40k are, even without counting servitors I'd guess around 100,000 since the necessary warp fuckery can't be outsourced to servitors.

>>62604586
It's taking longer than I thought it would, sorry.

>>62607046
>Port Nautilus
Ooh, I actually really like that. It both sounds like something the Imperium wouldn't see an issue with a dock being named, and instantly conveys the idea of both submersion and strange tech. Let's use that name.

>>62606208
Skalathrax could be where the previously mentioned orkish deamon-prince of Khorne set up the blood bowl tournament.

>>62609027
Isn't Skalathrax the name of a Greater Daemon in canon as well?

>>62609010
Works for me, and Tarasque can be used elsewhere

There was some discussion of the Istvaan system a couple of threads back, and I tried to write some of it up. Thus, I present:

The Fall of Istvaan V.

Istvaan V was a world of very little interest to the wider Imperium. The only feature it had of note were a series of mountainous fortifications dating back hundreds of thousands of years before the first humans arrived in the area, believed to be of ancient kinebrach construction; but whatever those defenses had been built to protect was long since gone. All that was left was a barely breathable atmosphere maintained by a meager biosphere of bacterial mats.

Still, as Istvaan III began its expansion out into space, they saw promise in their near neighbor, and began the centuries- long process of terraforming it. Slow successions of introduced pioneer species and careful geoengineering transformed Istvaan V from a borderline uninhabitable globe into a fertile agri- world, feeding colonies across the Istvaan system and beyond. For thousands of years Istvaan V enjoyed this gentle, quiet prosperity.

Then in 343.M36, it ended.

To this day nobody in the Imperium knows what led the Nimina to take an interest in such an unassuming world. Some believe she heard of local legends claiming (inaccurately) that Isha herself had taken some level of interest in the terraforming of the world, and thought that the world would offer some opportunity to get closer to Isha in her sick and twisted way. Others think that the world held some deep secret beneath its fortresses, one the Imperial inhabitants remained ignorant of but that Nimina somehow discovered. Most people, however, assume that she simply saw a relatively soft target and went for it.

Whatever the cause, a fleet of ghastbone daemon-ships translated out of warp, trailing sprays of corrosive pus, glistening pipes bulging out of rents in the hull like entrails, and made an immediate beeline for Istvaan V.

>>62611767
Despite being outmatched, the System Defense Force rallied to its protection.

The opening engagement of the battle seemed to go astonishingly well for the defenders, with the attacking Crone fleet breaking off its attack after only a few volleys. Any celebration was short- lived, however, as the Nurglites' plan revealed itself. They had woven entropic curses into their weapons and ammunition, which were now going to work on the ships of the Istvaan SDF. Rust crept along the corridors like time- lapse photography of a growing fungus, causing vital systems to malfunction and decay. Meanwhile, the injuries inflicted in the brief struggle on the Croneworlders were slowly healing themselves, scabbing over with diseased growths of new ghastbone. It was obvious that they were simply going to wait for the defenders to be reduced to utter helplessness before they moved in for the kill.

It was obvious that the naval defense was no longer viable, and regretfully the decision was made to pull back. The still salvageable ships would withdraw behind the orbital defenses of Istvaan III. The hopelessly contaminated were left with skeleton crews to launch a final attack, to cover the retreat and try to do as much damage as possible. Charging into the teeth of the enemy gun- line in ships half broken down already, it could not be anything more than a suicide charge. When the dust cleared, although some damage had been done the way was clear for the ground attack to begin.

The people of Istvaan V withdrew into the ancient fortifications; although most of them had long since been repurposed for habitation or similar purposes, they were still formidable constructions, built with all the skill of kinebrach artisans from the height of their empire to stand up to almost any foe. They had sheltered the people of Istvaan V from everything from Ork Waaaghs to Dark Eldar raiders for millennia. They had endured before; they would endure again. Or so they hoped.

>>62611781
Nimina declined to launch a conventional invasion. Instead, she dropped a set of horrific protoplasmic creatures on the world, things cultivated within the depths of Nurgle's Gardens. The amorphous abominations rapidly began expanding, spreading their tendrils across hundreds of kilometers to consume the rich biosphere of the agri- world. The PDF launched their small stocks of atomic weapons, backed by waves of bombers filled with incendiaries, but for every tendril they burned away two more had already taken root. Empowered by sorcerous rituals enacted on the warships orbiting above, the creeping sludge simply grew too far and too fast to be contained. Despite every desperate effort, the tide of slime washed over the bastions, worming its way inside though even the tiniest gaps.

Thousands of desperate battles erupted in the winding corridors of the antediluvian fortresses as the people inside desperately tried to fight back, but it was like trying to hold back the ocean; there was simply too much and it was too fluid. It overwhelmed strongpoints and seeped through cracks in sealed doors. At the end, a few hundred thousand people managed to save themselves in the deepest layers by collapsing the access ways entirely, hoping that an Imperial rescue force would find some way to dig them out.

Then the Conservator fleet fired up its teleporters. An hour later, there were no survivors. Only the slime, coating the continents and filling the seas. The Nurglite force remained only a few more hours before departing, leaving behind only a single light cruiser which had been crippled by a suicidal ramming attack and was unable to make warp. And, of course, a murdered world. From start to finish the entire operation had taken just over 200 hours, and two billion souls were dead.

>>62611798
Just a day later an Imperial relief force translated in, too late. All that they could do was to exterminate the abominations that had been left behind, pounding the world until nothing was left but an airless desert of volcanic glass.

The people of the Istvaan system have neither forgiven nor forgotten.
---

So, what do you think? Two things I think could be changed: first, I picked the date at random, and could easily be moved around to wherever, like one of the Black Crusades. Second, while I left the cause ambiguous, it might be useful to tie it in to some sort of long- term plot.

>>62611829
I thought it sounded pretty good. Good to have the Chosen of the Gods wrecking shit in realspace beyond just squabbles in the Eye.

>>62613147
Also sets the minimum bar for their realspace damage, for when the Taskmaster and Grand Marshal get written up.

So I havn't been in one of these threads since thread 50 something. How much of the setting has changed?

>>62613622
Basics of the setting are already set quite deep in stone, we've just been elaborating on the details.

>>62610690
That could be the ork's name.

>>62611829
Is good. Istvaan V was wrecked in the WoTB by Nurflite forces it's been already mentioned. This is good in that it really hints that somebody on the other side knows something about the place that the current Imperial inhabitants don't.

Also there could be a subtle indication that the kinebrach constructions weren't actually fortresses. They look like fortresses in that all the buildings are massively sturdy with good thick walls and shit but were so old and decayed that little else survived beyond the basic structure. They might have been designed to keep people out but they might also have been designed to keep things in and it is known that the kinebrach can bind deamons and shit into the things that they make. Those could be containment facilities as much as fortresses and it's possible that they aren't or at least weren't all empty when Nimina came calling.

>>62600245
>if you ignore that it's furries

>>62614663
It's not a really part of the story. If you were to replace them all with humans it would be exactly the same. They are just like that to take the piss out of cartoon and Sanic characters think.

>>62610863
Maybe a lesser hive-fleet or a particularly big splinterfleet

>>62606208
There would also be the weirder shit like the Dark Mechanicus cult that believe that the Omnissiah has to be built and that they are receiving messages from him in the future about how to build him or build a techno-industrial base from which to build him.

But the thing is that they are getting messages from something and that something may be from the future.

There are a lot of "somethings" that it could be and all that they know is that it isn't any know voice of Chaos.

>>62600822
Anything. But only the best of anything.

>>62617068
Those guys are out there, but weren’t aligned with Luther.

>>62617068
The Worm-in-Waiting, the living ever tortured loop in time that lived in an aborted future

>>62620531
I think this is one of the big mysteries we should leave for *~your game~* to decide. Not everything needs an answer.

That being said, WHAT WAS WILL BE WHAT WILL BE WAS

>>62620628
What other good ideas for factions or cults could there be?

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>>62621966
In terms of factions it could be really cool to flesh out the Old Empire military remnant that is the Scions of the Broken Helm, we've touched on Arrotyr but not the actual faction he leads.

>>62614016
I think we had the ork's name as Nuffle. Skalathrax is a bit odd for an ork name as well.

Skalathrax is supposed to be cold as balls in canon, it's where Kharn went on his infamous team-killing spree with a flamer.

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>>62621966
There could be some really fucked up shit in the AdBio. Google and take from the Sarkic Cult and the stories of Mother_Horse_Eyes all you need. They are body horror and the worst thing is that they could seriously justify it as "it's better for you this way" and "they aren't dead and they aren't suffering".

It's easy to make a belief and following in the usual racial purity way but when you can make racial purity in a bottle it looses most of it's value. We are talking the creation of super fucked up shit. Bio-sculptures made of human flesh with humans broken down and rebuilt into "for their role" models like grotesque insect hives or coral reefs All Tomorrows style.

Differences would arise from different ideologies that get them to that stage and the mindset made exaggerated by isolation and echo chamber as they form brotherhoods close knit and living of each others poison ideas. The AdMech has the problem that it is too highly regimented and structured, but the AdBio has the problem that each brotherhood has very little oversight until after the nightmare starts and by then it's too late to make it not happen.

>>62626461
I wonder if there would be a minor Order of the Inquisition keeping an eye on the AdBio in this timeline.

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>>62626461
>>62627192
>They are body horror and the worst thing is that they could seriously justify it as "it's better for you this way" and "they aren't dead and they aren't suffering".

Huh, when you put it that way Franken Fran is basically the ideal rogue AdBio operative. All about the greater good but no concept of "quality of life" or "sometimes the ends don't justify the means".

There would definitely be an Ordo watching over them. Even moreso because they aren't as secretive as the AdMech.

>>62627970
What would this hypothetical Order be called?

I'm wondering how exactly Lelith Hesperax feels about all this "Vect marries into Chaos" stuff. I can't imagine her being a fan

>>62629496
Her cyborg assassin-sex-toy "daughter" decided to flee town, so one imagines Lelith knows which way the wind is blowing too.

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>>62623075
One think we've kind of portrayed with the Scions so far is that they tend to be a different kind of Khornate than Kharn, more general ripper, "I love the smell of D-weapons and burning mon-keigh in the morning" types than frothing berserkers like you'd expect from the canon World Eaters. That role tends to be taken by Riastrad and his gang, who act more like a bunch of glory-hungry Viking raiders or Celtic warriors than people with any sense of discipline (of course, that's not saying that the Scions of the Broken Helm wouldn't have crazed berserkers in their ranks, in terms of plot importance Arrotyr ranks above Riastrad. the "named HQ" to Riastrad's "special character only" in TT terms).

We've namedropped Arrotyr's Lann Caihe during the Fall, Kyrion. A Lann Caihe is supposed to be both a second-in-command to a starship, but is also supposed to have the important job of relieving the captain of their duty if they go over the line. However Kyrion seems to have drunken the same bloodthirsty kool-aid that Arrotyr drank (though he doesn't have his bloodline madness). And it's always possible Arrotyr could have offhandedly killed him at some point if Kyrion voiced an opinion he didn't like (pic related).

>>62630619
I thought Reri was still with Lelith, but her behavior is becoming increasingly erratic. She was tracking Legienstrasse for the Dark Eldar before the Inquisition got to Legi first, and Legi is what, like less than a century old?

>>62630982
>>62630619

I like the idea that Momma Hesperax is not at all happy about Malys. Why she's using a robot clone child to do the killing rather than slitting throats herself I don't know. Or what her actual goals are.

She and Vect had the closest thing to a working relationship in Commoragh before that hon hon-ing chaos bitch showed up. She should be livid.

I'm seeing her as a potential Legacy of Kain-esque antihero.

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>>62630776
Another connection I just realized with Arrotyr being an ancient uber-elf that got so angry he burst into flames is Feanor. Noldorian antics under king "yes, I'll stab you" could also be a good fit for the Scions.

>>62631466
Kain, at least by the end, was actively trying to save the world and was willing to risk death and damnation to do it.

Lelith Hesperax on the other hand just wants to get even.

>>62632041
Beil-Tan are the most Noldor. They even have a fiery burning war god.

>>62632240
>>62631466
Would the DEldar give a shit about sexual fidelity?

>>62629239
Ordo Carnes Vigilanti

Or possibly just Ordo Carnes.

But that's just Ordo of Flesh and might be a bit to blatant.

>>62632240

I was thinking in terms of potential or teased character development. By the end she may want to save her spiky hellscape from chaos, but right now, it's just about "fuck that bitch"

>>62633085

Sexual, no. Emotional, well, that's a different story. Considering that unique relationship was HERS and Deldar are very possessive. Especially a collector like Lelith.

>>62634364
>"fuck that bitch"
Well, if you insist.

>>62624789
It could be Nuffle, Lord of Skalathrax but enough people call him Lord Skalathrax that it's kind of stuck as a name. Orks still call him Boss Nuffle.

>>62634161
Too obvious. What's latin for cultivation?

>>62630619
She hasn't gone renegade or Lelith would have shut her cybernetics off.

>>62637499
According to Google it's 'cultio' in the context of agriculture, 'cultus' in religious contexts (and also bathrooms), and 'cultura' in the context of improving something and/ or admiring it. Cultura is probably the best fit out of them, but I don't think any of them are really great.

>>62638336
Are there any other words we could use? Other languages?

>>62639730
Perhaps the Ordo Mutatio, with a remit involving oversight of mutant populations and other biological aberrations in addition to the Biologis.

>>62607046
>>62607287
While second anon is correct that it's probably big enough to at least hit the hundred-thousand mark in terms of crew, it's also important to note that one of the biggest limitations of the dock is it's size. It was designed to build cruisers, and while later additions may have pushed it's capacity up enough to construct vessels in the Heavy-cruiser range, that's really pushing the dock's capacities. They can't produce Grand Cruisers or Battleships because they just don't have the capacity- which is good for the Imperium, because the best way to kill a ship with Nautilus-armor is a large number of guns heavy enough to wear through the armor, and a battleship with Nautilus armor would be a nightmare that could probably take on entire battlefleets just because it would be able to shrug off full broadsides from even other battleships. Thankfully this will probably only ever be theoretical.

Downscaling to smaller ship classes doesn't work that well either; Nautilus-armor has a better weight-to-durability ratio than anything the Imperium has short of Neutronium, but it's still heavy as fuck. Even Murder-class cruisers pay for their durability by having relatively limited gun-batteries and slow speeds; translated down to light cruisers or escorts, and you get the issue of the ship's armor taking up all the weight you'd need for weaponry. They'd be tanky little shits, but they'd lose the maneuverability that allows such small ships to stay relevant, and not have enough guns to shoot back with to make a dent in ships of the same class.

>>62641376
These limitations have been the source of lots of friction between the station's crew and the Fallen, since the Murder-class has some glaring failings that make it necessary for fleets to have additional ship-types to provide things like strike-craft and long-range fire support. Not to mention the fact that they have to keep devoting vessels that could be out fighting or furthering the Fallen's goals to the odious task of ferrying production materials to the dock, which can be a trying endeavor since shipping something to a location in the Warp is significantly harder than shipping it somewhere in real-space, not to mention getting their hands on the resources in the first place.

Luther keeps biting the bullet and continuing to support them because despite all the issues, they're one of the only non-xenos sources of vessels he has, and for all their limitations the Murder-class is a sound investment- that durability means that even if a raid goes south and your fleet gets caught out, that armor keeps the number of these vessels low enough that the Imperium actually managing to take one down is considered a significant accomplishment- with one particularly famous example. That I seriously need to finish writing if school would just stop kicking my ass for like a week

bump

>>62640943
That could work. AdBio tell you if you can do a thing. These officials tell you if you should do it among other things. A big part of their job would be the preservation of the integrity of the human gene-pool, which is not the same as preventing mutation. In some cases they encourage it.

>>62643394
I suspect that there would be conflicts within the Ordo between Inquisitors who, like Horus, believe in abhuman speciation and more monodominant types who believe in a single human kind.

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>>62643394
>>62644517
That's a good point. We’ve mentioned that treatment of mutations is still one of the big areas of values dissonance between the Imperium and modern society, and the Imperium practices infanticide on a scale even the Spartans would balk at, under the reasoning that it is better to put them out of their misery now than let them suffer. Idolization of the human form may not be public policy, but massive mutations like having tentacles for arms stand out, and most people tend to view mutants as either “those poor bastards” or “Chaos cultist in disguse”, given that the most likely sources of mutation in the galaxy are 1) former guardsmen and sanctioned psykers who rolled bad on their Perils of the Warp test, 2) people exposed to mutagens and the like in underhives and similar areas, and 3) chaos cultists who have received gifts from their gods. Your Marcus Mediocris may see a mutant trying to explain how they got their mutation in the light of a Yakuza member trying to pass off their missing ring finger as a workplace accident, especially since Chaos cults are fricking dangerous.

Even abhumans, xenos, and otherwise different people like squats or Astartes have to worry about being mistaken for mutants out in the boondocks despite the Imperium trying to make it well known to everyone that there is a clear difference between abhuman and Chaos mutant, because on those worlds the idea of baseline humans who look different from the norm, much less cat-people or tech-priests or Astartes or squats or Void Born, boggles the mind. People from one Segmentum may never have heard of abhuman types from the other side of the galaxy and mutated Chaos cultists pass themselves off as abhuman breeds nobody has heard about.

Someone would have to vet that shit (ironically, like what the real-life Inquisition often did, investigating claims before some yokels burnt someone at the stake on shoddy accusations of heresy).

>>62646506
On that note, this is something I wrote for a Celestine bio that went nowhere but still works to flesh her out a little more from what we've said.

“Even if Lady Celestine had not become famous by her later actions, she still would have gone down in the history books in some small way for causing the Ophelia VII mutation scare. Ophelia VII was a Katholian theocracy world, which took pride in having one of the lowest mutation rates in the entire Imperium. So when a baby with wings was born to two completely normal parents, this naturally raised concerns of Chaos corruption, possibly signs of cultists poisoning the well in preparation for invasion. On most other planets, Celestine would have immediately been labelled a mutant and left to die. But Ophelia VII was proud of its low mutation rate, and immediately sent the infant off for testing to get to the bottom of this potential corruption problem. To everyone’s surprise, the tests came back negative. Despite the infant being born with bird wings, there was no sign of taint from the Ruinous Powers.”

The implication being that other children with active may have existed throughout the centuries but got killed and infants because people assumed they were run of the mill mutants. Celestine survived only because someone bothered to test, and even then her parents kept her isolated for most of her childhood on their farm in the middle of nowhere because they were afraid of repercussions.

>>62646506
This is actually a good reason for the existence of cartoons like the Teen Titans-expy; they're both cultural entertainment, and a way of familiarizing the youth of the Imperium with some of the more common deviations from the Human form, as well as the possibility of people who don't look like you still being human.

It's still a problem out in the boonies where the technology to even view said holovids isn't available to anyone but the highest administrators in the system, but high-traffic areas like hive-worlds have at least a couple of episodes available for the public and probably broadcasted over public screens at certain times, like our modern television broadcasts.

>>62646506
There’s also the potential problem of regulatory capture. The Ordo Mutatio is supposed to keep an eye on the AdBio, but given the skills needed to do their job a lot of their staff, and potentially many of the Inquisitors themselves, would be drawn from... the AdBio. How many horrors, I wonder, were overlooked or even signed off on by Inquisitors with ideological ties with the groups they were supposed to be restraining?

>>62634364

I do like the idea of a clandestine resistance movement in Commoragh. Centered around the Wych Cults and their Dark Muses, perhaps?

There are some areas where Crones have a tendency to not return from. The fact one of these is where Lelith lives isn't lost on Vect, though he hasn't mentioned it to Malys.

>>62646506
>Someone would have to vet that shit (ironically, like what the real-life Inquisition often did, investigating claims before some yokels burnt someone at the stake on shoddy accusations of heresy).
Interesting extension of the role, and the historical connection is as well.

When acting in an investigative capacity the Ordo Mutatio's need for accuracy, technical expertise, and long term planning is compounded by the fact that Men of Stone are all to a degree genetically mutable. Even discounting discreet classes of abhuman there is immense variety, even novelty, within the range of 'baseline' human traits. Catachan are often raised as the physical paragons of unaugmented Men of Stone, but that only serves to demonstrate that humanity has come deceptively far through the GaBHD and even Old Night. The case is the same of nearly all deathworlders from Fenris to Kalidar, the Cadian iris being an example cited by the Biologicus to the point of being a proverb, to say nothing of the additional technological embellishments so prominent on particularly desolate worlds like Krieg and Savlar. One sector's backwater bumkins may have the same slightly changed foot structure another classed as a Slaaneshi blessing, the slightly elongated fingertips common on some factory world may get an innocent man detained a dozen star systems over, a discolored tongue, an unusually shaped pupil, etc. The work of the Ordo is ever decisive, but never impercice.

>>62631466
>>62633085
>>62634364
Lelith Hesperax would not be one of the Dark Eldar to jump ship, she's one of the most recognizable faces in Commorragh and a star in the arenas. Not only would she be at the top of the Imperium's "Shoot on Sight" list, she would find it insulting that she has to give up being in the city where she is the adored icon of millions.

I think in the case of Malys and Vect we've mentioned that both sleep around a lot but as long as they remember who's number one in their heart they ignore casual dalliances. I can see cases prior to the Dark Wedding where Vect makes it seem like he's favoring someone else over Malys, just to see what creative torture Malys will do to them in her wrath when she finds out. That's what he finds hot.

Whether that's typical of either Crones or Dark Eldar is an open question.

>>62646830
Its fucking typical. The AdBio or their predecessors have historic ties to the Imperial Court, Cthonian restoration (an obvious Hydra front), Astartes programs, and Thunder Warrior program before that, so Terrawatt and the Hydra obviously. Of course the Imperial Ordo that deals with mutation and just coincidentally got to direct the course of human speciation for the last few millennia needs the expertise of the AdBio to pursue their mission, and is coincidentally the same Ordo that is tasked with policing the AdBio. And what is their mission? The "integrity" of human genetics, which seems to mean crossbreeding with xenos, using worlds as laboratories to grow novel (disgusting and weak) "wetware" without heed to orthodoxy, and propagating 'useful' mutation. >>62648030 is just Horusian propaganda, and its the Horusian agenda the Ordo Mutatio was made to enact, the Hydra and the ancient Terrawatt leaders are trying to turn humanity into sorcerous xeno-crossbreed mutants for their Golden Man overlords. It's the Hydra that's hiding some crazy thing in their secret pleasure dome on Cthonia, and its up to truly human forces like the ancient and venerable Olympus Mons Brotherhood to guide the souls and genes of humanity from their holy red mountain.
-A concerned member of the Illuminate Order (definitely not Oud Oudia Raskian)

>>62648345
I like to imagine that about 80% of the Illuminati's doings are just petty bullshit like this, because they all want to change the Imperium but can't quite agree on how it should be changed or what methods to use, and they can't get too aggressive with each other because everyone has mountains of blackmail material on everyone else. So almost everything they try to do degenerates into passive- aggressive infighting.

>>62649202
Well that's always going to be a problem with secret handshake clubs on that scale. That and trying to remember exactly who is a member when you can't keep a written register.

Also just because some AdBio may or may not be in on a clandestine long-term goal doesn't mean anyone else is. AdBio are terribly disorganised and the individual groups within it enjoy a lot of autonomy with little oversight.

bump

>>62648345
Galactic. Eldar. Conspiracy.

>>62648265

Jump ship, no. Be furious and vengeful as hell, yes. At least when she can get away with slashing crone throats.

>>62651545
I wonder if Luther thinks the Crones and Craftworlders are in cahoots in the Galactic. Eldar. Conspiracy.

>>62653270
How could (((they))) not be? Look at how they are playing both sides against us.

>>62651545
that post is just his pontifical grace O.O.R.'s opinion on the Ordo Mutatio, asking him about the AdBio itself (over the right secure channels) will probably yield an even longer tirade about Terrawatt thralls of Justinian and long plotted plans to secure a false Omnissiah. As well, he might be prone to speculate that the Genesmiths and Biodruids were Isha and/or Eldrad's agents from the beginning, or had become so following the Great Hunt era re-terraforming projects. Within the Illuminati he might make a point of conspiracy mongering just to deflect possible inquiry from the dragon in his basement.

>>62647556
Vect openly still follows the Dark Muses, that wouldn't be a working call to arms.

>>62654702
Hell, Vect probably uses Lelith as his own personal garbage disposal. Of course, he might be the only one thinking this, but when has the opinions of others ever really mattered to him?

Or hell, maybe Malys IS aware of what Lelith is doing, and SHE'S the one who's decided to use the girl as a convenient blender for any Croneworlders she deems useless.

I'm imagining that Servitors in this AU come in 3 varieties.

Type 1 - The cast out. condemned criminals. It's repaying your community and execution all rolled up in one useful package. Look not upon them with pity, this is the fate that they deserve. If something needs to be done that will result in the termination of a unit then they get sent to earn some measure of redemption.

Type 2 - The grey. Vat-grown organic components grown individually in glass jars and built into a unit with the metallic components simultaneously. Extensively used by many forge-worlds but not the rest of the Imperium lest it result in unemployment. They were never people.

Type 3 - The blameless. People born with crippling brain damage or deformity. Their artificial components tend to be decorated with porcelain and chrome and are rebuilt with care and even love. They are not people but they are more people than they would have been. Their cortex technology tends to be quite good, you could have a conversation of sorts with one. Typically found in high class establishments and tended with care and even have what might be considered some quality of life.

>>62656634
I like that last one because of the values dissonance where it's both kind of sympathetic but also really dark. It's essentially exploitation of the mentally impaired, like keeping people with dwarfism in the king's court, which is horrible by today's standards, but at the same time is understandable because it's a better existence than these people would otherwise have had. It's a fascinating idea and way of playing on the fact that while the Imperium is much nicer than in canon and the people in charge are generally moral, it's still a place that tolerates things that would be unspeakable by today's standards without batting an eye.

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>>62656793
They would see it as a gift. In the life cruel fate would have had the live they get to be a burden on their family, contribute nothing to society, degrade the nobility of the human species just by "living" and spend their days shitting through a tube and being spoon fed if they are even capable of that.

But the Imperium takes that worthless and broken non-life. The Imperium takes it and makes it into something good. They live in service to the many, these selfless angels. They are reborn whole by human hands and human ingenuity in defiance of the cruel universe. They are not worthless and the people are thankful.

How is that unthinkable? It is a blessing.

>>62656793
>>62657662
I can imagine certain mutant- phobic worlds giving their mutants the same treatment even if they’re mentally and physically capable of living a relatively normal life. ‘For their own good’, of course.

>>62656793
>>62657662
>>62658860
It's something definitely worth noting that the Imperium is not a utopia or even that nice of a place to live. It only looks good in comparison because of the scale of the threats lurking outside of society's walls and because it's being compared to vanilla grimdark 40k.

>>62654778

And if she finds out she's a dumping ground for that Usurping Bitch? (Malys, I mean. Let's assume this was already part of her working relationship with Vect)

>>62658860

Someone mentioned an in-universe teen titans-esque series regarding abhumans and other atypical humans. Would an X-men style series with real mutants be considered Samizdat?

>>62662068
Probably not. The X-Men are anti authorian and then to have pretty stupid plot lines that go nowhere.

>>62662336

Samizdat means underground and illegal material, published without the blessing of the state.

>>62662068
>>62662388
Probably be underground in most places, but there would be a lot of variance in censorship practices from world to world. There would likely be a few worlds where it was allowed and a few more where the authorities were lax and turned a blind eye.

>>62662336
>>62662388
>>62662753
It also doesn't have to be a one-to-one conversion of the X-men. Xavier's Institute could be replicated as an official Imperial organization (real or fictional) whose purpose is to give mutants a way to contribute to the Imperium.
This actually makes the conflict between them and not-Magneto and his forces more thematic within the show- the central conflict being whether to try and do good with what you have, or give in to the hate and despair and say screw everyone else. The villains are in some cases sympathetic because the audience can understand how they got there, but it's framed in a way to clearly state that their actions are not acceptable. This would also be why the organization is always treated with mistrust- none of the prejudices against mutants are unfounded, because the bad apples are the ones who act that way in the first place.

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>>62662068
>And if she finds out she's a dumping ground for that Usurping Bitch? (Malys, I mean. Let's assume this was already part of her working relationship with Vect)

The the *~FUN TIMES~* begin.

How would Healing tanks from DBZ effect this setting? Keep in mind that they don't heal what can't be healed naturally but what can be healed will be healed in twelve hours time at most.

>>62663193

"You have served me well, little gladiatrix.You thought yourself a queen when you were but a pawn, hon hon."

"I serve no one."

>>62654778
Lelith, as well as the Mandrakes, definitely work as Vect's intrafaction-conflict weapon of choice. They're at his disposal, but also allow a degree of distance from his direct authorization or ban on some matter.
>>62631466
I also like the idea that Reri's actual utility (notable but definitely less so than her 'mother') as an assassin, as well as her odd position as Lelith's publicly recognized and accepted daughter in Commoraghi society, and her just as publicized status as a bio-mechanical Eldar-Human hybridizing combat construct and the furthest possible thing from "trueborn", are all a somewhat calculated set of postures by Lelith in Commoaghi politics. Reri appearing to have bolted or been sent on some dire secret mission after the wedding is for Lelith letting the other players in the Crone-Dark Eldar political games see her conceal a variable that can still assumed to be relatively predictable in how it might pop up again. She's set up as an effective feint against seers and other four dimensional chess players, with enough established history and interconnection to cloud the sight of her mother's course of action with all the contingent plotting and counter-plotting recalibrated by the rumor of action. Essentially Reri just has to go out into the Galaxy and look like she's busy with something important.

>>62654702
Not sure if Vect would worship the Dark Muses. The Dark Muses are a number of post-Fall Commorrites for whom the Dark Eldar worship. Not so much as gods, but as examplars of a particular concept and examples to live up to. Vect probably knew most of them personally and wouldn't have much awe of them, though he'd consider them a far more worthy figure of veneration than any of the other so-called gods out there.

I had some ideas for the Dark Muses that I couldn't get much of an entry written up for them. There are currently seven Dark Muses, each of whom the Dark Eldar consider to represent traits that they consider virtues but everyone else would call sins or personality defects. The Dark Muses are only named posthumously, because you can only evaluate one's life in hindsight, much like the famous saying "call no man happy until he is dead". Two or three of them died because they had more ambition than brains and tried to assassinate Vect.

There's talk that if Vect ever died he would be canonized as an eighth Dark Muse, the Muse of Ambition, but the bastard just won't die. Vect thinks the idea is nice, but he'd have to die to make it happen and he'd rather be alive and ruling his baby Commorragh than dead and venerated.

>>62664480
There are seven statues of the Dark Muses in the heights of Upper Commorragh. Vect put larger statues of himself standing over them to make sure people don't get ideas (though I can't remember if that was from regular canon).

Other Dark Eldar-related events that could be expanded on are the fighting between the normal Dark Eldar and the Solar Cults who initially controlled (and based on the name likely worshipped) the Ilmaea, and that time someone resurrected one of Vect's rivals from thousands of years ago to try and put some sort of counterweight on Vect. Which due to the altered timeline this rival could have been in the early days of Commorragh circa when Vect was one Archon among many and was not the undisputed top dog (though he was well-known/infamous for having organized the purge of the proto-Crone pleasure cultists).

>>62662068
Should we co-opt more super heroes for in universe happenings?

>>62664583
Claims I remember about or attributed to Vect were that he had served the royal house in some capacity, that he served Iygonesh and was among the servants at the estate spire in pre-fall Commorragh that was at the heart of the pleasure cult's building projects there before the empire collapsed in on their godhead. He made his name wiping them out in the Dark City, only to restore his own ties with them just before the rise of Malys's bright star in the Eye of Terror, while the rest of the city's bosses already abided by his precedent as a matter of established culture. The same pattern followed much of Commorragh's early few millennia, until Vect polished off the last of the serious competition with more violent purges, cementing power over the much developed and expanded Commorragh.

Also, I have an entertaining picture in my head of Vect and the Taskmaster having very surface level polite interactions, while underlings carried out acts of perversion and brutal violence in the name of their millennia old and still ongoing legal battles and contract renegotiations for the precise rate of souls attrition by Slaanesh.

>>62665410
probably not, not as fully as the teen titans thing

>>62662880
I imagine there would be a fairly large department of the Administratum dedicated to making works like this as part of an effort to cultivate an Imperium- wide culture.

So healing tanks?

>>62668216
>>62663356
You mean rejuvenant treatments? They're a thing that extends people's lives and can probably fix minor sorts of injuries.

>>62662880
Super powers like controlling the weather and teleporting are all warp-craft. Inquisitor (retired) Xavier's school is probably a Scholar Psykana institute. They aren't in fashion at the moment because High Lady Kissa prefers the master and apprentice type of arrangement but Xavier doesn't require government funding, he has acquired the resources to keep the lights on for a good few centuries.

Perfectly mundane mutation is more likely to be treated via surgery, genetic rewriting and possibly sterilisation if it's still likely to be inherited by the offspring.

Mutation caused by chaos exposure is dealt with via infanticide. It's a hideous necessity that nobody is happy with but history has repeatedly proven that it is necessary.

>>62670317
I don't think there's been any indication that rejuvenants fix injuries. Cain lost his fingers before he started on them and didn't get them back afterwards.

>>62653863
>Oud Oud Raskian thinks everything is a conspiaracy going back to Justinian.

Qah, that's a level of salt beyond your normal level of salt. Though I'm impressed he managed to tie almost everything into a conspiracy theory, conspicuously omitting the AdMech's own secret in the basement.

>>62671844
It's debatable exactly how much of it he believes and how much he is just using to distract people from the Noctis Labyrinthus.

>>62671844
Would the modern Imperium know anything about Justinian?

>>62673564
Only as a cautionary tale. Theodora was of Mars and Justinian spent most of his time on Earth, the old cultural, religious and historical (in both interpretations of the word) capital of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. Mars was more industrial and an R&D hub. You couldn't put that stuff on Earth as it might deter tourists and bring property prices down.

To that end Mars would never let people forget about Justinian as a cautionary tale of what an unshackled Silica Animus is capable of when it doesn't have the great blessing of being raided in the Imperium (lead/guided by the wisdom of the Adeptus Mechanicus). Also subtly reminding the people of Old Earth that the threat of Abominable Intelligence in the Sol System ended on the red soil of Holy Mars, you're welcome and the subject of Theodora is not raised by anyone with a red robe not least because the original Martians were her citizens. Also subtly reminds Oscar that the last Man of Gold that set foot on Mars died there. Oscar knows history extensively so as far as thinly veiled threats go it tends to fall flat.

It also causes division on theological technicality within the AdMech on the nature of the Men of Gold and how absolute the First Commandment is. Absolutists believe that the Golden Folk absolutely are/were A.I., Oscar is an A.I. and that there are no exceptions to the First Commandment. To that end they tend to live on hermit colonies and deal with people under the direct Imperial Aegis as little as possible. Refuse to deal with anything Space Marine all together as the Astartes augmentations are derived from Oscar's flesh. Will more willingly deal with Survivor Civ's politely but under sufferance.

On the other end of the scale are the Moderates who don't class Oscar as A.I. because his body is a quasi-organic construct and his intellect was developed naturally as he was raised by Malcador and the Terrawatt Clan and even if he was an A.I. an exception should be made just this once.

>>62673955
>On the other end of the scale are the Moderates who don't class Oscar as A.I. because his body is a quasi-organic construct and his intellect was developed naturally as he was raised by Malcador and the Terrawatt Clan and even if he was an A.I. an exception should be made just this once.
This would probably be the official OMB line, but within that category there would be another range of opinions, essentially on the subject that while not an AI, Oscar's Terrawatt values are lesser than proper Mechanicus doctrine.

>>62674671
Lesser or not Terrawatt was human and he was raised on human values and as far as Old Earth values of the Age of Strife the Terrawatts were second only to their own outpost on that old world. A long way second but only because Mechanicum are so far above everyone else.

It also Implies that the AdMech do not remember Malcador fondly. All human technology ultimately belongs to them and is merely loaned to lesser peoples at least in principle. Point is that Malcador should have handed the haul he got from Cthonia over to Mars to be given back to Malcador after it had been looked over. An opinion shared by Mars and only Mars because they sit on their cogs like a dragon on its hoard.

Oscar, as far as the Martian Historians are concerned, should have been raised on Mars as organic or not he is a technological relic of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion.

Of course this is before the Unification of Mars so it's not certain that the Olympus Mons Brotherhood would have got custody of the Last Man of Gold.

>>62672514
>It's debatable exactly how much of it he believes and how much he is just using to distract people from the Noctis Labyrinthus.

Yeah count me in as thinking that Raskian knows much of what he's spouting is bullshit- after all, he IS the Fab General, he has full access to the finest monitoring devices, cogitators and other information sources that the Imperium can provide. It's just that he knows everyone else knows it too, so if he continues spouting shit like 'the AdBio have mind control rays' people would be more likely to believe him and go after the hippies than look at Mars's secrets.

>>62662068
There were two Teen Titans-esque series.

One was the extremely popular cartoon that taught kids to be less shit to each other, the dangers of The Ruinous Powers and other such things. It was very popular with a substantial interstellar following. It was a little darker than many children's shows but not massively so.

The other was closer to the recently declassified reports of Inquisitor Dick "Robin" Grayson. It was not for kids. It was not as happy and friendly and didn't have quite the same following. It was still not as grim as the raw reports were.

Of the Inquisitor and his retinue the only survivor by 999M1 is the eldar known as Koriand'r. She runs a drinking establishment on craftworld Mymeara, returning home as she told her people she would a very long time ago. True most of the retinue would be either dead or extremely old by 999M41 even with the best rejuvenents but it is also known that they didn't get the opportunity.

>>62675904
To be fair, they were both adaptions from the reports, it's just that the kid's show omitted/adjusted certain events and contexts to something more kid-friendly, and took lots of liberties in order to justify filler material. This of course led to a couple of issues, like how the show 'ended' very abruptly without a real conclusion (due to the writing staff having sort of backed themselves into a corner where the actual events both wouldn't make sense and would be far too dark even in watered-down versions), but despite this was very well-received because the people behind it had genuine passion for the project and knew how to mix humor and dark themes together without either being to jarring in contrast.

I think Koriand'r probably enjoys the cartoon more. It reminds her of the good times, and lets her lie to herself about how some events panned out.

>>62675846
And it isn't like the AdBio isn't full of weirdos, historically close to the Court and Imperial Couple, and very cozy with the agency tasked with monitoring them. Raskian isn't wrong that they the organizations in tandem have been shaping human genetics, it's their stated mission, and are branching out to serve Xenos populations of the Imperium in the current era.

In terms of oversight one could explain the situation with the context that the AdBio was already under the Imperial Court, and before that the Steward's own wholly adequate supervision prior to the existence of the Ordo Mutatio, itself one of the few institutional relics of Goge Vandire's ill fated rule, and Court and Administratum officials still maintain a tighter leash with power over the purse-strings of most major Biologicus projects than the Inquisitors ever could. Another might point out that this fact and the fact that there is still much of the AdBio not involved with those endeavors were the causes that led Vandire order the Ordo Mutatio formed, and why Oscar kept it in existence with only minor changes instead of disbanding it. A third might interject that the Ordo has since become notable for another unofficial mission, and in addition to monitoring the AdBio and relying on them to investigate and counter chaotic mutation, they're (supposedly) also the Inquisition's pipeline for their own biological augmentations and new research and development.

>>62654778
>>62663193
>>62663365

That raises a question. Just how much do we know about Hesperax personality in canon? We know she prefers to let her weapons do the talking, doesn't want the responsibility of ruling Commoragh, and that she (allegedly) collects weird bricabrac, but that's about it. Maybe she likes being an enigma.

>>62663365
>hon hon
Did Alfabusa really think this was a good idea?

>>62678791
Being extremely controlling of information about herself is a good survival tactic, especially if there’s a possiblity of your enemies using esp against you. Ideally Lelith wants people to assume she can stab them to death, but have as little other useful information as possible. When she fights in the arena she shows off excessively and mixes things up constantly, and when she fights elsewhere she’ll usually just appear out of fucking nowhere, kill efficiency, and vanish.

>>62679421
I'm not sure anything about TTS could really be called a 'good idea', really.

>>62678791
>>62680541
In canon she's very straight-edge and surprisingly considered boring by Dark Eldar standards. She doesn't like using combat drugs because she feels it detracts from the adrenaline rush of a kill or cheapens the thrill of victory. Which other Dark Eldar find weird. She likes to go around looking for opponents who are worthy of her skills. She's fought Hive Tyrants, Space Marine Champions, and her current goal in 8th Ed. is to pick a fight with Lucius and live to tell about it.

That said she also likes showing off how skilled she is, she spends about half her time in the arena stomping scrubs like some big name WWE star and loving it, and that behavior doesn't change when she's fighting outside the arenas.

Which ironically means Lucius and Lelith in this timeline would get along like a house on fire.

>>62679421
Pretty sure that's supposed to be related to her stealing body parts from Cegorach.

>>62677571
Given that in the case of one friend she had to deal with him constantly starving himself half to death and another friend decided to deal with the problem of daemonic corruption by going out with a bang and taking as many enemies as possible with them (either literally or letting not!Trigon temporarily use them as a daemonhost), it's no wonder she prefers the nostalgia of a world where everything worked out okay.

>>62673564
We know they don't know all the details of the Iron War. They know the Iron Minds were super-powerful A.I.s, but they don't know that they were psychic, as most people (including Oscar) believe the Men of Iron had no soul, a notion which Castigator would violently disabuse you of. A lot would be remember as half-myth, metaphor, and cautionary tale.

>>62681318

Did Lucius fall in this timeline?

>>62681371
Kind of- he was obsessed with immortality and stuck a C'Tan shard into himself. Now he roams the galaxy, trying to find something to do with his newfound time.

>>62681318
Do we have any fluff on Myrmeara?

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>>62656634
>>62656793
>>62657662
The type 3 would definitely be outfitted differently than your average servitor. The vast majority of servitors are vat grown, and part of the reason servitorization is treated with such horror is the objectification aspect of it. It's as if your soul was put into a computer chip, and then mixed up with millions of other computer chips that were artificially made and put into cars' navigational computers, cell phones, what have you. No one will ever know you used to be you.

In reality, you're pretty much lobotomized and no trace of "you" survives (probably, this is Warhammer), but humans are self-centered enough that such an idea terrifies them.

In that case, the type 3 mentioned by >>62656634 would probably be differentiated somehow, as said poster suggested by different quality of artificial components, etc. By Imperial standards the act is considered a blessing and a way for the individual to contribute, not a punishment. It doesn't make it less horrifying by our standards, though.

One could even see a case where you have a tech-priest whose child would have been born mentally handicapped and been a potential such case but is brought up to normal standards with augments. Whether it was done because "replacing defective organics with machines is just what the AdMech does", a personal ego-trip by the parent, or sentimentality on their part is up in the air. Contrary to popular belief, tech-priests are capable of sentimentality, though the terminology and way they approach it is different, there's one in Know No Fear who misses her husband and one in Gods of Mars who when a cloned successor doesn't turn out like they planned keeps them around anyway.

>>62681434
They're the Craftworld that parked themselves in the middle of the Tau Empire. They were on the edges for a really long time during the Age of Strife to the point that they thought they were some of the last eldar. The Myrmearans like the Tau. Their optimism makes the Myrmearans feel young again.

>>62681318
Oscar might have been unsure on if the Iron Minds had souls at one time. Then he met Elmo. Elmo has a soul.

Also the Iron Mind of the Maggot Men.

>>62681582
I'm imagining the Type 3s as not unlike the Tranquil from Dragon Age.

>>62681318
She sounds like a DEldar Puritan.

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>>62681582
Don't forget about the Imperium's retirement plan for the indispensable. With the funds and resources most type 3 servitors can be made into a servobrain of some capacity, and as with servobrains at some point the cogitators are doing far more than the damaged meat they're networked through, but the sentiments (and usually important family names) attached to such individuals have made the argument that their souls truly correspond to the processes in their minds generally accepted. Even these rarities are not mentally human, nearly all are unique in mental architecture. The Inquisitorial study of their souls and those of more typical servobrains is not public, public study of their souls, and the complex interlocking things appended to them has been well funded but inconclusive. With a more normal servobrain cogitator components can be designed to 'fit' a soul, to some extent, but in attempting to elevate a type 3 servitor to or beyond human baseline one must often either invent whole-cloth, resort to abstraction, or interweave these options. Some in aristocratic circles have even joked such beings should be considered Xenos Independens, or even Obscuras.

>>62682212
Good point given they killed it with the psi-disruptor.

This deldar talk does raise a question - what happened to the dark eldar who left Commoragh when chaos first came? They probably wouldn't be able to deal with the path system, so they're probably stuck with either harlequins or particularly sadistic corsairs.

>>62686714
There are plenty of eldar citizens of the Imperium apostate from The Path and they can pass for normal to the humans. Any oddities are put down to "eldar are a bit strange".

Also if they stop being delicious tasty torture buns Slaanesh stops slurping on them, they just have to find a method of dealing with the natural eldar tendency towards obsessions.

>>62687590

So would Lelith be not particularly interesting to Slaanesh? While her perfection as a combatant would be appealing, in terms of hedonism and sadomasochism she's kind of garden-variety. She probably doesn't even kill her slaves after having sex with them.

>>62687877
There would be tastier, but she's still too tasty to ignore.

>>62687590
Slaanesh still tries to get at Craftworlder souls. Soul stones are what stops them. In canon the Exodites have soul stones, but it's not entirely clear why. It could be because they are focused on work and survival and don't have time to get pampered and develop obsessions (which seems to be the way canon is leaning). But that implies they are somehow free of Slaanesh trying to nom their souls regardless of what they are doing as happens with the Craftworlders. That said, in canon it's also mentioned the Exodites also have some of the purest souls among any major sapient race, which is why the Dark Eldar and Chaos like attacking Maiden Worlds so much. It also could be the Maiden Worlds themselves prevent Slaanesh from getting in as easy due to the World Spirit.

>>62686714
We talking the exodus after the Dark Wedding? Most tried the Path system and got soulstones (usually only being let in if they had something useful to trade). Others tried to carve out spaces in realspace or become corsairs, but probably didn't do so well because outside the Webway Slaanesh would get them relatively quickly.

Canon mentions that Dark Eldar have joined Craftworlds and gotten soulstones, and vice versa. There are cases of Soul Stones being used by the Dark Eldar, but they are of dubious utility (do you really want to be left helpless and at the mercy of your rivals and/or subordinates)?

>>62682374
Tranquil meets Cephalon (seems independent but mentally tweaked and reprogrammed to be better at their task and not truely independent) sounds pretty good, kind of like how servobrains were once described as R2D2 meets Cephalon (or Bob the Servo-Skull from Servants of the Imperium meets R2D2).

>>62689735
Also most of the Dar Wedding runaways were on the very bottom of society. The Withered and the like. They had nothing to loose. Also they never got invited the cocaine parties so they might not have been that far down the degeneracy slope and could adapt easier.

Bump

>>62691263
I wonder if the wave of refugees from Commorragh contributed to the Ork reform panopticon project we’ve discussed a couple of times. After all, if even (some) Dark Eldar could see the error of their ways and the light of civilization, why not Orks?

>>62683629
Probably also some Mechanicus sects claiming that, biological components or not, they are Silica Animus and must be destroyed. Such arguments would likely not win these groups any friends.

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>>62696026
How would they be able to do that with a straight face? They would either be no different from servitors on most grounds or be the equivalent of very brain-damaged tech-priests or skitarii. Of course never question the ability of people to twist an argument into something that supports their worldview.

I think I got most of what was posted during the threads I missed up. Last thing to get is Cherys which will take some time to format from all the separate posts.

Haven't put the Teen Titans-inspired thing up because we don't really have a name for it yet and while I like it as much as the other anons in the thread we don't seem to have dressed it up enough so the shout out doesn't seem obvious (though it's not like vanilla Warhammer never takes cool ideas from another universe, check the dozens of Elric ripoffs walking around in Fantasy and 40k).

>>62697283
It could be cerebral augmentation that they have an issue with. Everything else is fine.

>>62681582
Does this mean that along the Maslow's hierarchy of needs the Imperium Mostly provides Physiological needs and Safety needs but everything else above it difficult or rare?

>>62699854
Imperium provides the bottom two tiers when it can as best.it can for as many as it can. The third tier to an extent as either a side effect the way it gives the first two or by the first two providing an environment that the third can arise from.

Top two are your (or the problem of the immediate tribal group) problem. It's the Imperium, not a safety blanket.

>>62699854
To be honest I think most governments throughout history only provide those two tiers at best.

>>62698308
Of course not, most Tech priests here and in canon want nothing more than to replace their brains with as much hardware as they can possibly cram in. Belisarius Cawl, for example, is said to pretty much not be a human any more, with his personality/consciousness copied and stored across multiple banks of cogitators.

>>62698266
I'm not a fan of people randomly porting other media into this AU (see the COD Advanced Warfare debacle), but I'd guess I'd be ok with it as long as we make it clear it's in-universe entertainment

>>62703321
Tech-priests walk the line of wanting to be as machine as possible whilst not becoming Silica Animus.

Most of them.

So Imperial transhumanism; not just for Astartes and cogboys?

Krieg and Savlar have been noted as prominent non-mechanicus worlds with the highest proportion of transhuman technologies used in by their populations, and kinda show the far ends of the spectrum for Imperial use of such things. Savlar's extremophile cyborgs are notable as individual transhuman beings, adapted and customized for their environment and preference, while Krieg is home to a transhuman population, physiologically unchanged, but fundamentally altered in their life-cycle and psychology, changed from being mere social animals by their societal symbiosis with industry.

>>62703321
The Titans show is strictly in universe entertainment. The reports of Inquisitor Grayson are not very like the more popular series. The career of "Robin" Greyson is a 300 year demonstration of a small group of people having the shit kicked out of them for an extended period of time in cruel and unusual ways. It's one of the rare and sad occasions when an old master out lives a talented former apprentice as Senior Inquisitor Wayne stopped sending letters to HQ as late as 447M41.

>>62705812
Krieg aren't transhuman, they're kind of sub-human. They are human with everything not war removed. But it's only kind of because it's cultural rather than inherent to them. Take a krieger baby and raise it as a more normal human and it turns out human as what happened the Derivatives of Terrainius.

Savlars are more chemical resistant up to a point but not massively so. They can outdrink people easier and eat food with uncomfortable levels of toxic elements in them. Possibly this comes at a price but Savlar is so shit anyway it's not evident.

>>62705812
I think the degree of transhumanism would be a heavy subject of debate in Imperial society. The official stance of the Imperium is that it's not trying to enforce transhumanism, merely trying to maintain what's already there. Keep the human gene pool stable rather than tampering with it. They aren't trying to "fix" the void born and felinids, but they aren't trying to turn everyone into one either. Most genetic changes being in the name of that, like uplifting the ogryn and beastmen to keep them from degrading in sentience further. Astartes/Sororitas, the Adeptus Mechanicus, and Adeptus Biologicus would be considered comparing apples and oranges since they are all created through implants (either fleshy or mechanical) rather than inheritable genetic engineering. Oscar didn't want a genetically engineered ruling caste dominating everyone else (which may have been another reason why Horus' ideas made him uncomfortable).

However, in practice it's a bit different. Krieg did change their sociology to an almost eusocial system when they got access to the Vitae Wombs. Leman created the Fenrisian Wolves trying to improve the Dog Soldiers. Etc., etc.

And there's the thorny issue that if anyone were to compare the gold standard human genome (as in baseline human from Old Earth) to a pre-spaceflight Homo sapiens sapiens, 40k's Men of Stone would have to be classified as a different subspecies due to the degree of genetic differences, including tweaks in the code to eliminate certain diseases, handle spaceflight better, reduce risk of implant rejection, etc. I think we even suggested 40k Men of Stone may be able to ignore protein chirality (incompatible protein chirality or spaceflight osteopenia surprisingly never comes up in any 40k novel despite every other horrible thing that can happen in space being mentioned). It's just like the eldar humans have taken what would be considered genetic engineering for granted as natural because everyone has it.

>>62703321
>>62706105
Yeah, I think the main reason it straddles the line is the real inquisition team it was based on weren't teenagers, events didn't pan out like they did in the in-universe show (the cultist they spent most of their time chasing was hanged instead of dying in a convenient explosion), and things ended badly for everyone involved as you would expect for Warhammer (one member turned traitor, another struggled with the beastman equivalent of chronic anorexia, another died on their terms rather than let the daemons take them). Still, at the very least using different names to show that it's "inspired by" instead of a direct port would be a good idea.

>>62703321
COD Advanced Warfare debacle?

>>62706105
Savlars have higher base drug tolerances, but they also have a society that while deeply underdeveloped in many, many ways, maintained a notable level of cybernetic and peripheral material engineering technologies in the process of preserving the Neutronium foundry and living in its exotic runoff. Much to the OMBs protestation, the relationship between the Savlar Brotherhood and wastelanders of their world has been likened to a characteristically desolate premutation of the Magos and Skitarii of true Forgeworlds. The extent of augmentation if far less than true Mechanicus forces, but Savlar legions are the archetypal technobarbarians of the modern Imperial army. For every hundred confused adicts aiming shoddy lasguns with barely operable "aim stabilizing" augmetic arm joints, there might be one or two gyroscopically unshakeable lunatics leaping around with machine legs that belong on a Ruststalker, carving up tanks, aircraft, and walkers with semi-functional DAoT power tools.

Krieg, be they subhuman or superhuman, through their introduction of technology to the human lifecycle are as a society very clearly moving away form the categorically human breadth of sentiments and functions that characterize the species. They are physiologically and genetically unchanged, but as a population they are psychologically and socially distinct from other human groups, and through their application of technology they become moreso. In any other population an adult Krieger's psychological development would be considered stunted, neurotic, and fundamentally afflicted with a great number of maladies produced by the mechanism that is Krieg's society, but this is the desired output of that vast machine. What is to the Imperium at large a ghastly vision is to them the refinement and optimization of human utility through technology, one they will continue to streamline and perfect long past the point of total alienation from humanity.

>>62707986
>>62706482
For all their personal augmentation, the most heavily altered Savlars often remain deeply human in psychology, remaining hungry, sensual, moody, and distractible as any entirely fleshy person, occasionally even becoming more so with the added power of cogitators as is proudly demonstrated by the Savlar Brotherhood. It is because their augmentations, from the advanced to the trivial, function to enable the the life of the human animal in a hostile wilderness. Krieg, but for their veneration of the human form, marches lockstep along a path tread before by the likes of the Olamic Quietude, even the Necrontyr, and perhaps even more than the Mechanicus are the rare post-humanity of the Imperium. It is one much more akin to non-sentient master control programs than silica animus, despite the occasional joke among the Eldar that Krieg does the much neglected work of reincarnating Men of Iron.

Maybe, with enough time, Kriegers will become their own subspecies of humanity that act as barely sentient cannon fodder for the imperium.

Are Imperial cyborgs more susceptible to corruption?

>>62709907
Depends on the type of corruption. Chaos corruption? They're less likely to turn on their own, lacking some of the emotional urges that lead normal humans to the Ruinous Powers, but they can still be corrupted by outside forces just fine.
Then there's Void Dragon corruption. In which case the answer basically boils down to "does the Void Dragon feel like it today?"

>>62705812
>So Imperial transhumanism; not just for Astartes and cogboys?
Already in canon 40k, transhumanism isn't privilege of some factions.

Having enough resources and influence, one can request at will gene-therapy (see Hector Rex) or cyber-implants (see Eisenhorn's bro trader).

But I think on this AU, the concept would be more freely pursued, due to the human form not being venerated as untouchably sacred. Even more if you want impress the Eldar qt3.14.

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>"Guardsman, I asked you to fetch the platoon's ratling."
>"'ere he is, sah, roight an' ready fer duty!"
>"Guardsman that is not a ratling."
>"Sure 'e is! Got the tail an' all, don't 'e?"

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Just found this image set titled Starship Polyphemus, struck me as a good example of Interex ship design.

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>>62712619

>>62712572
Man, now I'm REALLY wishing the space-Skaven from that one non-canon story were an actual thing.

>>62712673
Anon who wrote that one, I had more ideas regarding that timeline and the overly naiive space Skaven, but I didn't want to waste thread space on an alternate timeline few would care about. There is always the illithid option mentioned last thread if you want to run them in your game of "They're from the future and travelled back in time after accidentally breaking the space-time continuum. How does one accidentally break the space-time continuum? Skaven that's how."

>>62710924
What would Eldar be impressed by? On the one hand they are really vain about their own species, on the other hand they are as interested in new experiences as humans, apes, and dolphins are (see: canon Dark Eldar and pleasure cults), which is part of the reason Slaanesh was born. I suppose it would be more internally seeing one's self as better even though "boldly coming" is still enticing, which is a really weird mindset for humans to wrap themselves around.

Out of all the human civilizations, the Avenians and the Interex would probably be the most impressive based on physical similarity. Both are lanky and tall, the Avenians have angular features (and their culture is basically the High Elves from Fantasy), whereas Interex have big ears (not like elf ears, just big ears in general). The Interex were on decent terms with the eldar in canon.

>>62707979
Someone suggested importing the Atlas Corporation into the setting, even though it made no sense and actively contradicted some of the established nobledark fluff. See >>50753225 and >>50753714.

There were a couple of other examples that we thought were references too far.

>>62710924
On the subject of body shape did octo-humans ever get anywhere?

>>62712619
I think their ships were described as looking like scepters, but the general aesthetic is about right.

>>62706518
Which one turned traitor?

>>62715048
Sceptres in the style of TNG era star trek ships.

>>62687590
There's also the problem of High Tongue. To speak it properly you need some minor psychic ability to convey tone and shit.

>>62712638
Anyone have moar of this?

So I had a wild idea that I want to run with. Crone Slaaneshi Altruists.

The basic gist for is that they view being devoured by their daughter-son parent-lover as a good thing, and that Eldar who seek to avoid this fate are selfish.

Furthermore, they see it is their sacred duty to help the less fortunate races (all of them) to know the joy of Slaanesh by spreading wealth and decadence to the most impoverished corners of the galaxy.

This small, selfless and depraved group of crone eldar already have many devoted cultists to call on thanks to their largesse.

Their acts of charity are, of course, warp infused and designed to drag the recipient into the service of Slaanesh.

The Imperium knows them by many names - The Glad Hand, Galt's Nightmare, The Heralds of Strange Joy. But to their beneficiaries, they are simply known as The Aristocrats.

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>>62670504
I'd say that this is also just in-universe entertainment. We don't need to port absolutely everything into this AU. Inquisitor Xavier exists in this AU as a fictional character thought up by someone during the time of the previous head of the Psykana before the teaching policy reverted to an older model.

Possibly the character is based off of someone in the Inquisition the head of the writing team met once or it could just be an amalgamation of shit he had learned about the Inquisition and about the Psykana. In any case their job is to teach kids that psychics aren't bad people, but they are dangerous sometimes. Especially if not trained. It's not to make warm fuzzy feelings in the general populace, although that's a nice side effect. The main purpose is because psykers typically switch from latent to active during puberty and the Imperium simply can't afford to monitor quadrillions of citizens across a million worlds for the one in a million that this happens to despite the damaged the Unsanctioned can cause. To that end it is needed for the general populace to be convinced to be convinced to police themselves a little. The purpose of the cartoons and live action series' is to influence children to turn in their friends when they start to manifest their abilities. It's better this way. the psykers get sent to a training facility (not always Old Earth for logistical reasons) where they are then sorted into groups based on ability, strength and stability. The frighteningly unstable, the ones too unstable or weak-willed to possibly save, are euthanized quickly and painlessly and they are the only ones discarded in such a manner. The rest are too much of an asset to the Imperium to waste from a purely pragmatic point of view and are typically good and loyal subjects and citizens so it's a matter of principle that they be helped.

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>>62718303
Maybe they come back to the world they left year later and thank the friend that turned them in. Perhaps they can't forgive them. Perhaps they don't return, not all stories have a happy ending. But tragedy or jubilation the cartoon and other programs like it have done their purpose at a fraction of the cost more extensive professional surveillance would have cost.

Also after the first few centuries/millennium of making this shit you can just keep rerunning the same episodes on a very, very long loop.

not!Harry Potter is probably also very popular on a number of worlds.

The eldar don't understand any of it and just chalk it up to humans being a bunch of fucking weirdos again. Eldar will take in human psykers if there's no practical alternative just to not have deamons coming out of the woodwork.

>>62718303
>>62718380
It also has the welcome effect, perhaps intended, of increasing the likelyhood of the child turning themselves in, or at the very least being more open to the idea of going on the black ships. The idea of being the next Storm or power ranger or whatever does a lot to allay the natural unease in a child being taken away from home. The reality isn't nearly so glamorous, but a calm psyker is less likely to go haywire and start failing Perils of the Warp checks than a psyker who thinks they're off on an adventure rather than being taken away for what might be the rest of their lives.

Of course, this does lead to it's fair share of false alarms where children turn themselves in without actually having psyker abilities, but the screening process usually filters out the fakers who don't understand just how dangerous what they're doing is. Usually. Every process carries the possibility of false positives.

>>62718380
So how is sorcery handled? Outright ban, or each use requires authorization from the Psykana?

>>62700486
The first two - when it's an option. Remember, the universe still sucks, and they can't always cover all their bases.

>>62654702
I like the idea of some sort of resistance, at least to Malys. The problem is that her relationship with Vect is indeed genuine, twisted as it is.

Lelith is probably heartbroken but hiding it at all times.

>>62719075
Once you get your Sanctioned stamp you can live unsupervised. The Psykana teaches you to know your limits so if they are confident enough to sanction you they are confident that you have learned what to and not to do. As they are sanctioned under Imperial Authority any breach of good behaviour is to the detriment of confidence in the Imperium and the agents of the Imperium take that very seriously.

Essentially you can live with some level of autonomy and lack of supervision so long as you don't do anything stupid. If you do something stupid then serious people pay you a serious visit and ask you some serious questions.

>>62719075
>>62719519
Sorcery is dealing with deamons. Big, big no no.

Inquisition and Grey Knights have been known to if there is no other choice under supervision with lots of security. Procedure set out by Magnus, approved by Russ.

>>62708761
Hopefully they will be healed by then.

>>62721768
I guess the point is that they would have to realize they were sick before that could happen

>>62722716
The Derivatives are making them question things. It's the first time that the leadership has been divided in opinion for a very long time. Can they be redeemed? They ask. Is this the rain washing their sins away?

>>62719075
>>62720295
What got Ahriman on the shit list is he was using Ada's old methods that Magnus taught him to summon daemons and beat them for information. It was a huge scandal and everyone involved was horrified, largely because even if you think you have total control over a daemon they can still manipulate you (lying, for one).

>>62718984
IIRC, something akin to Xavier's school is actually how the Imperium sells the Black Ships to the populace and how most people see it. The black ships take psyker children away to a special place where they can learn to control their powers and can't be a threat to themselves or others. Earth (and formerly Prospero) are the only places that know how to make Prosperine Quartz, which while it won't keep all daemons out dampens psychic activity enough that an emotional teenager won't start accidentally summoning daemons. It's the best option because you can't just tamper with people to make them not psychic like Tranquil (The Path of the Eldar series says the eldar can actually do this to each other and it is a punishment for those that abuse psychic powers, but given how different the brains of the two species are trying to do that to humans is probably a bad idea. I think there are two examples of this happening in the fluff though).

Only its a massive bureaucratic system rather than some private school due to the sheer size of the Imperium. Black Ships are seen as a public service rather than people coming to take your children as fuel for a giant psychic bonfire.

Of course, this overlooks a few facts, such as most of these psykers will never see their homeworld again. And the fact that the Schola Psykana is filled to the brim with propaganda and plays up the benefits of Imperial service and the Adeptus Astronomica while downplaying the negatives. In modern terms we would call psychological manipulation and bullshit, even though they're not forcing anyone to join anything.

>>62723720
Derp, meant everyone who found out about it was horrified, Ahriman and co. clearly knew they what they were doing, seeing as they bugged out rather than defend themselves against the accusations.

Even if the Psykana was objectively puppies and candy in a noblebright sugarbowl, you would probably get some people who are against it in the same manner that you see parents today against public education or vaccination.

>>62719075
The question being when would Lelith and Vect have gotten together? Malys and Vect first got together shortly after the WotB. Of course neither of them are known for being strictly monogamous, and in that case Lelith would always know she is playing second fiddle.

We’ve have said Vect and Malys broke up and got back together several times before they decided to get married. One potential reason for that is that at one point Malys came to the conclusion that Vect doesn’t believe in her or her goals. It’s clear that Vect is not going to convert to Chaos worship any time soon. And while the Chaos Gods would settle for Age of Strife II: Electric Boogaloo, Malys wants to drag the whole damn Milky Way into the Warp. That would potentially be bad for the Dark Eldar unless they can get enough of a breeding population going in Commorragh. Plus, her beloved Asdrubael lives in the immaterial equivalent of a bomb shelter. The fact that Asdrubael doesn’t see her as a threat might imply to Malys that he has no confidence in her (though more likely it’s he thinks she can break the Imperium and usher in a new Age of Strife, but doesn’t have the pull to cause a full End Times scenario), and that’s something that can ruin any relationship.

>>62723720
>this overlooks a few facts, such as most of these psykers will never see their homeworld again. And the fact that the Schola Psykana is filled to the brim with propaganda and plays up the benefits of Imperial service and the Adeptus Astronomica while downplaying the negatives. In modern terms we would call psychological manipulation and bullshit, even though they're not forcing anyone to join anything.

It's worth noting that Psykers are some of the most socially mobile people in the Imperium, but only because their average is incredibly skewed. Their actual social mobility within the society of a given world or system is often very limited, and many that go off on the black ships never amount to anything of note, but among tales of people without fortune or renown from the unsung nooks of the galaxy swept to high prominence and station among the circles of the Interstellar Aristocracy, Psykers are often the unlikely protagonist. Though the risks are certain, few other populations in the Imperium possess an inherent potential sufficient to raise an underhive urchin to the courts of Sol with naught but a period of schooling. The alienation of homeworld, the immersion in the political spheres and propaganda, are all part of this integration to what has become the governing society, more than just a social class, of the Imperium.

>>62719075
>>62724063
>Heartbroken
What kind of weak shit is that? This is Lelith "BAD MOTHERFUCKER" Hesperax, the only hearts she feels breaking are uppity Crone bitches who don't know their place when she stabs them.

But really, I can't see Lelith feeling anything for Vect, or any individual really; her characterization in canon is literally "she likes to kill things" to the point where she doesn't use combat drugs like most other DE because it dilutes the satisfaction she gets from killing (and because she's just that good). She might be a bit miffed because Malys is now the one person in Commoragh other than Drazhar that she's not sure she can beat, but Vect? Malys is welcome to him, Lelith doesn't give a shit about politics or people.

Actually, in the new fluff Lelith is apparently allied pretty closely with Ynnead and Yvraine, presumably to take down Slaanesh, but also because she wants to fight Lucius. That would be a solid characterization and plotline for this AU, pitting everyone's favorite DE waifu vs our immortal C'tan space-Abhorash and giving them something to do since they're thin on fluff.

>>62724290
Not to mention their skills are in high demand if they are an astropath or have other such skills, which means they are even more likely to end up in a system other than their birth because someone is willing to pay the expenses for them to travel there.

It's also kind of interesting how between the increasing psyker populace, trace Prosperan cultural influence, and burning hatred of Orks, Old Earth in this time line is starting to develop its own quirks rather than being the generic human homeworld you often see in science fiction (though a lot of other Earth-born cultural groups set up colonies elsewhere both before and after the Age of Strife).

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>>62726755
Well yeah, the inner system is heavily settled, earth is slowly becoming a shellworld and an eucemenopolis where you can take a train/elevator from the deepest artificial caverns to the hub of the daisy chain in geostationary orbit, Luna is a giant starship factory, Mars is the vatican of an entire additional civilization within the Imperium as well as the producer of its own industrial finery, the belt is full of habitats, and on top of all the military, officials, and tourists coming and going there's the myriad entourages from Segmentum Solar that show linger at minor ports of call throughout the system whenever the Traveling Court isn't actually traveling and they can afford to crowd the capital rather than attend to more productive business.

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bump

Did we ever figure out how the demiurg joined the Imperium?

>>62731874
It was either an Armageddon war or Th Civil War and orks were taking advantage of it to try and take Armageddon. Massive fighting on the surface, Imperium barely holding on. Fresh orks suddenly appear in space. Imperium doesn't have the ships to stop them, not even slightly, and the moment they land it's game over for the people on the surface.

Then out of nowhere Demiurg. More Demiurg in one place than any have ever seen before. Orks run straight into them and are flattened. Victory from certain defeat and all the Demiurg ask in payment is to be allowed to join the civilisation they helped defend.

>>62732357
Essentially picking an optimal diplomatic moment to go from reasonable neighbor to Imperial province

>>62726748
How would she deal with something like Lucius? It could be a case of "and then the sun came up so we parted ways for reasons of fairness"

As a side note if Lucius didn't fucking rek Cyrene what happened to it? It could still be that Gabriel did still nuke it, but for a real reason. Most notably that it was an apocalyptic hellscape of Gene-Stealers vs low end vampires.

>>62732678
That and Armageddon was a big customer of theirs. Also the orks reclaiming and rallying around their old pet rock would have been bad news for everyone everywhere.

>>62726748
It doesn't mean that she didn't have stirrings of an obsessive + lustful nature for her stylish king. That is what Cupid's affliction mostly is and the DEldar are very good at both obsession and lust.

She won't admit it and will hide it behind perfectly normal and acceptable hate and spite and it's not like anyone is going to push the issue.

>>62677759
The AdBio would love to be this organized. Sadly the AdBio can't do anything on the large scale and the individual orders are run by grumpy old people who don't much trust the other orders, sometimes even for real reasons.

Sadly about all the High Ups in the nominally in charge council of the AdBio can do is task an order with a problem (if you ask all of them eventually one will agree to the job) and hope for the best. They won't send you regular reports and they won't listen very carefully to further instructions.

Case in point Praetoria. the Order of the Old Tree were tasked with undoing the effects of inbreeding it the ruling elite. It was expected by the elders of Molech that they would arranges some marriages, using the borrowed authority of Molech and the Imperium brass to bully them into agreeing, maybe get a few offworld kids adopted from a distant gene-pool and then they all come home with the job well done for the next few centuries. They didn't expect the Old Tree to install themselves as an integral part of the aristocracy and make it their permanent home.

>>62727472
>>62729203
Anymore like these pics?

>>62735289
I get the feeling you didn't really read my comment, because that's exactly what I'm arguing against. Obsession with Vect? Why? People don't factor into Lelith's worldview except for as things for her to kill, so she wouldn't give a shit about him on a personal level. In canon, the "reward" she promised an Archon for bringing her an SM Champion that gave her a worthy fight was to murder him for the lulz. She also explicitly does not care about ambition, power, good hair, and the other things that Vect represents. Again in canon, she was ostensibly his ally but jumped ship to the Ynnari pretty much immediately once she figured Yvraine was more interesting.

Lust? Maybe, but unlikely. Maybe they hooked up a few over the years, they've known each other for millennia, but sex is probably pretty low on Lelith's hierarchy of needs, killing is always going to be her preferred way of getting her rocks off. Just because Dark Eldar are hedonists doesn't mean that lust has to motivation for her. I think it's actually quite an effective contrast and bit of irony for her character: she looks like a slutty seductress, but on the inside she's a psychopathic apex predator. If her looks matched her personality, she'd look like Freddy Krueger.

Anyway, I really don't see why we would muck up one of the unambiguously badass female characters in 40k with juvenile love triangle bullshit, especially when it's at odds with every depiction of her in canon.

>>62599200
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss

First google result after urban dictionary.

>>62733137
>apocalyptic hellscape of Gene-Stealers vs low end vampires.

Metal as fuck. This has to be how it happened.

bump

>>62737939
Agreed; if anything, her closest thing to a relationship she's got going is with Lucius, and most definitely not in a sparklepire kind of way. That said, as one of the big names in Comorragh she's got to have some kind of connection with Vect, but I think the barely-controlled animosity on her part, and 'useful garbage disposal' on Vect and/or Malys's part detailed above would be best.

What's Urien Rakarth and the other Haemonculi up to in this AU?

Would Urien Rakarth be Dark or Chaos?

>>62743570
The haemonculi continue to be haemonculi; they’re not enough of a unified group to be up to anything as a collective, although I’m sure individual haemonculi are up to plenty.

Don’t know who Urien is, so I can’t answer that question.

>>62735289
>>62737939
>>62741921

Is there even anything in canon about Lelith having a relationship with Vect? I mean there’s references to her helping him rise to power and him patronizing her, but while they know each other I haven’t heard of anything in canon of the two having an actual carnal relationship beyond what you’d expect for Dark Eldar.

>Lelith and Lucius

This. Lelith and Lucius probably fought a long time ago, when Lucius wasn’t at OPplznerf levels of C’tan vampire power yet. The two managed to walk away from the encounter and both consider it one of the best fights they ever had. It would be something like the fight between Wrex and Aleena in Mass Effect, where Wrex still remembers it fondly as one of his best fights centuries later.

Both would drool at the possibility of a rematch, Lucius thinks it would be one of the few fights worthy of his skill and Lelith thinks she can get the edge on him if she can strip him of his accumulated power and make the fight one of skill rather than brute force. And, because they are both such sadomasochists, their dialogue both during the fight and reminiscing about it later would be so innuendo-laden without context you’d have a hard time telling if they were fighting or making love. People would ask if they were talking about an ex and they would go “no, I’m talking about a perfectly wholesome fight. What are you on about?”

Orks would get it though.

>>62746563

So can vampires make more vampires in this? In the interests of fairness of course.

>>62743570
>>62745297
Urien Rakarth and the Haemonculi are still Dark Eldar, rather than Crones.

In term of what they are doing, I would say of all the inhabitants of the Dark City, it is the Haemonculi that put the Dark Eldar most ill at ease. Archons will kill you, Mandrakes will drag you into the shadows, Medusae will boil the blood from your body, but the Haemonculi, with their artsy passions and eccentricities, remind the Dark Eldar a bit too much of their Croneworld kin. Many of the original haemonculi were heads of pleasure cults in pre-Fall Commorragh, and even today a significant number of the remaining pre-Fall Eldar are haemonculi.

In many ways, the haemonculi service as a link between the Dark and the Crone Eldar, and are the closest a Croneworlder can get to leaving the Byzantine politics of Shaa-Dome (at least for those that do not pledge themselves to a particular god).

However it is not simply possible to ban homunculi from Commoragh. Commoragh needs the Haemonculi. These are not some Crone children who think that just because their people have the favor of the gods that they are invincible, and they can easily make their name by opening Khaine’s Gate. The Dark Eldar laugh at such fools.

It is the Haemonculi are the ones that maintain the resurrection services that allow the Dark Eldar to cheat the touch of She Who Thirsts. And the Haemonculi themselves are often very old and very clever at both avoiding and dealing death.

At least that's how I see the best way to work the fluff. The Crones act a lot like canon Haemonculi because they both originated in the the pleasure cults, and in fact Haemonculi can be seen as a touch of Crone upon the Dark Eldar (though they aren't Chaos worshippers and reject Chaos in favor of their art, which is why they hang out in Commorragh). Which in turn explains why the Haemonculi are so weird culturally when compared to other Commorrites.

>>62746563

No canon romance, but canonically she's really the only person Vect can turn his back on and be sure she won't stab him.

>>62746812
Yep. C'tan shards break down fractally. A vampire can insert a sliver of its shard into one of its victims to create a new vampire, which will eventually grow into a larger shard. Shards can be destroyed as long as the entity itself is still alive somewhere (killing vampires usually involves overstimulating the shard to the point where it eats the host), C'tan can wax and wane in power but cannot conventionally die.

The only C'tan who is dead in the conventional sense of the word is Llandu'gor, and Szarekh only accomplished that by creating a pocket of the galaxy with tweaked universal constants where he couldn't exist. However doing so nearly imposed those constants on all of reality and nearly reduced us all to monatomic ash. That said the C'tan seem to consider being sharded close enough to dead for their purposes.

>>62739659
>Visits home
>there's a significant genestealer problem, but don't worry Gabriel
>this very trustworthy fellow has offered his aid in their destruction
>and great boons as well
>the insects will not long stand Inquisitor Angelos, join us in the hunt

bump

>>62746563
When they fought it wasn't even for anything, not even anything petty and stupid. The two of them just wanted to know who was best. Ten hours of high speed dancing later and the sun starts to crest the horizon. They both stop, bow to each other and calmly leave. Both consider the fight the best they have ever had but ultimately both consider it a failure as they didn't determine who was best.

>>62747387
Angelos is still a space marine, not an Inquisitor.

>>62746945
Exactly how dead Llandu'gor is is debatable as at least a little bit of it has survived in the Flayer Virus.

>>62746877
There still could be Haemonculi workshops on the old homeworld in addition to the ones in the Dark City. They were there in the days of The Fall, were at ground zero when Slaanesh was born, surfed out the psychic backlash and they just never left.

How much influence, direct or otherwise, over their vampires do the C'tan shards have?

>>62754318
their whole personality, up to the point where a vampire is essentially just a meat suit for a c'tan shard

>>62754318
>>62754705
To be more precise, the vampires think they have free will, but their thought process can be tampered with at any time by their patron. A lot of vampires think they're making their own decisions but they're being subtly influenced to their patron's own ends. Most of the time it's super subtle, but people who know the infected well would notice the shift in personality.

Deceiver vampires have more free will because plotting against and screwing over everyone at the same time, including pieces of yourself, is kind of the Deceiver's thing and the Deceiver has no long term plan. Only possible exception is Orikan, if he is a vampire, who has been suggested to have a more Nicodemus-Anduriel relationship with his shard (not the pyramid, the shard that would be in him, see: "screwing over yourself"), and even that might be another lie.

>>62755165
Which flavour of shard did Lucius shove up his ass?

>>62756817
Deceiver seems to be the general consensus, since Nightbringer shards and slivers were much rarer in the earlier eras of the Imperium, while the Strigoi Court of the Lacrymole was among the most prominent lineage of vampires coming out of Old Night into the early Imperial era. Whether Lucius found a shard of the Nightbringer or Deviever, he either went far out of his way to find an unclaimed sample of C'tan necrodermis that would not bind him to a sire, or made a point to kill his sire before he could be made subservient. As a Strigoi he would have gained more mental and social powers (and Deviever-esque quirks) straight off, with more tempered physical boosts until he's fairly advanced in development, as a Nosferatsu he'd have immediately shot up to Astartes SP or higher, and kept growing as a combat monster while on a Nightbringer planned murder tour of the galaxy until becoming powerful enough to maintain his own thoughts over his sire's bloodlust. Hell, he could even be a Lamia, having found a more esoteric C'tan sliver that produce more exotic vampires, belonging to the Burning One, the Endless Swarm, or the Moulder of Worlds.

>>62756817
Given how he's described as a top- level combat monster, probably a Nightbringer shard. So he would be a Nosferatu.

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>>62757057
Or he could have found a tiny piece of the Void Dragon in the form of a Wyvern. Maybe he did battle with it and only a small piece was what survived. In his quest for immortality, and being aware of the reports of the Lacrymole, he intentionally infected himself with it.

Mag'ladroth can't influence him because it can't get out of the box and may not even be aware of Lucius at the current time. It's going to be a hell of a surprise when the shit hits the fan and all the prophesies start being fulfilled.

>>62757843
Well yes, that is the last sort of Lamia. Lamia could be a good option for Lucius, excluding the Void Dragon the C'tan they embody were even more thoroughly destroyed by the Outsider, and the slivers left in the galaxy are the crumbs the great automaton didn't eat. The problem for Lamia, again excluding those of the Dragon, is that sufficient energy throughput by their sliver has potential to draw the Outsider's personal attention by raising one of the voices in its head. With the a sample taken from a Wyvern, Lucius takes a gamble, and one with worse apparent odds the more he learned from the Lacrymole, since his apparent sire would be a rampaging and animalistic force of nature.

>>62756817
>>62757843
Now that's what I call a bad dragon.

You know, if Lucius got his powers by beating the shit out of a shard of the Void Dragon that would make him even more of an Abhorash in space.

>>62757057
>>62759242
Strigoi (one of the eaten ones) would probably affect his free will the least.

>>62761127
You linked to two posts that explicitly explain that Strigoi are from the Deceiver, Lamia are from the eaten ones

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Any situation where guardsmen might have fought alongside an avatar of Khaine?

>>62765039
Lots. The Avatar is basically the biggest singular ground force beatstick the Imperium can pull out of their pocket short of Oscar or Isha. A large group of Custodians, Grey Knights, Handmaidens, or Harlequins could equal it, but they're not a single unit. An Avatar with a LOT of backup at one point was responsible for one of Malys' many deaths.

That said, we don't have a lot of specific examples. At the Battle of Iyanden half a million Kriegers showed up courtesy of Yriel and the Avatar was going on a one man rampage until it got bogged down by carnifexes while trying to get to the Swarmlord and even then it took another carnifex with it by puking molten iron all over it. But Iyanden is big, around Ceres or Pluto in size and there's no indication they fought together. There must be cases where Bob the Guardsman got the chance to see Khaine.

Bump

>>62765039
>>62765364
Are there any battles in canon that could potentially be repurposed?

>>62761127
Oh shit, I like the Void Dragon take on it. To take the Abhorash theme even further, maybe Vulkan was Lucius' Green Knight who managed to beat him and won his undying respect.

*Cue a scene inside the Temple of the Flame on Nocturne where a novice priest is doing the nightly rounds. He spots a huge, hooded figure standing in front of the Empty Sepulcher of Vulkan placing something in front of the marble plinth before melting into the shadows. The novice hurries over to investigate, and kneels down to see what the intruder left. To his puzzlement, it seems to be an ancient, ornate Space Marine helm, purple and gold, crushed by a single, heavy hammer blow.

>>62765364
I'm glad we're rehabilitating the Avatar, poor guy needs it after constantly getting Worfed in canon. Not sure where exactly its power level should be though, the description you provided would put it solidly above Bloodthirsters who are probably only worth about 10 GKs, and it'd be weird if Avatars were too much stronger than BTs since Khaine DID get his ass kicked by Khorne. That said, the Avatar is tougher (made of metal) and doesn't feel pain, so those are solid advantages.

>>62767767
Also the avatars are pieces of a god rather than creations of one. Being above Greater Deamon status feels right to me. Also, and the eldar will never admit this, but the closer their people and humanity get the more human energy becomes compatible with their gods. Although humans can't power Khaine we do enhance to varying degrees the effect the eldar do have on him.

The question I have is did the Dark City have an avatar. If it did I imagine that it left with the repentants during the Unholy Wedding.

>>62767406
The Imperium has been at war for 10,000 years. Every world has seen war, most of the time the Avatar doesn't eat the eldar that awakens it so it gets brought along to help more often. The sort of battles that would warrant it's presence are the sort Space Marines get deployed in but Space Marines typically act as an elites force of the Guard and bring lots of Guardsmen to secure the areas that they clear. Also if they are defending an Imperial world rather than attacking an enemy's world they will probably meet PDF soldiers. The Avatar has been seen by billions of regular soldiers down the long years.

>>62767767
>>62768041
Could it be possible that Khainite worship might be one of the Imperium's most popular cults?

>>62768959
They have a following among the Assassins. There is some overlap with the Death Cults/Religio Mortis but outsiders aren't typically told how the Religio Mortis works so who knows what's going on there. There might be a few people who venerate the name of Khaine scattered around, Prosperan Hermetics and the like but such are an insignificant minority.

The problem is that Khaine dosn't make friends very well and he dosn't lend him self well to notions of civilization. He was friends with Chapter Master Calgar but that was considered very odd and may have had a lot to do with Calgar being a killer of excellent quality who embodied most of Khaine whilst still retaining nobility. Khaine may have looked at him and wondered if he would have grown up to be like that if the Old Ones hadn't mutilated him in his formative years.

>>62723720
They might get to. Being able to speak a local language is a bonus for any astropath.

>>62767767
>>62768041
Altansar's Avatar of Khorne would trounce the Avatar of Khaine, since Khorne has more juice he can put through it. The downside to the Avatar of Khorne is there is only one, it requires over a hundred times more sacrifices than Khaine, and after you have to wake it up you have to entice it with a juicy enough battle for it to comply. The BLOOD KING OF THE GALAXY does not follow orders.

High-rank Bloodthirsters like Ang'grath and Skarbrand might outclass the Avatar as well. GKs need a numbers advantage to reliably fight high-powered Bloodthirsters.

Commorragh doesn't have an Avatar by itself, as the statues coalesced out of the Infinity Circuits. That said, Vect killed an entire Craftworld soon after the Fall and used their spirit stones to animate wraith constructs that he uses as one of his many back up plans. It's likely they would have an Avatar.

>>62768959
There are human Khaine cults, kind of like in Fantasy.

So I'd imagine Raskian and the OMB have an interesting view of the original Psy-disruptor

>>62771848
Which is why they aren't allowed to keep hold of it.

>>62772821
It's in the AdMech's vaults. Oscar went to them and pulled it out for killing the Rangda Abomination when the usual methods didn't work.

>>62773688
And did he put it back?

>>62773806
It honestly might have gone into Ganymede instead, early politics between Kelbor Hal and Oscar were a bit tumultuous

>>62773806
>>62775465
Yeah, I don't think we said

>Land, I need your help. Everything's a mess. The entire northern galaxy is on fire, there's maggots everywhere, the works. I need you to talk to Kelbor Hal and see if there is anything in the Mechanicum's catacombs that can kill one of the horrors of the Old Night.
>Fair enough. Such dire times require the exhuming of the most deadly relics of the Omnissiah. Will you bring it back when you are done?
>Eh, no promises.

>>62776963
Damn, meant I don't think we said where it went. It got posted early.

>>62776963
He could argue that he was the only person in the Imperium who could reliably use it and as the last Man of Gold it is his inheritance.

Also they weren't doing anything with it whereas he knows some people on Titan that want to take peak at it and see how it works.

>>62777597
Mars had it because Justinian brought it there, whatever contingent of the eventual Terrawatt clan were present at his end evidently left unable to bring it back to earth after turning it on him. Whatever red priests recovered it in the depths of Old Night likely put the weapon that killed beloved and terrible, mad Theodora in a place of suitable gravitas and locked it up.

>>62777597
>>62777851
That said, this is tech. The Mechanicus have been known to not be reasonable when it comes to tech, even in this timeline. And even Kelbor-Hal might be a little worried about giving Oscar regular access to a gun another of his kind used to kill a god...and everyone in a several kilometer radius (details of Theodora's death were probably lost, but you know the collateral damage was remembered as part of the moral to fear Abominable Intelligence).

>>62780839
Speaking of Theodora, where on Mars would the GaBHD have put the giant neutronium and adamantium cylindrical casing that is their usual way of housing the physical components of an Iron Mind?

>>62781237
Anywhere they wanted.
But seriously, I'd guess probably somewhere equatorial and probably close to a coastline and/ or river. Launching into orbit is easier on the equator, and human civilization has always clustered around sources of water. Both factors would probably be almost entirely irrelevant to the GaBHD by the time it was building Iron Minds, but the Martian capital would likely have been founded back when those factors were relevant and they probably would have put the Mind in or near a pre- existing administrative center.

>>62781618
Probably somewhere around the Tharsis bulge then, as that area is upland (above sea level in most terraformed projections of Mars) and is on the Equator.

>>62781735
Either that or on the coast of the Valles Marineris. It is unsure if she knew about her ancient neighbour, although if she did she never tried to make contact.

>>62770995
There are human ones but not many. Humanity are Isha's children of adoption and she doesn't encourage it.

>>62597893

>>62767767
>Vulkan and Lucius squared off during Vulkan's days as the Imperium's champion

I like this idea, I really do. Not only does it give more for Lucius to do, it gives an idea of the kind of stuff Vulkan got up to when he got into near certain death situations and survived.

>>62786099
Lucius never particularly wanted to betray the Imperium, even Fulgrim personally, though he felt himself betrayed by the former. For all his personal power, and the predation necessary for his sort of immortality, Lucius hasn’t gone out of his way to harm the Imperium or its people, or the nation or people of any other faction, excluding of course those notable individuals he duels.

>>62782692
Even subtle pokes from the Void Dragon might have been hugely influential on an AI like Theodora, but it could be that it was the huge psyonic splash from Justinian’s weapon was what shook the Old One bindings with sufficient force to rouse the Dragon to its current level of activity within its prison.

>>62786099
Vulkan was known as The Perpetual Promethean because he just wouldn't stop and he wouldn't stay down. Lucius would have been in his infancy relatively speaking, the battle would have been a fight of attrition between two quite equally matched near immortals. Lucius would have lost and ran, perhaps Vulkan kept him fighting long enough for help to arrive, but only barely. Vulkan would have been at Death's door and his recovery playing to his nickname.

Lucius remembers that day fondly, it was one of the best fights he ever had.

>>62782692
It's possible the DaoT couldn't find the Void Dragon's tomb. There are other objects in 40k that are completely undetectable to all senses aside from natural sight, including at least one floating around the Sol System (Artefact 9-Kappa-Mu) and if anyone would know how to make them the Old Ones and Necrons would.

The Olympus Mons brotherhood found the Void Dragon partly because it was calling to them to let it out, even if they didn't know it at the time.

>>62790545
I'd keep Artefact 9-Kappa-Mu as a total mystery. Nobody knows who built it or how long it's been there or what it's for. It was assumed for a long time that it was either a relic of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion or an ancient eldar artefact.

Then the Mechanicus unearthed an Old Earth data storage device. Mostly it contained crap. Some ancient nerds collection of amusing pictures, some porn, a bit of (unimpressive) music, news articles about current events and whole load of other glimpses into the life of a pleb of the era. And an article about Artefact 9-Kappa-Mu amounting to "archaeologists have taken another look at the artefact, still clueless" .

The eldar don't know about it. The ones that have had a look at it don't think it's one of theirs. It doesn't look like something they would make and can't fathom any sort of reason for what amounts to a stealthy but inert honeycomb.

The deep historians of the Imperium, both human and eldar, have put forth the idea that it could have been a Necrontyr observation post in the War in Heaven as it was known that the Old Ones exported Earth wildlife for their galactic gardening projects. But it's unprovable and at some point anything of value that might have been there was extracted, leaving just the empty structure.

Currently it's being used as a black box by the Inquisition.