>>62813095
Sorry it took me a while to get this thread back up, had to help get things set up in preparation for the coming elections and it kept me at work longer than usual.

Speaking of which, is voting a thing that happens within the Imperium? At some level you need to be appointed to your position, but there's probably at least a couple of government positions at the planetary level that could be determined by elections.

>>62813146
there are a higher proportion of democratic governments among member states, though feudal systems, oligarchies, etc. are still common. Somewhat related is the more representative approach encouraged to be taken in Administrated system, thought these are still ultimately extensions of Imperial bureaucracy.

>>62813146
Interex are a cyberdemocracy, though you need to be a citizen to vote.

Noticed there wasn't a lot of writefaggotry last thread. Hope this helps contribute to fixing that.

We mentioned the Crone Eldar are kind of like fair folk to the Dark Eldar's Drow/Dark Elves. So that would mean they need fairy hounds, right? Only weird and gribbly because Chaos.

The Crone World eldar are nothing if not an ingenious people. Consider the humble Chaos Spawn. It its natural state, it is a pitiable thing. Barely able to move, barely able to breathe, in most cases good for relatively little except as component materia for a Mutalith Vortex Beast. However, take that Chaos Spawn, prune away the unusable limbs, induce further mutations, and replace the parts that don’t work with prosthetics, and you get a creature that is actually worth something. Crone eldar are masters at this process, their fleshsculptors carefully and artistically trimming chaos spawn like bonsai to create the creatures that they call faehounds.

Like other flesh-sculpted abominations, it does not matter what faehounds were before they were blessed with their mutations. Even Chaos Spawn that used to be Crones receive no special treatment, Crones generally considering being turned into a Chaos Spawn as voiding one’s claim to belonging to the chosen race of the gods. Faehounds come in a vast array of shapes and forms, and it can be quite accurately said that no two look alike. As with anything Chaotic, there are innumerable variants of faehounds, their numbers limited solely by the whims of their creators and the mutating eddies of the Warp. However, most show echoes of a common design, a general hound-like form, typically quadrupedal, though bipedal, six-legged, and even centipede-like forms are known. Manipulatory appendages are rare, but most have some kind of mouthparts with which they can savage their enemy. Faehounds are generally smaller than most Chaos Spawn due to the careful grooming of their flesh, but they trade this for much more coherence in their body plan.

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>>62815375
Faehounds have many uses in war. Perhaps their most common use is as cannon fodder. Faehounds, with their unnatural speed, can rapidly outpace Crone Eldar, and can charge enemy lines absorbing enemy fire while more valuable forces advance. Whether or not they survive is irrelevant, faehounds are easily replaceable, and each shot fired at them is one less shot fired at more valuable eldar lives. Although Perhaps one of the most common variants of faehounds are forms modified as suicide attackers, exploding in a burst of corrosive digestive juices once their purpose is finished or they are too damaged to fight any longer. After all, it is not as though they were expected to survive in the first place.

Faehounds are also useful trackers. Many varieties have some form of highly acute senses, whether it be smell, sight, or even the ability to see the raw currents of the Warp. Therefore, many Crones include faehounds in their hunting parties, these mutated beasts tracking their quarry at the side of their masters. Although the actual battle is important, the Crones find hunting down and killing the fleeing survivors to be just as much if nor more enjoyable.

Basically, the kind of creation someone with access to fleshcrafting and lots of Chaos Spawn lying around would make.

Also, continuing the Wild Hunt/fair folk idea, what if there was a Slaaneshi Erlking/Herne the Hunter-like figure (maybe a Daemon Prince) whose goal is to hunt the most dangerous game in the cosmos? To be sporting, he gives his prey advanced notice and then hunts them for an old Shaa-Domean day and a night with a full hunting party of Crones and faehounds. If they can survive past then, they are worthy quarry and are let go to continue their lives and speak of the magnanimous "mercy" of this figure. If not...well the dude has a trophy wall in Shaa-Dome for a reason.

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So, it might be moot in the grand scheme of things considering that most of their fleet is gone and what remains was basically refugee ships, but for the sake of conversation, what do you think the Ulmeathic League's naval doctrine was like?
That their ships are tanky is almost a given. However, if that's combined with a preference for kinetic weaponry, that makes them too similar to Imperium ships for my liking. Instead, I would propose that their fleets have a focus on stikecraft and counter-strikecraft. For instance, while Ulmeathic ships do pack kinetic batteries like Imperial vessels, they tend to have two ammo types, with the primary intended ammo being essentially shrapnel/flak rounds. While ineffective against voidshields and capital ship armor, these types of rounds at the Macrocannon scale are an absolute nightmare for enemy strikecraft, especially since these rounds can start coming in from main-battery ranges, disrupting both incoming bombing strikes and fighter interception. These rounds also knock out secondaries and point-defenses with their blasts. The Ulmeathic's own strikecraft are primarily bombers, with a bit more durability than those of the Imperium but less maneuvering, since they leave dealing with the enemy fighters to the afore-mentioned flak.
The end result of the carrier-ships being highly survivable, their bombers being very heavy-hitting, and their main-battery fire disrupting enemy screening attempts makes space combat against an Ulmeathic fleet a very frustrating and drawn-out affair, since their vessels see no reason to close on you while their bombers constantly harrass until your fleet is worn down.

This design is not without flaws- fleets with do not rely heavily on strikecraft and can tank the hits from the bombers are dangerous, while ships like Tau vessels that outrange the Ulmeathic ships can simply kite the bombers outside battery range of their motherships before launching interceptors.

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>>62815534
In addition, the success of the fleet can be jeopardize if they lose too many strikecraft, though their vessels are far from helpless without them. It's more a matter of the bombers being their main offensive punch; if the enemy can reliably shoot them all down, then the Ulmeathic vessels have to resort to using their kinetic batteries, which while still comparable to Imperium Macrobatteries when firing anti-ship rounds are still markedly inferior and not as accurate.

Still, these strategies served them well in their final stands against the Tyranids; flak rounds against an enemy that uses swarm tactics is quite effective, and their bombers could target their larger bioships in the vulnerable areas while allowing the main vessels to keep their distance and avoid getting nommed. Logistics won out in the end, but the Ulmeathic fleets gave a damn good showing for it, and it showed when that Hive Fleet finally made it's way to Imperial space.

As for ship design, I like appropriating the covenant vessels from Halo, only a bit more blatantly tweaked to resemble a swimming lizard. The circular area is where their main batteries are found; while they can't bring their full battery to bear on a single target like Imperial vessels can, they have a much wider range of fire, and can fire in sequence as the ship is turning/circling to keep her distance.

>>62815779
Reminds me of the Turtle Ships that one Korean general came up with that wrecked Japan's shit.

>>62815779
The swimming lizard design sounds really good. Wonder what Tarellian ships would look like in that case?

>>62815503
If there is a deamon-prince that is responsible for first creating these abominations then it could be a hybrid prince of both Slaanesh and Khorne. Usually they would not cooperate in such a manner but the dude is just too entertaining to let the other have full claim. He was a pre-Fall generation eldar and a prominent discipline of Kurnous back in the old days.

Tries to pretend that he has some sort of nobility still but is convincing nobody but himself.

>>62815779
They would have had a few military craft remaining. Not many but a few. They knew they were totally fucked and their entire campaign was to slow them down as much as possible to get the subjects that they were responsible for to the escape ships. A few ships were allocated to convoy guard duty, in the event of being followed they were to leave the convoy, keep the bugs busy, hold them as long as possible and die slowly whilst everyone else increased the distance. Thankfully the Nids were too busy eating the planets. These half wrecked ships joined up with the Imperial bulwark that the 'Nids eventually ran into. A few survived and were renovated, they assist in patrolling their settled worlds in the Imperium.

>>62815503
Nice. We could always use more Croneworld units.

>>62813966
In the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds the Demarchy worked by every citizen having a cerebral implant that allowed voting on issues in real time. But in The Prefect it was revealed that the tallying program does not assign equal value to all votes. Those that have been proven to have good judgment and vote to push society in a direction that is later proven to be objectively correct have their vote count for more and those who vote in objectively the wrong way have their future vote's value diminished slightly. Continue to vote in a way that is proven correct and your vote continue to increase in value.

It could be that the Interex operates in a similar way and the leadership is made up of those that make sound judgment as proven by having made sound judgments. How they make their decisions is not usually an issue. They could read tea leaves and cloud patterns as far as any one gives a shit so long as the result is good.

>>62816675
Tarellian vessels might look more avian in design, considering their habit of using feathers for headdresses and decoration; plus they would have developed flight imitating birds like we did, so ships that look like birds with spread wings would make sense to them.
By contrast, the Ulmeathics developed their space program alongside the Passeri, a bird-people that already had their own vessels. Considering Ulmeathic mentality, they would have designed their vessels to intentionally resemble themselves, to show that it was their own strength carrying them into space.
>>62817820
Agree on them having military craft remaining, and the convoy guard duty is a idea, but it's also worth noting that for the Ulmeathics, every vessel was probably a military vessel. The refugee ships were basically vessels that had emptied their hangars and ammunition reserves against the Tyranids, and now filled those areas with refugees instead.

The issue of command of these refurbished vessels is a bit of a tricky one. Officially they are under direct Imperial command, with an Imperium admiral in the escorting Imperium-built vessel in charge. However, the ships themselves are commanded by Ulmeathics and Passeri, and tend to have their own admirals like Oscen; more importantly, their crews will answer unquestioningly to the current Ulmeathic "Deyi-mho" (their word for their position of king). TECHNICALLY, this isn't an issue because their admirals were granted official Imperial rank when they joined the Imperium due to how they did it, and they and Nickaidos are highly loyal to the Imperium, it's just a frustrating prospect for Imperial admiralty when if Nickaidos sends out a call, ALL the Ulmeathic vessels will respond regardless of what they were doing prior.
Also
>"Enemy vessels spotted, staggered line! Shipmaster, they outnumber us three to one!"
>"Then it is an even fight."

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>>62820955
They were an interstellar empire. They would have had other ships beyond only warships. Or at leas the vassal peoples would have had. The Ulmeathic themselves were possibly the only people who had warships but they would have had only warships as befitted theirs social standing within the empire as it's protectors and warrior-nobility.

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>>62821614
A fair enough point. On the other hand, this was a refugee fleet that needed to be able to carry enough people from multiple races to have a sustainable population to recover from their losses, and not many civilian ships would be large enough to house that number of people. Or run fast enough to get away from the Tyranids.

Though on the subject of refitting, this raises an interesting question regarding how the AdMech would approach such an issue. Is working on xenos vessels tech-heresy period, or is replacing their inferior macrocannons with Mechanicum-approved designs acceptable, even though the vessels are not Mechanicus-designed? I imagine that they're at least willing to tolerate inserting Mechanicum-tech into xenos-craft under the justification that eventually they'll be forced into getting supplied solely by Mechanicum-tech.

>>62815503
Herne might even be a fine name for him. His hunting obsession suggests a disciple of Kuronus prior to the fall which offers some inbuilt connections and story ideas, foremost how he ended up in the good graces of the young Prince of Shaa-Dome instead of exile with Nimina.

>>62823132
They would do it for the reasons you mentioned, do it for the greater glory and try not to touch this shit more than necessary. Also maybe a dash of White Man's Burden thrown into it. These idiot lizards need the AdMech, and maybe the rest of humanity if they're having a good day, to tech them to be civilised.

Civilian cargo haulers and ferry ships might be slow and wallowing things but they can carry a lot of shit. Lots of people too if you're not going too far and comfort isn't a concern. Also the lizards would, in their cold reptilian way, have realised that it was their dying day and the sunset of their empire. But they are Ulmeathic. They would only have commandeered and strapped guns and explosives to the minimum of civilian ships that their stalling strategies required, the rest would have been used as evacuation craft. They knew that they couldn't hold their worlds and they were Ulmeathic and they were obligated to die fighting.

They knew that they only needed the ships to make one journey. If the Imperium refused them they had nowhere else to go and there was no-one else to go to.

>>62815534
>giant tanky lizard warrior caste in giant concrete battlestars with macrocannon AA
>fuck anything smaller than an escort sized ship with the flack curtain equivalent of the Berlin Wall
>torpedoes, bombers, assaultcraft, underarmored destroyers, any shuttle that isn’t a brick shithouse, your own fucking interceptors closing on the fuckton of heavy bombers they’ve been launching, all get exploded
>in point of fact, with numbers they can chuck enough KABOOM at ork ships to blow small or unlucky ones to bits even when they shouldn’t, because orks sometimes don’t believe they’ll survive quite that muck dakka
>the bloody swaths these things cut in Tyranid fleets are already the stuff legend in the eastern fringes, and the clear value of the surviving Ulumeathic ships in Imperial bug-hunting fleets has only seen their reputation as the fearsome naval offspring of an automatic shotgun, a frontline carrier, and a rock

>>62824536
The current adult Ulmeathics all want to die on those ships. They are both together relics of a failed empire, and they have no illusions and know they failed. They had one job JUST ONE FUCKING JOB and that job was "protect the plebs so that they can do all the other jobs". That was the whole basis of their social order around which they built an interstellar civilisation. The only price for such total failure is death. When the next generation is grown and strong they are planning plow a furrow through the Hive and see how far they can drive a spear into it's face before the last of them atone. Clean break free of sin for the new generation of Imperial Ulmeathic. Nickaidos will be the oldest of their people on that day.

>>62823914
This raises a question I had been wondering. How do the Ulmeathics travel through space if they killed all their psykers and those of their client races?

>>62820955
Maybe flying pyramids given the Lizardmen influence. Or do the Necrons have those kind of ships in addition to the Necrossaints?

>>62823750
Maybe the Celtic name for Herne to make it sound more eldar-y. The Hunters of Kurnous must hate him. Though he probably loves it, akin to Hircine from the Eldar Scrolls. He is the hunter who hunts while being hunted. It's a poetically perfect adrenaline rush that keeps the hunts from being too boring and helps enforce his self-imposed time limit.

>>62825271
Shallow warp drive system of a sort similar but identical to the Tau drive.

>>62825030
Admiral Oscen then (metaphorically) smacks them upside the head because we're still alive, damnit, you don't get to go yolo into the hive fleet and leave us on our own because you feel guilty about not being able to save everyone. More importantly, he makes it very clear that if those old Ulmeathics go charging in, the Passeri and all the rest are going come right in after them, so they better be planning on having a way out or be fine with having the Passeri warriors die alongside them. The fact they know he's serious about it is a large contributor to why they haven't- redemption may only come with death, but if what's left of the other races dies with them it renders the whole thing moot.

Of course, having one of their vassal races- a former assistant at that, even if the one he was assistant to was an Admiral- as the highest-ranking outside of Nakaidos probably makes the guilt worse, especially since he'd be physically crippled if not for mechanical limbs to replace what he's lost because of their (percieved) failings. At the same time, that perceived debt and respect is probably a large factor in why he remains the highest-ranked and followed loyally; Nakaidos wrecks the shit of anybody who tries to usurp the old bird, and the older Ulmeathics use their own authority to effectively make his word law.

>>62825271
>>62825271
Regarding space-travel, any discriminatory policy towards psykers was suggested, but not agreed upon, or at least not solidified. I'm not entirely against them being untrusting of other race's psykers, but I personally like the idea that rather than killing all their own, it's just that Ulmeathics make for very bland psykers.
Put it this way; what happens when humans are able to use powers that effectively make what is in their mind a reality, or perceivable in reality? Humans would throw around fireballs, twist up the ground, fuck with the laws of physics, and generally get creative.
Ulmeathics are, by comparison, spectacularly uncreative. An Ulmeathic Psyker would end up using their powers to make themselves stronger, or make their swords swing even faster, or their guns shoot even harder... Whereas humans can justify fireballs without ignition source, fuel, or obedience to the laws of physics with "it's magic/psykery, it doesn't have to make sense," an Ulmeathic literally cannot comprehend the concept. They comprehend other race's psykers because even if they don't understand how, it's observable that they can, and thus they believe "psykers can throw fireballs" because they observe it to be true. However, "You/the Ulmeathic can throw fireballs" does not compute, because how would I be able to do that?
To put it succinctly, they are very bad at telling when one of their own is a psyker, because the way their brains are wired practically prevents them from even conceiving of the idea of using their powers in any way that isn't "What I can already do, but better." This may be an evolved defense mechanism to protect them from Warp corruption (If humans are tasty to demons, Ulmeathics are bland paste), or just a side-effect of their mentality.
For example, it's possible that Nakai was a Psyker, and basically just turned his natural survivability up to eleven with it.

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>>62825630
More controversial/fantastic personal take on it: His survivability got cranked up the point where a warp-spirit resembling him is effectively standing guard over Nakaidos, preventing him from getting warp-possessed. It's not truly Nakai, not anymore, and the main thing keeping it from being a demon in Chaos' army is that the foremost motivation/idea imprinted on it above even surviving is "protect my son"- which means that within the next century or two when Nakaidos inevitably passes because nothing lives forever, Chaos is going to get another really powerful demon in their ranks.
Unless the hive-fleet makes things dire enough that Nakaidos ends up doing a fusion-dance with the warp-spirit that gives him a power-up to face down the horde, but effectively erases what's left of his father.

The theme of this is how these characters are reflections of the Imperium's heroes to the Ulmeathics. Nakai was their version of a Primarch, who won the genetic lottery and honestly could have fought the Human Primarchs on even footing, despite lacking the type of bio-engineering they went through. In this theoretical event (which is noncanon because it would occur after "present day"), Nakaidos would become their version Oscar- thematically at least; power-scaling-wise, he'd be nowhere near the level of Emps or a lot of the nasty stuff in the Warp. Also because I love the punch to the feels of this kid who's already had to grow up too fast essentially having a conversation with the broken husk of what might have once been his dad's soul, only for it to effectively kill itself to grant him it's power, followed by a sobbing power-up that might not even be enough to save his people.
...I need to finish writing that piece on Nakai's final stand so that maybe all of this makes more sense to people who don't have that script sitting in their head. Without context this all sounds like a bad power-fantasy.

>>62825630
Killing their psykers was suggested as a way to show that they weren't a perfect people in a flawless society. Culling the psykers is something that they don't do anymore because the Imperium tells them not to and they know their place. Now they just isolate them and tell the nearest Imperial agent to collect them.

>>62826015
Or he could be the ghost behind the throne. eventually something climactic happens end everyone assumes he has burned away. In the hatchery some months later an abnormally pale hatchling emerges.

Every people has their perennial heroes.

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>>62825406
For the time being their remaining ships, venerable gunners, and veteran bomber crews are the new and well regarded specialists of various Ultramar-Tau eastern-fringe joint crusades. The macrocannon flack curtain idea, among many other local and xeno methods, are gaining traction with the Primaris Initiative, the pressure of Jormungar's coming forcing new combinations across the east, and the younger generation of Ulumeathic warriors are forging a new way within the armies of the Imperium increasingly unfamiliar to their forbearers. Where their fathers were almost always the sole and mighty protectors of the Ulumeathic League, they fight nearly every beside other unfamiliar, sometimes mighty, but in their eyes often unlikely warriors. The ancient and glorious Astartes and Eldar warriors of the Imperium, the cyborgs of the Mechanicus priests that accompanied them, Kroot and Vespid, even their meticulous lords the Tau, so unassuming to the Ulumeathic, have left their influence on the young warriors. But nearly more so, the PDFs of little stone men that held the line against the descending swarm, the civilian hangers-on that would join their fleets in repurposed cargo ships and merchant vessels with the non-explanation that "they were coming to join the bug-hunt" from "Ultima" or "Solar", the city spires still crawling with scarred but surviving defenders calling out foremost for more ammunition after the shadow in the warp's passing, and the lean, slick, palid businessmen behind what the Imperials revered as The Guns of Empty Space, who seemed to make royal bounties of thrones and the accompanying mercenaries appear wherever there were Tyranids to kill.

>>62825030
Kryptmann and the Ulmeathic must get along pretty well.

>>62826042
>a way to show they weren't a perfect people in a flawless society
...Their entire philosophy can be boiled down to "Might makes Right," and while they were fair to their vassals, it's implied that becoming their vassal didn't have to be voluntary- if they were stronger than you, you had to either surrender to them or get conquered and put under their rule anyway.
Not to mention that one of the themes of Nakaidos is that he's a child- currently what for humans would be somewhere in the 16-21-year-old range- who is the person running the whole nation by virtue of being the son of a hero, having hit the same genetic jackpot his father did, and being a monster at combat. More importantly, how none of these traits actually lend themselves to being an effective leader, and how he basically relies on his top advisor to do all the actual decision-making- if Oscen wasn't a virtuous old grandpa, this would be the stereotypical "advisor using the king as a puppet to enact his evil plan" situation.
The Ulmeathics were far from a flawless society, and those flaws should be tied to their strengths, not tied on because they're "not flawed enough." Every philosophy has advantages and disadvantages; if we want them to be flawed, we should do that by focusing on the disadvantages of their methods.

>>62827820
Their shared trauma makes for a good bonding point. He finds Oscen too conservative when it comes to committing resources to the fight, but at least grudgingly has to admit that giving their races time to regroup and rebuild their strength is reasonable- if they had time, which they don't. Oscen finds Kryptmann one of the few people who sees through his act and thus one of the few- perhaps only- one he can be honest with about the pain in his heart, though he also finds it tragic because if anyone needs to be soothed, it's Kryptmann.
Nakaidos respects his resolve, but finds his attitude irritatingly similar to those of all the young upstarts with the brilliant idea of "why don't we just go kill the bugs?" without any regard for how his race is still right on the brink of extinction, to say nothing of the logistical difficulties that come with having to basically ask the Imperium for shit because the Ulmeathic League no longer has the infrastructure to produce shit for themselves.

The old Ulmeathics do get along well with him, and he with them, even if he does find them a bit too willing to die. He wants them alive so they can keep killing bugs, not dying in glorious last stands.

Horus is the goodest boi

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>>62825337
That also makes quite a bit of sense. The Ulmeathean League was not that big (smaller than pre-8th edition Tau, probably about 40-60 systems or so like the Interex, Thexians, and other notable independent powers), so they didn't need that much. It wouldn't be as effective as the Tau Drive as it doesn't need to be, the Ulmeathean League was pretty isolated. By contrast the Tau have a much larger empire and are far more cosmopolitan, having an entire galaxy with which they can exchangr ideas. To the refugees from the Ulmeathean League the trip to Imperial Space was some huge trek.

>>62823750
>>62825271
Maybe he was mortal for the first few millenia but ascended at some point between M31 and today, another example of the slow but changing status quo over the last 10 milennia. Possibly he ascended after an atypical hunt where through use of the Webway he managed to chase his quarry over the entire literal galaxy (from Shaa-Dome to somewhere on the eastern Fringe). Either that or he somehow managed to hunt down another god's daemon, in a way impressive enough for even Slaanesh to take notice.

>>62830423
I think the hunt through the webway sounds good, very wild hunt-ish with lots of potential story applications in repetition.

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I know a thread or two ago we talked a bit about the Silent King inflicting some kind of nano-plague on the Imperium to "thin the herds" akin to humans trying to wipe out rabbits with myxomatosis, did that go anywhere?

IIRC, the suggestion was to make it Ten Plagues, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the Mummy's Imhotep-themed to keep up the Tomb Kings-esque motif, but the only one of the ten plagues that fits the bill would be boils. Maybe some kind of nano-scarab boils that burst and self-replicate.

Such a plague could easily be mistaken for Nurglite or maybe mass weaponization of the Obliterator virus until the true culprit became known. Of course by then it would be another point of contention between the Imperium and Star Empire's long feud.

>>62834101
did he died

>>62834101
It wasn't a nano plague, it was just the regular kind of disease.

>>62828616
He could sell any dream.

>>62825406
They'd only be doing it after their children grow up, the old vassal people have their new Imperium to protect them now and fuck you those are our ships. It's a point of internal dispute among them.

>>62826181
>Every people has their perennial heroes.
This doesn't really seem to be the case beyond a few examples.

Necrons and Chaos champions are often genuinely immortal or near as makes no difference. But it isn't confined to just a few, there are millions of potentially immortal asshoels running around on the side of Chaos quite aside from the deamons and Necrons are all immortal by technological superiority.

Tau do genuinely have one that won't publicly admit it and doesn't know he's still working and they have one renegade who is warp contaminated but doesn't know it.

Imperium has the surviving eldar gods and Oscar.

Orks have nobody and wouldn't have it any other way.

This could be an Ulmeathic thing. They believe that The Last Deyi-mho of the League won't rest until some condition is met. Some say that the condition is the safety of the other peoples of the League is assured as that was the oath the Ulmeathic took and he was the one on whose shoulders it rested more than others. Others say that he won't know rest until the League is rebuilt. Others still say that he's not going away until the Tyranids are driven to extinction. Whatever the reason enough believe that he isn't leaving any time soon that he'll keep coming back.

On the subject of that there could be a small but not insignificant number of eldar that believe that Oscar is Eldernesh reborn. They reason that the eldar in the old days could reincarnate, that the Iron Minds were dredging the Deep Warp for soul stuff and that they snagged Eldernesh. Eldernesh gets jammed into a Man of Gold and just before the technicians can wire up the psy-graft machine Slaanesh is born.

This is why Slaanesh and her deamons can't brag about torturing the soul of the greatest hero for all eternity, they missed out on having it by a few hours at most.

There is no proof or evidence of this and no way of getting such. Isha claims that Oscar's soul does not resemble Eldernesh's.

>>62820290
I'd say appointment to high office should be more official than this.

Also Interex as a surviving civilization with a lot of humans in it will know enough not to rely on too much computers.

>>62826181
>>62836384
I'm not sure that "ghost behind the throne" really works with the way the Warp operates. People aren't supposed to be able to remain behind as ghosts, and only the strongest-willed or most famous manage to retain fragments of their personality.
The way I'm imagining it, the only way Nakai managed to "survive" in such a warped form is because he died in the middle of a tyranid invasion, and the Shadow over the Warp was fucking things up enough that his violent but quick death of getting blasted from orbit combined with one of the strongest and most commonly-known traits about him- his ability to survive- and basically acted as a warp version of survival instinct that had his soul quite literally carving his way through the Shadow of the Warp to reach calmer waters.
It's also important to remember that he -or his soul- is not coming out of any of this unscarred. one arm is merged with the Ravener scythe he started using when his sword broke, which even now is still trying to eat it's way up his arm and convert him into tyranid food. The warp has twisted him, his body grown larger and spikier, to the point that only those who knew him would recognize him.
Nakai was an actual person, who had desires and drives outside of the obvious ones; for instance, he quite enjoyed the delicate hand required for painting, particularly of landscapes. All of that is gone now; all that remains are two concepts/ideas that were strong enough that the warp made them real: "I must protect my son," and "I am the Unbreakable." Nakai had a life outside of battle; this thing that formed from his soul exists only to fight an endless battle against the tide of demons who would look to possess his son.

This would not be common knowledge for the Ulmeathic; their understanding of the warp is rudimentary at best, and since this spirit resides entirely within the warp, only psykers can even see it.

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>>62838309
I just wanted something nice or at least not bad to happen to or for them.

>>62838594
Well this is NobleDARK after all, everybody has to deal with horrible shit kicking them constantly. The Ulmeathics just keep having all this shit happen to them because they're tough enough to take it and keep going.
And in a way, this IS a good thing for the Ulmeathics, since it means they don't have their ruler getting turned into a daemonhost on top of everything else- Nakaidos might not even realize he's a psyker, since the only voice in his head is his father's, and Nakai was always a man who's vocabulary consisted mostly of differently-toned grunts and only using words when absolutely necessary.
Plus, this retroactively shows what an absolute badass of a monster Nakai was, where even the Hive Fleet gave up on harvesting his biomatter and just bombed him from orbit- and even that wasn't enough to completely put him down. It also shows that they're not entirely obsessed with strength, since their greatest heroes strongest desire or trait turned out to be his love for his son, with his personal strength coming in second on the priority list.

>>62837619
It could be that they are split into specialized teams and they vote as a group and the collective's vote is taken as one vote on larger issues.

>>62816675
They would be built for speed over brawn, it's what most of their war philosophy relies on.

>>62816675
I figure the influences around Tarelian space would produce something comparable to the various bird-of-prey designs from Star Trek

>>62840230
That's kind of what "generic" Tarellian groups (i.e., not Mazans, Tikalese, etc., but the ones on places like Nova Tarellia descended from refugees of the major Tarellian planets) do. They're divided into military units/communities who elect the most capable member to lead them, the leaders form a group which elects a leader among them, and so on and so forth until you get to the top.

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>>62841979
Allrighty then how about we go full Star Fleet on the Interex and have them be run, not in theory but in practice, by a board of admirals. In theory it's run by a duly elected House of Representatives made up of one representative for every group over 5 million (or whatever number, I just pulled that out of my arse) so in an empire of billions they all have a voice and a vote each.

The Board of Admirals have all the ships, have men under their command that equal each a shit load more than their civilian counterparts and represent by weight of numbers each more than any other representative several times over and also whilst the representatives squabble like little children the Admirals tend to work in lockstep by comparison and also own all of the ships and the loyalties of the people on them. True there are civilian ships but they are typically lighter armed, slower and more fragile and in any case the biggest source of trained voidfarers (outside the local Void Born clans) is ex-military who need something to do when they get old enough to claim their pension but no so old that they start to fall apart. Just shit loads of grey haired, big eared veterans. Most of the ex-military if push came to shove would more likely listen to the Admirals than the Representatives.

Nobody wants to admit it but the Admirals run this shit and the House of Representatives is there to keep the clueless plebs sated with token gestures whilst the grown ups keep civilization floating. They have their use as an ongoing opinion poll.

There is a limit to what the Admirals can do, although they control the skies absolutely in the Interex they still need someone to fix their ships and give them food and such things so they know not to push it too far. Also they couldn't govern a planet, it's typically outside their skill sets.

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>>62844252
Like all citizens of the Interex they like maths and see it's mastery as the mastery of war. War, like all citizens of the Interex, they see as abomidable but sometimes a necessary evil and the sooner it's over with the better. The best way to end a war is overwhelming force, as soon as possible delivered at the most opportune time in the most devastating place. When the hammer comes down their should ideally be no reason to strike again and then the beaten foe can be dragged to the table of reason and a compromise can be reached that will benefit all parties concerned for the foreseeable future. It worked with the kinebrach and presumably with at least one group of eldar as there are eldar that call the Interex their ancestral home. The Interex itself, not the patch of worlds it's spread over. This is not an atitude that works with everything. It didn't work with the giant fucking awful spiders native to a planet they named Murder because fuck that place. In that case they put monitoring satellites around the homeworld they drove them back to and throw a nuke at anything they build that looks like a space ship.

Also orks. Orks are an exception to the "lets not drive them to extinction" rule because fuck those guys. This is one point of contestation that they have with the Imperium. The Imperium does and has driven to extinction species that can't or won't be reasoned with. The Nephilim for example ate human brains, presumably they didn't evolve to do this but did so any way possibly because they couldn't or wouldn't stop, maybe we had cocaine for brains or something but the Imperium wiped them out. In a similar way they thought that they had exterminated the maggot people, they certainly intended to, and on both occasions the Interex of both the House of Representatives and the Board of Admirals had a bitch fit.

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>>62844476
When it came to light that the "HOLY SHIT BALLS" Ungoliant impersonators had escaped from Murder at the later days of the War of the Beast the Interex informed the Imperium and the Imperium told the Interex that they were aware of it. They never raised the subject again because a well timed silence can sometimes speak a thousand words and the Interex knew that the Imperium saw this as substantial proof that their policy of containment was not viable in the long term. The Interex had no rebuttal for the Imperium on this occasion.

The House of Representatives does have a Speaker for the House just as the Board has a Chairman. Both chose this rank from among themselves and both are not permanent position, at least in theory in the case of the military who have always had one since at least the days of Horus. The House, true to it's nature, don't typically keep theirs for very long. There are no fixed terms but they get voted out when the majority switch their status to "not confident", nobody has held the job for more than 20 years in one stretch although it is possible to hold the job for non-sequential terms. It's also not always a human who has the job and there have been kinebrach and eldar Speakers in the past.

Speaker is the person who officially deal with the Imperial Ambassador and is the official representative to the Imperium even if the Ambassador has regular secret but not really secret but nobody is prepared to raise the issue meetings with the Chairman.

>>62838594
>>62838779
>Well this is NobleDARK after all, everybody has to deal with horrible shit kicking them constantly.
Pretty much. Nobledark basically means that the universe (and sometimes people) is always looking to make things worse, whereas the only way things get better is through the actions of people, even if it isn't easy.

>>62844252
This seems to fit what has been suggested so far about the Interex. We've said they have an admiralty board that handles the "right the hell now" aspects of warfare that you couldn't get a cyberdemocracy to agree on.

The only thing is that Murder would probably have been exterminatus-ed by now. The Imperium let the Interex keep Urisarach as a protectorate on the condition that if the Megarachnids ever got out it would be an Imperium problem, not an Interex one, and the Imperium wouldn't hesitate to kill them all.

The Interex fluff really needs to get on the Notes page.

>>62825630
>Put it this way; what happens when humans are able to use powers that effectively make what is in their mind a reality, or perceivable in reality?
This fits pretty well with what was mentioned about the Hrud. The Hrud are all psykers, but because of the way they see the world instead of casting fireball like humans and eldar (and even then there are ways that eldar and human psykers differ), the hrud developed powers more affiliated with entropy and warping space-time.

>>62825271
The best options might be Herla, Manannán, Fionn (as in Fionn mac Cumhaill), Arawn, or some variant of Gwyn ap Nudd. The leader of the Wild Hunt varies massively in human folklore.

>>62845769
Psyker abilities being linked to your species' neurology is an interesting and logical angle. I like it. Though it does raise the question of how powers manifest in other species.

>>62847029
I think it's also due to culture as well. The Warp is affected by belief and so what you can do is tied to what you think you can do, which is influenced by how you see the world.

Humans have always tended to see power as "human but more". Demigods, legendary heroes, superheroes. So it makes sense that their psyker abilities tend towards fireball, chain lightning, telekinesis, etc.
Eldar are similar to human but have some differences. For example, eldar psykers can see the future with much greater clarity than humans.
Orks are all latent psykers and tend towards cartoon physics, but unless you're a Weirdboy you don't put too much power in one place.
Kinebrach are all latent psykers but like Warhammer dwarves their ability is limited to metalcrafting because in their mind of course it is.
Tarellians seem similar to humans but they are prone to "spikes" and tire out quicker. There was also a suggestion that in the old days their leaders were seen as blessed by the Old Ones when really it was the collective belief of the Empire fueling their status as super-warriors.
Hrud used to "just" produce a poison mist. With Old One tampering a psychic effect was laid on top of it as a entropic field.
The Old Ones saw the world in logical, if not rational terms. They treated the laws of the immaterium as building blocks and variables to manipulate and come off as full scale reality warpers, though that could be because they were so damn old they could investigate other avenues other species didn't have time to learn.

In theory one species could learn the tricks of another, but it would require completely seeing the world in different terms and probably wouldn't be identical.

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>>62813095
What's the point of this fanfic shit now that based Robot Guillyman is leading the Imperium? Canon is already Nobledark.

>>62849197
To put it one way, we started this project long before 8th edition and the new direction for canon, and honestly this project works best when base 40k is grimdark to contrast with.

In addition, the stuff with Guiliman is taking canon in a new direction from the old grimdark for what is likely an attempt to make the game more "marketable." This project overhauls the setting from the ground up, with some big divergences from canon specifically because everybody got smacked over the head with the common-sense stick.

We don't want canon 40k to be nobledark, we wanted to create an alternate version of 40k that was nobledark. Don't get mad at us for Games Workshop making questionable decisions.

>>62849382
Not mad just curious

>>62850827
To be fair, from the old threads it started out as just a way to justify shipping and LCB, but since then the project's taken a life of it's own with the premise "what if everybody got a healthy dose of common sense?" and generally working with the benefit of hindsight.
For instance, the Primaris Initiative is a thing, but rather than spechul Uber-Marines, it's essentially an Ultramar military mobilization that's cranking up production of new (as in standard but freshly-made) Space Marines, warships, and all the other military resources available to the Imperium. This initiative has been heavily criticized by many of the people in power in Ultramar because it's a mobilization on a scale not seen since the Great Crusade, and with the costs confined to Ultramar and not spread out among the Imperium, which means the whole thing is likely to bankrupt the entire sector. Not to mention worries about how such a mobilization looks to the rest of the Imperium, considering how Ultramar has already got a reputation for being relatively independent(really just self-sufficient, but perceptions are not reality).
Chapter-Master Titus, the one pushing the whole initiative, just points at the massive Hive Fleet Jormungandr predicted to make galaxy-fall within the next century and take a path directly through Ultramar. For context, in this setting all the other Hive Fleets were essentially the scouts. Jormungandr is the main Hive Fleet.

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>>62849197
>>62849382
>>62850827
This. Nobledark Imperium is, in a sense an “Ultimate Universe”. A “What If” retelling of the story of 40k, but “not as you know them”. Except instead of most “Ultimate Universes” where everyone is a bigger jerk than in the normal timeline, the reverse is true, simply because it’s pretty hard to out grimdark regular 40k (with the notable exception of 50k).

But it’s not supposed to supplant regular 40k. It’s supposed to be a contrast to it and emphasize certain aspects to each setting. For example, Nobledark raises the question of whether some of the decisions made by the Imperium (and other order factions) in canon were truly necessary, thereby increasing the grimdark of canon by contrast. For one, there’s the implication made in Nobledark that the Emperor in canon deliberately allowed the Age of Strife to much worse than it already was, just so he would have less resistance when he got going and no one had enough knowledge to meaningfully question his ideas.

It’s meant to be a sandbox for people who like the Warhammer setting (the Warp, the techno-feudalism, the fuckhuge nature of the galaxy and the vast scale, etc.) but who get tired of absolute nihlism (but still plenty of darkness) by swapping out the atmosphere for one more similar to pre-AoS Warhammer Fantasy. If people get sick of the more noble atmosphere the regular grimdark pool was supposed to be open for people to jump in.

It’s supposed to be like different flavors of ice cream. Some like strawberry, some like chocolate. But it’s still ice cream, and no one wants to deny someone the right to try a different flavor. I don’t think most people here are happy with the recent lore directions, but we have no say over GW’s decisions.

I've been working on a writeup of the demiurg for the past few days, and this is what I've completed so far. History of the demiurg up to just before the Great Crusade starts.


The demiurg, in the present day, are known as a nomadic race of stocky, silicon- based humanoids, noted for their superb craftsmanship and sharp business sense. As ever, the true story is more complex. The demiurg once had a homeworld, an empire. But no longer.

The foundations of the modern demiurg were laid almost eighteen thousand years ago, before the Fall, when they were a young race first expanding out into the stars. Their now long gone homeworld was located in a star cluster of intense stellar activity, which produced vast amounts of mineral wealth but also great radiation storms that sterilized all carbon- based life which tried to arise. It was not until a silicon based ecology arose that the cluster knew the touch of life, and the demiurg were allowed to develop and take their first steps into the stars in (relative) peace.

Their first colonies were founded by slower- than- light ramscoops on their closest neighbors, but their expansion only began in earnest when they built the Kybernetes. 'Invented' would not quite be the right word, for the demiurg maintain that the design was revealed to their finest craftsmen by their forge god in a dream. The Kybernetes are the demiurg equivalent of humanity's Navigators, although naturally there are a great many differences between the two. The silicon biology of the demiurg is exceptionally well suited to the addition of augmetics, and it by this technology that they navigate the depths and currents of the Warp.

>>62852301
A Kybernetes, once selected, undergoes radical and irreversible modification, binding them on the deepest level with their ship. In a very real sense they become the ship, their sense of self expanding outward into the metal. They feel auspex arrays as their eyes, hull plating as their skin, magnetic and gravitic field projectors as their hands, plasma jets as their legs, air recyclers as their lungs, fusion furnace as their heart. They will never again be able to walk on the surface of a world, but very few Kybernetes mourn the loss. And most importantly, the gain the ability to see into the Warp without going mad, and guide their ship-body along its currents.
Compared to Navigators, Kybernetes have their strengths and weaknesses. They're slower on average and are slightly more dangerous; a Kybernetes cannot peer as deeply into the Warp as a Navigator and thus are occasionally blindsided by dangers a Navigator would see coming. On the other hand, any demiurg could become a Kybernetes with sufficient training and the necessary modifications.
With this gift from their god, the demiurg began their expansion in earnest, colonizing the many systems of the stellar cauldron in which they had been born. It was not an easy expansion, for all the worlds around them were scorched and lifeless, but their craftsmanship was up to the task. To bind the many colonies of their growing empire together, they created the first of the great Trade Ships; cathedrals of industry, designed to be almost entirely self- sufficient on their years- long tours of the outer colonies, each almost a city unto itself.

>>62852311
For over a millennium, the demiurg methodically expanded. They breached the boundaries of the tortured region of space they called home, and discovered for the first time complex life besides their own; a joyous occasion, one still well remembered by the modern demiurg despite the millennia of tragedy since. They encountered a few other intelligent species, established trading relationships, fought a few small wars. They even encountered the eldar a few times; although by this late point in the Empire's history these all ended in tragedy. But a few small raiding bands boasting of having a vast galactic empire were not enough to halt their steady rise. The demiurg were emerging onto a wider galactic stage.

Then it all ended.

Once more the forge god spoke in their dreams, this time not bearing a gift but a warning. Soon a great divine catastrophe will overtake this entire region of space. None will survive. Board your ships and flee while flight is still possible.

So they refitted their existing ships and built new ones for the longest journey any of them would ever undertake, packed them full of as many people as could fit, and sent them out. Thousands of tiny metal seeds scattering into the bleak void, running as far and fast as they could. The billions upon billions left behind burrowed into deep bunkers and prayed.

Mere weeks after the last ship left, the Eye of Terror opened. Behind them the fleeing ships could see their homes, their families, everything they had ever known, swallowed up by the madly yawning chasm, consumed by the cosmic abortion wound. Everyone left behind, it is hoped, died swiftly. If there is any mercy in the universe they died swiftly.

>>62852322
And the survivors were separated from each other by the turbulence of the warp, scattered across the length and breadth of the galaxy, tiny and alone in a universe going mad. Many, most, would have been overwhelmed by the myriad horrors, and indeed many of the trade-ships-turned-arks vanished without trace. But the demiurg as a whole adapted and endured.

They adapted to lives of strict rationing and harsh discipline. They forged their weapons into tools and their tools into weapons. They traded with those sane enough to talk to and, when necessary, fought with those who weren't. They sifted through the ashes of cinder worlds, scavenging for useful technology or resources. (The Mechanicus is still a little salty about this, even though they handed over any STCs they found as part of the terms when they formally joined the Imperium.) The perfected the methods of quickly and efficiently strip- mining asteroids and minor planets, to extract the maximum amount of resources before some imminent threat forced them to flee once more. When the warp was too turbulent to risk transit, they took the long way, crawling through the long darkness between the stars with Bussard ramscoops.

Some of them turned to darker paths to try and ensure their survival. Some turned to piracy, looting peaceful and defenseless worlds. Some dug up technologies they really should not have. Some even made deals with the very dark powers which had destroyed their homes. None still persist; the demiurg made a special point of hunting them down.

>>62852335
As the centuries and millennia passed, the scattered arks were able to find each other once more. The demiurg would never really be a unified state again; there had been too much cultural and political drift during their long isolation. Even if that wasn't a factor, they were simply far too scattered for any sort of central authority to exist. Still, they raised their sights higher than mere survival and began to recover. To forge a new society in the voids between worlds.


And a bonus section on the ambiguities surrounding their god which didn't fit cleanly in the narrative:

The identity of the demiurg's now- dead forge god is a matter of some debate. Some eldar believe it to have been Vaul, pointing the the demiurg's proximity to the Elder Empire, the mastery of the warp demonstrated by the Kybernetes, and foreknowledge of the birth of Slaanesh.

Some heterodox Mechanicus sects suggest it was a facet of the Omnissiah, pointing to the massive adoption of cybernetics among demiurg society, whereas Vaul was never associated with such augmentation in the slightest. (Such an opinion is considered heresy by Mars; the Omnissiah is a god of human technology and only human technology, not xenos.)

Indeed, the demiurg are forbidden entirely from approaching within a million kilometers of Mars, officially to preserve its holy sanctity. Since similar restrictions apply to nearly all xenos breeds, nobody regards this as unusual.

The Guardians of the Dragon take no chances.
One thing I could use help with is a good name for their forge god, since even if it was Vaul I figure the demiurg would have known him by another name. Other than that, thoughts?

>>62852359
I really like the write-up, definitely another good addition with a sense of history. Maybe something with a minor phonetic similarity to Vaul, but distinctly un-Eldar.

>>62852359
It's good if short. I'd clarify that they evolved some time prior on a normal timescale and that the thousands of years was the time it took them to go from Paleolithic to interstellar travel. Otherwise a few thousand years is a ridiculously short time to go from primordial soup to space.

As for name I'm not sure possibly something like Faarul or some other variation on Vaul as said whilst grinding two bricks together.

>>62851049
In the last few days of 999M41 the reports have landed on the desks; Jormungandr has arived.

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>>62852359
It's good. There was some mention in earlier threads that most demiurge want to become Kybernetes, the union of man and machine is to them the highest form of enlightenment available in life.

They give the Mechanicus the weirdest shameful boner.

>>62852359
Every smith god across all of time was Vaul some eldar believe. These eldar are considered new age hippies by more serious eldar.

Omnissiah was not Vaul. Omnissiah was the other one

>>62852359
Ooh, I like the idea that the Demiurg's god might have actually been the Void Dragon. It would make sense for him, after realizing how badly he fucked up with the necrontyr by not accounting for the importance of souls, to pick another race to tinker with to figure out how to do more with souls than just rip them out, and how to make a race retain their souls when turned into robots.
It even fits with his absolute lack restraint, since by this account his first attempt was "turn these guys into spaceships!" If the Demiurg hadn't been silicone-based and very receptive to the mindset-change of such alterations, it would be a sort of cosmic horror story.
Then again, maybe they weren't the first, just the first success.

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>>62856621
By the time the Demiurg achieved sapience the Void Dragon had been in his box for millions of years and was in no position to influence anyone.

It was probably Vaul in a poor disguise but that's not to say that he hadn't had a very long time to go through all the surplus doomsday devices and other things Mag'ladroth left behind. He could have found the notes on what was done to the Necrontyr and millions of years later decided that something similar but more moderate would be advantageous to those lovely glittery silicone people.

Also the decline of the eldar and their slip into decadence and debauchery was gradual. It sped up considerably towards the end but it started a quite some time prior. When the eldar stopped listening to him he could have adopted the Demiurg for someone to talk to if nothing else. His social circle consisted of very few entities at that point and most of those he didn't get along with on a personal level.

Demiurg go from "holy fuck I just invented fire this shit is the tits!" up to analysing the results of the first manned interstellar voyage in 8,000 years because their top engineers were prone to bouts of innovation just as their artisans kept getting inspired to make elegant and beautiful designs. When they lost the homeworld this stopped and a great sadness beyond words lies in their stony hearts.

>>62821614
Who were the other people in the League.

W have the Ulmeathic, bird people and the Ff'eng so far.

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>>62857322
...You know, we've said that the Ulmeathic philosophy is somewhat like Halo's Elites but with them in charge instead of the religous prophets, but I've just realized that we've been unintentionally creating a not!Covenant with the Ulmeathic League.
Ulmeathics themselves are a combination of Elites and Brutes, Passeri are the Jackals (because they're both bird-people), and the F'feng could easily be seen in the same role as Grunts (idiotic comic-relief canon fodder).
The Nameless Enemy could have been their version of the Prophets or Brutes, or perhaps a combination of the two.

So maybe we can continue that theme, but intentionally now. The Hunters would be an iconic species to add, though we already have worm-people that are less than friendly. Maybe we can tweak it so that instead of a worm-colony, they're essentially an aquatic species somewhat relatable to Cephalopods. They're still big and heavily-armored, but a bit dumber- hence why they ended up subservient to the Ulmeathics.
On the one hand, the Ulmeathics are already massive lizards, so maybe this doesn't really fit. On the other, if we tweak it so that these not!Hunters are essentially walking whales, they could function as the army's smaller version of Imperial Knights.

>>62858024
I wasn't aware we were heading in that direction as I have never played Halo.

I think we mentioned that there were half a dozen subject peoples so we've still got some more to decide on.

>>62859612
Like I said, I only just realized it- the Passeri were based on a completely unrelated Stellaris playthrough, and somebody else came up with F'feng in order to have Sand-Raiders in the setting. We didn't mean to, but it seems to have ended up working out that way.

Of course, it's not a one-to-one conversion; Jackals are cutthroat mercenaries, while Passeri are artisans and scientists. Their main connection is that they're both bird-people, and their roles on the battlefield would be similar as long-range snipers and agile fire support.

>>62856847
The Demiurg then were most likely given some sort of protected status when the Eldar still weren't totally shit. Those few raids were punk kids with air rifles rather than anyone important.

Mymeara is supposed to be in the middle of the Tau Empire. How influenced by the bluies are they?

>>62858024
Some anon suggested a M'galekgolo-esque tyranid bioform in one of the earliest threads. It could have been the result of them eating a good chunk of this species and then bad things happened once the tyranids assimilated their DNA and started making bioforms based on it.

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>>62862691
Sounds a bit too much like the maggot people.

How about a species that evolved seemingly simultaneously on two very, almost suspiciously, similar moons of a gas giant. It was suspected that they both originated as transplants from another as of yet undiscovered ecosystem. Why they were dumped there is anyone's guess although it did happen in the last half a million years. All eyes point to the eldar who maintain that they don't remember anyone ever mentioning it but that they can't rule it out as their old empire had eccentric hermits and weird crazies in abundance.

Maybe they could be some sort of lung-fish sort of creature. They had limited contact with each other before the Ulmeathics arived. Both worlds were still nation state patch works but most of the big nations on each world hated each other over ancient feuds and hated their distant neighbors over basic paranoia and competitive instincts. There was a big 12 sided multi-sided cold war brewing with fission warheads on chemical rockets.

Ulmeathics arrive declare every nation on both worlds their new property, now get on your knees or be shortened some other way. All nations band together in a new sense of brotherhood against a foreign and genuinely alien aggressor and launch all of the missiles at them. This has about as much effect as you would imagine and everyone involved got a right royal kicking for scuffing the fabulous paint job on the flagship. New lizard overlords set up shop, disband and replace the military and up the tech level of the fishsticks by centuries because nobody wants backwards servants. Not that the fish sticks appreciated this and there were still occasional half-arsed rebellions right up until the 'Nids showed up.

For name I'm going to go with Kharateg becasue it begins with a K and we don't have one of those yet and it sounds like a bit like breakfast cereal.
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kharateg

>>62863831
I like the basic idea you have for what they were like before getting subjugated, and the idea for them to be some lungfish-analog sort of creature.
Though I have to point out-
>implying they scratched the flagship's paint
>implying their missiles managed to get anywhere close to the motherships
>laughs_in_Explosion.holovid
Those missiles launched, then got pulverized before they'd even finished exiting the atmosphere, with stray shrapnel from the Macrocannon-AA wreaking havoc on the planet's surface below. For one long moment, the Ulmeathic vessels and bombers remain silent, as if everyone just simultaneously went "Really?"
Then the invasion actually began.

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>>62864379
>the gunners were so well drilled they were swatting ICBMs out of the air before really noting what they were
>the naval sensor equivalent of a double-take was necessary to actually tell what pitiful variety of weapon had been fired
>subsequent volleys of airburst macrocannon shells into the atmosphere are entirely sufficient to pacify the planet, the Ulumeathic bombers that follow them up just run victory laps around the moons and their gas giant parent

bump

>>62866021
It's no wonder the Ulmeathic were able to dominate their area of space; their weaponry and tactics are a hard counter to the missiles and small voidcraft other races first stepping foot in the great beyond would employ.
>>62859612
There were supposed to be some races that rather than being conquered by the Ulmeathics, had been conquered by the Nameless Enemy and were then liberated by the Ulmeathics when they came around to stop those monster's shit in. This would be a good fit for the "huragok" race; which in the Halo-verse are essentially sentient gasbags totally fixated on technology. Here, they could still be gasbags, but having undergone severe and horrifying alteration under the rule of the Nameless Enemy, to the point where part of the process when birthing a baby not!Huragok would involve immediate mechanical implants to keep their vital organs functioning. Their minds, of course, were left perfectly intact, or even augmented, just to further increase the intensity of their suffering.
Ulmeathics might not have respected them as equals because they're the farthest thing from strong, but they aren't trying to be anything but properly subservient, and even cold lizard brains feel empathy and rage towards those who would abuse their strength just to be cruel. While unsuccessful, the Ulmeathics did devote a good chunk of research and resources trying to fix what the Nameless Enemy broke, and at least managed to come up with new versions of the implants needed that focused entirely on keeping their fragile bodies functioning, rather than causing as much pain as possible while not causing vital organ failure.
AdBio can't restore them to what they once were without genetic samples from an untainted member of the species, but their experience means they've already made large strides towards improving the gasbag's lot. Their implants are not as invasive as they used to be, and within a generation or two they may even be able to start going without.

>>62852359
I really like this. It takes the stuff that was suggested so far and meshes it together and adds to it brilliantly. The Kybernetes also solves the whole dispute over how much cybernetics the Demiurg use in a really unique way that still fits very well with the rules of the universe. Plus the name is really cool.

The only thing I'd say is there is some dispute in the Mechanicus as to what technology is considered the domain of the Omnissiah. More conservatives ones say it is human technology only, whereas others use the concept of the Akashic Records to say that all technology is based on the same underlying knowledge of the universe and hence is all under the domain of the Omnissiah.

All agree on the idea that the AdMech are the Omnissiah's chosen group to interpret and house technology and knowledge, which is why the radicals get so pissed off by bonesingers (apart from them reminding the AdMech of the Dragon), they have no clue how the eldar's psychic technology works and that undermines their claim.

>>62870113
But we also need a few that the lizards just outright conquered for no other reason than because they could.

>>62871175
How many Demiurg are there on each ship?

>>62872886
One that is the ship, a small group of them no more than a dozen who attend to the ship Demiurg, orchestrate some of the more independent drones on the ship, test the automated systems, deal with visitors and everything else you can't entrust to clockwork.

Every (almost every) Demiurg present dreams of being able to becoming a Kybernete although it is understood that not all are suited to become so, not all are worthy and not all could withstand it and retain all of their sanity. Also there needs to be a population maintained that is capable of breeding and there aren't that many of them left and they don't breed fast so it's a bad idea for too many to undergo the procedure. Also every Kybernete needs a ship. Demiurg only have one broad class of ship by Imperial reckoning and that ship is huge and therefore prohibitively expensive. The entire Demiurg economy consists of trading and producing materials to build more ships for their population, that and survival are their biggest concerns and goals. Each ship is a potential civilization on it's own. Beyond that there is not hard and fast rule of composition as each Demiurg customizes the shit out of their bodies. Demiurg Kybernetes are thought to be clinically immortal although the "natural" Demiurg lifespan is not known.

Sometimes a Demiurg rebels against their culture. It's rare but it happens. Prince Yriel's first mate is one such example. The other Demiurg bear them no ill will and still write to them if they are able, even visit if they are close.

In a similar way their Imperial Guard regiment analogues typically consist of three or five Demiurg and an army of clockwork spiders bound to their will. Demiurg love spiders.

>>62872886
>>62873521
I was thinking tens of thousands, personally. Not that far off from the Imperial standard. They crammed as many people as they possibly could onto the ships when they left and given the centuries of isolation automation could only go so far.

>>62873698
There may have been that many when they set off in the Day of Dying. But the days that followed were not much better.

Food rationing discouraged breeding as resources were stretched in the final years of the Age of Strife. Orks took out a shit load of the ship. Many ships were swallowed by the warp. Eldar pirates and slavers of the Fark City. Other and stranger things.

By the time the Imperium arose and started to impose some degree of peace on the galaxy there might only have been one or two of the original ships left, the species being in the thousands.

In the relative calm of the Great Crusade they drift into the Imperium. They can't join but they don't need to. Mostly they just want someone to talk to, trade with and somewhere quiet to mine mineral rich unclaimed asteroids to make new ships and repair what they have. In these days their population starts to recover and a new generation of Kybernetes arise. Surviving populations are spread across the new and old ships evenly to ensure survival. Slow birth rates make recovery slow. By the time of the War of the Beast there are tens of thousands of them across maybe 50 - 100 ships. Too few in number and to offer any real aid to the Imperium without risking total extinction and so bar a few recorded exceptions camp out in the deeps of interstellar space for the entire War of The Beast, this won them few friends. They did help somewhat in the rebuilding of many worlds which did win back some of the lost favour.

In the Age of the Imperium their numbers have grown but the number of ships that they can build (especially with outside help on some of the more basic tasks) outstrips the birth rate.

>>62874059
By the time they came to the aid of Armageddon and won their place in the Imperium proper they had maybe a few thousand ships and their numbers were in the hundreds of thousands if not low millions, still their losses at Armageddon were substantial and it was essentially the entire species that took part bar maybe a few who were too distant when the call to war was sounded. In the days since then they have grown stronger again but again their numbers don't grow as quickly as they can make ships.

By 999M41 their collective fleet is estimated to be in the low tens of thousands but their numbers are spread thinly across them. Their numbers are growing despite what the sensationalist media may claim and there may be as many as a hundred million of them. Each ship contains enough to perpetuate itself for at least a dozen generations even without tapping the gene-vaults and their mastery of technology and their expertise in it's use allows them to punch phenomenally above their weight. The ability of the Demiurg to multi-task is legendary.

They could rebuild their numbers in a few years with use of gene-banks and growing the new generation in glass tubes but with the loss of near everything that they held dear their traditions are of great importance to them and they hold traditional family values strongly.

All current Demiurg can trace their lineage back to the few original ships that survived the final days of the Age of Strife and the passengers on them.

They get along extremely well with the Void Born for all that they are often in competition with them in a business sense. Like the Void Born they won't compete someone into the grave, space is wide and good friends are too few.

>>62834101
It makes sense that the Silent King has tried contagion as a means of culling the lesser "people". If he's done it once he's certainly done it often. AdBio can typically counter that shit quickly when it's purely biological in nature, even when they are using the most exotic of things using non-standard chemic exchanges as metabolism. AdMech typically halt the spread of nano-plagues, although not as easily.

Often it isn't the Silent King but his subordinates who are doing this shit of their own volition in the hopes that depopulating a few systems will earn them good boy points with their master. It does to an extent but it's less "what a wonderful servant, I should reward him" and is more "a useful tool. I will exploit this resource" because the Silent King is 100% all about the Silent King and the universe and all in it exists only to further his endeavours.

When The Void Dragon gets out of the cage he's going to have a very bad day as it was he that issued the orders to biotransferance the reluctant against their will using his own machines to violate and kill them and that's fucked up.

>>62863831
I can only hear them in Lrrr's voice now. It's glorious.

>>62875473
The Silent King would definitely have some kind of plague in reserve as the War in Heaven was against the Old Ones and their servants, and with the exception of high end Warp constructs like the Chaos Gods and Webway most of those are squishy and biological.

>>62878540
It's doubtful his original plague collection survived the time of Great Sleep, have to make new collection. Not that this is hard, universe is crawling with diseases. Some of them he and his servants doesn't understand exactly like Nurgle's Rot and the Oblitorator virus but you can still bottle it and throw it at people just fine.

>>62874187
>space is wide and good friends are too few
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mO7vkdkJhg

Good taste.

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>>62872728
True enough, and I'm not disputing that, just pointing out that the consequences of the Ulmeathic League's equivalent to the War of the Beast haven't been explored other than how the Nameless Enemy weakened the Passeri from being the Ulmeathic's equals to a vassal race. The Helith (let's call them that for now, as a bastardization of 'helium' because they're gasbags) provide an example of exactly how fucked-up the Nameless Enemy was by showing what happens after extended servitude to them, and why the Ulmeathics did not bring them to heel but instead sought to erase them completely. It also gives an example of some of the limitations of the League, since they couldn't figure out how to fix damage that AdBio is already progressing on with far less time and resources.
It also twists the Helith away from their Huragok inspiration; while Huragok are techies obsessed with machines, the Helith are fixated on the flesh, with their light touch and flexible appendages making them excellent doctors and medics. Part of this is out of necessity; their biology was already fragile by the standards of other species, and now it is fundamentally broken to the point that childbirth must also be surgery to keep the child from dying before their life even begins, and their growth cycle necessitates constant replacement of implants as the child outgrows the old hardware- all of which is equivalent to human open-heart surgery in terms of risk to the patient.

Funnily enough, this results in these passive, compassionate, and gentle balloon-boys being responsible for the worst diplomatic incident between the League races and Imperium. AdMech showed up wanting to share information on augmetics (figure out how to replace the xenos augmetics with Mars-approved designs), which the Helith were more than happy to cooperate with.

Then a cogboy replaced his arm with machinery to improve his efficiency, or as a demonstration of why Mars products are superior, or both.

>>62881277
The original Helith were probably native to a gas giant planet.

The Nameless had no real use for the gas giant itself. They just did it for teh lulz.

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>>62881277
The Helith proceed to absolutely lose their shit.

They never chose to become half-machine, and their race is still very much suffering for it, with half their augmentations just being there to allow them to do things they once did naturally, like gravitic thrusters to keep from having to drag themselves along the ground under the weight of the metal fused into their flesh. They were robbed of the ability to fly carefree as they once did, violated so thoroughly that their greatest efforts into the fields of flesh-crafting involved finding ways to just not have their descendants be in constant pain...
And these motherfuckers do it to THEMSELVES!?! On a WHIM?!

One of the cogboys, in an attempt to explain the whole thing and not understanding the root cause of the outrage, makes the mistake of dropping that "the flesh is weak" line.

Even the othe Ulmeathic races were completely unprepared for the Helith's explosion that followed. It took almost an entire day of reports all saying the same thing before anyone in authority could actually believe that what seemed like the entire Helith race had turned violent.

To keep a long story short, Nakaidos' response was harsh but effective, the AdMech survived (if missing pieces that were returned inside barrels of septic material), and now AdBio is in charge of working on and with the Helith.

To be clear, it's not that the AdMech are more machine than flesh that pissed them off; Oscen has a metal arm and artificial eye, and they don't think any less of him for that. The difference is that, for instance, Oscen lost his limbs in the fight against the Tyranids; his augmentations are scars, replacing flesh that was taken from him. AdMech, on the other hand, willing remove perfectly-good limbs and organs just because metal is more modifiable, or because they felt like it. Such disregard for their functioning bodies the Helith can never have is tantamount to HERESY!!! to the Helith.

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>>62881728
I like it. It gives the AdMech a moment to back off and look at themselves and the ones that do and the ones that don't can look at each other with new eyes.

>>62882879
It's also somewhat darkly humorous because the cogboys are on the receiving end of some loud REEEEEing for a change, and by what are essentially a race of paraplegics at that. The biggest contributing factor to the lack of fatalities during their riot is how utterly unsuited the Helith are for violence.

Jokaero are Men of Stone. Somehow. Don't give me that look, they are the work of the Human Dominion before Old Night, it is certain. There are truly antique records of creatures very much like them in form among earth life, relatives of ancient humans. None balk at the notion that the self styled Great and Bountiful Dominion had no qualms in rebuilding Humanity, it follows easily that they did much the same with other Old Earth life. Certainly the technological encoding of the Jokaero fit the proud pretenses of the Iron Minds to mimic the Old Ones. In concept at least the ruddy apes' startling knowledge resembles an attempt at Ork-craft by another author, whose boldness and ambition matches that shown in all the Iron Minds' projects. The secrets they hold, knowingly or not, bear the distinct and momentous imprint of that past human epoch, at least in my estimation.
-- Uthan the Perverse

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>>62874187
It sounds good, but I’m pretty sure the conflict the Demiurg helped out in was the Imperial Civil War, not an Armageddon War. It was part of the reason why the Imperium was willing to offer them official membership in the first place, they gave help to the Imperium in extraordinary circumstances and so the Imperium was willing to offer them extraordinary rewards. The events of the Imperial Civil War made it clear that nothing was going to be the same again (e.g., founding the Sisters so nothing like this ever happens again) so what were a few more changes to the status quo.

There was a suggestion that Vandire had pissed off the Demiurge and a significant number of Demiurge decided to get revenge by helping Thor’s rebellion. There was an element of pragmatism as well. The Demiurge are traders that like to sell their technology. Being outside the Imperium meant they could only do so through Rogue Traders, so there were significant benefits to be had working with the Survivor Civilizations if they joined. Of course, there were potential risks to helping Thor’s side as well. If the Demiurg backed the losing side of the Imperial Civil War the winners would have declared them Xenos Horribilis and had them hunted down for helping their hated rivals.

Perhaps what happened was there was a major Ork WAAAGH! (potentially even a Beast WAAAGH!) and the Imperials were too busy killing each other due to the civil war to pay it much attention. As we’ve mentioned, the Imperium’s enemies were not going to just sit back when the Imperium was at its most vulnerable point in ten millennia. The Imperial response to the WAAAGH! was lackluster because both sides had most of their resources wrapped up fighting each other and it looked like the WAAAGH! was going to rampage through Imperial territory when the Demiurg came in.

>>62882879
>look at each other with new eyes
And both the AdBio and AdMech have the very eyes for that occasion on special offer...

>>62884611 (cont.)
The Demiurg’s actions were not solely altruistic, the Imperium was normally the power who dealt with major WAAAGH!s and if it fell all of the Xenos Independens races would have been threatened.

Huh. I guess there are benefits to both. An Armageddon War would be the best explanation as to why the Demiurg showed up, because there would be no risk of Imperial retaliation if they showed up to fight Orks (and the image another anon gave of the Demiurg riding to the rescue like winged hussars to Vienna is a really good one). But aiding in the Imperial Civil War would be the biggest reason for the Imperium to change policy and invite the Demiurg to join as a full-blown member state.

>>62873521
That actually sounds like an idea for a really neat tabletop army, like a combination between Tau and Chaos Dwarves/Vampire Counts. A few actual demiurge backed up by lots and lots of constructs.

>>62879162
Does the Obliterator Virus affect Necrons? I would assume it probably would, as there are other cases in canon lore of Chaos ignoring the fact that Necrons are non-biological (like Lucius popping out of the body of a Necron Overlord).

>>62884751
And a note about the shade of this iris, the AdBio advises Cadian violet, always best to be safe, and its such a lovely shade.

>>62884805
In terms of pre-civil war policy, it might not have even been an intent to exclude other Xenos, just a different mindset that 'civilization' encompassed multiple polities as well as the Eldar-Human spacial Imperium (as some eldar scholars of the era called it) with the list of Xenos Independens being much longer. Among other arguments for that status quo was the actual eventuality that even diplomatic expansion would eventually corner out all major 'external' markets, a substantial concern for the Rogue Trader houses of the era that had a measure of exclusivity in those markets. In turn this would mean the Navigator and Seer interests deeply invested in those houses would support that status quo. All of these factions actually line up into a pretty substantial interest in the Craftworlds and Interstellar Nobility, one intent on preserving the trade conditions of "golden age" of the Imperium prior to the civil war. This alignment matches with the vague backers we've pointed to as Vandire's supporters pretty perfectly.

Speaking of, I really think it would be fun to sketch out a post civil war Vandireist faction. Our version of Vandire seems like a perfect lightning rod for the more tragic of the lost-and-damned, and something vaguely Bonapartist or french revolutionary seems the right flavor for the subsequent disciples of Goge Vandire, a sort of Robespierre/Napoleon/Stalin figure. He's the absolute fallen paragon that Horus isn't in this timeline, not just the horrible first Emperor of the Imperium, but the person who scared Oscar off from trying to make new mortal friends.

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Finally got Cherys up on the wiki, am going to try to go through and get some of the other important stuff that has been missing on there when I get the chance (e.g., Interex).

The Notes page is getting really long and I think we may be reaching critical mass, any help in reformatting the Notes into entries would be much appreciated. I am also going to try to get a couple of them into main page format if possible.

>>62886886
There actually was a post-Civil War Vandirist faction mentioned, one of the writing pieces mentions a group called "Sons of the First Emperor", which are an insurgent group the Inquisition and Sisters have to deal with, but few other details were given. That could be a really good starting point to expand from.

>>62884805
I was thinking that maybe they intervened in an Armageddon war that was happening during the Imperial Civil War, so Imperial reinforcements were completely absent and the planet would have been lost except for the demiurg's intervention.

>>62887966
I can see about getting the stuff from this thread on the Helith into something that can be put on the main page so they don't clutter Notes up further.
Regarding the bloat, part of the problem might be that we keep putting everything that isn't main-page ready there, ranging from ideas that require polish to meta-commentary on individuals or events. Maybe we could create a "Work in Progress" page to put all the stuff that needs polish/fleshing out, and trimmed the Notes page down to meta-knowledge and commentary? It's not a complete solution to the problem of not enough people working on formatting stuff into main-page writing, but it might help compartmentalize the issue and divide the commentary from the half-finished projects.

Thankfully this week's a bit of a break from school thanks to voting, so I'll have more time to devote to getting some stuff properly written out and off the Notes page.

>>62888702
definitely seconding the idea of sorting wip and meta-knowledge

>>62888702
Thank you very much.

If nobody objects I'm going to have an attempted sorting some of the Notes into more suitable places this afternoon.

Remind me, I thought the Tarellians were Lizardmen in space, or is that the Ulumeathic League? Or is the UL just the Saurus in space?

>>62826015
>fought the Human Primarchs on even footing
Let's pump the brakes there, the Primarchs ranged from mostly normal dudes to combat demigods that moved faster than even Space Marines and Aspect Warriors could see. Nakai could probably do OK up until the middle tier, but would struggle hard against the upper-middle tier combat-focused Primarchs (Russ, Khan, Angron, Fulgrim) and would get absolutely splatted by any of the MK III S Primarchs. It's no disrespect to Nakai, it's just a matter of physiology since their reflexes are naturally slower, and even at peak levels is nowhere near an SM, nor can he rely on a strength and durability advantage like young Vulcan did vs the DE Archon.

I'm sure no one really cares about one throwaway line in the middle of a random comment, but it triggered my power level sperging.

>>62870113
>>62881277
Why are we trying to port Engineers from Halo in again? Is this a symptom of the dearth of OC these days?

>>62889523
All right, I'll answer your issues in order.
>Tarellians were Lizardmen in Space
The distinction we've made is that Tarellians are Saurus and Skinks, while the Ulmeathic are Kroxigors. There's in-universe speculation that the Ulmeathic might be a lost Tarellian colony whose divergent evolution was particularly extreme, which the Ulmeathic find very insulting. Tarellians are Iroquois in space, Ulmeathic are Samurai in space.
>Power scaling
I do agree that against the higher-level Primarchs, Nakai would get bodied, particularly the Psykers like Magnus since he'd be an entirely physical fighter. However, I stand by the point that his genetic-lottery would allow him to at least compete in the same ring as Russ and Angron; he's a ten-to-eleven-foot-tall dinosaur whose genetics were essentially a natural occurrence in his race of what was intentional for Sanguinious. Durability-wise he would have an advantage in both being harder to damage and more willing to take damage in the first place; a victory where he's lost limbs and lost a good chunk of his intestines would still be a victory.
Humanity does not have a monopoly on super-beings. They got twelve of them, the Eldar have six (seven? I forget the number of Phoenix Lords), and the Ulmeathics got one. And their one got orbital-striked by Tyranids.
I do admit, it does also depend on the type of combat. I was imagining a melee duel in a ring; any fight that requires crossing ground quickly would put him at a disadvantage. So he's sort of an Abbadon unit; brutal within his area of expertise, but good luck getting him to the fight on time.
>why are we putting Engineers from Halo in again?
I realized we had unintentionally made the Ulmeathic League into not!Covenant. I thought the jagged look of the engineers made for a good "victim-race" backstory to show how fucked-up the Nameless Enemy was. They're more inspiration than direct copy; there's not a wide variety of "gas-people" to choose from in fiction.

>>62889779
>>62889523
I wasn't here for the CoD fiasco that I know happened a while back, where people tried to port that into the setting. If that's what you're concerned about, I was not trying to make the Ulmeathic League like the Halo's Covenant; we came up with the Ulmeathics being croxigors, then we came up with the Passeri based on somebody's Stellaris playthrough, then somebody wrote up the F'feng, then I tried to figure out a naval strategy for them that wasn't "Armored with big boom-guns" because that's the Imperium's thing, then I looked up and realized "oh, this is a not!Covenant. huh."

And to be honest, anything involving xenos that don't have models or art is basically getting invented wholecloth, because the only information we have on that species is a single sentence in a book somewhere. It's hard to stay strictly canon when all canon gives you is "these guys were a thing that existed" without telling you what kind of thing or when or where or how they relate to the rest of the universe or what they look like.

Bump

Have any Deldar become deamon princes?

>>62813770
I’m pretty sure the bureaucracy hugely varied. Some systems are more like a Pre-French revolution system where members of noble houses etc often pay for positions in the government which come with their own salaries and powers. That or the positions are hereditary. Other systems will be fascistic with military dictatorship assigning roles based on efficiency/ interaltionships within the system. Some others might have some degree of voting but it would most likely be an electorate of lords, merchants or other powerful persons. I don’t think a serious democracy is something at all common in 40k

>>62889523
One is meritocratic crocodiles, the others are grumpy authoritarian marine iguanas.

>>62813770
>>62813146
>>62893193
As a whole the Imperium itself does not care what the local traditions of leader choosing is. The Ophelia system for example is a Katholian theocracy, Rynn's World is run by what amounts to a military aristocracy, Praetoria is run by the richest noble house, Cadia is a stratocracy and a shit load of others. It's a million worlds so somewhere any viable method of governance has almost certainly been chosen.

bump. Also would people be more interested in lunar style ships or sketches of the great crusade flagships?

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>>62897975
>would we be more interested in sketches of ships
YES.

>>62897975
Always interested in new art, especially art deco space ships.

>>62893115
No. Reason being that it is not usually enough to merely serve or perform behaviours that benefit the gods be it accidental or deliberate. A mortal must truly love the gods and try to emulate them or at least some small facets of them. Only then can they become a living aspect of that god.

Or one of the gods does it for a prank.

>>62893115
If you mean Dark Eldar? No. The Dark Eldar are edgy atheists with the exception of the Incubi (who worship Khaine). The Dark Muses are treated more like saints or lamas whose example they seek to live up to.

Crone Eldar? Yes. All of the Crone Eldar are on the Path to Glory. However we only have a few Crone Daemon Princes, including Shaha Gaathon, Doomrider, and the Erlking, surprisingly enough are all Slaaneshi so far.

>>62897975
Yes. Also if there are any missing on the wiki please let me know so I can put them in the appropriate places.

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>>62881392
How about a colder sort of Venus like planet but colder due to distance from it's sun with the temperature in the habitable for normal life range. Atmosphere was extremely dense and heavy in sulphur and carbon dioxide among other things typically considered toxic. The planet was extremely tectonically active and produced a healthy magnetosphere. The combination of strong magnetosphere, distance from sun and heavy atmosphere resulting in Helith never developing eyes and never developing any biological countermeasure to any real amount of radiation.

Helith biology is based on sulphur bonds rather than carbon. Of all the planets in the League theirs was the least devastated by the 'Nid invasion and is still recognizable, though the ecological devastation has resulted in it no longer being capable of supporting life of any sort.

Worlds of a sort that the Helith could survive on are far rarer than more terrestrial worlds. Historically terraforming was done by the Humans, the Eldar and the Old Ones before them and such worlds were of no interest to any of them.

Such Helith as have survived live now in contained environment stations or inside environment suits. One of the long term goals of the AdBio is to either find a world that the Helith can "Venusform" and live on or, failing that, tinker with the Helith gradually over a long enough period for them to live on normal worlds.

In the Days of the League their Ulmeathic overlords typically didn't leave their fortress except in heavy suits to occasionally remind them who was in charge. Their world was not of interest to them but it was the principle of the thing. The Helith were grateful for the Ulmeathics because even if, compared to the AdBio and AdMech, they weren't brilliant geneticists or cyberneticists they were trying and they did have painkillers. Ulmeathics are happy that the Imperium can do something for the Helith as it was always as not being able to help always brought them sorrow.

>>62900886
>glances at paragraph of writing about how the Nameless Foe basically fire-bombed their homeworld while the Helier were forced to watch, with the planet’s natural gases resulting in the inferno burning for weeks
>also paragraphs on how the Helith are very good doctors by necessity, and for less frail races are practically miracle-workers with basic injuries
Welp. I kind of like your idea, but hate the thought of scrapping what I’ve already got written.

I’ll try to polish up what I’ve got and post it so the rest of y’all can review it.

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>>62901093
Yours is probably better. I'm looking at everything through a haze of illness and tiredness and I'm not firing on all cylinders.

>>62901162
Eh, I'm kind of in the same boat of feeling like I'm about to pass out. I'll just go ahead and post what I've got so far.

Helith - consequences of cruelty

While the Ulmeathics did their best to erase all the works and identity of the Nameless Enemy, there is one piece of their legacy that could not be stamped out- not without crossing a line they could never uncross. Thus, some semblance of a legacy lives on within the race known as the Helith.

Helithians are a strikingly alien species, bearing close resemblance to an old-Earth jellyfish in some respects, with a series of air-bladders they use to float above the ground and four tentacles that split into fine cilia they use to manipulate tools and pull themselves along. Their "head" sits on a thick, prehensile neck, and possesses six nostrils and four eyes. Their initial homeworld was a Gas Giant whose gravity was heavy enough to form a solid core but not quite enough to form a proper planet. The exact location is both lost and irrelevant, for they had only just begun to take their first steps into the Great Void when the Nameless Foe found them.

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>>62902447
How long they were enslaved is unknown; none of their records survived, and information had to be passed on by word of mouth. It is known that at some point, their captors pulled enough of their ancestors from their homeworld to have a stable population, then forced every last one of them to watch as their homeworld was bombarded, the weaponry intentionally igniting the planet's gasses and turning the entire planet into a raging inferno bright enough to illuminate every vessel within several hundred kilometers. Some stories tell of transmissions being kept on and forcing them to listen to the screams of the dying, others tell of complete silence as they watched their home burn. As none who witnessed the event survived to be liberated, the accuracy of this tale cannot be verified. What came next, however, is all too observably true.

Flesh-crafting must have been a hobby for the Nameless, as they turned it on the Helith with unspeakable glee. The gas-people were already of a delicate biology by the standards of other races; the Nameless broke them and twisted their bodies into something grotesque, organs vital to their survival made dependent upon mechanical implants to continue functioning, if not replaced entirely. Their genetic code was altered, curled around the finger of their masters before a yank snapped it in twain, ensuring that their children would be born broken and deformed. While the exact method has been lost and forgotten, the consequences paint a grim picture of how the Nameless Foe violated them. Where once the Helith would have used their gas-sacks to float through the sky, now they require thrusters to compensate for the weight of their mechanical augmentations. The thrusters were added by the Ulmeathic; apparently the Nameless took great amusement in watching the Helith be forced to drag themselves along the ground.

>>62902531
Several organs simply do not form for them anymore; when a new Helith is born, the delivery doubles as a surgery to install their first mechanical parts before the newborn's body dies. Without a healthy specimen to determine the makup of these organs, or what they once were, replacing them is all but impossible.

Yet the Helith appear to have grown kind from their suffering; their entire race knows basic medicine as a necessity for their condition, and have become known as gentle and caring healers, treating each patient as precious as family. They are meek, yet when first the Ulmeathic found them, they wasted no time in seeking to treat the wounds of their liberators, enabling those initially deemed combat-ineffective able to return to the fight. They became the League's respected doctors and flesh-weavers, growing renowned for their compassion, gentle nature, and skill at the mending of injuries. Yet for all their knowledge and skill, there was always a quiet melancholy for the Helith, for they could not find a way to fix themselves.

>>62902598
... and that's what I've got so far. Damnit, it always looks like more in the word document, and then I post it and what looked like a proper paragraph now looks more like a couple sentences.

If people like it, this could be the entry for the Helith on the Minor Xenos page. I'll try and write something main-page-worthy about the incident where they won a REEEEEing match against the cogboys tomorrow, assuming I'm not still perma-exhausted.

>>62889523
>>62889779
To expand on this, the Ulmeathics (Ulmeatheans?) are Kroxigors in space, but their societal organization takes a bit more after Saurus and the Fantasy Lizardmen in general, whereas Tarellians look more like Saurus/Skinks but are more independent. However, instead of being a specially bred caste system like the Tau, the Ulmeathics are a bunch of extremely hierarchical authoritarians who set up a system where they represent a military-ruling elite and everybody else performs the other roles of civilization for them, something that is becoming a problem now that they are no longer as dominant as they were.

>>62889947
Basically this. Most xenos races that aren’t the major playable factions, slaugth, or hrud tend to have less than a paragraph of fluff. The only race I can think of that has a decent amount of fluff that’s never been talked about here are the Cythor Fiends.

>>62887978
That might be the best idea. Which Armageddon War would be the best? 2nd on the Notes page is said to be Imperial Victory, 3rd and 1st were scraping things closer but the 3rd was the one Ferrus died in and it's hard to see the Orks waiting until M36 to spring the first.

>>62904899
>something that is becoming a problem now that they are no longer as dominant as they were
The issue is not really about their dominance; their integration into being a servant-race of the Imperium was actually very smooth because they can observe and acknowledge that the Imperium is stronger than them, therefore the Imperium should be in charge.
The bigger root of the issues that are becoming a problem is that an entire Generation of Ulmeathics died to the last fighting the Tyranids, and this generation was the "Middle-aged" and "Young Adults" portion of the population. This means that the Ulmeathic race is now split between the very old and the very young, with one side traditionalist and slow to change, while the other is impulsive and emotional without any form of temperance. The lack of polarized voices within their race is causing cracks to form that are only kept in check by the ruler being young enough to be "one of us" to the younger generation yet "wise enough" to heed the council of his elders (or one elder in particular).

It's like if suddenly the only two groups in America were the old grandparents who can barely figure out how to use Microsoft Word, and the dumb teenagers who never take their noses out of their phones and are obsessed with fortnite. Now consider how much culture, temperance, and stability is lost in that scenario; the most relevant effect from our perspective would likely be the almost-complete death of the tabletop hobby, as almost their entire consumer-base would be just gone.

>>62902672
It might be a bit bare bones but the basic idea of it is good.

>>62904899
I suppose we could make there have been six Armageddon Wars, although it is an inelegant solution and would require a bit of editing of existing stuff. Probably not the best idea, though.

Maybe a Black Crusade would work better? The Age of Apostasy does seem like the ideal time for Malys to pull one together.

>>62906992
It's still only 6 over 10,000 years.

>>62907349
Hell, let's go all out, a very-most forward front of a play by Malys (actually short of a Black Crusade, which Oscar would have been fighting personally if it was running alongside a civil war) got as far as Armageddon, painfully, desperately close to Sol in terms of the Warp. Maybe Malys got a contingent past the eye, but couldn't keep one of many variables in check, lost Arrotyr, Iygonesh, Luther, or some other player in an early stage, and only had the weird odds and ends that Nimina, the Indigo Crow, and Chaos Orks could provide with most of everything stuck behind the Cadian Gate and the Eye's main naval powers fighting amongst themselves. Malys was determined to make use of the Imperial civil war, but civil war is Chaos' natural state, and she is sometimes more coherent than her gods.

>>62907446
It would have been a small contingent as anyone worth anything would be at the main event. A bunch of Devanite Lodges stirring up the Orks to retake the Holy Land maybe.

>>62902672
My only criticism is that MOAR PLZ!

>>62886600
Hand me down hands

He has his father's eyes

What's happening with commissar Holt?

>>62907446
Funny to think that in the Imperium, apocalyptic often means "like something or other from Apocalypse", and it still gets used in the same ways. There are probably a good number of isolated worlds with populations that don't realize the "apocalypse guns" or units they might meet aren't actually a reference to the end of the world by forceful revelation, as they certainly seem sufficient.

>>62907446
The Crones may have also been dealing with the fallout of the Malalian Heresy at this time, which would have put a dent in their population numbers (among other things, somebody accidentally summoned Skarbrand and he depopulated a layer of Shaa-Dome before being put down, for one) which would hamper their ability to organize things.

>>62912118
Nothing yet, I think. Who is he?

>>62913045
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FiaJldR39A8

>>62881277
>>62881728
>>62905657
>>62909124
This does bring up an interesting question about the Admech, and more specifically their attitudes towards allowing xenos into the Mechanicum. Their attitudes towards xenos tech may be notoriously hostile, but a xenos who's replaced most of their body with Mechanicum-approved machine bits would be difficult to distinguish from a human with the same augmentations. It's possible that Admech doesn't care about your original race, just that you stick to Mars-approved designs and pursue the same teachings.
This doesn't happen often, since xenos who might be inclined would usually rather stick to their own tech or aren't willing to cut off parts of their body for no reason other than the machine-parts being cooler, but would the Mechanicum be a humans-only club? How would they be able to tell a xenos who is more tank than flesh is a xenos? Is there a cogboy somewhere out there who's entire body is techified who's dirty little secret is that he's a xenos who wanted to be part of the techies-club?

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>>62914081
The problem is that the AdMech, especially the Mars AdMech who run the show, have a very good memory and they were a more or less unbroken line from technicians and engineers of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion through the Age of Strife and up to the current day. For the Age of Strife it was a dirty every man for himself fight for survival and there wasn't a whole lot of friendly contact between man and xeno. The greater Imperium has been gradually encouraged to over look it and be generous on the subject and as time has gone on this has worked in no small part due to most of the shit show having been forgotten alongside the burning libraries. Except Mars and the other older Forge Worlds (and the Hubworlders to an extent) because they kept a shit load of records in pristine condition detailing every raid and predation.

Xenos are tolerated, perhaps even befriended, and maybe they are granted the unspeakable favour to receive the cyber-blessings of the Omnissiah, who is a just and very generous God, but they are not the chosen people. They are not his priesthood. He did not reveal himself to them. laughing_dragon.holo

If there are sects out there that allow the ordination of xenos they are minor and fringe if not outright excommunicated and declared all sorts of bad names.

>>62914815
It's also an interesting food for thought if it turns out that humans are just far more inclined to roboticize themselves than most races. Possibly as a result of the the dragon.

>>62914962
The Dragon was still firmly in the box for the entire history of the GaBHD, so it would seem that humans are just naturally inclined to literal self improvement. Current AdMech are just imitating the Golden Age.

>>62916501
The GaBHD was shaping up (in their own dreams) to be the synthesis of the Old Ones and Sleeping Tomb Kings of that era, though the Eldar Empire intended to have none of that.

bump

>>62883957
Uthan, because being so wrong requires practice.

>>62921521
I think Por'O M'arc might have met him at some stage of his trip, though Uthan's reputation may have been lost on the Tau party.

>>62914962
>>62916501
Just because the Dragon was asleep doesn't mean he wouldn't have had an effect on people. He IS a C'Tan after all, and one who was on Mars when the GaBHD was just a twinkle in the United Nations' eye. Who's to say his dreams didn't seep out or the like?

>>62914962
Given that humanity at the time of the DaoT was a species complex composed of numerous different variations of organic and machine increasingly blending together to the point where complete breakdown of the terms was likely in the future if Slaanesh hadn't happened, that may have been a distinct possibility.

And the eldar have noted the disturbing parallels between us and the Necrons and orks. Like the orks we tend to be strong but unstable psykers that work best in groups (though eldar in general tend to be stronger) and like both Necrontyr and orks enhanced forms of human tend towards endurance and durability over agility and speed. The equivalent to humans as modern eldar are to proto-eldar are liable to be more like Sororitas or New Men than anything else. Astartes-level augmentations are overkill for everyday life. And like the Necrons we have a knack for mechanical technology and A.I. Heck, before the Fall our "hat" was artificial intelligence, one that is now picked up by the Tau. Some eldar are kind of hoping that their influence will keep us from turning out like either of them.

>>62922227
Uthan lived in M32, I think. He would have probably been dead by the time Por'O M'arc traveled the Imperium.

>>62922926
>Uthan lived in M32, I think. He would have probably been dead by the time Por'O M'arc traveled the Imperium.

How tight a lid would the Eldar have kept on his writings, though? Maybe one of the reasons for M'arc's travels was the Ethereals wanting to see how much of the bullshit was true- after all, if it was simply BS the Eldar wouldn't have tried to hide it, right? laughingEldrad.holo

>>62923028
Ulthan might also be another surprisingly lively bugger

>>62922607
The stuff we had on the Void Dragon so far did mention it stamped a dragon-shaped mark leaving echoes on existence similar to how the Nightbringer did so with the concept of death, which is why so many civilization have concepts of draconic beings. But that would have been pre-War in Heaven.

I had always figured that on Earth you might get vague flashes at best of it trying to broadcast for help through the centuries which lead to people on Earth having weird visions.

The Europeans/Middle East see an entity of primeval destruction who hoards things and guards knowledge (Python/Typhon/Jormundgandr/Biblical Serpent/Medieval Dragon), unaware that the treasure being guarded IS knowledge.

The Egyptians see a serpent of oblivion who picked a fight with a sun god and lost (Apophis).

The people of East Asia see a powerful yet benevolent force of nature and order that provides for his people (Long).

The Mesoamericans see a serpent god who defied his brethren for having morals and got banished for it (Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan).

Each only tells part of the story as the Dragon is trying to send its message through what amounts to a really staticky connection that fades in and out and people fill in the rest with their own cultural experiences.

>>62925192
That's a wonderful idea and even better for the distinct possibility/probability that the Dragon wasn't even aware that he was doing it.

>>62923028
They would have kept his writing around for something to laugh at. Eldar love laughing at teh stupids.

>>62925192
I think this is fucking awesome but I'd make it more ambitious. It was only his dreams that were half heard.

>>62912118
Presumably that campaign went on close enough to Vanilla to make no difference.

Hello. Gonna keep it simple. Seen these threads since the beginning. Read thru Notes page. I like Nobledark. I like 40k. I like writefagging. I understand yall need literature. This is an intro to a potential story (Ive got it storyboarded just not written). If it there's interest, ill continue. If not, this post gets buried, no big deal. So for your consideration:

>The shrouded, other-worldly tint of the Immaterium peeled away as the first ships of the 219th Expeditionary Fleet exitted the hell realm. The various attendant ships quickly repositioned to their surrounding places as the few larger ships ponderously oriented themselves in the new system. Destroyers began languid corkscrews around their command vessels while the smaller frigates ballooned outward to form picket lines. Void measurements, order requests, sensor scans, and myriads of other data all flowed into the command deck of the Basilica Emergent, the head of the 219th. Easily the largest of the fleet, the Basilica was a battleship unlike no other. The pearl-white, marble gilding gifted to her after the rescue of an Eldar world long ago set her apart from the two other large tonnage vessels of the fleet, the smaller battleship Tantamount and the battlecruiser Dirge of the Warlord. Now organized, the 219th moved in system towards what the frigates had just started pinging at the extreme edge of their sensors: Tyrannids. It was not unexpected that the locusts were here for Myriandros’ precious resources. In fact, it was the very reason that the 219th had an extra two ships amongst the fleet. The Scythes of the Emperor had be returning to their own fleet when Myriandros found itself in the way of a tendril from Leviathan. And so Chitinbane and her sister battleship, Unyielding Protest, despite losses and weariness from previous campaigns, answered the call along with the 219th.

>>62927066
Agreed; it'd be cooler if the Dragon was just that powerful. Maybe his dreams contained all the elements mentioned above, and people simply filtered in what was relevant to them, or different people were exposed to Mars at different times. As time went on and we assumed the ancients were thinking about dinosaurs when they talked about dragons, the Void Dragon's dreams manifested in different ways among the populace, this time as technological advancement and fears of technology. That said, we should be careful not to ascribe too much power to the Dragon; it should have been enough to motivate people to get into technology, but the GaBHD was almost if not wholly humanity's creation.

>>62928370
Yeah, I'd think the Volistad campaign would've gone pretty much as canon did; while the Imperial forces would've been a combo of human and nonhuman forces, the Orks would've been a far more devastating force. Mmmmaybe Overlord Petchenka would've been more competent, if still somewhat bumbling? Sure, let's keep Holt's 'Choose your next words' line, but in the Nobledark context it's less Holt threatening the Overlord with execution, and more a veteran Commissar trying to help a well-meaning but pampered noble become worthy of the title; I'm thinking the Overlord bungled a supposed-to-be-inspirational speech and Holt's helping him along, though in typical Commissar fashion.

>>62928541
How would the Old Nemensor remember Mag'ladroth?

>>62928514
Sounds like a fine intro to me.

>>62929525
quite possibly, though on the other hand, having a draconic robo-god around (among others) might be what originally started cracking his mind up

>>62931129
Dragon was trying to help. He might not be remembered unhappily.

>>62928514
>unlike no other
Other than that one tiny quibble I'm looking forward to it.

How many eldar might have joined the Greater Good.

>>62934684
Very few is my guess, since they have actual gods around. Any that did would probably live on Myrmeara. Those that do follow the Tau'va would probably do so because it seems new and fresh.

>>62932034
Yeah, if Zahndrekh remembers the Dragon at all, it might be the fairest one the Imperium might have- that of a well-meaning divine being with absolutely no sense of scale.

>>62936814
The C'tan existed in the Necron Star Empire before everything went to shit. He would have known about them because they were political players and he was part of the aristocracy, even if he was stuck out in the most provincial of the provincials.

If Inquisitor Helynna Valeria was to ask Nemesor Zahndrekh about the known C'tan he would say something like;

Aza'Gorod - A nasty piece of work. Wasn't until the end we figured out it was he who was responsible for our persistent health concerns. Would have been one thing if he was apologetic, we never knew if they could control what they did very much in their infancy, but he reveled in it. Said that we deserved our misery for the sins of getting ideas above our station, for not showing reverence and worship where such was due. We maimed him something fierce I think, reports from the end of the war were... confusing sometimes. Sunk is flagship and tore him apart. Left the pieces to starve and wither in a makeshift cage buried in an old shit five miles under the crust of some lifeless rock. That he's still alive and got out of his tomb keeps me up at night, childhood stories of primordial fears all wore his face and that's probably no accident.

Mephet'ran - Father told me he was the least awful, even sometimes decent of them. He was wrong unfortunately. He was as deadly as the others but it was a slow poison that tasted nice. He wasn't as strong as his siblings but was probably the cleverest. At least clever when dealing with people. We saw through him in the end and tore him apart. In retrospect that was probably counterproductive. There was talk in the High Court that he had been aware of things on worlds even in his infancy, took an interest in the intricacies of small interactions. We never knew who fired the first shot in the war with the Old Ones. Or at least we were never told. I remember in my youth one theory being this bastard pulling the strings from the start. It's all unprovable now in any case.

>>62937941
Llandu'gor - Tells you something when a king is willing to break out a weapon that could end all of creation just once. This was that once. It was called The Flayer for a reason and I'd much rather not talk about it.

Mag'ladroth - Out of all of them the least terrible. Dangerous, oh my yes. Possibly more than the others. Never really took an interest in us unless we were interesting but I think it cared for us in it's way. The things it made, terrible things of unfathomable destruction, were all made so that we could operate them. There was this one time when he made a gravity reversal device, point it at a thing an the gravity inherent to it's mass reversed. Point it at something like a desk and it just atomizes instantly, good way of getting rid of toxic waste. Point it at a black hole and star charts stop being accurate. He claimed it would be useful if we ever wanted to blackholes. Totally bonkers and unsafe to be around but he kept mostly to himself. I don't think he realized how fragile we were and I don't think he ever intended half the things he made to ever be used, he just liked making things. When we fought his kind we never targeted him. In time we would probably have had to do something about him but he just vanished one day and we never found out why.

>>62938236
Worth noting, the Flayer thought of flaying as a nice thing to do, just the natural converse of the favor the Necrons did for him. Llandu'gor didn't just flay the skin, but everything, unto the soul, and Necron Gauss weapons were his work in some measure.

>>62928514
2/?
The locust fleet split into halves around the gas giant, Myriandros Quartus. A small contingent of bio-craft entered orbit to engulf the gas harvesting void stations about the planet. The rest trudged onward towards the human fleet and the populated world of Myriandros Secundus. Myriandros Secundus was in the latter half of its orbit being around 10 o'clock. The first planet in the system was located at 1 o'clock about the center star while Myriandros Quartus was as at 5 o'clock. The third planet had broken up into a moon sized rock after a moon from Quartus was eventually flung off and pulled towards the system center. The collision created an asteroid ring. The ball consider Myriandros Tertium was at 7 o'clock amongst its debris. The 219th Fleet was approaching from the system north in a prime position to defend Secundus and receive the extra-galactic invaders. Admiral Dega aboard the Basilica Emergent voxed his orders to the fleet. The bulk of the 219th along with the Chitinbane move in support of Myriandros Secundus and her people preparing to deal with the now east half of the Tyrannid fleet. A pair of destroyers and a triplet of frigates broke off to follow the Unyielding Protest on a long burn on the inside of the system's eminent debris ring. The six vessels orders were to corkscrew around the field and catch a gravity-aided sling about the moon, M. Tertium, and slam into the westward fleet. Dega intended for the smaller contingent to punch through the formation and then flank the eastward sub-fleet. A practical and tactical strategy on the void maps but in the cold, uncaring black, best laid plans are put to the test.

>>62932924
>>62930285
I appreciate the interest

>>62940642
3/?
The opti-sensors of the Unyielding noted multiple ichorous puffs on both hive ship. Minutes later, scans identified tentacled-boarding bio-ships. Cogitators spit out flight paths and projected intercepts upon pict-screens. Several flights of the living craft were headed towards the Unyielding. From a dais in the middle of the command deck, the Captain Lyras bellowed with a voice untainted by bionics, “Listen up boys! All hands to stations, we got a fight comin’ our way! Huh-ha-ha! These vile bugs think to board us and eat us from the inside! I'll be Emperor damned if our magnificent vessel will see their likes in our decks! Plus, our esteemed Astartes Captain Phiras and his men are far too tired to fight right now! Poor guys are all tuckered out! Ah-hah-hah-ha! Now spool up those flak turrets, ready our first salvo of macrocannon rounds and remember 'don't drop the ordinance'! Ah-ha-haha! For the Emperor!” The vox caster across the decks went quiet, drowned by the cacophony of of an Imperial voidship mustering for combat. At the utterance of 'all hands’ the men and women jumped to their stations already in the process of preparing even whilst Captain Lyras continued his boisterous cast. Mechanics greased autoloaders even as they fed rounds. Magos and engiseers monitored the banks of plasma reactors as they dipped and spiked at the whims of the charging lance batteries and flaring drives. Auger arrays and cogitators began to relay firing vectors and predicted flight paths of the invading craft, updating as different permutations were analyzed. Amidst the din, Captain Phiras perked an ear towards the vox caster nestled in the corner of his armory. Even amidst the din of clanking ceramite, bolter slides being racked and battle orders being administered, the men of the 5th Company heard their captain respond to no one in particular. “The mad man thinks we're tired? Heh!”

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>>62821614
Do we know what Oscar looks like? I mean he's called a man of Gold, but I'm pretty sure we all know its about as literal as the men of iron being made of solid iron.

That said my head cannon basically has him looking like a version of Adam Warlock...

>>62940673
It's fun when it's clear, and the imagery is well described, but kinda disconnected going sentence to sentence. I'd advise making the point of view clearer, and definitely hope it continues.

>>62941205
You know I totally agree. I will try to put some breaks in. The second part should have been broken into three smaller parts the layout of the system being the middle section. Such things are bound to happen when posting rough drafts.

>Enter Clearance

>Password: ****************************

>Verifying...

>Commencing biometric scan...

>Verified. Welcome, Inquisitor.

>Opening file...

OPERATION: RHODOPSIN RHUBARB SNAPDRAGON (Quiet Quern 6)

SOURCE: Interrogator URBAN WELDER, Inquisition Watchtower Snarkle, Jack Hive, Joseph Haarlock Sucks At Cards

Analysis of the artifacts captured in last week's raid on the cult stronghold [reference: RHODOPSIN RHUBARB SNAPDRAGON (Questing Quail 1), (Questing Quail 2)] has conclusively identified Items 23, 27, and 106 as psy-grafting machines of Chaos Eldar origin. Devices of this type are used to transfer an infiltrator's psyche into a captive subject, subordinating the original individuals' will to their own while retaining enough memory and personality to permit the infiltrator to pass as the original even to close confidantes and surface level psychic scanning. [refer to: Hideous Machineries of the Lost and the Damned: A Comprehensive Reference to Known Cult Technologies of the Segmentum Obscurus, Vol. 3, 227th Edition, pg. 1128-1145, for more detail] Quite simply, it turns loyal citizens into sleeper agents for the cult.

As this cell of the cult was using a high-class retreat as a cover, they would have had potential access to a wide cross section of lesser nobility, including PDF officers. A full assessment of the threat must wait for the completion of more detailed analysis of the compromised social networks and the completion of interrogations of captured cultists, but we must assume the worst. This cell alone may have seeded hundreds of sleeper agents in sensitive positions, and if this was not the only cell of the cult it is possible there are still more psy-graft machines out there.

>Loading rest of file...

>>62942161
The implications are dire; and any other cells of the cult will surely know of the destruction of their fellows, and respond. I fear the situation is beyond the ability of a single Watchtower to contain. Consequently, I am officially requesting aid from the other Watchtowers on-world [attachment: RHODOPSIN RHUBARB SNAPDRAGON (Query Quetzal 1) and the deployment of specialists in dealing with psi-grafted sleeper agents from off-world [attachment: RHODOPSIN RHUBARB SNAPDRAGON (Query Quetzal 2)].

Hopefully, we can root out this cancer before it spreads further.

>End file

>Logging you out...

>Good hunting, Inquisitor.


Another look at all the horrible, horrible things the Crones will do to you. Thoughts?

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>>62940992
Malcador describes him as looking vaguely Native American-ish, comparing him to the western tribals of Merica and Calbi (who are a mix of various ethnicities but have a higher proportion of Native American ancestry than people from the eastern coast like Fulgrim, with golden eyes and dark hair. So it sounds like he looks pretty close to canon.

>>62937941
I love this description. Only thing is Zahndrekh thinks everyone is a Necrontyr and doesn't remember the Old Ones. Asking him about the C'tan would be a big no-no because Obyron is really protective. However, Trazyn might be more willing to part with the information, though I love Zahndrekh's take on it.

>>62938236
>>62938917
Llandu'gor was said to be one of the nicer C'tan. And yet he still makes Mag'ladroth look sane, responsible, and well-adjusted in comparison.

>>62940673
>4-1/?
Flesh, vitae and bony armor exploded out of the living boarding craft. The bubble surrounding the Unyielding and her retinue was criss-crossed with flashing dash lines of flak rounds and the cottony contrails of small anti-craft missiles. The bio ships loosed compressed digestive gasses to jink and dodge while augers and cogitators corrected their life taking ordinances. The calculated mechanical precision of the human ships was still being swamped by the sheer number of locust vessels. Some were getting through. One of the destroyers had already been impacted on the top decks; the rasping, diamond hard teeth, enzymes and acids of the craft ate through the meters of adamantite to deliver its deadly payload. An escort bio-ship had found a blindspot in one of the frigates flak screens and careened headlong into the side. The bloated ship burst smearing the vessel in acids and viruses that dissolved through the decks at a frightening rate. Entire bulkheads vented, spattering the viscous juices across the inside of the void shields until they shorted. Boarding vessels dove toward the stricken ship like vultures. A many-limbed bio ship, roughly the size of a frigate, had rushed inside the Imperial formation, impervious to the smaller ordinance. It raked talon-tipped appendages across the vessels ripping up thick plating and flailed limber, coiling tendrils that tried to crush and tear away anything they could grasp.

>>62942826
>4-2/?

The Unyielding Protest was faring much better. Her defense networks were nigh-impenetrable. Void creatures that strayed too close were subject to overlapping screens of flak. Missiles tracked and obliterated whatever was beyond the range of the autoguns. Entire flights of troopships and escorts were vaporized as lance batteries fired actinic beams through them at the hive ship and her escorts. Likewise, living craft smeared and then vaporized as macrocannon rounds barreled through their formations towards larger targets. However, Unyielding and her companions were taking just as much punishment. Hundred meter long chitin spines shattered against the void shields. Globs of corrosive bile crashed over the ablative fields eroding them as the tides of a beach might. Sections of Unyielding's void shields were failing. Troop laden craft swarmed towards the holes that had appeared in the overlapping fields. Lyras’ thrust was being blunted.

>>62942382
Was gonna mention something similar, and Trayzn’s occasional state visits to the Traveling Court are an excellent way for him to tempt more talented Imperial scholars into his employ with tantalizing anecdotes.

>>62942382
War of the Old Ones might still be a thing to him that he remembers if not accurately. It's just the whole robot thing that he can't see and warps his world view.

>>62942841
>5-1/?
Warning voxes blared. Dingy, soot-covered yellow strobes illuminated the metal bulkheads. The gun decks of port battery three were filled with a coagulating fog of acrid smoke, corrosive vapors and venting mists. Whorls formed as bolter rounds rocketed towards fleshy gaunts. Linear wisps formed as talons sliced towards servitors, naval conscripts and Astartes alike. The drilling maw of the living dropship had punctured two floors up from the deck. Captain Phiras and his squad were fighting a daunting vertical battle. The locusts would scramble up from underneath catwalks whilst some would jump and leap from above. Others skittered down stairs and through open bulkworks. At any time Phiras and his men were surrounded. The gunnery crew was still drilling even in the toxic miasma and xenos intrusion. Their belief in their captain and the trust in the Scythes gave them courage even in the face of the tide of locusts. The huge macrocannon fired. Backblast and sonic concussion parted the fog. The force nudged Phiras back before the magnetics in his boots activated. Conscripts stumbled but regained their footing instantly; they were used to it. The captain could see gaunts bent over like blades of grass in a wind as their clasping legs fought for purchase. Some were blown wholesale over catwalks and into bulkheads. An unlucky dozen or so locust were crawling on supports and bearings as the autoloading gimbal rocked backwards. The machinery masticated the yielding flesh and chitin of the invaders.

>>62943693
Ichors and biles began to ineffectively eat into the metal. Across the deck, the wet corpse of a gaunt sagged onto an autoloader for one of the many flak guns. The overseer stared at the body he had shot several times. The autopistol shook in his nervous grip. Unlike the macro gun, the enzymes and caustic blood quickly dissolved the much smaller structure of the autoloader. It furiously self-destructed. Large caliber flak round detonated in the feed racks killing the overseer, the gun mechanism, it cogitator banks and anything else unlucky enough to be near it. A stray round pinged off of Phiras’ pauldron.

>5-2/?
Phiras looked up; he had one more level to reach. Above was the second floor of the gun deck where the troopship had punched through. The locusts were still trickling out of the slimy, toothy orifice. He heard a clang behind him as a pair of gaunts landed on the catwalk. He wheeled and his bolter barked. A quintet of mass-reactive shells obliterated the intruders. Phiras turned back towards the staircase and sauntered on. The locusts swarmed the captain as soon as he reached the landing at the top of the stairs. Phiras whirled into a flurry of measured sword strikes and bolt shells. He pumped round after round into the gaunts that rose from below the catwalk and clambered up the stairs behind him. His sword separated snarling heads and swiping talons even as he ducked and blocked them. His bolter had clicked empty so he resorted to crushing one of the last beasts beneath his heel while swing his gun around to crumple the skull of another offender. He finished it with a bifurcating swipe through its thorax. Another miniature battle was over. The evaporating ichors fizzed into mist off the floor and his armor. His chest piece had a rent in the left side and his pauldrons were covered in a myriad of scratches. An errant boring beetle had gnawed and melted a hole into his right shin guard. “Damn. They managed a couple hits,” thought Phiras.

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>>62943719
>5-2 cont
The macrocannon fired again. Down to the other end of the suspended floor Phiras finally saw a pair of his squad round the landing. “You boys are slow,” he smiled inwardly. The creatures scuttling towards them met grisly fates at the fiery maw of a storm bolter, smoking bolt pistol rounds and gnashing chainsword teeth. The three Astartes joined up at the quivering mouth of the troopship. Phiras yelled out over the din of battle, “Burn the infestation out men! Get your meltas out!” Grenades were tossed into the gullet. The sizzling meat and tortured screeches of the dying ship were ignored. “Set that patch up Ordin,” hiras ordered, “Graid, finish off the remaining creatures in this deck.’ The marine placed a mesh field over the hole as inertia pulled the bio ship out of the cavity. The shimmering field would hold the void out until an adept could patch the damage. The other marine jogged off to confront the few gaunts scattered about the gun deck. Meanwhile, Phiras voxed the various other squads he'd sent to other puncture sites. Some reported they were still in the process of repelling the borders. Others had successfully eliminated the locusts and were moving amidship to new breaches. The macrocannon fired. Suddenly entirety of the Unyielding lurched throwing the marines and conscripts to the floor. Immediately Phiras’ comms pinged with a priority hail from Captain Lyras, “Phiras! We got a problem!”

>gotta hit the sack but more posts will come
>gotta post some scythes artwork at this point ya know?

>>62943229
Old Ones would have been a thing from history in the lifetime of the Nemensor.

>>62944281
But not ancient history. If the aristocracy were stasis hopping to extend their dynasties rule whilst maintaining continuity of vision and policy then there might have been some around in the days of Biotransferance who met people who fought in the Old One war if not actual survivors of it.

I'm assuming that the basic timeline was

Rebellion Wars

C'tan discovered

Old One Wars start

C'tan incarnate

Biotransferance

C'tan War starts

Old One remnants get desperate and accidentally make enslavers

Old Ones die

Last of C'tan dealt with one way or a other

The long sleep

Total time from rebellions to long sleep between 1,000 and 1,500 years.

>>62940992
Skin tone varies greatly depending on sunlight levels. No beard, Isha wouldn't approve of a bearded husband. Long black hair. Square jaw, prominent cheek bones, roman nose, metallic golden iris'. Shoulders are broad, described as athletic rather than hulking. 2.5 meters tall.

Typically wears a dusty grey robe when not making a public appearance.

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>>62946333
>>62940992
there was a drawing, but its also been referred to as a replica of an in-universe portrait

>>62902598
>>62905657
>>62909124
(These first few paragraphs are probably going to get rearranged when I put this up on the wiki, so please excuse how this is jumping around somewhat.)

CONT.
When the Ulmeathics first found the Helith, they did not immediately recognize them as sentient beings, thinking them some form of twisted fleshy design to amuse the Nameless, though whether this is a reflection on a propensity for flesh-crafting as their main technology or simply indicative of their personal tastes can only be speculated at. Upon discovering that the bloated blobs dragging themselves upon the ground were not only sapient, but fully aware of their condition, it was debated on whether the greater kindness would be to simply put them out of their misery. The Ulmeathic were not cruel, but it was late into their campaign; their renowned endurance was wearing thin, their soldiers growing weary and their ranks tattered by their ceaseless advance. The resources simply could not be spared to care for those who could not lift a weapon or constuct fortifications when their own forces were beginning to wear thin.

It was when members of the Helith were brought to Ulmeathic medical wards in order to better study their physical state that their propensity for medicine was discovered. The Helith would seek out any injured they could reach, at first by dragging themselves through the halls, then carted along by nurses once their intentions became clear. Using the multiple fibrous cilia that are their analogue to fingers, they could delve deeper into wounds than fingers could dare go, stitching veins and tissues with a precision most would require tools to achieve.

>>62948900
Shattered bones were reassembled and properly aligned, and soldiers thought to have been put out of action for good were able to stand and take up arms once more. While they were not miracle workers and could not save those beyond saving, the Ulmeathics were quick to flood their hospitals and regimental medical staff with their newfound workers. When the Nameless counterattacked, they found the forces that should have been breaking bolstered by troops thought eliminated, and resistance stiff enough to hold out for reinforcements instead cracking from the pressure. In thanks for ensuring their campaign could continue, and seeing them through to the end, the Ulmeathics and Passeri did all that they could to help improve the Helith's lot, and restored them to at least some semblance of a normal existence.

(end of stuff that will need to be inserted in-between the earlier stuff. Now on to the next bit.)

>>62948949
Considering their subservient, empathetic natures, it is shocking to note that these passive, amicable xenos were also the source of the greatest diplomatic incident between the races of the Ulmeathic League and the Imperium.

The Admech officially arrived soon after the refugees from the League were accepted into the Imperium, eager to convince their new clients of the superiority of Mars-approved designs, especially when it came to their downright-primitive augments. For a time, all went well; the Helith were well aware of their augment's failings, having started from the worst possible designs and working their way backwards towards pure functionality. Admech's insights into the craft was already revealing flaws they had not realized needing fixing, and the techpriests were pleased to have such a rapt audience willing to accept their teachings without question- or at least, without contest; the questions were many, but in pursuit of elaboration, and there are few topics as appealling for a techpriest to discuss as the virtues and details of mechanical augmentations. The relationship was shaping up to be very pleasant and amicable.

Then one of the techpriests made the mistake of replacing his own biological arm with the servo-limb he'd been preparing, to give a demonstration.

>>62949101
The Helith were utterly horrified. They had thought the techpriests a race like their own, twisted by others or necessity into reliance on augments, or the injured and sickly of humanity who sought to overcome their sacrifices. That they removed their own flesh willingly to replace it with wires and welding, that they SMILED as they brandished the twisting of their form into something of oil and steel instead of flesh and bone... It was an insult, a slap in the face, a dismissal of the suffering of their race, the pain they had to endure, the sense of being 'wrong' that they still felt every time the thrusters did not respond as quickly as inflating their sacks would have, the itch in their flesh from atmosphere missing something that had been abundant on their homeworld, when flight that should have made them feel free instead made them feel the downward tug of the metal within them dragging them away from the sky that was their home. Why, they asked frantically, desperately, searching for something, anything to explain why these beings hurt themselves so, Why do you do these things to yourselves when the flesh is still good?

"The flesh is weak," said the befuddled techpriests, unsure why such a normal thing had disturbed their new clients so, "and thus we forge ourselves anew, that we may be better." For surely these beings who also sought the strength of the machine, who could not have traveled the stars if not for the augments within their flesh, surely they understood the importance of improving yourself by excising the limitations of your flesh?

("Your flesh is weak," said the cackling horde that dragged them from their clouds and strapped them to tables, "and thus you are nothing. but rejoice," their hushed taunts carrying over the whirring of saws that smelled so strongly of wrong. "For we shall forge you anew- to better suit your stature.")

>>62949384
The main reason no Mechanicus died on that day is because the Helith are utterly unsuited for violence. Weapons drag them to the ground, and they cannot compete the swing of a blade or handle the recoil of a gun. All they had was the grip of their tentacles, knowledge of the workings of the body, and a furious, hysterical rage. The cogpriests lost many of their parts, including the offending arm, before managing to lock themselves within a room the Helith could not enter. Intervention was slow in coming; it took several hours of argument, transmittion of shaky holovid recordings, and a relating of the sequence of events from one of the clearer-headed techpriests before any authority could be convinced that the Helith, of all people, were rioting.
When it was finally accepted that the Helith were on the warpath, Nakaidos' response was swift and brutal; the Ulmeathic may not be unkind, but they have little tolerance for rebellion or disorder, even from a race such as the Helith. This did much to soothe the Mechanicum's ruffled feathers, as did the ban placed on Helith access to Imperium technology for several year's time. That this was done in part to prevent further contact between the Helith and Admech goes unspoken by those in power, both in the Ulmeathic League who wish to protect their fellow member-race, and by those in Imperial governance who recognize that the Mechanicum is at least partly at fault for skimming over the details of exactly how the Helith came to their current state. As for the Helith, their care is now handled by the Adbio, with whom their relationship has proved much less turbulent.

>>62949399
and there we go. As I said, I'll fix the pacing and format issues while I add it to the wiki.

That bit in the spoilers doesn't necessarily need to go on the wiki; it's more to give tone to why the Helith flipped out so badly. None of them would remember that, but the attitudes created in their ancestors when that kind of language was used were passed on and influenced the mentality of the Helith, somewhat similar to how "bastard" is still a curse-word despite most people not really caring about parentage these days.

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>>62950030
That bit in the spoilers absolutely does need to go on the wiki. If the Helith have long tendrils with delicate membranes, sensitive with nerve endings and receptors then they could between themselves exchange information directly. The can exchange memories between each other. It's not psychic as such as there is not otherworldly contact, just the exchange of electrical impulses. They've never been able to get it to work with anyone else.

Certain treasured memories are shared among the population and memories that are considered of great historical importance that are not treasured at all, such is the Nameless and what they did to them. To the Helith the memory is still fresh because they have kept it fresh to remind them and future generations that they were not always like this and with good fortune and hard work the good times will come again.

Then a Tech-Priest cuts his own arm off and accidentally recites almost word for word the mockeries of the Nameless.

On the plus side of it the Bio-Druids and the Helith have common ground on taking the piss out of the autistic cog humpers.

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>>62945106
I think that's close, but with a few events switched around. The C'tan were discovered after the war with the Old Ones started as a last ditch effort to do something to stop the Old Ones from curbstomping them. The War got grindy between the C'tan incarnating and biotransference which is why the Necrontyr agreed to the latter. Eldar, hrud, krork, k'nib, etc. were uplifted about this time as the Old Ones panicked that the Necrons had weapons capable of harming them and needed meat shields...I mean minions to do the fighting for them. The C'tan wars started when the Old Ones were on the wane, because now that there was no longer an existential threat they started fighting for power. However, the Old Ones were not completely gone and that's when the Enslavers started popping up.

>>62946333
He can grow a beard, but I'd assume he just shaves it off. How he does it I don't know because it's described as having the consistency of flak armor.

>>62944281
Indeed. Trazyn mentions the Necrontyr knew about the Old Ones for almost as long as they had space travel, even if the Old Ones mostly left the Necrontyr to their own devices besides some diplomatic flare ups (i.e., "what do you mean you knew about the radiation" and "what do you mean 'you aren't ready for immortality'").

What are eldar corsairs up to in this timeline?

Not only Yriel goons, but warbands like the Void Dragons.

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>>62950871
Presumably it could be shaved off using a power blade, his own psychic fire or an angle grinder.

Presumably as a pre-Long Sleep robot Zahndrekh knew all this shit in the right order with crystal clarity. Imperium era Zahndrekh doesn't necessarily need to. He has all the right pieces, the memories of the events are mostly all there (with the exception of biotransferance obviously) but it might have gotten a bit jumbled up with the added confusion that as lord of some shitty podunk settlement the news came to him late and sometimes not at all.

>>62951736
There are less outright pirate corsairs and more privateer corsairs. Pirate corsairs were a way that the craftworlds dealt with insufferable cunts it didn't want to deal with in Vanilla. Send them out into the galaxy to sate their lusts and hungers, maybe they come back and maybe they don't but any humans harmed was not their concern at all.

In the Nobledarkness that's not an option. Any corsair going pirate will be hunted and likely by their own kind. This is their Imperium, the Realm of the All-Mother, transgressions against her children and children of adoption are met with full force of The Law and on sea of stars the law is hard. If they are taken alive they are dragged before the Law-mastes of the Path of The Enforcer on their craftworld. Should their crimes be great enough they are executed, should their souls be tainted and made foul their soulstones are broken under a hammer far from the craftworld.

Corsairs that remain privateers are not an issue. They are businessmen with a boat to call their own. Do a little cargo hauling, do a little ferry work, maybe be a convoy guard, sign on as extra help with the Navy for a few years, maybe do some undercover work for the Inquisition. It's fun and varied work and you get to see lots of interesting things and meet lots of interesting people and home is always there to return to.

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>>62951736
IIRC (and my memory on the subject is not great, so take this with a grain of salt), a lot of corsairs like to hang out with Rogue Traders (either eldar or otherwise), who love to hire them because they bring their “own” (sometimes stolen) toys and hundreds of years of experience, making them excellent fighter pilots. Tagging along with a rogue trader lets them indulge in thrill-seeking while technically being on the right side of Imperial law. And a corsair may eventually get their own Writ of Trade and break off on their own. Yriel is a good example of this. There is zero difference between Yriel’s personality before and after he received his Writ of Trade. The only difference is his shenanigans are now sanctioned.

Corsairs claim to be on the “Path of the Corsair”, which is basically a scoundrels code of honor reminiscent of Jack Sparrow. Be charming, be witty, and if you have to backstab someone do it in style, etc. The Craftworlds claim that’s a path of bullshit and is not recognized by any Craftworld, the various governing bodies of the Craftworlds worry that the corsairs are corrupting the youths.

However, corsair life isn’t as nice as it seems. Yriel for example, was doing things completely illegally before Kraken. And while most are privateers there are quite a few corsair bands which are full anti-authoritarian, they aren’t into the sadism or religious fervor of the Dark or Crone Eldar, but they have no problem attacking Imperial interests or hanging out in Commorragh. The Craftworlds have declared them persona non grata and if caught by humans they usually end up getting shipped back to one of the Craftworlds. Eldar don’t like seeing eldar getting killed but they are very interested in keeping their reputation clean. Or worse, the corsairs get shipped to “the Imperium is the New Eldar Empire” Biel-Tan.

>>62950733
>sharing memories through their tendrils
I hadn't considered that. It's an interesting idea, though I feel like it should probably be more vague than actual recollection; our own memories tend to warp over time, it's probably worse when essentially playing the telephone game with your ancestors. Only a couple of really significant points would remain clear.

Assuming this is something we want to be a thing, of course. Does everybody else think this is something we'd like to include?

>>62953369
I like it, or at least the idea that the AdMech were echoing the Nameless Enemy and the Helith knew it.

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>>62953042
It's not that Biel-Tan considers the Imperium the "New" Eldar Empire. That would imply that the Empire ever fell and had to start again. It did not. Obviously it did not. You know how they know that it did not? Because they hold true to the Empire, the Empire as it was before it became decadent and degenerate. All of their surviving gods live in the Empire, the Dark Carnival travels it's worlds just as it did in the ancient days, the Avatars of Blood Handed Khaine march along side the armies of the Empire, the All-Mother sits upon the throne of the Empire. So long as they hold true to the Empire, hoist it's the colours high and swear their loyalty to it's name it has not fallen. The Homeworld might be in enemy hands but the Empire endures.

Corsairs that use their high station to harm the Empire are guilty of treason against the Throne, and have by definition broken faith with the All-Mother. Some can be redeemed with corrective education and good honest work, others can not.

Is there a Dark Biologis to go with the Dark Mechanicus?

>>62950733
Its essentially the (cultural) equivalent inverse of Szarekh's request to Oscar in regards to biotransference. Neither facing up to the theoretical soundness and coherence of the proposition, nor its lack of overt malicious intent helps, and in fact only heightens the realization of the proposition's horror. The particular articulation of the idea is what reveals its undesirability, nobody but Szarekh could plausibly be pleased with the results of biotransference undone under Szarekh's rule at his direction, but absolutely nobody would be happy if the Mechanicus ended up needing to take care of a fleet of emotionally scarred servo-blimps. It's your doctor reassuring you with how he'll save your pacemaker from that malignant tumor attached to it.

>>62956539
They exist in theory, but the Biologicus was a fairly recent political contrivance at the time of the Great Crusade to Great Hunt, whereas the Mechanicus was already a thing that existed throughout the ruins of the GaBHD for the whole age of strife. Since then the Biologicus has essentially sorted into court- and hedge- varieties. Courtly Biologicus are often tied hard with vested interests to the Imperial Throne/Crown/Personage, and could more accurately be called Oscar and Isha's 'demons' before fealty to any other might be considered. Hedge Biologicus are still great and mighty in their knowledge, their potency is that of Kudzu, but they are themselves very much part of the (galactically) local ecosphere, which is their chief concern and often sole interest almost by definition.

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>>62957073
>>62953473
It's also worth noting that the Admech were not unaffected. They may be more machine than man, but the Man is still in there. Whether they were conscious of it or not, a part of them was eager to have others who see the value of augmentation like they do (Hubworlders and Demiurg don't count because they're snobby assholes according to the Mechanicum - rather hypocritically). It might not be respect or seeing them as equals, but finding someone who does the things you do is always nice.
Having them start screaming because they see a reflection of tormentors so vile they were eradicated entirely in you would be a harsh shock, and bring up some very uncomfortable questions. For some- especially the ones in proximity to the event who saw the hysterics for themselves- it was a reminder of the fact that they walk a path next to a yawning chasm, of how deep that hole goes, and just how close they are to the edge. Some of them didn't like the answers they found.

The most tangible effect would have been a quiet loss of support for the movements to find ways to make improved soldiers and skirt the ban placed on pic related. Not a complete stop, and there's always some who think "what's the worst that could happen?," but for many, the Helith are an example of the worst that could happen.

>>62957992
Okay, so the picture in your post is Grimdark taken to the extremes of hilariously horrifying and horrifyingly hilarious, but could something like that form the basis of Space Marine Dreadnoughts? Not the horrendous torture bits of course, but perhaps by combining human and Eldar tech a more mobile Dreadnought can be created, sort of a cross between a Wraithlord and a canon Dreadnought.

Hell, look at Dreadknights sans the baby carrier (maybe with the canon Dread coffin midsection in its place) or that otherwise hilarious Iron Man model posted elsewhere. Those could work for better Dread models.

>>62958077
Not sure how well the technology would mesh. Despite being functionally analogous on the battlefield, wraithguard and dreadnaughts work completely differently. Dreadnaughts are made by cybering up a Space Marine who has lost most of their limbs. Wraithguard are made by ripping someone's soul out of their body and shoving it in a full-body prosthetic. There is also the issue of getting a soul stone to work on humans. It is possible to use soul stones on non-eldar, but the only people who have figured out how to do it are the Dark and Crone Eldar (seeing as the Imperium isn't giving soul stones to everyone), and much like the time in canon when the Imperium asked the Dark Eldar for tech support, doing so in this timeline is likely to end poorly.

The AdMech might also get pissy about messing with the STC design. Though by the "modern" day in the last few millenia the AdMech have been willing to swallow their pride and collaborate with bonesingers on hybrid technology, on the basis that the Imperium needs every advantage it can get given the threat of Malys' 13th crusade, the tyranids invasions, and the Star Empire.

That said, it raises the possibility for more tragedy. Being a dread is no fun regardless of how good the chassis is, but it's even worse for people like Bjorn because they can't move him to a newer chassis without the significant risk of him dying.

>>62956539
>>62957281
Oh yes. Though not as prominent as there wasn't a huge schism. Though a lot of Imperial AdBio sometimes go over the line in their zeal. The problem with the AdMech is they are too dogmatic. The problem with the AdBio is they aren't dogmatic enough.

>>62958077
The designs from the Iron Fists Legion would be available to the Imperium, and the Throne could probably strongarm the OMB into producing them for Astartes chapters with good favor.

>>62957992
Was it in the last thread where we got a demonstration of what happens to people who try to recreate those things?

>>62954203
You know, this regard of Biel-tan could put it in the eye of the G.E.C..

>>62917156
Presumably they started to give less of a shit as time went on. History's for nerds and the effort could be better spent flesh crafting new orifices and appendages.

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>>62960488
It's hardly a conspiracy, they aren't subtle about it.
>>62958919
The bigger problem with the AdBio is that they have no real accountability within the AdBio and like to treat instructions as suggestions and laws as guidelines when they come from outsiders. Outsiders meaning people outside their particular order within the AdBio because they don't recognize the authority of any other member of another order and consider the ruling council to be a bunch of clueless dipshits who need to keep their dicks out of other peoples pies.

>>62960488
I'm a bit tired here- what's the GEC?

>>62961710
Galactic. Eldar. Conspiracy.

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>>62961391
>It's hardly a conspiracy, they aren't subtle about it
...explain?

>>62961824
A conspiracy is typically a group of people acting behind the scenes to do something unlawful.

Biel-Tan has no intention of usurping the Imperium for eldar dominance or anything of the sort. Why is this? Because they openly refer to the Imperium as the Eldar Empire and publicly claim direct and unbroken continuation from the day they crawled out of the Webway in the desolation after the War in heaven all the way up to 999M41.

It's why they are so loyal to the Imperium and why they defend it with such enthusiasm.

>>62954203
>The Homeworld might be in enemy hands but the Empire endures.
>Biel-Tan has spent the last ten thousand years referring to Earth variously as the 'temporary capital', 'capital in exile', etc.
>they at least let the issue of acknowledging Shaa-Dome as the historic capital of the Imperium drop, after the third Black Crusade.

>>62953042
If they have to backstab somebody they had also better not do it to the legitimate businessman who genuinely has nothing to hide because they can go to a higher authority with the matter and that will make life uncomfortable.

Also the Writ of trade is now more of a symbolic thing rather than the license to print money it used to be. There aren't that many people beyond the wall that have survived and are still sane enough to trade with.

>>62961824
They control the best.

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>>62964281
>best
*banks. I meant banks.

>>62962235
The "Capital" is wherever Isha All-Mother is.

>>62914815
Hubworlders are possibly more likely to accept xenos into the ranks of their Hubworld Orthodox Mechanicus brotherhoods and sisterhoods. For one thing it pisses off the Marsies and thats always good and they are way less centralized than the Adeptus Maechanicus so there is less stopping them if they want to allow it.

Except eldar. They're in the Book of Grudges.

>>62964903
That would be Rogue Trader houses, or whoever else in the aristocracy gets made high lord of the mercantile fleets

Alright, got the Helith stuff up on the wiki page with the rest of the races of the Ulmeathic League. I'll see about getting something properly written for Port Cherys next, hopefully sometime tomorrow.
>>62959851
Either that thread or the thread before it. The project was banned and shut down, but there's always somebody advocating for bringing it back, or using stuff from it for a new project because "THIS time we'll get it right!"

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Nobledark by GW

>>62970711
Yeah, at this point I really do think GW steals our ideas

>>62970711
>>62971586
Okay, wow, they really are copying us. That ship design plus the concept of the calm discussion by groups that in canon are all stupidly-intolerant of each other... There's no way the artist hasn't been browsing these threads.
At the very least, it's a coincidence of sizeable proportions.

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>>62971586
>>62972059
Look to the good side, our alt-verse is being ported into canon.

Remains to see how much they will preserve, how much they will butcher.

>>62972311
Honestly, I'm somewhat stoked at /tg/ having some influence over actual GW canon as opposed to stuff fa/tg/uys at FFG put in their games. That said, I don't really think we'll have that much impact on what the brain trust at GW does, nor do I think we had that much impact in the first place. IIRC GW's been moving towards Nobledark for quite a while now, long before this project took steam.

That said, if they put Love Can Bloom in, my endless nutting will birth Slaanesh IRL.

>>62972424
>IIRC GW's been moving towards Nobledark for quite a while now, long before this project took steam
While this is true, it's only from GS onwards things got serious,

>That said, if they put Love Can Bloom in, my endless nutting will birth Slaanesh IRL.
Heh, I don't think they will make it so explicit.

And they really don't need to, as Illyan Nastase was just a reference that some eldar pirate had a good time with some human gal.

>>62964903
>. I meant banks
>Ia(eldar)n M Banks
>Iron Minds confirmed Eldar collaborators
It all lines up

>>62972311
>how much they will butcher
Technically, merging the two kind of defeats the point of both. 40k is grimdark, Nobledark Imperium is Nobledark. It works because they contrast each other, with Nobledark's possibility of happier resolutions making canon's bad ends much worse for the suggestion that different choices could have averted disaster.

>>62974686
GeeDubs won't move canon 40k entirely to nobledark, just half-way. What they're trying to do is to give some flexibility to the story, as pure grimpderpness wouldn't allow a demi-god being ressurected by an alien death princess, at the same time both species haitng each other guts. It's very clear they're trying to do some 'age of heroes' thing.

And if they decide to come fish for ideas on /tg/, eventually apeing some of this project...Well, there's fuck all we can do.

>>62975185
>Give some flexibility to the story
In some respects yes, but in other respects they've been butchering the "your dudes" potential of the Imperium being a big enough place for all kinds of planets to exist. Before Agri-worlds were understood by fans to be a mix between pleasant countrysides with nothing but food as far as the eye can see to processing-planets where shit is shipped in and the artificial growth-hormones in the soil also result in the atmosphere being toxic or whatever. Now GW has come out with "agriworlds are all shitty places where shit is shipped in and the planet is processed and overused until the planet can no longer sustain life, so agriworlds only last about eleven years before being useless."
Which is stupid, even with the Imperium's ridiculous logistics, and extremely limiting when the stance is that every agri-world throughout the Imperium is like this.

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>>62972059
I have to say, when I first heard the news about UR-025, the first things I thought of were Tiberius, Elmo, and "totally a Man of Iron, not a Necron" Gahet. But I am almost certain that is a coincidence.

I think that ship is a typical eldar corsair design, though.

>>62975330
I am almost 100% sure the new agri-world fluff was written in response to the common sentiment of "technically the average planet in the Imperium is fairly decent, yes quality of life is lower in modern day but in the form of 'subsistence living bad' rather than 'Mad Max bad' unless you're being invaded or a hive" that you see a lot of people citing.

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>>62975330
That's because they're trying, and failing, to unbrick the setting.

For more than a decade, any potential for story-telling and universe expansion was funneled into HH, which turned to be a shitshow. Now they're trying to do something different, the damage is starting to show, and GW hasn't been minimally competent for a long time.

We can surely expect more in-universe potential to be thrown in the fire.

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To get back on the topic of nobledark, speaking of ships, I thought I’d throw out a ship idea I had been mulling over for a while.

We’ve mentioned that only the largest Necron ships have inertialess drives, right? And smaller ships like Doom Scythes have to hitch a ride with larger ones? So would it make sense that Necrons would have some kind of specialist carrier to ferry smaller ships around the galaxy, since the Necrons are so dependent on inertialess drives and Dolmen gates, while an option, are really dangerous and unreliable?

I was thinking something like a “spineship”, kind of looking like the typical crescent shape but with a huge asymmetric blade for the edges of smaller Necron ships to attach to. It’s not much of a fighter, being basically an inertialess drive hooked up to the spine, so in battle it’s job is to get the ships there and leave.

The fact that it makes them look like giant floating ribcages or ancient Egyptian solar barges is a complete coincidence. Honest.

>>62976129
I dig it. Also for all but Szarekh there would probably have been a question of a trade off between putting the one (or very few) inertialess drive your dynasty could afford to produce on (and investing in constructing) a ship that was primarily a fleet carrier or a ship that was primarily a dreadnaught, and the non-inertialess drive ships that would make up a fleet to compliment their I drive ship. There would be questions in naval alliance between houses, when one house must move its fleet as one upon its massive carrier or leave its strength stranded piecemeal, but another house has a duo or trio of irreplaceable, far-ranging heavies that can take with them only the least of escorts.

Also, have we elaborated on Trayzn's slow accumulation of inertialess drives and other treasures of the Star Empire from other late awakening dynasties for the severance of their control protocols. Solomance

>>62976926
You can move small ships FTL by getting them in the effect envelope of one of the big ships. Nemesor Zahndrekh does this as he only has one ship that can into FTL.

>>62977595
Zahndrekh does this because he doesn't have many ships. He has a garage full of lovingly maintained classics that he wouldn't allow within a hundred lightyears of a warzone under normal conditions. But he's a nobleman with obligations.

Presumably dynasties with a decent sized fleet would need a more reliable way of dealing with bigger numbers of smaller ships.

>>62967357
Book of Grudges.

It's not WHF levels of autistic "every little thing ever done to us is reason for a thousand years of blood feud". Squats can let shit go and often do. It's the real fucking dick moves that get in the book.

Eldar not honouring their agreement to come to Hubworlder aid during the Age of Strife that resulted in thousands of years of misery and being very slowly pushed through an orkish meat grinder that almost results in the extinction of human life on the Hubworlds for example gets you in the book.

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>>62968456
That would be Abdul Goldberg

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Speaker_for_the_Merchant_Navy_and_Rogue_Traders_Abdul_Golberg

At least in theory. In practice he and his family are too unimportant to actually enforce anything and generally just go with what the majority want so long as it doesn't look like it will annoy the Royal Couple enough to get them to intervene. In such an instance he sides with The Throne because he's no fool. From his point of view the High Lording job is just a means to gather information and fill the most lucrative job openings with members of his family because family is the thing he cares about most of all.

Due to his hands off attitude to almost everything (because hand on or off there's a hard limit to what he can currently do and keeping hands off ensure he still has hands at the end of the day) including the interstellar banks it's not unreasonable that other people, people who can predict future events to choose one totally random example, could be manipulating things without anyone either caring or noticing.

Two major problems with this idea; Firstly it would require a level of cat herding coordination between eldar from different craftworlds that would be unprecedented. Secondly the Imperium itself is not a capitalist society even if many of it's member worlds are and attempts to outright control the Imperium via the banks just results in people being told to fuck off and their assets seized for the war effort if needed. If they push the issue then they have an accident. If they push the issue further then they don't get the dignity of even the pretence of an accident (pic related).

>>62949384
Is there indication of what the Nameless were.

>>62981835
It can be inferred that they were probably Chaos-corrupted, considering their penchant for cruelty and the fact that the Ulmeathics- who with every other race they encountered would rather dominate and rule over- decided that they were worth eradicating both as a people and in concept, from their structures to their writings to their name, both for themselves and what others had decided to call them.

Other than that, and the effect they had on those they conquered, it's impossible to say. The Ulmeathic were thorough in their efforts, even going so far as to bomb lifeless worlds within the systems where the Nameless had inhabited worlds, and the systems surrounding them, in order to obscure which planets were originally Nameless planets. The two best sources left would be Passeri stories and the shared information of the Helith, but the Passeri only sing about the effect it had on them and are intentionally vague about the details (because their ancestors didn't really like to talk about being made to "perform" at dinnertime while their family members were getting served as the main course) and the Helith focused on passing on memories of before and that the Nameless had hurt them- what they passed on is traumatizing enough, and what they intentionally omitted would probably have rendered their race a bunch of mental-ward patients.

>>62978081
Yeah, I definitely imagine the Lady Betsy as a dreadnaught more than a fleet carrier, it can bring its escort ships with it, it has a complement of skiffs and shuttles, but it can't move an entire battlegroup of ships each individually on a similar order of magnitude as the carrier itself. Carriers would have I drives designed to move the tonnage/volume of the fleet plus the carrier, dreadnaughts would have I drives that suffice to move them, along with a little extra capacity. Since the resources to build I drives were limited even at the height of the Star Empire one might figure there would be limits of the capacities of these drives as well, with an engine of some given size needed to move a ship or a given size. A drive for a carrier would presumably be more resource intensive, building an engine to move the whole fleet as one, whereas a dreadnaught can be designed however a lord wants as long as its sufficient to protect and make good use of the investment of an inertialess drive. Inertialess drives only appear in the biggest Star Empire ships not because they're necessarily huge, but because even small I drives are exponentially more expensive to produce than the rest of a ship. Small I drive pickets, scouts, and similar exist in some of the Triarchy fleets, but for most of the NSE the cost of building an inertialess drive that can move a yacht or a superheavy isn't much different, so you might as well go big.

>>62980765
Yeah, ultimately the Throne is a fiat currency to which the Imperium is the sole guarantee, and Oscar's dread accountants have no compunction with going full MMT on financiers. The Imperium does not take loans, for example, more thrones enter circulation when the Imperium needs more thrones, grabs a gold rich asteroid, and makes it into official coins. Thrones leave circulation to become industrial material when the Imperium says, their value and denomination are set as the Imperium says, and debts of thrones are settled or absolved at Imperial command. The utility absolute fiat over the Throne serves in freeing the Imperium from the chaotic system (possibly Chaotic) of market pressures is essentially why the Imperium is so protective of its sole control. Counterfeit is a problem, as are schemes to manipulate deflation with the 'unfortunate loss' of entire treasuries, but so is the essential notion common among aristocratic classes that they own their hoards of thrones, or that they represent value beyond the Imperium's grant. Thrones are Imperial property, public tokens to track the exchange of goods, services, or favor, and divorced from this they are nothing but mass produced yellow discs. A fortune in thrones is a fortune in potential work, if the work isn't getting done, the thrones will be put in other hands.

>>62980765
Pic related is only when nobody else is involved. If it's a group thing they wait until they're in the same room and send in a drugged up threshing machine.

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>>62979276
And the AdMech for intentionally and incorrectly classifying them as abhuman. They haven't got much against abhumans as such but they do resent the tone of voice the AdMech have with them.

>>62979276
>>62984290
I was writing a bit on some ideas for how the Hubworlders view the world and the whole grudges thing. Don't have it with me but will post what little I have when I get to a computer.

bump

I was looking over the wiki page, and got an interesting impression from the lists of battles roughly pre- and post-civil war, where the pre-civil war 'golden age' imperial flavor seems fairly 1600s, our focus on adventures in the eastern galaxy and plays against rival empires and factions is much more "age of exploration" or new world feeling. In actuality these eras weren't actually separate, but its an interesting shift to notice.

Figured I'd post the start of the Conquest of Laer to get feedback.
The world of Laeran was, in all Imperial records of the Great Crusade and since, unique. A wonder brought together in the horror of Old Night, with technology from the brighter age before the dusk of the Old Empire’s Fall. The space based, sculptural colonies of the Laer were first encountered by the 28th Expeditionary Fleet of the Terra’s Children along a long arc across the fringes of the galactic west, and at their eager initiation of contact with the third legion the serpentine Xenos seemed the most advanced, cultured, and diplomatically forward the Imperium had encountered since Eldrad’s representation of the Craftworlders. Shared in these early encounters with the diplomatic clades of the Laer, and confirmed by Imperial analysis of the distribution of known colonies, the Laer had fled their home in the regions of the galactic northwest to escape the collapse of the Old Eldar Empire they had evolved in the midst of. Absconding from their home star in a mass exodus and seeding new colonies along the path of their flight, they had fled the opening of the Eye of Terror.

>>62990083As the next stages of diplomatic contact and positioning were prepared, Imperial assets from the Terra’s Children likewise began the far less stately work of intel gathering and the preparation of contingencies. The Laer’s description of their means of exodus, Laeran itself, was striking both in their soaring reverence for the world, and its technological significance as a gas giant and lunar system driven by torch drives to the point of warp transit capability, constituting a starship of utterly immense scale. Of similar interest were the trans-biological technologies the serpents employed, with many of their modifications matching or surpassing Humanity’s best Astartes or Skitarii implants and treatments. Fulgrim’s personal attention quickly fell upon the Laeran matter, drawn by this wonder, and with it came his inquisitive pack of mechanists and genewrights, Captain Lucius and his force reconnaissance fleets, the Legions’ Blades, the Phoenix Company, the support brigades of heavily updated Merikan Shock Cyborgs, and the Mechanicus Exploratory attaché offered by Ferrus. Their Administratum observers, Munitorum bullet-and-bean-counters, Alpha Legion contacts, and the not insignificant following of painters, sculptors, artisans, documentarians, writers, and veritable circus of other artists that had found Fulgrim as a patron and received stipends as Imperial Remembrancers, followed close behind. As elements of the third legion and their diplomatic entourage contacted more and more Laer colonies the air of open artistic and diplomatic exchange persisted, but in actuality diplomacy stalled, and deep tension was building between parties veiled by a pretense of aesthetic debate and politely contrasting paradigms for cybernetic development and genetic engineering.

>>62990099
Though more formal diplomacy between powers, a meeting on Laeran, remained the subject of talk, in truth the planet’s location was not forthcoming from the Laer even as Imperial Naval assets narrowed down their deductions for its path and place. Within the week the elusive torchworld’s presumptive location was pinned down and confirmed, a discovery made by Lorgar was delivered to Fulgrim by the hand of the Custodes that had accompanied the Preacher’s expedition to the brink go the Eye of Terror.

>>62990112From any other Primarch, the aristocratic ones long in the Warmaster’s highest favor particularly, Fulgrim’s pride and nervous sense of inferiority would have led him to doubt the clear conclusion Lorgar’s report implied. He would have dared to think nearly any of his twenty peers would press such conclusions upon him merely to disrupt the handful of years he had sunk into cautious diplomacy with the Laer, but not of Lorgar, he had no doubt in the conquer of naught but hearts and minds. The Mechanicus attaché, Lucius, Ames, and Ozzy, the Mechanists, the Genesmiths, the Administratum observers, the Eldar Corsair captain Fulgrim had convinced to join them, and all the rest all agreed upon the necessity for decisive action. It was made clear that the path of Laeran had not taken it from its place among the Crone worlds along a direct path out of their midst, that their path started at the Cadian Gate, that their passing had been marked with terror and rapine, that their elder colonies were rocked by civil war against a mono dominant cult of perfection. Fulgrim was insistent that he personally reaffirm to the Laeran delegation with his fleet that the Imperium truly had negotiated with them in earnest, and that he had the assurance of one Mr. Ozzy they would be transported to Ganymede unharmed and in perfect safety. Upon the seizure of their vessel and the Laer diplomats’ removal, Fulgrim returned to the Pride of Imperium and began the Astropathic relay of instructions to activate the contingencies, likewise prepared in earnest.

>>62990130
Next section is even less finished, spec ops Lucius, the Blades, and a bunch of assault cyborgs are at an advanced position way ahead of the main fleet closing on the Laeran torchworld, the plan is they catch it in realspace in whatever star system and do whatever is required to keep it there for the bulk of the Third Legion's top troops sweep along its path eliminating Laeran loyalist colonies to eventually drop on them, while a final force of Astartes leading cyborgs and Astra Militarum troops supports and supplies the cause of the opposition in the Laer civil wars further from Laeran and its influence.

>>62990292
>>62990130
I like it so far. The idea that there was civil war among the Laer both fits with how they originally split apart into the Laer and Ssylth, with the latter fleeing to Commorragh, and raises the possibility of some being earnest in their rebellion and desire to break away, leading to eventually getting evacuated by the Terra's Children and allowed sanctuary- under watch, on their own separate little area away from where they could potentially hurt something.

I bring this up because it's yet another justification for why the Imperium didn't find the Ssylth running Cherys Station that out of the ordinary, and more importantly gives potential for hilarity where one of the War Hounds originally trained under one of the Terra's Children involved in the whole debacle who'd helped evacuate the few sane ones, and is eager to interact with the descendants of the people his teacher told him so much about.
So you have this boisterous Space Marine who's dragged his battle-brothers along to say hello, and is now chatting them up and going on about all the stories his teacher used to tell. Meanwhile the Ssylth are nodding along vigorously and smiling as hard as they can, pouring sweat and [internal screaming] so loud the astropaths on the station start getting a headache.

>>6299072
Yeah, I intended to leave a good amount of space for the Ssylth, since I realized I was also trying to write their origin as well as the battle and made a conscious effort to leave that for someone else. In terms of Fulgrim's tactics I'm trying to make it something like cold war US leveraging of overwhelming diplomatic power accompanied by special forces-centric proxy war, combined with Imperial transhuman tech and superhuman aspirations.

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>>62986041
This is going to be very scattered, I had some stuff down but didn't flesh it out all the way.

Grudgekeeping is a central, and often misunderstood, part of Hubworlder culture.
Grudgekeeping is thought to have started with the Hubworld League’s origins as a semi-independent group of merchants and miners trying to seek their fortunes on the frontiers of the galactic core.
You owe a debt to the parents who birthed you, the hold that raised you, the society you live under, etc. Much of life revolves around repaying what is owed, and it’s part of the glue that holds Hubworlder society together.
Each hold keeps a Book of Debts, in which everything a given hold owes and is still owed is recorded for future posterity. There is no central Book of Debts, owing to the decentralized nature of Hubworlder culture, but there are complete records in some of the more important holds.

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>>62992692
However, over the years debtkeeping has evolved into something more philosophical than simple recordkeeping. When Hubworlders speak of a Book of Debts, they may be talking about a literal book or something more metaphysical, a record of all the historical events of the universe. In this respect, Hubworlders view debts as a sort of karma. It doesn’t matter how much you try to cover up history or pretend that something didn’t happen, it still happened, and eventually the consequences of those actions will come back to haunt you. A common phrase heard among the members of the Hubworld League is the phrase “all debts come due”. This phrase has many uses but is most often translated as “history repeats” or more accurately “what goes around comes around”.

This is part of the reason for the Hubworlder’s legendary animosity with the Eldar. The Hubworlders have one of the most complete records of the history of the galaxy just prior to the Age of Strife. Unlike most of the galaxy, the Hubworlders remember the actions of the Old Eldar Empire. The Hubworlders, though, are less concerned with the atrocities and madness of the last days of the Old Eldar Empire when law gave way to anarchy and depravity, and more concerned with the eldar breaking their mutual protection pact when the Hubworld League was invaded by Orks during the Age of Strife. The eldar did this not because of any crisis on the eldar’s end, no, but because they were too busy fleshcrafting new orifices to honor their oaths. The eldar racked up a lot of debt in their eyes by that action. It’s highly likely the grudge would be dropped if the eldar were simply humble enough to either apologize or admit that their ancestors were in the wrong. But both sides are too proud to back down. The Book of Grudges will always hold their names.

>>62992706
The representatives of the Hubworld League to the Administratum have a history of just loving to pester the representatives of the major Craftworlds by reminding them that “all debts come due”.

Debtkeeping started in the Age of Founding, in order for the holds to keep a running tab of who owed what to whom and when to pay back when possible. Strazta Hold gave you two shipholds worth of tools and you can't repay them right now? Write it down, make sure you pay it when you have the spare resources. This is also why oaths are so important. Oaths are your word and your reliability, and if you can't back it up no one will help you.

The squat mafia/Pyrite order probably started out as debt collectors.

tl;dr: non-Hubworlders see oaths, debts, and grudges as separate things, but to Hubworlders there is no difference. Grudges are are just negatively percieved debts and oaths are positively percieved ones.

>>62990292
Also think it looks good. One thing that might need changing is Cadia was not discovered until after the War of the Beast, and while Crone Eldar (specifically the Conservators) were encountered during the Raid the idea that Crone Eldar were an actual unified force rather than a bunch of insane stragglers from the Fall was not discovered by the eldar and humanity until the War of the Beast. The assumption before then seems to be that the Fall scoured the Eye of all non-daemonic life. An alternative might be they noticed that Laeran came from straight out of the Eye after it formed, which was super suspicious.

>>62993353
>An alternative might be they noticed that Laeran came from straight out of the Eye after it formed

That could be better as it's is, at least for the characters in universe, a possible creeping dread moment. If the Sneks have been setting up colonies as they have been going then they could be looking at the dates of founding and extrapolating backwards, add to this that the colonies are all in worlds that don't deviate more than a few light years from a straight line and the astro-cartographer and the resident Navigator (who adjusts the map for prominent persistent warp currents). The end result is a nervous junior Navigator and a man in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows having to present a rather disturbing implication to the Primarch.

You add that to the shit Fulgrim and his senior contact teams would have seen and reported as they took stock of the colonies even if they hadn't found the homeworld yet and combine it with the better education among the populace in general and officers in particular in matters regarding Chaos and hostilities will happen.

If there were Sneks who wanted out of the pit and had also been spinning stories about atrocities of a most bizarre and cruel nature perpetrated by their own kind then these tall tales might be seen in new light as something other than just rumour, gossip and falsehoods to claim asylum with.

Also by this point it's possible that the Imperium had encountered the Diasporex fleets. They would also have noticed and spoken to the four armed Sneks of the fleet who fled their homeworld prior to the opening of The Eye for much the same reason the Exodites were leaving and with much the same intent. Although the Diasporex aren't everywhere so it's distinctly possible that reports of them hadn't reached Fulgrim and his Legion. They would only hear of them after the fact.

>>62990726
The Imperium assumed that the Cherys Ssylth were Diasporex trying to renovate Cherys for one of their waystations.

>>62970711
GW late to the party as per usual and shitting on the cake.

>>62983184
They're not on as many drugs in this AU. Still high as balls when killing but they do come down between missions.

>>62976129
Looks like the USG Ishimura from Dead Space. That was also pretty ribcage looking, I'm pretty sure that wasn't a coincidence.

>>62950871
At what point did they realize the C'tan were sapient?

>>62999403
After they mastered I drives and produced the first samples of Necrodermis, AFIK

>>62994831
Also and mostly because they weren't bad at.

Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.

things that don't work get broken

>>62999403
When the Old Ones were banging at the doors and Szarekh was worrying he was going to be the last Silent King. Aza'gorod was the first discovered and he was in the Necrontyr's home star.

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>Pre-age of strife tech adepts visit a tomb world and kidnap sleeping locals
The confused Necron commoners the GaBHD stole probably had quite the strange time in their captivity. Any still 'alive' throughout the Age of Strife would be a trove of worthwhile tales, if Szarek and age iself have not claimed them all, Trayzn is certain to treasure their inclusion in his collection.

>>63002814
Or they would get found by Gahet.

>>63005139
A possibility, but with the Iron Minds intent on studying that ancient machine race, coordinating across the galaxy by way of their perfected Astropaths and much emboldened by the play against the old seller of secrets that had gained them the Third Eye of the Sload, Gahet's means to frustrate their efforts may be insufficient. The Iron Minds' had no care for the rank of their femtomechanical captives, and were satisfied to have their red-draped intendants and investigators carry off oncoming warriors and tides of scarabs by the teleporter and gravitic bubble-full. Gahet's Cabal could not act to confound these expeditions and experiments without revealing itself to the GaBHD, and consequently the Eldar Empire. Maybe they could have succeeded in subterfuge if they had combined with the other party the Great and Bountiful Dominion had aggrieved, but Gahet would have sooner gone to the Emperor of Shaa-Dome for help than Be'lakor.

ideas for next thread's theme

>>63007425
Do we really stick to thread theme ideas past the first few posts anyway? I don't seem to recall setting a theme to ever be successful.

Anyway, how is the Inquisition seen in Nobledark? I want to run a DH or RT (haven't decided yet) game in this; while I'm sure the big =I= aren't the boogeymen they are in canon, I'm still a little confused over whether it's generally seen as a few FBI agents coming in to have a talk with you, whether people immediately think of CIA death squads, or NSA wiretapping. Again, I know that in practice it's all of the above, just wondering how the general public perception is.

>>63007695
Maybe we don't stick to the thread theme past the first couple of posts, but from my understanding they're not meant to define what's getting discussed that thread so much as they are conversation-starters, a starting point from which the rest of the thread starts going off in tangents for until somebody posts new writing or a new idea or something interesting.

As for Inquisitors, they're still a bit of the boogeymen they are in canon; their power isn't absolute, but it is terrifying, and their jurisdiction is wherever they happen to be at the moment. General public perception ranges from them being FBI agents who come knocking when there's trouble, to celebrity hero ala John Shepard, to batshit crazy geezers like Kryptmann who control fleets and can reduce your world to rubble.

>>63007695
I don't remember. I think the general impression is still fear and apprehension, as the Inquisition usually don't get involved unless something big is going on. The amount of apprehension is directly proportional to how much they are digging into your business.

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>>63007425
Cute Imperial Couple

>>63007695
They mostly know them from the films!s and know enough to be nervous around them.

>>63009846
At some level its a matter of Ordo. If a major office of the Inquisition is making public appearances on your world, marching forces around and asking pointed questions it means, the adepts sent to investigate have long since called their masters in, and at very best you have the Chaos equivalent of the Heaven's Gate cult and whatever they summoned to look forward to hearing about on local news reports, Maggot men or Genestealers being burnt out of the underhives, or entire swaths of your society being reorganized after the discovery of high level corruption. On the other hand, the Inquisitorial agents might be from some minor and esoteric Ordo, chasing the faintest hint of a lead or attending to a politically contentious but widely inconsequential concern that the local Administratum or tithe paying government could not adequately settle. You fear the presence of Inquisitors as an Imperial citizen not because they would wish you any harm, but for the same reason you would be unsettled by the arrival of a bomb disposal squad, or hazmat suited men. Even visits from the more benign Ordos can spell upheaval in a planet's settled social order, as political capital is spent and local statesmen tip their hands in the Inquisitor's presence, and actions are determined by one's rivals' reactions to the embodied presence of Imperial scrutiny. It's the notables of a world or system that are truly afraid of Inquisitorial visits, having to make some sort of response, the common folk that aren't actually connected to society endangering practices like chaos worship or providing knowing quarter to genestealers have little to fear in terms of reprisals. Still, being evacuated from your dear homeworld while inquisitorial assets and the PDF hold off whatever Horribilus incursion unto their last breath isn't a fun experience, so Inquisitors are serious business in nearly everybody's mind.

Bump

>>63012236
Canonically, one core tenant of the Inquisition is that they don't do routine checks; if your place is being visited by them, better to pack your things ASAP.

>>63007425
=][=

>>63014854
They also follow up a lot of leads, not all of them are good leads and not all following to ends in a gun battle.

>>62961391
And then you have the Sarkic cult type "alternative morality" brotherhoods. They are undoubtedly skilled and often isolationist so their damage is self limiting. The few that find employment in an official and above board capacity is just sufficient, usually, to buy them tolerance for their unpleasantness.

Is there anything in Sol that still needs doing?

>>63014854
>>63017089
The Inquisition also does a lot of boring stuff as well. There’s writefaggotry of them running clinics researching potential cures for genestealer infection (with one notably failing in its mission), Valeria would preferably spend most of her time doing xenoarchaeology and making sure artifacts of importance to galactic history BELONG IN A MUSEUM, and Coteaz spends most of his time trying to understand the underpinnings of xenos technology by wranging Jokaero and working with Kinebrach warsmiths. Those kinds of jobs are about as glamorous as being a data cruncher for the NSA/MI6/your intelligence organization of choice. At least until you get an accidental daemon summoning or such.

They’re also behind quite a bit of tech-heresy, as bankrolling hereteks and the like via an organization the Mechanicus can’t touch without a damn good reason is a good way to get tech to advance, especially since the AdMech is officially hostile at any such attempts to modify technology to fix a current problem. But in general the benefits from this are minimal.

However, your average person isn’t going to know that. It’s a very good question what someone would think if Inquisitor Valeria showed up on their planet looking for xenotech. Valeria herself is essentially harmless unless she accidentally trips some ancient trap, but there’s a very real reason to be worried in her case as her presence means Darkammer might show up to try and ruin everyone’s day. It’s possible in those cases Inquisitors travel under a pseudonym or something. Inquisitors are not inquisiting 24/7, even with the Webway sometimes they are just trying to get somewhere or gather intel.

>>63019965
So, nobledark Inquisition is basically MiB?

>>63020619
It's the Imperium's investigative apparatus, and Inquisitors are expected to press inquiries in the fields of their jurisdiction. The paramilitary elements that are actually part of the Inquisition and not just under an Inquisitor's command are nothing to sneeze at, but they're ultimately part of the business of investigation, and its only really the aptly named Ordo Malleus that bring the proverbial hammer down with naught but their own usual means. An Inquisitor brings the advisors and specialists, the amassed experience with a given problem, the honed instincts and intuitions, and the dreadful contingency of exterminatus if all their efforts fail, but they themselves move as the hounds of the Imperium's great hunt, low and fast, with the stately spear and gun bearers close behind trumpeting the coming of Imperial justice.

And yes, as the post you liked said, they are also the Imperium's main avenue for R&D, not to the extent of designing brand-new systems or patterns in most cases, but more in the way of providing technical solutions to specific things an Ordo might deal with. Examples are the high-UV lasguns for Vampire hunting, hardware and software adaptations to let Inquisitors more easily break into computers of Xenos design, vehicles modified as needed for specific operations, etc. Essentially, the Ordos all have their own (essentially independently run) Q Branch to produce the necessary tech to operate in the margins beyond and between normal Imperial capacities. The most pronounced of these instances are the R&D arrangements of the Ordo Mutatio, which are with the AdBio instead of AdMech Hereteks. This setup is far more prolific in their production than any other, and in fairly recent centuries they have gone so far as to begin supplying their own patterns and designs of bio-augmetics for their parent Ordo and others.

File: cowboy eldar exodite.jpg (1.09 MB, 2000x1076)

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>>63020619
To an extent. But to the general populace the MiB are a semi-myth half believed or whose actions and presence is attributed to other institutions or outright dismissed as the ramblings of a tinfoil hatter off his meds/on too many meds.

In contrast the Inquisition is a known thing. There are films about them. They turn up on multiple occasion and are verified in the histories of the worlds they visit. After ten thousand years with tens if not hundreds of thousands of Inquisitors active at any one time they are almost certainly to have been there before at some point.

The thing is that more often than not their presence is only known retroactively. A man and some friends steps of the train in some town that has been having strange and disturbing things happens. He's wearing a long coat/duster and is tooled up for a fight and so are his friends. He's got two revolvers and bullets made of silver alloy with holy text scrawled into them, you later find out that the bullets contain holy water. He introduces himself as Alius von Pseudonym, a deamon hunter sponsored by the Katholian mission in the big city or the Prometheans or whatever the local equivalent is. He and his motley looking cohorts then storm the old fort, interrupt the summoning rituals, dispatching deamons and cultists with almost preternatural speed and accuracy. The survivors of the cult get dragged to the town and hanged from the neck until dead but not before the stranger gets some names out of them.

Only after the execution and the dust has settled, the injured seen to and the dead buried does the Inquisitor reveal who they are if they do at all and only then to reassure the local law enforcers that this was all done legitimately and professionally.

Holy shit this is autistic

>>63022777
>like clockwork
I'm curious what about the project smacks of autism, or if you just apply that buzzword to anything besides a dispassionate, effort free, and generally cavalier affect.

>>63023510
Not that guy, but you have to admit that working on a fan project that is essentially a treasure trove of fluff can smack people of being slightly obsessive. Mind you, that absurdity is why I love these threads, so I might not be 100% compos mentis myself.

Wrote up a paragraph describing what was mentioned in a previous thread about how Saim-Hann's power doesn't come from psychic might or sheer military forces but the soft power it can leverage via ties with non-eldar groups. Though I think we need a paragraph first talking about how the other Craftworlds look down on Saim-Hann for being wild, disorganized (due to their tribal clan organization), and little better than mon-keigh.

"However, what Saim-Hann lacks in population or political unity it makes up for in connections. Whereas other Craftworlds focus on preserving eldar culture or military pursuits, Saim-Hann has been cultivating soft power, building oaths of friendship and brotherhood across the galaxy. When the Horn of Kurnous blows and the Wild Riders call for aid, legions answer their call, the Disciples of Kurnous, the swarthy warriors of the Vlka Fenryka and with them the Valkyries and Fenrisian Line Regiments, the Harlequins, the myriad ordu of the children of the Khan, even the hunting parties of Nemesor Zahndrekh may join in via their connections to the Khan and Illic Nightspear, though the eldar would be loathe to acknowledge any Necrons as potential allies. Hemibarbaroi one and all, standing together for civilization, for while they may have one foot in both worlds they understand how tenuous the order of civilization can be overcome by barbarity."

>>63023510
Not that guy but I assume a lot of these type of comments (with the exception of people who are genuinely curious like >>62849197 or
offering actual criticism like the anon saying we needed to flesh out the xenos and tau more a while back) boil down to "40k is supposed to be grimdark, if it's grimdark it's not 40k".

>>63024276
>40k is supposed to be grimdark, if it's grimdark it's not 40k
People who say that usually don't know of RT.

>>63024265
>Not that guy, but you have to admit that working on a fan project that is essentially a treasure trove of fluff can smack people of being slightly obsessive

Well I mean when you put it that way I can see how someone could say that, but then again that could be used to define every worldbuilding project on /tg/. I don't think most worldbuilding threads have gone on for this long.

>>63007695
Let us know how it goes, we're all up for storytime in the nobledarkness.

Has there ever been a time that the AdMech went to war with their own or with the AdBio?

>>63028626
Probably at some points, in some places, but its not been a prominent historical point.

>>63028683
There was the Schism that created the Dark Mechanicus.

>>63019792
There was the start of something last thread involving an unknown object orbiting Sol between Venus and Old Earth

>>63029057
The Dark AdMech were already a thing born from exiled adepts, they were outsiders invading rather than brother against brother.

About time for a new thread

>>63029057
I didn't actually catch the 'their own" part, just war with the AdBio. In general the Imperium has been much better at organizing itself in ways that prevent infighting between competing or even opposing internal factions. Part of that is certainly down to having a non-comatose head of state and government present to arbitrate and mediate disputes, and subsequently a much more influential and active Imperial Court directed in the service of the broad Imperial interest instead of those of their individual faction. While it might not be possible to overstate the influence the difference in Emperor made in the development of the Imperial government, some of those differences are also just down to fundamentally different compromises and solutions being chosen, like trusting and empowering the Voidborn in the process of subborning Mars to some extent early in Unification, or inducting Survivor Civs nearly totally intact, etc.