Nobledark 40k XIII: Based Horus edition

There is also Khine.

He is still alive after a fashion and the eldar Aspect Warriors live by his creed and dedicate themselves to him as do a small but not negligible population of humans in the Imperium. Some of the old families of the Imperial Army, many of the Temple Assassins and some of the Space Marine Chapters hold him in varying degrees of reverence.

These are just the gold-like beings that are extant and active in the Imperium, it has oddly not that much to do with the religious nature and makeup of the Imperium.

Slaanesh- The Prince of Pleasure was originally conceived to be the god of joy, and of beauty, but its birth, the fall of the eldar, demonstrated the already fallen nature of the eldar empire. The prince now rules the Brass Palace in the warp, attended by daemons and horrors, and for a long while it eagerly feasted on the souls of the eldar. The great mistress of Shah-Dome has since turned to more complex, extended, and varied predilections. While young and weak as a warp presence, Slaanesh maintains a vast physical empire and cult within the eye of terror, intent on shaping the state of the materium for greater power within the warp. The dark prince and its cabal of faithful cenobites wish to see Slaanesh as master of the warp, with all other gods bound before its throne. The Slaaneshi cult is particularly interested in fulfilling the domination of the eldar pantheon, hoping to angle its personal enmity with the unified empire into a claim to arch-deamonhood and luciferian mastery of all temptation.

And what of Ynnead?

Not around yet.

There is something going on in the Infinity Circuits and World Spirit Clouds but nobody is quite sure what. Is that Ynnead being born from shared emotion of the inhabitants or Ynnead's effect as it pushes upwards from the deep warp and born from the much bigger pool of all the galaxies inhabitants?

Also It's possible that the Impossible Child will be it's body and act like a spiritual lightning rod and draw the finished god-soul into it so they can both be complete.

All that is known is that Ynnead is not here yet. Everything else is up in the air.

Tzeentch- created alongside Malal, he was an early warp god of boundless creativity, writing new rules of sorcery and new beings of thought into existence as quickly as Malal could deny them. In the original duality, formed from and shaped by the Old Ones, the warp and sorcery were ultimately manageable and illuminating forces. In subsequent eons this order has changed, Tzeentch has changed, and sorcery has become a bleak art of insane rituals and hateful acts. Where once he sung a song of creation, he is now a delirious, deceptive crow of plots. Tzeench maintains power bases across the galaxy, as he has since time immemorial, but the true might of his cult is in the twisting redoubts of the webway, in colleges and orders of fell and maddening arts.

Malal- Originally the 'destroyer' of the warp, be he denial or the thought of mortality, Malal swept up the multifarious gibbering creations of tzeentch and met them with their nullifying opposites, or talked them apart with what they weren't. He was supplanted by Khorne after the War in Heaven, and it seemed like impassioned, honorable, involved destruction would better suit the minds of the galaxy than Malal's own nihilistic void of denial.

Nurgle- In the spring of the galaxy Nurgle was created between Tzeentch and Malal, to me maintainer, shaper, and preserver, until such time as Malal might rightly end a story or thought or thing. In the wake of the War in Heaven, as the triumvirate adjusted to the new galactic order, Nurgle began the slow slide into malignance that also afflicted Tzeentch. Nurgle still ultimately serves his role as preserver, but where once in his garden he strove to safeguard against Khorne and temper Tzeentch he now maintains a landfill. His servants can be found on caustic wasteland planets and in the gutters of rookeries, but the foremost among them are the attendants of Isha, seeking to return her to the garden 'for her own safety', and the Astartes of Sisigmund.

Khorne- Born in the heat of the War in Heaven, he may be the psychic reverberation of that bloody event, but it has been posited that he coalesced on the battlefield around some great weapon of the Old Ones, prototype to eldar and ork alike. His relationship to Khine is unclear, but they were alike in aspect, and he has taken up much of the old eldar empire's military caste in his immortal service. He has much love for the great game, and it was in the wake of Nurgle's horrible loss that Khorne championed the usurpation of the Orks. The Blood God is the great power in the warp as of the 41st millennium, commanding the fiercest core of crone eldar and fallen angel warbands and retaining his Ork auxiliaries with greatest ease. His catalysing role in the War of the Beast, drawing slaanesh's lust for Isha and Tzeentch's will for change to push Nurgle's corruption en-masse of the orks, such that he might incite them to a direct and purposeful war, has emboldened him to name himself lord of the immaterium. The Blood God arrays his armies before the Skull throne in him immaterial domain, and there they drill, and march, and war, and stage interminable invasions of the real. Khorne is said to retain Malal, in some form, as advisor, or weapon, but the diminished god's status in the court of murder is unknown.

The exact birth date of Horus are not easy to pin down as the calendar used by the Void Born of Sol was one used by no one else and didn’t recognize the Earth Year as the basic measure of time. And in any case the particular calendar used by Tribe Lupercal fell out of use with in a few generation of the death of Abaddon the Last and the disbanding of the Void Born as a unified nation.

What is that by the final days of the Earth Unification Wars Horus Lupercal was a man of renown and considerable accomplishment. His age was always difficult to judge as up until the extremes of old age he remain spry and lively and remarkable well preserved. When the Warlord first made contact with him he was described as late prime to very early middle years in age. In appearance he was much like all void born; freakishly tall, thin, pale and with big eyes and pianist hands. His face was much accustomed to smiling, his mouth contained three gold teeth and he generally put people in mind of a second hand star ship salesman.

The Void Born were not in those ancient days a unified people, although they were more cooperative amongst their own kind than baseline humanity ever was. This they attributed to the constant exposure to the bottomless depths of the inky blackness. Space is wide and good friends are too few. They would swindle and cheat and engage in cutthroat business practices but never to the point of death and of the branches of humanity theirs was the only one willing in those days to ply the starry sea. How Horus, son of Maherpa, of the Lunar Lagrange Point rose from a humble bulk haulage transporter to represent the Void Born as a unified people is the stuff of legends amongst the Merchant Navy and the early Rogue Trader dynasties and like legends almost certainly mostly bullshit.

What ever the case not long before the final defeat of Ursh Horus found himself in a support harness on the surface of Old Earth unsteadily approaching the Warlord’s tent a few miles behind the front lines. Exactly what they discussed that day is not recorded and was witnessed by only a few, Sigillite Malcador and Lord Guilliman among them, but beer was drunk and hands were shook and Horus returned to his people and the blessed lightness of empty space.

The nation of Ursh was brought to an end the next day for all that their underground resistance persisted for nigh on twenty years.

The Warlord now Steward appointed his twenty greatest the rank of Primarch and in their ranks was counted Horus who soon after was crowned King of Empty Space by the unanimous vote of the great matriarchs and patriarchs of his people.

It was revealed some time after the King’s death from archived audio records that the Olympus Mons Priesthood of Mars had offered him vassalage at not unreasonable terms some days after the deal with the Warlord was made;

>so you're saying you'd rather be vassal to the terrawatt appostates' flesh smith than master of our every ship for perpetuity?
>you scorn the shipwrights of your forefathers!
>you scorn the smiths of time immemorial!
>what nerve you have, lord-admiral, what-

>Nerve, is it.
>Certainly, it is nerve, magos.
>He promised me a partnership, as fruitful and even as the bargain you propose.
>He'd have me be his indispensable confederate, until the end of my days, and lord or my people.
>I made sure he stood as I knelt to throne, and swore no oath he had not.
>I set the terms of my service, and I chose my mandate.
>the gilt conqueror has amassed the treasures of man's eldest ruin, and he dotes mightily upon his subjects.
>more than that, he is unabashedly greedy.
>Oh yes, his greed for self possessed statesmen and commanders is vast, his appetite for men wiser than he insatiable.
>I am the admiral of my ships, and of his ships, and all ships he might gain henceforth, and of his navy just as my own.
>He is steward of my people, and he is bound to them, each and every, not just for as long as I hold them as one, but in perpetuity, so long as his empire stands.

And so was brought to some bitterness an older arrangement between the Void Born and the Mechanicum as each felt betrayed by the other. It was maybe not such a heavy burden and sadness on the Primarch’s heart as it might have been. He had never dealt with the Olympus Mons Brotherhood and so felt no real loyalty to them. In the days of his youth and in his father’s service they had dealt with lesser and less arrogant brotherhoods and the Olympus Mons Brotherhood had subjugated them and felt they were entitled to take on their obligations and owed loyalties but Horus had shook no hands with them.

The great ships of the Migrant Fleets now stood with the Steward whose eyes were fixed upon the waring states of the Far-Orbit colonies on the moons of Neptune and Uranus and the Jovian and Saturnine nations and the settlements of the asteroids belt and the kuiper belt and the ultimately to the distant stars. And suddenly those stars seemed maybe not so distant.

And it would be Horus’ people who would take them there. His formidable ships would be at the forefront of the frontier, at the bleeding edge where the Imperium met wilderness space. At the place where profit, fame and fortune could be made and legends forged. In every way his people were going to make a killing off of this deal.

The Void Born, though master sailors of the starry seas, were poor soldiers. Upon their ships were placed bondsmen of the Imperial Army and the fearsome and awe inspiring astartes pattern Space Marines. In essence Horus now had his own Legion and was a necessary participant in the operation of all the other Legions as he was the one with the ships. There was not a war he didn’t have a hand in, not a victory his people not accredited with having done their part.

But of these victories, he would claim, none were a grand as those that came to the Imperium willingly as he had. Deals were to be made, trade could flow, riches could be shared and increased and all the petty little worlds had to do was reach out a hand. Of all the Primarch only Lorgar managed to get more worlds to join the Imperium bloodlessly.

Time wore on and the borders were pushed back. More ships were made, more wars were fought to victory, more trade flowed, more deals made, more riches flowing, more fame and fortune and stories and glories than even Horus could have dreamed of in that far away and long ago tent on some forgotten battlefield. It was a golden age after the ten thousand years of the Long Night. It was in this golden age that Abaddon, nephew of Horus, was born.

Horus had no children (that he knew about) and so took the young Void Born as his heir and protégé and tried to instil in the child the skills that had lead him down the road to kingship and riches. But Abaddon turned into more of a Admiral than a salesman to Horus’ mixed shame and pride. It is not to say that he didn’t learn much from Horus, quite the opposite. Abaddon was no poor diplomat and could play the part of the blunt but lovable old soldier to his advantage and manipulate an Administratum requisitions committee as well as any royal court. It was just as well. There weren’t enough Void Born to fill the Navy by that time and hadn’t been for decades if truth be known. The Imperium was growing fast and it could produce ships faster than his people could fill them. It became needed for baseline humans to fill the berths. Horus was Void Born to the marrow and had grown up in another time and it was a time all but gone now, Abaddon would be the sort to inherit Empty Space. His people were now more military than migrant and it made him feel oddly old.

Horus had dreamed of a day when the Void Born would rule. Humans suited to their environment, adapted and moulded to it and Space was the thing that linked the worlds it was only natural that, as abhumanisn became more prevalent, his people would raise to the top of large-scale society. It was a dream he didn’t let go of, but as the Imperium grew he got a glimpse of the hundred thousand year time scale it would take for this to be accomplished by natural trends and knew that, although it was inevitable, it wasn’t on a timescale that would even notice him.

As the forces of the Void Wolves, as his forces had collectively become known by that point, were at the edge of Imperial Space it was they that were first alerted to the arrival of The Beast.

The Beast’s forces, raised across a thousand star systems and launched simultaneously and with unorky precision, swatted aside hundreds of ships in a matter of hours across a front twenty thousand light years long. After that it was known that his people would need no incitement to vengeance, they would need no rhetoric or Warlords or Stewards or hypothetical Emperors. Blood had been spilled in Empty Space. Since the days of the first space pirates it was known that only one thing could wash away the debt of blood; more blood.

Void Born had a natural affinity for three-dimensional battlefields, an innate skill only matched by the Autarchs of the eldar. With this affinity and the oath bound soldiers and super soldiers of the Steward they made the orks pay and pay and pay and cut and cut and cut until they found the puppet masters at the end of long barbed strings.

The people of the Void Born were not as numerous as the baseline humans and for a time it looked as though by throwing their lot in with the Imperium Horus had doomed them to extinction. But Horus, and the wise admirals under his command, could be all too sure of one thing. Chaos would have come for them in time, Imperium of no. The War needed to be over quickly. It needed to be over before his people left the stars forever.

The King of Empty Space went to the Steward and proposed a plan. A desperate and needed plan. He would by misdirection and feigned weakness funnel the forces of the Beast to Old Earth. Orkish psychology would demand that The Beast himself be at the head of the incursion and there, deep in Imperial territory they would close the trap and decapitate the WAAAGH!!! Of The Beast. Without their leader the orks would fall apart and fight each other and the Chaos Eldar without their meat shields would flee.

Horus was not on the surface of Old Earth to witness the death of the Angel-Primarch. He knew that none of the other primarchs knew of his plan to force the end of the war. He knew that they would blame him. He could tell them that the war needed to be ended, a war of attrition against orks was a slaw walk into the grave and as relentless as a gravity well. He could have told them that this had been the only hope of victory. HE knew it all to be true. Maybe they would agree. Maybe they would not. Maybe it didn’t matter in the face of victory, but it was a bitter victory given the cost and the ruins the Imperium was in. The Golden Age was over and it seemed that Long Night had never really left.

The Merchant Navy was in those rebuilding times as instrumental in the rebuilding of the Imperium as the forces of the Imperial Army. Broken and scared worlds looked to the heavens and the Pale Men of the stars with pleading and love and maybe it healed some the heart of Horus in those times to help but now he was old and he was broken inside.

Void Born are fragile creatures by nature. Their bodies can’t deal with alchemy in the blood well and it is easy to overdose on drugs. The rejuvenant drugs that kept him in some manner of youth had to be of lower dosage and now they were starting to fail altogether and his body was too fail for longevity treatments designed for baseline humans. Age took him quickly in the end but he went into the Long Sleep knowing that he had served his people and the Imperium well and that a good man would take up his burdens.

>So. Any good or should I burn it all and start again?

>I tried to make him more of a business man than a general. Sort of a really charismatic C.M.O.T Dibbler with a space ship type flavor.

Ynnead is supposed to be the Starchild, all grown up. At least, in some prophecies. Kind of poetic that the first "new" god born into the galaxy turns out to be the one of death and rebirth, heralding the end of the old age and the beginning of a new pantheon.

does he have cancer?

Sort of good, but missing two things.

1) Horus was not "Void Born above all". He was "transhumanism is the wave of the future". Horus saw any attempt at trying to impose one government and one body type on the vast diversity of the galaxy as kind of ridiculous. Instead he was more of the mindset of a vast "Star Union", with a thousand worlds all joined together as equals in mutual friendship forging their own path. This is the reason there was so much friction between Horus and the Steward, but because their ideas were more similar than different and Horus thought that humanity would diverge into a thousand branching paths naturally regardless of how hard the Steward tried to hold them together, so he kept his opinons to himself and followed the Steward. He thought he would be proven right in the end. Thread 9b discusses it better than I could.

No. He's just a Void Born with a shaved head.

Oh sweet Jesus you're right. Thanks.

It's going to have to have some work done before it gets to the 1d4chan.

2) Horus actually considered sitting out the War of the Beast. His forces could have rushed back to Earth, but Horus saw this as what was naturally going to happen if you make one world the center of the galaxy: you make it a target. Then Chaos Gods came to Horus and made him an offer of power if he stayed out of the WotB, and Horus realized that if he did so there would be so much bad blood between the factions of the Imperium that he would be essentially throwing his dream of a "Union of the Stars" under a bus. Horus flipped off the Chaos Gods with something along the lines of...

"Your offer sounds interesting. But you forget one thing. I am a captain of the migrant fleet and a businessman. In this place, I am the one who proposes the deals. Now, get off my ship."

Horus and his fleet rushes to Earth, but the efforts of the Chaos Gods stalled him long enough that he arrived late to the battle. As a result, people were suspicious of the loyalty of the Void Wolves following the WotB. What really got a lot of people nervous was that Horus was the only primarch aside from Sanguinius to really get along with (or at least be respected by) nearly all of the other primarchs, and so if Horus wanted to go rogue he could really do a lot of damage. As an user in a previous thread stated "Everyone in the Imperium high society was expecting Horus to try and grab the Throne. They waited for nearly 300 years for the betrayal, never came". Horus personally probably thought their nervousness was hilarious.

>I tried to make him more of a business man than a general. Sort of a really charismatic C.M.O.T Dibbler with a space ship type flavor.

Perfect mindset for Horus right here, maybe with a little bit of Venetian merchant prince in terms of the military angle.

You know, thinking back to the idea we had a few threads ago about Be'lakor being the last of the Old Ones, I just realized that we don't need to make Be'lakor a proto-Old One in order to make him work. Instead, Be'lakor could just as easily be an early experiment by the Old Ones into warp entities, the apotheosis of a single, psychically powerful individual as opposed to the embodiment of a concept or the merger of many entities.

That's why Be'lakor is so hateful of the Chaos Gods. In his mind, the ascension of an Old One should result in a full blown warp god, not "merely" a daemon prince. He's incensed at being forced to serve what are in his mind either natural phenomena or experiments blown out of proportion. It would be as if a human who achieved apotheosis was forced to serve a bunch of A.I.s who, by virtue of being created later with more advanced technology, happened to be stronger than you.

>Nurgle is basically a hoarder
Love it.

Wasn't able to post a reply in the last thread before it crashed, but there another possible way in which the Void Born could have Space Marines.

Oscar designed the Astartes geneseed using humans from Earth as a template of "average humans" for compatibility. Therefore, there are two factors which determine how compatible a given individual is with the Astartes geneseed: how close they are to Earth and how far their population in other respects has deviated from "mainstream" humanity.

Populations that have been isolated from Earth extremely long periods of time (e.g., even before the Age of Strife) would be unlikely to be able to produce Space Marines due to genetic drift alone, even if they looked otherwise human. By the same token most abhumans have undergone strong enough selection that gene-seed does not work on them.

But the Voidborn merchant fleet of Sol is a special case. The merchant fleet remained in contact with the other nations of the Solar System throughout the Age of Strife, and gene flow has continued to occur between these populations. Therefore, even though they are technically abhumans, the Sol merchant fleet (as well as others in nearby systems) might be genetically similar enough to Earthborn humanity that some members of the population are gene-seed compatible. There probably would be a lot of them, and so you would probably get a situation like the Raven Guard where you have a lot of non-Astartes individuals in an Astartes organization, but you probably could get some Voidborn Space Marines out of them.

I was kinda thinking we had already made the transhuman tech in the imperium pretty flexible, so it wouldn't be much of a leap to say they bridged this gap. We already have the fenrisian experiment with the canis-helix pattern astartes, so its really shouldn't be a problem.

There is also the problem of physical robustness. Void Born are fair fragile.

any opinion on Khorne? We hadn't really touched on his followers yet and he seems pretty close to canon but I wanted to slot him into the adapted mythology and make him a notable opponent.

Extra cybernetics?

One of the first implants they give Space Marines in canon boosts muscle and bone growth. As long as this is done under normal planetary gravity, this should easily reverse the effects of living in space for the first decade or two of one's life.

In a previous thread, we discussed the idea that even though Horus is dead, his casket is empty. I had a thought that might expand on that idea.

Horus did die, but his remains were never interred in the casket most consider his tomb. His ashes were scattered to the void, the only burial he would ever consider as a true Voidborn. Horus, ever the politician, intended the site of his cenotaph not to be a memorial but a statement. Horus was extremely pro-transhuman, even at the end of his life. If his casket were ever opened and the supposed resting place of his body ever discovered to be empty, as if Horus himself had simply got up and walked out of his grave, it would make people wonder: what else is possible for humanity?

Woah, shit, we have a drawfag?

reposting retirement/abdication end to horus story.
An entirely plausible story held as true by the Sons of Horus and official Imperial history. They forward this unusual reaction to rejuveants as an explaination of the Lord-Admiral's recorded vigor and mental acuity even unto the last years of his life, as well as his ceremonious abdication to prince Abaddon several years before his death. It has been relegated to obscure tomes that the Lord-Admiral spent those years assembling an entourage of notable captains as he flitted between the systems of the imperium. It is sure that in this time he threw his considerable clout into numerous ambitious projects, and was often present in the orbits of Old Earth, Mars, and Jupiter, as well as the systems of Chthonia and Prospero. Of all his works in these last decades he is recorded to have shown great interest in the creation of an imperial capital upon the Chthonian ring, in the work of the martian explorator fleets, and in the collaborations of Fulgrim and Ferrus Mannus. This is acknowledged to have laid the groundwork for much of the imperial navy's own capacity for independent sustenance and development. As well, the order that would become the Sons of Horus has its roots in this period, intended to see his vision of a humanity truly suited to interstellar civilization into the future. Horus died nineteen years after his abdication, and was entombed on his personal warship. This tomb has never been opened.

Bump

Anything different with the Navigators in this timeline?

I can’t think of too much that would be different, to be honest. The only thing I can think of is rather than being an obvious piece of Imperial hypocrisy, Navigators are desperately trying to keep the fact that they are mutants rather than abhumans under wraps. Abhumans are relatively accepted within the Imperium, mutants are looked at with either disgust or pity. Disgust if your mutations are voluntarily chosen as a result of worshipping the Dark Gods, or pity if your mutations are accidental results of warp exposure or something similar. As a result, the Navigators are trying to spin things as them being abhumans (being intentionally engineered and all), despite technically being mutants that undergo further mutations with age. But that just ends up with the Navigators still doing the same things as in vanilla. I guess maybe some things do stay the same, no matter the universe?

And did we ever resolve the issue of why the Astronomican needs psykers to power it if in vanilla Big E was able to power and direct it all by himself during the Great Crusade?

One thing about the current state of the galaxy is that it means that even Isha might have to get involved in the war. Although Isha prefers to be a "silk hiding steel" kind of person, the sheer scale of the war may mean she may be forced to take a more active role. And although she may be a fertility goddess, that could mean things get scary.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, think of Demeter in Greek Mythology. Think of what happened when she got pissed off.

I'm thinking about the Navigators, but I don't know enough about their history. Something about them feeling threatened by the webway, and feeling uncertainty about that.

Bump.

I'm pretty sure Navigators are abhumans rather than mutants due to the way that they predictably breed true. It's just that they aren't very stable and are prone to additional mutations. Or that's a result of warp exposure.

Also I think that there was some mention of them having abandoned Earth and taken up residence on the Jovian orbitals.

Given that Ishtar was the ye olde goddess of love, sex, fertility and war I think we can safely assume that Isha was always at least slightly dangerous to be around. Ishtar killed or left broken just about everything she touched and threatened to start the zombie apocalypse on at least 2 occasions.

Also in one of the previous threads some user made the joke that she had to be married to Oscar becasue he was the only person left who could survive having sex with her. Whilst it was an immature sex joke there could be some level of truth to it.

Maybe Eldrad looked to the changed future after her return and saw the creation of Sacrifice Cults of young lovers and the trail of bodies she would leave behind. To prevent this loss of life and Isha being associated with ritual suicide, that could have bled back across into the warp and poisoned her from the roots upwards, he married her off to the one being he knew that would survive her affections.

Also after an eternity in Nurgle's company her temperament will not have improved. In much the same way that Ishtar was pissed when she got out of the world of the dead.

Oh wow I have so much rewriting to do. Like holy shit I missed out so much.

Horusfag, i think there's something else you are forgetting. If memory serves right, in a previous thread it was said that Horus was entombed deep into a Blackstone Fortress that served as the capitol ship of the Void Wolves. Might be interesting to add that, especially because it would be fun to see how a transhumanist spess merchant would see using xeno tech and allying with Eldar. Just trowing this out, otherwise good job!

I think that the flagship of the Sons of Horus was incorporated into the Blackstone Fortress at a later date. Or that's what I'm getting from rereading the old threads.

Yeah, IIRC the blackstone fortress was either discovered or a gift from somewhere.

The monastic order known as the Sons of Horus found it at a later date. They somehow knew what it was but couldn't figure out how to get it to switch on. Eventually went to the eldar for help.

Eldar set up camp on it alongside the void born and figured out how to activate and control the short range weapons.

Wasn't there two of them? What happened to the other?

Also, would anyone be averse to some of the information in previous threads being uploaded to the 1d4chan page as crappy pseudo-greentext, so we can get as much information as we can in one place without having to dig through the old threads?

There were more than two but only two have been found.

The other found one was found much later than the one that holds the tomb of Horus and was found by Lady Malys, or at least by someone in her employ.

bump

I think it was stated earlier that Erebus has the other one (who is not necessarily aligned with Malys)

It could be that Erebus is trying to carve out a Chaos Imperium or convert the Imperium to Chaos but have it be very, very pro chaos human. This affords him lots of loyalty from the Fallen because most of the old veterans who run that shit are ancient Dark Angels who back in the day thought that the Imperium's eldar allies need to go to the death camps.

The younger generations of Fallen generally hold the original Fallen in high regard and obey even if they don't hold their xenophobic views.

Erebus and the old Fallen are allied with Lady Malys because they believe they can steer her into doing their will. Lady Malys thinks this notion is hilariously quaint but keeps it to herself so long as the dipshits keep doing what she wants.

I don't think Erebus is that oblivious, in fact I think he is supposed to be extremely cunning as he's the one who kicks off the entire canon Horus Heresy. More likely is that any cooperation with Malys is out of convenience but ultimately temporary, and I think it works better if Erebus and Malys are both scheming and playing off each other. The nature of Chaos is ultimately self serving, so I'm sure he is plotting for power struggle once the Imperium falls. Internal struggles could also explain how Chaos has been disorganized for 10 millennia.

Ok. I think I've fixed or at least slightly unfucked it.

I can't do any more, I haven't the skill to do more than acceptable on a good day.

It's probably going to need more editing by better hands some time afterwards.

Given that it might need to be edited should I post it here or dump it into the Horus section of the 1d4chan page?

Fuck it I'm doing it anyway. It's late and I have work tomorrow.

It's going on the 1d4chan page.

Bump

Khanfag here. In the interest of keeping the thread bumped, I thought I’d post a few ideas I had written down for Jaghatai that I never posted to the thread, in the interest of not swamping it. Most of these ideas concern not only Jaghatai, but also how his policy affected the modern-day White Scars, which is something that hasn’t been discussed for most of the canon loyalist legions.

In contrast to most other groups of Space Marines, many members of the White Scars and their related chapters are literal rather than spiritual descendants of Jaghatai Khan. Like his ancestor Genghis Khan, Jaghatai has a large number of descendants running around the 31st century. However, because Jaghatai never conquered half of Eurasia, this large number of descendants simply comes from the nature of time and the ridiculously large population of the Imperium (Jaghatai has a lot of descendants, but percentage-wise is nowhere near Genghis), as well as non-direct descendants from his brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts. Many White Scars claim to be directly related to Jaghatai Khan in some way, and try to join the White Scars in an attempt to try and recapitulate their ancestor's glory.

Jaghatai only had a few actual children. His first born son ended up becoming a rank-and-file Ultramarine. Jaghatai didn’t know whether to be proud or a little bit disappointed over this.

Like all of the other nation-states on Terra, the Khanate was essentially destroyed by the WotB. It was kind of difficult to maintain cultural distinctiveness when 60% of Earth’s population were killed in the fighting (the remainder surviving by hiding in the Golden Palace) and 70% of the land surface had to be rebuilt. Although Earth had already been undergoing hyper-urbanization during the Great Crusade, this was the point where Earth went from a bunch of unified, but culturally distinct, nation-states to the singular spiritual, political, and psychic hub the people of M41 think of today. This was essentially the point where Earth became Old Earth, in many ways.

Finally finished Emperor Oscar Steward

And I forgot the image

Khan had two major flaws. The first of these was his temper. Much like Magnus and his anti-sociality, this is something Khan got better about over the course of his life. Though I can imagine there must have been some debacle when Ursh fell, with Khan demanding retribution and the Warlord probably stepping in and saying that all Khan wanted was revenge, not justice, and if he did that then all it would look like is a monster killing a monster and not justice being delivered to a tyrant. That probably shut Khan right up (see point two). Khan's temper is a lot different from Angron or Russ, in that he's single-minded and you don't see it coming before it hits you.

Khan’s other major issue was he always felt like he had to make up for what he did while he served the Despot of Ursh, to a degree that would be considered unhealthy. He really doesn't like to be reminded of his past. There was an incident while passing through Ursh, where he enjoyed watching some children play a game where they recited a rhyme about how they had to act good or else the goblin king would send his goblins to take them. Then he realized that the "goblins" they were referring to were his people, and got real quiet.

Nice, though doesn't Big E have black hair?

And nice touch with the golden eyes, I had forgotten that was a thing until I re-read Malcador's log

Unlike canon, where Khan could just fuck off to Chogoris or the front lines any time the other primarchs annoyed him, here Khan actually had to interact with people to get things done and so more people were aware of him being the “pragmatic, reasonable one” among the primarchs. Don’t get me wrong, Khan is still the speedfreak who often likes to go off and do his own thing (and given the general competence boost among the primarchs being “level-headed” is no longer that noteworthy), just that he wasn’t as much of an outsider as in canon. Khan got along with a lot more of the primarchs than in canon (though not to Sanguinius or Horus levels), with the notable exceptions of Morty, Curze, and (surprisingly enough) Corax (at least at first).

Corax is kind of understandable in retrospect. He came from Sino-Japan, a territory which for years had been controlled by Ursh using the steppe nomads as enforcers. It makes sense that Corax would balk at the inclusion of what he considered a bunch of animals pretending to be human beings into the Imperium. Khan, for his part, did not feel the same way (see Khan's second flaw). He even made it a huge point to either discipline or execute those who committed particularly heinous war crimes under the Despot of Ursh, to try to make reparations between the Khanate and the other “Children of Ursh” and to show that such behavior would not be tolerated anymore. However, Corax was still rather skeptical of Khan. Khan and Corax would eventually come to an understanding, the two seeing they were more alike than different, but this did not happen until well into the Great Crusade.

(forgot name)
Magnus and Khan both probably tried to reach out to Morty and Curze, as both knew what it was like to be forced to play the monster.

Morty probably called Magnus some psyker slur and stormed out. Curze was always in a foul mood and claimed Magnus gave him a headache. Magnus wrote them both off at that point.

Khan sympathized with them but questioned why they hadn't tried to build a life beyond what happened to them. Morty replied why was Khan so quick to try and bury his past, while Curze said Khan "wouldn't understand". Khan remained more open to helping them than Magnus (though Morty probably pissed him the hell off), but understood they would probably never come around.

Made the hair darker. Any suggestions for the next one?

bump

Emperor Oscar Steward, the good King of the Imperium and its people uncounted, Consort of the All-Mother and her most favored champion, protector of the Tarellian realm, protector of the Tau Dominion, and protector of the dominion of Ultramar, Presiding Justice of the many confederated legal unions of stars, Imperator of the Imperial Grand Army, Navy Superiora, and all Astartes Chapters, Inquisitor Primus of all Ordos, and the high chancellor of the Schola Telepathica. Oscar the Golden Man, first emperor and founder of the imperium as some histories, even entire worlds, in the hinterlands of his vast dominion are taught, is certainly the first of his name. So too, it is the unknown hope of all the galaxy that he is the last of his kind.

Shouldn't she have pointed ears?

Nice. Looks regal without looking like he's trying to compensate like in the Vanilla. Also looks militaristic without looking like a warmonger.

The Emperor was born without a name, in a palatial laboratory on the Circlet of Chrhonia, not long before the Fall of the Eldar. In this place, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids had recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invisible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Macro-soul psychic engines trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-though shaped raw human-esque spirits from the immaterium. In Chthonian in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond the Iron Minds, and so mighty in sorcery as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Oscar related to the Sigilite that he was to his knowledge only some few days alive, and did not know his siblings, though he has some vision of the grandeur before the age of strife, of their grandeur foremost, and of what unfolded in orbit of Chthonia. He was among the spires and ships of the ring, and saw the eye of terror, first a crying slit of stars, then winking open, an opalescent gash, at the center an infinite speck, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling beck from the singularity.

I like the start. It make the Men of Gold more akin to genuine children and work of art from godlike A.I. rather than an industrial product.

Not too keen on the second half.

It had already been established that Oscar was utterly empty when Malcador fished him out of the jar. Unless that's changed.

The Golden Man watched his siblings running down the ships of Chthonia, slaying world killing picketts and carving their hulls, until they bored and bloodied themselves in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead filled the golden crown of the Chthonian system, acts neurotic and personal and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, acts upon the delirious humans and the incestuos Golden Ones. They broke the golden ring, and those that remained left its shattered pieces to hang around the pale Chthonian star. Oscar, as night had fallen on the galaxy, was induced to inactivity by remaining Iron Mind protocols, though the abominable intelligence(s) succumbed to the grievous damage it(they) sustained in the breaking of the ring before they could make use of the incomplete Golden Man. The Others, those whose leaden corpses do not lie cratered in the circlet or lost in its debris fields, hopefully met fitting ends in the age of strife. Some are said to have made out across the old empire and have put the scourge of their rule to it in regimes long dead, others to the beautiful world of pleasure they saw gleam in the eye, and others into the intergalactic sea. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those illustrious orders that go unnamed cannot tell, and Chaos has made no sign. One leaden body has been recovered, and though there is pressure to move it to Ganymede, its finders are reluctant, preferring their own workshops far from Sol. These matters, and the obvious concerns they pose to Imperial High Command, have been a consistent impediment to the age old Chthonian project, thought so too have they been a reason to fund such ventures.

we had psychic AI as a necessity for coding souls since the first time its come up, I was thinking that Malcador finds him tabula rasa, soul active and functional but unwritten and inhuman. Malcador finds an ambulatory being that picks up language, and develops a self as a child would, but the sigillite neither coded the Emperor's soul nor switched on the psychic AI that could.

Why is he crying and holding a soulstone?

Bump

You poor fool...

This pic ain't the emperor with Isha. I'll give y'all a clue; "I like horses."

Agreed. Oscar being tabula rasa is very important for the overall state of the setting.

Oscar's story is essentially the triumph of nurture over nature. Here is a being who started with literally nothing, not even the few instincts humans have when they were born, and yet chose to be a good person and ended up greatly changing the galaxy for the better. Not because he was programmed to. But because he wanted to.

This greatly shows off at least part of the essence of nobledark: the idea that at their core people are fundamentally good, even though evil is rampant in the world and people are often highly flawed beings.

(cont.)

Something else I find funny (and great) is that based on the writing so far in this timeline Oscar's biggest flaw is that he often fails to realize he is a person as well. Malcador probably treated him like a son, but Oscar was still made aware of his artificial nature from the start, which probably shaped some of his worldview.

Oscar is a genuinely nice guy, and the type of person who knows exactly what he needs to say to help others solve their problems, but he often utterly forgets about his own needs as a person. He sees the way things work, but utterly forgets he is a part of the equation.

When Eldrad said Oscar owed him a favor after the WotB, Oscar said "name it", thinking it was going to be something like another great raid on Chaos or some other impossible task.

He never expected Eldrad wanted him to get married, because he forgot he was a player in the first place.

Same with the Golden Throne. Oscar constantly did not want to take official charge of the Imperium, because he saw himself as an artificial lifeform that was unfit to rule.

The encounter with Sebastian Thor was essentially the Imperium's referendum on what they thought of Oscar. The Imperium had spoken on who they wanted as a leader, and they chose Oscar. Oscar had proved himself time and again an effective leader who at the same time would not abuse his power. So what if Oscar was not born naturally, many in the Imperium were born in-vitro or through other means. It did not matter that Oscar claimed to not be a real person, in their minds he had proven himself as a person, in the only way they felt mattered.

Prospero: The Lost Crown Jewel of the Imperium

Prospero was first settled by mankind in M23, shortly before the Age of Strife. Its original colonists were primarily composed of psyker refugees, fleeing from the persecution and witch-hunts of psykers that had gripped the rest of the galaxy. Prospero was chosen because of its isolated location. Although it was relatively close to Old Earth in terms of realspace, Prospero was an arid planet with little water or arable land that was relatively off the beaten path in terms of warp currents, making it ideal for people that did not wish to be noticed. The psykers of Prospero pooled together what little knowledge they had and were soon progressing in psychic technology by leaps and bounds, inventing such things as psychic-assisted medicine and crystals that dampened psychic powers allowing psyker children to learn how to control their abilities without the threat of daemonic possession. For a scant few centuries, Prospero was a paradise for psykers.

Unfortunately, along with the Age of Strife came Warp Storms and psychic predators. Prospero became host to one particularly nasty form of psychic predator called the Psychneuein, who were attracted to the planet by its large population of psykers. The Psychneuein were an insectoid species which reproduced by laying their eggs inside a psyker’s brain, which would later burst out of the psyker’s head to produce more Psychneuein. On a planet full of psykers, one Psychneuein could rapidly turn into a plague, and many times the inhabitants of Prospero were nearly wiped out. Only the fortress-city of Tizca, situated on a central plateau between the three highest mountains on the planet, was naturally well-defended enough to reliably fend off attacks from the Psychneuein. Over time, the depredations of the Psychneuein would wax and wane and the people of Prospero would try to recolonize the wastes once more, but were always beaten back to the walls of Tizca by the Psychneuein.

(cont.)
To the inhabitants of Prospero, the appearance of the nascent Imperium in their skies in 935.M30 must have seemed like a godsend. At this point in time the inhabitants of Prospero had once more been forced back to the safety of the walls of Tizca by the Psychneuein, and this time its inhabitants were not sure the walls would hold. Although the Imperium was unable to completely destroy the Psychneuein, as seen by their presence on planets like Mara later in Imperial history, they were able to eradicate the threat of the Psychneuein to the people of Prospero.

The discovery of Prospero was a boon for the Imperium as well. Here was a society possessing all sorts of psychic technology and knowledge the Imperium desperately needed, either saved from what little was known of psykers during the Dark Age of Technology or created de novo on Prospero itself. What's more, this knowledge was specifically tailored to human psykers, as opposed to the advice the Imperium had previously only recieved from the Eldar who had to figure out what aspects of Eldar psychic abilities did or did not apply to human psykers. Prospero was of special interest to the Thousand Sons, who as a legion of psykers were interested in any way to better hone and control their gifts. In particular Ahzek Ahriman, although Terran-born on Achaemenidia, rapidly rose to prominence in Prosperan society as a teacher and eventually came to consider the planet a second home.

(cont.)

With the help of the Imperium, Prospero was rebuilt as never before. With the destruction of the Psychneuein, cities once again spread across the planet’s surface, reflective plated obelisks and hive-pyramids gleaming in the sunlight. Tizca itself particularly prospered, with the greater reaches of the city expanding off the plateau of the city center all the way to the sea. The sheer size of the city and extent of gleaming hive-pyramids on Tizca eventually led to the city being referred to as the City of Life. Psychic research also continued on Prospero, its inhabitants always interested in ways to refine their powers, only this time with the resources of the Imperium at its back. The Great Library of Lexandra was said to be the greatest repository of psychic knowledge in the entire Materium, second only to the Eldar Black Library hidden in the Webway. At its peak, Prospero was the prime center for the psychic arts and biggest exporter of psykers in the galaxy, eclipsing even Old Earth. The planet had gone from pariah to one of the crown jewels of the Imperium.

Unfortunately, this wealth of psychic knowledge made Prospero an ideal target for the Fourth Black Crusade (late M33). If the Black Crusade could reach Prospero, it would cripple the Imperium's ability to train new psykers, possibly even interfering with the maintenance of the Astronomican itself. The people of Prospero and the Imperium fought valiantly, but the forces of Chaos steadily gained ground, until eventually the two factions were fighting in orbit around Prospero itself, nuclear weapons bombarding the planet’s surface.

It was at this point, in an act of desperation, that a small cabal of sorcerers led by Ahzek Ahriman cast what would later be known as the Rubric of Ahriman. Ahriman’s intention was to seal the populace of Prospero away in a pocket dimension, keeping them safe until such time as the Black Crusade could be beaten back. Although the forces of Chaos might be able to claim the soil of Prospero, they would be unable to harm its people. However, something went horribly wrong. Instead of neatly transporting Prospero and its inhabitants into a pocket dimension, the planet’s inhabitants were violently torn between dimensions, disappearing in a torrent of ash and smoke.

Worse yet, the counterspell to the ritual did not seem to work. Although Ahriman and his cabal had created the ritual, they only had a limited idea of how it actually worked, having created it in haste from incomplete, limited sorcerous knowledge in the Great Library due to the impending threat of the Black Crusade. Like much of the rest of the Imperium, Prosperans looked down on sorcery as extremely dangerous (doubly so since the planet was full of psykers), and it was only desperation that led Ahriman to resort to using it in the first place. Ahriman was devastated by the loss of his adopted home, and vowed to undo the effects of the Rubric, even if it cost him his own life. Those few who survived the burning of Prospero, mostly aboard refugee ships, primarily emigrated to Old Earth. Old Earth was the biggest cultivator of the psychic arts in the Imperium now that Prospero was gone, and the remaining Prosperans wanted to be amongst their own kind.
Today, Prospero is a quiet world, the only movement on its surface being the fall of crumbling masonry, its only sound being that of the wind blowing through the canyons. However, Prospero might not be as dead as people think. Some visitors to Prospero claim they can sometimes still see the city of Tizca, the glory of the City of Light glowing on the horizon like a mirage. Many in the Imperium say that the blasted surface of Prospero is cursed, that the ghosts of the dead still haunt the half-destroyed ruins. However, others point out that these rumors are almost always started by looters and grave robbers, and that many have visited Prospero to pay their respects and have returned unmolested.

The people of Prospero may be gone, but their ghosts might not rest easy.

Wanted to write up all the cool Prospero stuff that was discussed in older threads so it didn't get lost. Left out the Rubric leading to the Legion of the Damned because that is an entry in its own right

Oh fuck. And it was such a nice pic.

>Rubric succeeded at shoving the populace and cities just under the surface of the warp
>too shallow to be easily detected from either the real or immaterium, as if it floats in the surf of the imperrian sea
>Ahriman gets distracted, possibly forever, in the Black Library
>Prodigal Daemon Breakers too busy playing King Solomon, but still intending to fix prospero.
>yeah, when Ahriman returns from the library, we'll do it
>Bloody Magpies (quoth Trayzn the Infinite) chase Trayzn to the ruins of prospero
>doing battle with skeleton Doom in the ruins of Tizca
>Fight through Trayzn's doubles and forces, modified necron soldiers and levies from his domain
>One band of the sneaky psychic transhuman saboteurs find him, a psyker from his realm, and his cryptek
>Heavily guarded by Necron forces, and even some of Trayzn's knockoff Custodes he made after stealing a working Astartes S pattern
>Trayzn drapes psyker with unfamiliar wraithbone cloak
>The psyker and cryptek go about the complex work completing the rubric
>Altered with Necron technology strip the unmoored souls and mirage glories of Prospero and array them in a bottled webway pocket
>While they work, Trayzn departs into the mirage to survey his newest treasure, by way of a long, suddenly hazy hall
>the forward squad calls in their discovery, but does not advise the interruption of the ritual
>then proceed to pursue Trayzn into the mirage

Choice of pic indicates excellent taste.

Also I love the implication that Trayzn is king of a small living kingdom.

someone wrote about his kingdom in the last few threads

I like this.

He was taught by Malcador that the Men of Gold were created to serve humanity, not to rule it.

He was also taught most of his early world view by Malcador so came out quite similar to him. Thankfully Malcador was a sort of kindly old father figure whose worst trait seems to be that his views on gender roles was slightly old fashioned. Hence no female primarchs.

If your taking suggestions I wouldn't mind seeing Magnus the Red.

In this continuity he is supposed to be a sort of animal skin wearing shaman. During his stay in the Haunted Mountains of Himalayzia he received red tattoos of some sort of script over much of his body. After that he got one of his eyes bitten out and lots of scar tissue around the empty socket.

So it appears that there is only Dorn and Lion left in the primarchs for there to be some write faggatory about. Even if it's only a draft as the Horus section seems to be.

Oh. Oh damn it.
Can we get an edit?

I'm finishing the colors for a deco Astartes ATM, next I'd want to choose between Sanguinious, Magnus, or Jubblowski

I'm sure whatever you do will be most welcome.

It would require her being slightly shorter. The Emperor was 2.5 merers (8'.2"ish) and Macha in the Vanilla fluff is "only" 7'2"

Also red hair and the red stripe face tattoos. It was mentioned in one of the early threads that the priesthood often but not always adopt the tattoos as a mark of identification, so unless outright stated otherwise this is still a thing.

Also it was mentioned that Mach was "blessed" with a more curvy body to denote her status as avatar and high priestess. The picture that usually get posted is of ridiculously exaggerated proportions so I don't fucking know id the wretched picture above is an improvement or not.

What is his kingdom like?

Deco Astartes, of some angel loving chapter. I'm leaning towards Jubblowski in court atire, unless I see a strong desire otherwise