Nobledark 40k Part 27: Roman Numerals are Shit

Honestly The Golden Vanity, the shanty that song is based on, works as well if not better for the tone of Nobledark.

youtube.com/watch?v=_j0EA_YH61I

I'm going to suggest that the date b fudged on this as well.

Xavier was recruited some time in the last 30 years of the Centuries of Silence and is the last Salamander of that age.

He knows or at least knew what happened to Vulkan, it impossible for it to be otherwise.

If he remembers he refuses to say.

Castigator might have succeeded in getting to the Eye or Maelstrom and got inducted into the intrigues of Chaos. Since its initial activation and the accompanying conflicts Castigator has just been living in Shaa-Dome like a giant successful mercenary/warlord on the dime of whatever patron he might find. He's thought of by the Crones as a big exotic hero from the neighbor of the Old Empire, and in general the Crones might like to belittle humanity by insisting the Men of Stone weren't the real citizens of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, instead giving that title to the Iron Minds and their subsidiaries like Castigator. The Crones might use Castigator as something between the archeotech Titan he is and treating him like a warrior in their employ, and just like Crone footsoldiers will gladly be daemon hosts to let their allies into the materium Castigator will employ the same tactic on a much larger scale. Often Castigator would be paid by a major daemon to be their body on some realspace escapade, and as such Castigator has brought greater daemons of every god into the world for horrific jaunts through the Imperium.

A while back, we were talking about the Kinebrach and their blades, and how they related to the Interex and their sagittars. I decided to try and expand on that idea, especially since we don’t have much on the Interex in the first place.

pastebin.com/837jbpE8

I was having a hard time balancing the sagittars to not make them seem useless while at the same time justifying why the whole Imperium doesn’t just train everyone who can't become an Astartes as sagittar pilots. In canon, sagittars are said to be almost the equal of Space Marines, with sagittars in Horus Rising able to kill several Space Marines when fighting breaks out, which puts them in the same ballpark as Aspect Warriors or Mont'Kau battlesuits.

I was trying to aim for something like the Catachan Jungle Fighters or the battlesuits of the Tau, a unique method of fighting that certain planets or member civilizations swear by, but for various reasons just aren’t super common. The idea to justify this was despite their effectiveness, sagittars are still cavalry or cavalry-infantry hybrids at best, and so they don’t have a ton of niches in the Imperial Army.

Whereas Space Marines perform better than similar types of soldiers in sheer power and durability, and Aspect Warriors do the same in agility and dexterity, sagittars outperform the other types of elite soldiers in their overall mobility. They’re also kind of like the Mont’kau in that they’re more replaceable than Aspect Warriors or Space Marines, but whereas Mont’kau suits are specialized for defense and tanking damage, sagittars are more for fast attack. They’re kind of like halfway between Mont’kau and Aspect Warriors, with the agility replaced with mobility.

For those of you wondering what sagittars are supposed to look like in canon, they are basically described as hoplites with metal instead of horsehair crests on top of Big Dog-esque mechanical steeds

It could be that most units that fall under the label of cyberized or super enhanced cavalry are lumped in with sagittars, so you might actually have quite a number of high mobility, relatively high cost advanced cavalry, but its less effective in a galactic economy of scale so they are mostly units assembled by Imperial member governments and aristocracy. Sagittars and the other forces that are filed with them would serve mostly as irregulars or auxiliaries to the Imperial army in major wars, but otherwise their remit and deployment would usually be tied up with their commander's personal power.

Interesting. Probably a major feature of Macharius organizational doctine as well.

That is really good

The Machairians would love these guys. They just point to them and say "See them? Just try and fit them into your so-called Cadian gospel. This is why it's better to play each world's strengths to your advantage rather than force everyone into a one-size fits all mold".

Combine these and you have an interesting dynamic where Macharian doctrine might be favored by various aristocratic officers that have the resources to supplement Imperial regulars with local elite forces or their own retainers. Essentially you could have Imperial commanders that are military xenophiles in a way that never happens in canon, and without the impetus of a crusade to gather an eclectic army they'd resort to rogue trader style love for exotic auxiliaries.

So the Cadian response to would be "Yeah that's all well and good, lets see what happens when you actually have to arm a force with limited resources."

And of course the Krieger response which is "..."

Though in practice I suppose things would vary. People in the extreme Segmentum Pacificus and Ultima would probably find it just as easy to field a mixed bag of weirdos and Cadian shock troopers. Sagittars work just as well as normal bike cavalry in a Cadian arrangement and they hit harder than a baseline human so they can fill the role of "diet Space Marines" you get the Sisters or Aspect Warriors in on occasion.

Just look at Armageddon. Cadian-style Steel Legion with decidedly not Cadian-style Outriders who keep screaming "Ancestors witness me!" before they charge into battle.

How many types of Xeno were in the Interex?

I'd assume around 5 or 6. They might have kept adding some even after incorporation into the Imperium.

It was a lovely day, such a lovely day!

Have the religions been called dibs on?

I remember at one point someone started on them, did a bit then stopped. Is it alright to do more or will I be stepping on someone else's toes?

Just two mentioned in canon. The kinebrach were said to be the first non-human species who joined as a client race. It was mentioned this was the first time they had to translate their language to another species and a first contact war had resulted due to mistranslstion.

There were also the Megarachnids, who were not allies but prisoners in a demilitarized zone. The Interex tried to reason with them but found they could not, apparently even though they could translate their language. So the Interex ended up fighting them back to their planet and confining them there, destroying all of their spaceflight technology. Then they left buoys around the planet telling people not to land. So it was kind of Interex-controlled space, even if theh were just the wardens.

Is anyone going to do the much needed Dorn fluffing?

There was someone who said either they had something or was going to try and tackle it, but they wanted to wait for Fulgrimfag to finish.

IIRC, didn't primarchfag have something on him too, or was that the alternate Fulgrim piece? There's also the little bit on his odd friendship with Perturabo.

What happened to most of the usual writefags anyway? They all seem to have disappeared.

I already wrote past the point where fulgrim's history bears on Dorn's, there's nothing stopping Dotn fluff. The part of Fulgrim's bio that's archived but not on the wiki covers the end of the Merikan war, what I still have to write is post unification stuff.

Still here

Work is holy shit who turned on the flood gate why does everything hurt when I move 72 hours no sleep need moar coffee levels of stupid crazy busy at the moment or I would be writing more.

I started writing a sub-mediocre alternate fulgrim piece when fulgrimfag seemed to vanish.

I might do some on Dorn when can stop and rest a little.

Might.

If anyone else takes it on first then they are welcome to it.

Dorn I'm imagining as being the son of a Merikan lesser officer and a native Calbi tribal woman. Unlike most such unions he was not a rape child.

He grew up and joined his father's people, joined the army, moved up the ranks and ended up as part of the Calbi garrison forces because he could speak at least one of the languages.

Angron is still underway, but progressing slowly since I got sidetracked on a piece of fluff for the CSMs.

How would he have gotten the early Mk I augments?

Part of what made Merika so tough was that unlike the Chaos touched megalomania of Ursh it was pretty coherent and efficient. While Ursh was the same horrific synthesis of refined decadence and dedicated, self conscious barbarity as the Croneworlders, Merika was just the right mix of Brave New World and 1984 to weild human and technological assets and fight the Imperium on the same strategic footing. Merika was like an industrialized, even more militarized Classical republic, and as such it was completely fucked up, but it was coherent enough to justify itself.

Presumably after he took command of the garrison, rallied his supporters and purged the ranks of the Merikan loyalists.

Presumably he either got the bootleg augmentations from Fulgrim or he got them from the Imperium later on.

Mk1 was more widely compatible so, as long as Dorn managed to stay robustly healthy, he could have been upgraded later in life.

Dorn also ended up being the military governor of Calbi, which was a Merikan vassal. I can see the Merikans putting him in there because he was part of the Merikan military structure but at the same time he was one of "them" (the Calbians), so the Merikans thought he'd be better accepted by the Calbian people. It bit them in the ass when they led a revolt.

How close were Fulgrim and Dorn anyway? There was a suggestion that Dorn was one of the people who vouched for Fulgrim to the Warlord, but that would be out the window since A&O were the ones to bring Fulgrim into the fold. There was also a mention of Fulgrim being the one to tell Perturabo "Dorn could come up with a better defense plan than you", mirroring canon. At the very least I can see them being relatively closer to one another due to the shared Calbian-Merikan culture.

That could have been how he got his masochism problem. Khan was a Mark I and he didn't seem to have any problems.

Glitches were common for the Mk1 but I don't think they have ever been said to be universal. Khan could have been lucky.

If Dorn's mother is a tribal of Calbi what name should she have?

Also I'm going, unless someone objects and can name a better place, have the capital of Calbi be the ruins of Toronto. I'm thinking of it being the City of Onto Rontus because I'm an unimaginative hack.

I'm imagining that Dorn and Fulgrim were allies of necessity rather than friends considering that one is a high society gentleman soldier and social climber and the other is a half tribal who doesn't give a shit what those around him think.

Also on a possibly unrelated note the genetic modifiers of the Rocky Mountains.

Each fortified commune I'm seeing as a group of splice-hippies who do the day to day mundane work to support the work of a Biodruid. In exchange the Biodruid bestows upon his supporters good health, new strains of crops immune to the recent bout of Strife bullshit and minor upgrades like slightly better night vision and shit. Or a pet six legged dog because Biodruid.

They operate out of old hidden/forgotten installations out in the mountains or other suitable place full of places to hide. Typically but not always underground often the entrance looks like a natural cave. They did not build these installations, some previous and now forgotten nation did. Possibly the biodruids can trace an unbroken line of master and student all the way back to before the Strife when some ancient predecessor actually earned a real wage from a legitimate government and wore a white lab coat.

Whatever pussified pacifist hippies used to be they sure as shit are not by the time Merika starts moving in. Not outright war like they will defend their communes with every blessing bestowed upon them by their biodruids and with home made glands oozing strange alchemy through their veins they could postpone pain and fear admirably. They might not have been warriors and they might have been driven out in the end but they weren't a push over.

Dorn's rebellion started when Fulgrim was a kid, and had become an intractable frozen quagmire in the west by the time Fulgrim was in the military. Dorn was a generation before him and Lucius, and he could have been receiving semi-covert Imperial support from early in his revolt, including mk I Astartes treatment.

It was mentioned that the capital of Calbi is on the western side of the continent, probably north of Vancouver. If you superimpose a map of the modern world on AoS earth, you can see that Merika has apparently expanded northward past it's current borders and has eaten up a lot of the nicer land in southern Calbi (including southern Ontario, you can see the vestiges of the Great Lakes). Which explains why Calbi was so dependent on Merikan imports.

This is probably going to be the stupidest thing anyone has said in this project so far, but I’ve been thinking about the climate and ocean currents of Old Earth just before the Unification Wars. Ocean currents can have a huge impact on the climate of a region; it’s why London is merely rainy and overcast despite being further north than Calgary at the same latitude as the southernmost part of Hudson Bay.

Because of geoengineering projects during the Dark Age of Technology the Gulf Stream would have shut down and very little of the water in the North Atlantic Ocean reached the tropics. This would force cool water to circulate south from the north, cooling the surrounding area. By contrast, the north Pacific has no connection to the Arctic Ocean anymore, which would cause currents to bring warm water north from the equator. This would make the Amur River an even better place to settle than normal (explaining Ursh).

The same warm water current that benefited Ursh would also warm the western coast of Calbi. Therefore, the best place to build a civilization and the place that could probably support the highest population density would be on the western side, whereas the eastern side would have been much colder.

I imagined the Merikan industrial heartland as a massive sprawl of ancient geoengineering projects heaped over each other where once was New England, the eastern seaboard, and the basins of the great lakes. There would be massive embankments and terraces overgrown and resettled too many times to count, and the cities would be stubby proto-hives that have risen and fallen out of disrepair again too many times to count. The same could be said for the ancient cities all over earth in the Unification era, but Merika's landscape really does have the feeling of the engineering being the landscape's very substrate.

Much like the Ziggurat motif was taken up by Ursh in a characteristic bout of imperialistic arrogance, the sheer sides of Merika's pyramid shaped bunker fortresses were built out of sheer practicality, but had since come to be affiliated with ancient lore and motifs already present in the land's customs. Later Merikan pyramidal bunkers would be crowned by Intelligence-Observation hubs, and those would be gaudily adorned atriums of communications and spy equipment.

What is the biggest hub of scum and villainy in the Nobledark Imperium? Outside of it, it's probably going to be Comorragh, but what about inside of the (nominal) domain of the Emperor and Empress?

>it's probably going to be Comorragh
>Comorragh
>the city that's absolutely assured to be preferable to Shaa-Dome, almost by definition
>worse than Shaa-Dome

Ehh, well I meant a lawless metropolis that is teetering on the line between 'crime ridden hellhole' and 'murderpit.' A place that would allow people to come and go, rather than a fuckprison. I'm sure Shaa-Dome is worse than Comorragh, but would it be worse than Slaanesh's personal pad?

I just wanted a place where adventurers would naturally gravitate for jobs/bounties/information/rare goods for an RPG.

Shaa-dome is beholden to no laws that are not based on the wills of the Prince of Pleasure or the Daemon Queen or are otherwise backed by violence. These include such laws as morality, causality, and physics.

By contrast, Commorragh is just a city full of fedora-tipping edgelords.

Shaa-Dome is Slaanesh's personal pad. Or at least the guest room next door.

If you want dens of scum and villainy for RPG hooks, Necromunda would fit well of the worlds written so far.

Necromunda would almost certainly be the highest-profile example, as a Survivor Civilization and early member of the Imperium.

Necromunda is like Vegas and Monoco tag teamed Amsterdam. It's a high class sort of sleaze, if only due to scale and history.

Rum-and-poor would be closer to the sort of cantina vibe, if only because it's not a whole planet.

Rum-and-poor would be a good one. If you’re running a game pre-M40, you could use Commorragh, since the Crones hadn’t taken over the asylum by that point. However, both here and in canon, Commorragh isn’t really a place where people can easily come and go. Commorragh is really only “safe” (and I use that word generously) for the Dark Eldar and maybe the Crones. Dark Eldar because they can walk through the streets without getting knifed for being a mon-keigh (no guarantees are made for any other reason for knifing). Crones because Crones are violent and crazy and those two traits are a good knife deterrent in a bad neighborhood like Commorragh.

Commorragh likes to present itself as a libertarian meritocratic utopia where everyone is free to do as they please without having to bow to the will of gods, kings, or any other authority. It’s unclear who they’re trying to convince with this message, as the Imperium sees them as a bunch of thieves and pirates, the Crones see them as prudes in denial, and the Necrons don’t really give a shit. In truth, they’re really, really not. You can get really far in Commorragh, but only if you’re a) an eldar (no mon-keigh need apply), b) a DARK eldar (no Craftworlders or Exodites need apply), and c) a TRUEBORN Dark Eldar (no tankbred need apply). Commorragh in canon has this weird habit where even though they hate each other’s guts, they hate the idea of an outsider with power even more. You have to be a Fabius Bile-level sick fuck for them to accept you as one of their own.

And of course, even if you manage to claw your way to the top of the heap, there’s still Commorragh’s number one rule: don’t fuck with Asdrubael Vect. Better eldar than you have tried.

(cont.)
That said, a well-known Imperial "hive of scum and villainy" might be a good idea. There's probably sleaze on every planet, especially since the underhives are starting to break down from lack of maintenance. Necromunda may be a high class sleazeball, but it's underhive is almost certainly worse.

Every sector probably has its own local shady region.

But thinking about an Imperium-sized Tatooine/Omega? How about something from one of the survivor civilizations or xenos races? Semi-autonomous status means that just about anything can go on beyond behind closed doors so long as it doesn't break the five golden rules so Imperial authority and the Arbites can't get a pretext to invade.

I can see the crime lords in such a situation having a unwritten rule to immediately hand anyone breaking said laws over to the Imperium so they can keep their little quasi-legal game running. Like someone slaving from an Imperial World or making treasonous deals with the Dark Eldar or Crones.

As for who...Demiurg? They're one of the merchant societies we've mentioned (along with squats and voidborn), but the latter two are distinctly community-oriented (as in there's probably a squat mafia but they're not looked favorably upon).

Shit, there was a supplement for Dark Heresy that mentioned a world that would be perfect for that that was a hub of the 'Cold Trade' (The trading of xenos artifacts). I'll need to go through my books, be back in a while.

Bumf

>as in there's probably a squat mafia but they're not looked favorably upon
There were major Voidborn mafias back in the age of strife, but they all seem to vanish around the same time the house of Horus got in the game. One might wonder why, and one might be denied an answer by fleet intelligence, because nobody saw nothing, and that nothing certainly didn't go down in Horus's used starship lot when some nosey fools asked pointed questions.

Squat Mafia I'm imagining as that they see themselves as holding up traditional Hubworld values an keeping society organized, orderly and happy. In truth they are a bunch of protection racket runners, drug dealers, smugglers and whore dealers.

But then it gets a bit weird. They have been doing this for so long that they have started to believe and try to live up to their own hype.

So whilst they still do a lot of shady shit they also do a lot of non-shady shit that ingratiate themselves to the population in general.

That would explain how Horus and his father got so powerful so fast.

Necromunda would be like that only in the lower mid-hives to underhives.

It gets progressively more polite the further up the hive you get to the courts of the spire-top kings who are, at least when at the spire tops, incredibly formal bordering on ritual and very polite. And very boring.

Spire-top kings often visit lower down the hives, anonymously if they are smart, to visit the casinos, the ale houses, the music halls, the night clubs, the bordellos, the feasting halls and myriad other entertainment facilities.

This is allowed and even encouraged as the Spire-top Kings tend to spend big, invite all their friends and tip like happy drunk sailors. Possibly they do this as social posturing to display their wealth. Either way it helps keep the coinage circulating.

As you get further down the hive it gets less clean. Bordellos turn into brothels and are referred to as such, burlesque houses are replaced by opium dens and such.

The there is a bizarre reversal in the Sump and the Warrens where what the up-hive people call the crime lords hold sway. Equally as proud as any Spire-top King they impose order as order is good for business, they all know that they are potentially only an hour away from a lynch mob or the arbiters and so they have standards and take at least some care of their subjects.

It is also rumoured that a Night Lords splinter group has set up a discreet recruitment station in the very lowest levels of the sub-Sump Warrens without the permission of the Imperial Fists descendant chapter that maintains a recruitment station on Necromunda. They have done.

There have been several attacks on the Necromunda hives by opportunistic but small time Dark Eldar kabals and at least one minor WAAAAGH!!!. They went into the lower hives and were never seen again.

I swear I'm working on the Dorn fluff bumping for time.

A question on the Dorn.

Is there an a character from the Imperial Fists who could be an old comrade in arms for Dorn?

Sigismund maybe?

I think we've already had him mentioned as the founder of Nurgle's brand of Fallen marines.

at which time he was first captain of the Imperial fists. Sigismund is definitely an option.

The voidborn probably don't look very favorably on crime, since out in space every morsel you illegitimately put in your mouth is one you had to take out of the mouth of someone else. On the other hand, the voidborn might see very little difference between organized crime the usual state of affairs. The only difference being crime directly harms people or society as a whole.

This would lead to some weird social norms compared to the groundpounders. Selling vices is okay because it's business and no one's being forced to do anything. Selling shitty tech is a no no because if your oxygen recycler blows then you have no air to breathe. But haggling is A-OK because why would you not want a better deal?

There also might be gangs of rambunctious youth in the bowels of the ships simply due to their sheer size. Back when we were talking about Horus' youth I almost suggested him having run with one of the undership gangs in his youth to explain how he was so good with organizing people (and how he understood a bit of violence could oil the wheels of negotiation) and to refer back to his canon origins. But I think that's not possible now.

There is nothing to suggest Horus didn't dabble in a bit of what outsiders might consider shifty behaviour.

Also he did manage to become the king of an entire subspecies of humanity. You have to wonder what happened to the dissenters.

Void Born might not be against reasonable violence on a cultural level. It being the other thing that differentiates them from the Diasporax.

Yeah, voidborn are merchants and traders by nature. They would definitely not be against a little justified violence when need be. Space may be a good reason for banding together, but it isn't free of people who would engage in violence. Diasporex are a religious movement who engage in trade because everyone has to eat. They're Silk Road merchants crossed with Silk Road missionaries or monks with a religion resembling ancient perceptions of the stars.

Sol voidborn also had close ties with the Mechanicum pre-Warlord. It's not unlikely they had to engage in a bit of outer space violence to get things done when hired by the Mechanicum.

...

Doing the writing up of the Dorn fluff. Run into problem.

I don't know shit about native North American naming traditions. I have no fucking idea what to call Dorn's mum.

Anyone got any suggestions?

It's 30,000 years in the future, make some shit up.

I can't seem to, I am trying.

Make a joke about Canadians currently inhabiting the region you want and go from there. Most of our OC names have been gags at first.

Keep in mind too that "tribal" in this case not only means descendants of the Native Americans, but of basically everyone who lived in Canada or the Pacific Northwest. Like how in Fallout you get tribals whose ancestors come from all over.

So there's a lot more flexibility in the names that could be used.

Also if you need help just look up Pacific Northwest First Nations culture stuff.

You know, I was just thinking, the fact that sagittar armor acts as artificial limbs is just asking for a character that has lost their legs and uses sagittar armor as a prosthetic. A true merger between man and machine.

It’s certainly a common theme in 40k. The Space Marines have their dreadnaughts. The Mechanicus often replace perfectly good limbs with prosthetics. Heck, even the Tau have their token "requires military-grade prosthetics to live" character in Bravestorm. Why not the Interex? It would also make up for the lack of Interex characters, of which we have almost none in canon.

I was thinking of something like a combination between Queen Tomyris of the Scythians and Chiron, to continue the centaur/horseman theme of the Interex heavy infantry. Whereas Chiron in Greek Mythology is known for being the most level-headed member of a race of hotheads, this character is the most warlike member of a race of peaceniks. The Interex in general love math, but rather than peaceful purposes this character is one of the Interex’s best strategists and prefers to use it for tactics and thrives on the battlefield. The Interex don’t like war, even though they acknowledge its necessity, and are rather unsettled by her agressiveness and decide to send her far away along with the like-minded soldiers, kind of like the Foreign Legion, which is one way in which you get sagittars on battlefields outside of Interex territory. However, when she gets out among the greater Imperium, it turns out she is only bloodthirsty by Interex standards, and in reality is only slightly more bloodthirsty than average. 0.5 Machariuses at the most.

I had the idea but wanted to bring it up before I wrote anything in case it sounded too weird.

We're keeping the post-Unification and personality stuff we have for Dorn, right?

Yes so far as I know.

bump while I write thing

An idea I had for a Cronedar special unit/weapon.

>Qlippoth
The Qlippoth began as something of a science project deep within the bowels of Shaa-Dom. An attempt at creating emotion and sensation unprecedented even to gods, creating zones of altered space equally foreign to both the Materium and Empyrean and minds to inhabit them- to be consumed. Born to die.

It worked. Croneworld legend holds that everyone even tangentially involved with the project was immediately elevated to Daemon Princedom for creating sensations previously unknown to even the Prince of Excess, but the actual truth could be anything.

Qlippoth intended for war use are transported within ghastbone containment/support wombs, which are in turn locked within stasis fields. Once on the battlefield, the stasis fields are deactivated and the contained micro-universe and inhabiting Qlippoth(s) begin eating their way out of the containment womb and leaking into the outside universe.

It begins with a psychic howl, an utterly alien psyche pressing down on the mind and soul. Devastating and incapacitating. Permanent damage is likely. Closer to the epicenter, total mind erasure.

Then, physical effects, as the containment womb starts to collapse entirely and the micro-universe within starts to force its way out, resulting in a zone of overlapping physics within both the Materium and Immaterium. The exact effects are never the same twice, each Qlippoth and its substrate being utterly unique, but they are invariably devastating. Not even daemons take well to the laws of physics changing underneath them.

Finally, the utter collapse of the containment womb and the release of the Qlippoth itself. Without the womb maintaining its form and feeding it energy, it will only live for a handful of minutes, but will cause enormous destruction in those few minutes before the laws of nature finally reassert themselves. Even so, the scars on both Materium and Immaterium will linger indefinitely.

Thoughts?

So, it's a Cronedar Exterminatus?

Probably varies based on the size, but I was thinking about a high-end Deathstrike on average, city and regiment-killing but not really planetary. You probably could have an Exterminatus-grade Qlippoth, but they would be special and rare.

It was talked about that the really high population hive worlds are populous enough to support multiple chapters. Armageddon has five, but that might also be because it's Armageddon.

The Imperial Fist descendants potential unhappiness with the Night Lords descendants setting up shop in the underhives might be less because they're edging in on IF territory and more because they're Night Lords.

I would suggest that the eighteen First Founding chapters all have a "Right of Recruitment", the right to recruit aspirants from Old Earth itself. This wouldn't just be symbolic, gene-seed was originally designed on Earth and so has the highest compatibility rates.

In practice, almost no one ever uses it. Space Wolves don't because Canis Helix doesn't work well outside of the Fenrisian Worlds. Iron Hands don't because Mars provides them with all the manpower they could need. The others don't really use it either, but in a situation similar to vanilla Warzone Fenris or IFs in WOTB it would allow the chapter to recover and find a new home world instead of being condemned to extinction or having to beg marines from other chapters (though they would probably consider it an honor to transfer to the founder chapter).

Do Liivi and Taldeer exist in this setting yet?

Absolutely do.

Which chapters have presence on Armageddon?

No clue. We just decided on five because that way there would be one for each hive and there would be more than a couple (which was thought to be too low, IIRC).

It was mentioned that different hives or planets in regions where multiple Astartes chapters are common tend to treat Astartes chapters like sports teams. I.e., local pride and rivalry with nearby hives ("Silver Snakes are the best." "No Diamond Crushers are the best, Snakes suck.") Obviously worse in some cases like Mordia and Praetoria and likely more of a hive thing than anything else.

The popularity of the Feast of Blades (Lion's team-building exercize turned Imperium-wide training spectacle) doesn't help.

Even by Chaos standards this is delightfully weird.

Does it have any connection to the Forgotten Apocalypse?

I'm not sure what you're referring to.

The Harrowing was an attempt by another universe to impose itself on our universe.

Maybe the Chaos Eldar accidentally attracted it with their insane weapons.

Actually, I was thinking that the Harrowing in this universe could potentially be Outsider-related, since the canon Imperial reaction to the Harrowing (erase all information) is identical to the appropriate course of action for dealing with the Outsider.

It's weaponized Zalgo.

It's beautiful.

>Which chapters have presence on Armageddon?

This is something we need to know.

Preferably adapted official chapters that contrast each other.

Should we have a vote on it?

The Harrowing is pretty well defined in canon as "universe full of magnetic lifeforms that didn't obey physics tried to forcefully impose itself on ours". The reason all information on the Harrowing was lost in canon was because the Imperium suppressed it to keep the masses calm. Here they're a bit more honest and tried to keep notes on it. You'd think if there was a massive galaxy-threatening event that took ridiculous pains to stop the Imperium would at least try to keep notes on what happened and how to stop it. Even if it was the Outsider, they would keep a list of "in case of something that wants to be forgotten, do this".

It's also been mentioned that the Imperium doesn't really know what the Outsider wants or where he is. The Inquisition know that the Lyrixian mega-structure exists and that it tends to kill any team that goes in there, but they keep assuming the team befell some kind of defense mechanism as opposed to what's actually in there. They have no clue that they're poking a bear, one that could have disasterous consequences on the Imperium if they wake it up.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean we can't have another major event, this one Outsider related.

>Magnetic lifeforms
Thank God the Harlequins were there to save the day.

fucking kek

I don't get it.

To be honest that's probably how the Harlequins reacted to the whole affair.

"We are under attack by a mysterious foe! Harlequins, what can your vast and priceless source of ancient knowledge tell us about this enemy?"

"Um, yeah, we literally know nothing about these guys, which is really saying something. Also, what we have seen seems to work completely at odds with all knows laws of how the Materium or the Warp works. I dunno, maybe they run on miracles or something".

For this we need 5 chapters of diverse ideology but no stated home world in Vanilla.

We need distinctive colours and simple, bold symbols to easily identify teams.

I'm going to suggest one be the Hammers of Dorn for that sweet black and gold colour scheme. Also as the Codex is this time guidelines only their deal could be that they study to point of obsession a wide number of martial doctrines to become perfect strategist and tacticians.

g.co/kgs/HfldJC

Let's see if this fancy link works. If it doesn't, just google "fucking magnets."

But now I'm just more confused.

That's standard upon witnessing Insane Clown Posse.

Knowing you poked the bear, and that there is a bear in the giant space orb, is exactly what sets the bear off.

Sometimes when Trayzn wants someone dead he has them peek inside the mystery box he keeps and read the files inside, and then mark will die soon after.

So what would happen if some colossal asshole accumulated as much info on the Outsider as possible and broadcast it across the communications networks of every planet in the Imperium with the technology to do so?

>nobledark Max Headroom when

Hideous murder on scale unimaginable, I imagine.

This (). Outsider keeps going until someone puts him down. Although he has no noticeable Warp signature, he's still the last of the pure C'tan, which means it would take the Void Dragon, Nightbringer, or one of the Chaos Gods to kill him.

Is the Diasporex (the pilgrim fleet) policed and protected by the Imperium? Cause that is one big giant target for Chaos to infiltrate in there.