Nobledark 40k 28: Imperial Grand Tour eddition

I liked the idea floated around...was it last thread?
That the old nations are technically still around, but not the cultures or anything, they're more the names of administrative districts than anything else.

It reminds me of Kent.

It's a county in south east England. It has always been Kent right back to when the Romans arrived, lands of the Cantii tribe.

Who were the Cantii and what were they like? Who gives a shit.

Page 10 bamp

It was like five threads ago. I think.

That said could work. The names are known but their meaning and the culture of the people who once claimed them are but dim memories, known only to Oscar and maybe Bjorn.

You could probably dig up some facts in historical texts, but even that's just dry, cold data and not 'this is how these people lived'.
...makes me wonder if people try to do historical reenactments of various battles (and get them horribly wrong, of course)

Pictured: A Tau regiment of the Imperial Guard supported by Astartes from the Emperor's Warbringers Chapter battle a swarm of Tyranid, part of the campaigns against Hive Fleet Leviathan.

They could probably build space elevators the way current proposals suggest, by hanging a line off of a counterweight in geosynchronous orbit.

The trick is finding a material strong enough to hold its own immense weight.

Are there any human worlds in the Tau Empire and should there be any Chapters that recruit from them?

How does the Imperium in this AU feel about scavenging on Space Hulks?

Also can they and do they take the time to free people infected by but not born into Gene-Stealer cults?

Also Zoat. Are there Zoats?

Tactical Dorn Bump

It's been mentioned the Cronedar like to mine Space Hulks to make their ships and fleet, due to the hulks being in the warp a lot.

Very little has been said about Genestealer Cults. The Imperium fought "the Genestealer Wars" in M36 which were a pretty big affair (likely genestealers on a galactic scale), and thought they were the main threat and killing most of them was the end of it. Then the tyranids showed up.

Given that the Eldar have genestealer screening technology and the Kroot joined in M39, it should be possible for them to screen for genestealers. However, the problem with genestealer infection isn't the infected you see. It's the infected you don't. With very few exceptions, genestealer infectees are from the underhives, and like to hide away after being infected. They're not the sort of people who will willingly go to the hospital for examination. Later generation hybrids yes, but by that point you have a serious infestation problem.

Zoats nothing.

Imagine people making films about the Unification Wars with all the historical accuracy of 300 or The Patriot.

That reminds me of something I was thinking about regarding Arik Taranis. Taranis, despite all he did, was still not a primarch, and was buried in a nowhere grave in Terrawatt among thousands of others. His grave is no site of importance like Sanguinius, Horus, to Lorgar. Arik might be known to extreme scholars of history in the same way someone like John Hamilton was known in America before the musical: an interesting person to those who know about him but otherwise literally who? The only notable recognition Taranis got in recent years was in 789.M40 when a film came out purporting to show the "true story" of the Imperium. In it, Taranis is portrayed as a bumbling sidekick and comic relief, like Baldrick on Blackadder.

The only reason the Emperor hadn't decried the film it would have made him too sad to see it.

Although there are uncountable numbers of films and shit about the Unification War, Great Crusade and War of The Beast there can only be a certain number of characters that people give a shit about. For every Lancelot there is are a hundred Lamorak and Kai.

There has never been a film out that featured Bjorn for the simple reason that nobody apart from the Fenrisians and a small group of eldar give a shit about Bjorn.

Ollanius Pius is barely remembered and he kamikazed a Rok from landing on the Imperial Palace. He is responsible for saving the Imperium. The only people that remember his name by 999M41 are Oscar, Isha and Lion should Lion ever come out of the coma.

Of all the well known public names there is only one that has remained conspicuously absent from the big film releases; Eldrad "Unreasonable Royalties" Ulthuran. Attempts to make films without informing the grumpy old bastard generally result in Eldrad kicking expensive executive doors in and yelling something on the lines of "heard you wear talking shit about me like I wouldn't find out!"

It's not a pleasant experience and Eldrad just does it to fuck with people. He's a dick like that.

Old Earth being restricted to humans is more a matter of privacy than anything else. Old Earth is a pretty big deal to humans and holds a lot of spiritual significance, regardless of religion, and they don't want a veritable horde of xeno tourists coming in and messing everything up like drunks spray-painting a holy site.

That said, Old Earth does have non-humans on it, just not very many. Annual permits are issued for non-humans to visit Earth. As is the case for some places today, foreigners (by which I mean non-humans) can rent places, but they can't buy property (then again, few can buy property on Old Earth). Ambassadors from the Craftworlds and non-human civilizations get a pass. You get tourists and students who are able to articulate well enough that they won't go getting drunk and disrupting cultural sites. Merchants and traders who want to sell wares (though it's generally a bad idea trying to sell tech in Mars' backyard). And of course Isha and the Handmaidens get a free pass because it would be stupid for the fricking Empress to not be allowed to set foot on the throne world.

Most people don't care that Old Earth is restricted in many ways, the Sol System is "good enough".

By the same token, the Imperium tries to afford the same respect to worlds like T'au, or to a lesser degree the Craftworlds. Ask permission before you land on a homeworld, unless it's an emergency.

Technically, there is no Tau Empire any more since they've been incorporated into the Imperium, though they probably have some level of autonomy like Ultramar and other similar states. Given the semi-free movement within the borders of the Imperium, it's almost a certainty that some humans have settled in Tau Space.

Though the Tau are fiercely proud of their military and rightfully so, the Space Marines are still the premier ground forces of the Imperium excluding the ultra rare heavy hitters. Getting a chapter assigned to your planet imbues it with prestige as it means it is one of the few worlds in the million worlds of the Imperium important enough to require that level of protection, so I'm sure the Tau agitated for at least a few chapters to be founded on some of their key worlds after they were admitted into the Imperium.

That's pretty harsh on Hamilton :( Anyone who knows anything about American colonial history knows his contributions to the Revolution and the Constitution, and of the Founding Fathers, John Jay is probably the most "literally who" of them.

I doubt people would see Taranis as a fool though. Even if they didn't know the specifics of his life, I doubt most people would assume the founder of one of the most legendary Imperial institutions is anything other than a certified badass.

The Imperial Palace is probably a borderline maze. It was designed by Dorn and Perturabo, with adjustments by architects repairing shit for 10,000 years afterwards, and Perty probably made it was labyrinthine on purpose to confound any attackers. In addition to being the home of the Emperor and Isha that they barely ever spend any time in, it houses the offices of the High Lords of Terra, parts of the Administratum, a museum dedicated to mankind's history (this is actually from canon) containing everything from the fragments of the first human built Warp Drive to Jaghatai Khan's shitty outdated warbike he used during the Unification Wars, and the biggest orphanage on Old Earth. At the least. It has large halls, but winding side passages that make it ridiculously hard for defenders to not have at least one escape route handy.

The primary temples of the Oficio Tacitum (Assassins) are said to still be on Old Earth, though obviously they wouldn't set them up in the old salt wastes of what was once the Mediterranean because that would be just too obvious.

Sebastian Thor was said to have had to fight his way to the Imperial Palace to get Vandire's eldar guard to step down. Thor basically said "I've wired the palace to blow, and I told the people outside I was going to see Vandire dead regardless of what happens to me. The only question is whether you live or not." The eldar took the smart way out.

I was actually going to say John Jay, but I thought that no one would recognize who that was if I brought him up (ironically).

>I doubt people would see Taranis as a fool though. Even if they didn't know the specifics of his life, I doubt most people would assume the founder of one of the most legendary Imperial institutions is anything other than a certified badass.

When you're playing the Watson to the Emperor of Mankind, and the people making the film thinks it "needs a comic relief to make people like the film more", the committee turns you into the bumbling comedy relief. Much like how 300 exorcised all of Themistocles' slimier elements to turn him into an everyman hero. No one besides the marketing department ever said the film was accurate. The nerd rage from Imperial historians was probably enough to make Khorne go "whoa".

It would be a step up from being a spear carrier, which Taranis would have been reduced to in most adaptations.

It's also a good thing Constantin Valdor wasn't around by M40 or there would have been words.

Perhaps he's portrayed less as a bumbling sidekick and more as the brawn to Emps's brains?
Thus completely neglecting the fact that A) he was a scientist himself and B) Mister Man of Gold is not some wimp himself

>Technically, there is no Tau Empire any more since they've been incorporated into the Imperium

There is in the same way that there is an Interex.

Also I don't think anyone has ever tried to claim or suggest that there is free movement across borders of the Imperium by Imperial demand. Worlds may allow free movement if it suits them but they are not compelled from on high to do so.

How far down can you realistically go before the bedrock starts to get malleable?

There is free trade, but only on the greater Imperium side. As in "we allow you to trade openly across our borders without any Rogue Trader skullduggery like most unaffiliated civilization". Rogue Traders are important because you never know what goes on behind closed doors and trading with and some race may be secret Chaos worshippers. This way just one dumbass who makes a bad trade deal is likely to suffer as opposed to an entire sector if you had unregulated trade.

Interex, Ultramar, Hubworld League, Tau, etc. have full rights to do whatever they want as long to improve the prosperity of theit people as it doesn't involve Chaos worship, Emperor worship, or shooting at other Imperials.

A good way to think of the Survivor Civilization, Craftworlds, and other xenos is like Catalonia in Spain. In some ways they are Imperial and in others they are clearly not.

Zoats could be either a desperate bunch of surviving refugees traveling before the Hive Fleet in their strange but primitive ships, dedicating themselves to warning others of the impending doom and urging them to tool the fuck up.

Or at least that's how they sold themselves to the Imperium when they first met.

In fact they are not so clean cut from the 'Nids.

They are survivors of the Hive at least, but not from this galaxy.

They don't know where they came from, not anymore. It doesn't matter to them.

Some millions of years ago the Zoats, the original Zoats, knew their day was done. Their galaxy was devoured and they the last pocket of meat were soon to be gobbled up. So they took what they could of themselves and turned the mutagenic properties of the Star Locusts against them.

They infected themselves with a virus that when they were eaten would spread to the rest of the hive fleet an lie dormant until such time as the Hive found a new feeding ground and began to multiply again.

When the Nid's got to the milky way and the Norn Queens started to spawn a new generation the Hive Ships that were infected by the Zoat Virus some five million years previous started to spawn Zoat. At least one batch of Zoat survived though many were purged.

The new breed of Zoat don't know much of their progenitors, their was a limit on how much knowledge could be programmed via virus. In truth they are not Zoat, they are the final spiteful act of the Zoat incarnate.

Maybe one day they will be Zoat again, or at least some sort of Zoat. They are havign to build up from step one again.

They have a deal going with the last remnants of the Scythes of the Emperor. Their hate is equal. They haven't met Kryptman yet, but they would be friends. They have hate in common.

If Kryptman ever met the Zoats he'd want to reverse engineer their virus and make the Tyranids mass produce him so he can devour them from the inside out.

Assuming that the reborn Zoat even know how to make that virus again it is perhaps then as well they have not yet met. The Imperium probably couldn't cope with more than one of the mad bastards running around.

Also if we do go this way with the Zoat it does raise the point that the Zoat are the only other extra-galactic species, are a stark reminder that failure is not an option and that they have in effect out gene-stealered the gene-stealers.

Also that Zoat are not truly Zoat in a way. They are 'Nids mutated to look and think like Zoat. They are not a people so much as a bio-weapon built in the image of a dead people, one last fuck you to the Great Devourer.

Also their origional ships were probably hijacked hive-fleet bio-ships which indicates that they have at least some ability to interface with bio-tech in the manner of a 'Nid. Also they can use 'Nid weapons, though they might prefer not to.

They would present the Imperium with a dilemma. They are 'Nid but not 'Nid. They are sapient and sentient but they have no art, accomplishments of their own and literally exist to do nothing but fight and die and take as many of the 'Nids with them.

They would be a bizarre cross between pitiable and frightening. There would be dissenting opinion on whether they are people. Te Zoat would point out maybe they are and maybe they are not but it is unimportant so long as The Hive lives. Maybe they can try and rebuild the Zoat as people again, but not today. Today is a good day to die.

This raises the biggest question of all.

Is Emperor porn legal?

The Zoats could even be the original tyranids, the organisms from which the beings that now threaten to eat the galaxy are descended. They are six-limbed beings that bear a striking resemblance to the tyranid groundplan. This brings me to an idea I had thought about, but had not been sure I wanted to pitch.

Ages ago in a galaxy quite a ways a way there was once a race. A technologically advanced race, not on par with the Old Ones but maybe equivalent to the Necrons. Masters of flesh and biotechnology. As all races do after a certain point, they began to think seriously about the bigger things in life. Mortality. Inequality. Understanding their fellow being.

And so the race came up with what they thought was the solution. Upload everyone’s mind into a single interconnected network, free from the constraints of flesh, from which bodies could be created on demand. On paper it seemed perfect. No one would die unless they chose to. No mind would be forced inhabit a body it did not want to. Everyone would instantly be able to see the perspective of anyone else, creating universal empathy. And the network was ever increasing, ever growing, so not only would the race benefit, but they could bring their gift to everyone in existence. There would be no more death, no more disease, no more hatred. For anyone.

Naturally, something went horribly wrong. What should have been an interlinked network of independent minds collapsed into a single morass, differences between individual thought patterns blurring until only the most universal impulses remained. Eat. Grow. Reproduce. The subroutines designed to bring in fresh matter to power the network and grow forms for resleeving individual minds corrupted into the biotechnological equivalent of gray goo. The race had tried to achieve the singularity, and instead all they had done was go past an event horizon.

The only people to survive this singularity, which had suddenly become one in a very literal sense, were the people who refused to upload their minds to the network in the first place. They suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of a quadrillion gaping maws of what had once been their entire species, mutated into unrecognizability.

(cont.)
(cont.)
And so they ran. And when they could not run, they fought. Always one step ahead of the network that had once been the summed minds of their brothers and sisters. They fought the tyranids in their home galaxy. They fought them in Andromeda. They fight them here. Everywhere they go, they bring the same message to the same message to every race they encounter, in the hopes that they will heed their warnings and either flee or militarize to the point they can fight the tyranids.

“Run, for in our foolishness the gift of our people has coming for you.”

However, I’m not too sure if this is a good idea, as it seems to retread a lot of the themes of the Eldar (big idea went horribly wrong, only survivors were those who rejected it) and the Orks (mutated into a literal invasive ecosystem that knows only war and would be unrecognizable to its forebearers). Latter could apply to Necrons too. It also takes away from the mystery of the tyranids. The original ideas was kind of an “origin story” for them, but do the tyranids really need an origin story?

On the other hand, it provides an interesting contrast to the idea of a future Imperial singularity caused by the likes of Ynnead, the Void Dragon, and the like. Singularities don't always work, and doesn't mean everything is going to be okay forever.

On a related note, trying to look up Zoats on Google brings up pages with the header "What Are Zoats and Should You Be Eating Them?" Rather ironic, sounds like a tyranid web article.

The only other big ideas we've had about the tyranids is to make them behave more realistically predatory, inasmuch as they're an (or a pack of) inter-galactic predators that have been closing on our galaxy from their last major feeding frenzy eons ago, and while they're well adapted to predation on a galactic scale the swarm is still desperate, hungry, and vulnerable since its committed its energy and matter to the kill. It's original burn and course set it towards the galaxy long before it could accurately observe biological affairs within, perhaps before the light of the war in heaven could have reached them, and were committed to attacking the galaxy back when it was dominated by the Old Ones and their relatively early psychic-biological infrastructure. Now that they're starved and closing in they face a galaxy that has become decidedly more hostile as a psychic environment, and has developed species like the Necrons and the Imperium that make significant use of applied engineering and physics based weapons, as well as the horrible local wildlife like Fenrisian Kraken, the biosphere of Catachan, Kriegers, Nurglite life forms, etc. that manage to outstrip them in horrific adaptations. In essence, the Tyranid hive mind(s) are a pack of coyotes sticking their snouts in what they think is a gopher den, but is actually filled with horrible cybernetic tarantulas.

To add to all that, its pretty likely that hydrogen grazers would be more viable than tyranids, so its fair to assume that either hydrogen grazers exist, tyranids might hunt them, and prey on galactic fauna in times of scarcity, or that their origin is less than natural.

I think tyranids are outright stated to be artificial in canon. That their genetic structure and biology is too "well-designed" to be natural among other things, and either someone built them to be weapons and lost control of them (at which point they became part of the galactic ecosystem) or some race somehow evolved into them (similar to how it was mentioned here the Necrons could do the exact same thing as tyranids if they put all their effort into grey goo and scarab swarms and put eating and reproducing above all else). It was one of the lines of evidence people have used to propose the tyranids in canon are the Old Ones' half-assed reset button.

That said, I do like the characterization of tyranids as "galactic predators who thought they found an easy meal and found the galaxy a bit tougher to chew than expected".

They are centaur lizards

How would the primarchs be remembered and depicted?

There is nothing in the 2 alternate origin theories presented in this thread that is mutually exclusive.

why_not_both.jpg

Some of them have been discussed.

Horus is remembered as a heroic Coyote- or Hermes-like trickster, his more oilier aspects and ambition ironed out. Part of this is because he only ever voiced his contrary opinions to the Steward behind closed doors.

Sanguinius is remembered as Objectively Best Primarch, despite the fact he had feelings of insecurity and powerlessness and rage issues (which are never brought up in the public perception).

Ultramar and the Administratum just love Guilliman. For Ultramar, he is the law-bringer, the civilization shaper. The Ultramarines call Guilliman their spiritual liege because he is a figure of veneration for him despite having never been a super soldier, been born in Ultramar, or even fighting on the front lines during most of the Unification Wars and the Great Crusade.

Khan is remembered as one of the founders of the Khanate to the Pastoral Worlders, and is known but not as revered elsewhere. I assume the same goes for Russ.

I agree, there is nothing stopping the tyranids from being a failed hive mind that went feral and became a galactic-scale predator over millions of years whose survivors engineered themselves to pop out of the Hive like parasitic wasps out of ant eggs as a final fuck you to their kin.

I was just more concerned that the "origin" retreads too much of what we see in the Orks and Eldar. It might also take away from the "galactic predator" concept, which is good. Although I was the user who wrote the idea, I have no problem if the "failed hive mind" idea gets discarded.

The one thing is we do need more on tyranids and it is hard to do so. There are no "natural" changes to their history like the Imperium or Chaos, and they don't have any individual figures. So all that can be done is describe the units they use (most of which have already been done so in canon), or the battles they fought in.

The image of Russ in the common Media of the 41st millennium could be the ultimate Honourable Savage Viking. Axe in one hand, keg sized beer mug in the other and a different woman every night. A riotous, loud and jovial marauder combining the most desirable parts of man and beast.

Truth was he was a never unfaithful to his wives and held great reverence for the sanctity of marriage. His small tribe of daughters was just the result of both his wives and himself being active for the better part of five hundred years.

He was also prone to bouts of depression and although he could laugh up a storm was more known for brooding and gnawing at old wounds. His sense of humour was fairly gallows and tended towards self depreciation.

But that's hard to make sit-coms out of and the only Space Wolf left who remembers him spends most of his time asleep so who honestly gives a shit.

It makes you wonder what culture the Zoats would develop.

They have essentially be wiped to a clean slate.

Threadly reminder that Nobledark is a 40k modification, not a total conversion. The only thing we've consistently had of the Nids is that they're a complete wildcard, predicted by neither psyker nor daemon nor farseer - and that, in turn, they're finding the Milky Way to be an unexpectedly chewy meal. Giving them a concrete origin, especially linking them to more xenos, feels too much of a step away from what we're given in Vanilla, like when we tryed to rewrite the War in Heaven.

The annoying thing is, I really like this idea, too.

The nids have always been linked to the Zoats in canon. The Zoats showed up in the tyranid vanguard force, back when the tyranids were space dinosaurs as opposed to alien locusts. Then GW realized the alien eating machines didn't need diplomats, and the Zoats were squatted.

Other than that everything you mention has a point.

Would it help to leave their origins unknown and this be an AdBio speculation?

The only issue would be if they could get information from the Zoats' mouths themselves. Of course, if the Zoats are being reborn from the tyranids, they might not even know their own origin.

Being custom-built bioforms also wouldn't explain the tyranids weird lifecycle, where it is thought that rippers are essentially larval tyranids that metamorphose into the necessary organism during war/someone annoying you when you're trying to eat lunch, and then hatched as is to eat the landscape during late-phase invasion.

Zola should maybe be extremely reluctant to give up information about themselves.

Is it because they don't know? Who can say.

Are Saruthi a thing in this AU?

Because if they are and have fallen they could be a major player in the non-eldar Chaos factions.

Then they got reintroduced as being Hive Fleet Colossus

Is the penal legion still a thing?

Has anything been written about Savlar and it's Chem-Dogs?

Also Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers

Nothing has been written about Savlar. The origins behind it would have to be changed somewhat from canon, since in canon it is a quintessential example of grimderp (planet is so toxic that you couldn't get miners to settle there if you paid them, so they made them a penal colony and worked them to death in the toxic smog instead, etc.).

While the Imperium may be willing to put convicts in some absolutely shitty situations, I don't think they would go so far as to put them in a situation that is a guaranteed death sentence akin to fetching nuclear waste from Chernobyl

might be fun to have Savlar be a really messed up survivor civilization, genetically Men of Stone like the rest of the galaxy's humans and abhumans, but on the far end of the spectrum from the human baseline, to the point of almost being Xenos. The Savlar would be heavily augmented, divergent humans somewhat more adapted to the death-world's absurdly hostile environment. Their culture would be techno-barbarian and hedonistic due to the harsh conditions and high rate of attrition in their society, and only kept from actual Chaotic corruption due to necessary pragmatism and cooperation, in as much as diverting resources in the name of Slaanesh or Khorne is a death sentence due to natural hazards. The absolutely absurd toxicity of the world could come from DAoT extraction or synthesis of exotic material, which could also explain survivable humans living in the system, and would be more of a justification for the Imperium to back excavation activities in such a horrible place, under the name of archeology instead of mining. The Savlar themselves would be almost Fremen-esque waste wandering junkies, stuffed with drug glands and anti-toxin adaptations, prone to charge into battle with deadly tech they prize above their own lives and wreak madcap destruction like inverse Kriegers before they can be shot down.

That sounds like it has potential!

Survivor civilization would go a long way towards explaining how Savlar became the way it is. Imperium can't touch Survivor civilizations beyond no Chaos and no war with rest of Imperium, so they can't do much to Savlar unless the people of Savlar want it.

The only thing is that to be a Survivor Civilization implies that Savlar has space tech.

I would suggest dialing back the "would be Chaos worshippers if not for the environment". The Imperium wiped out Survivor civilizations that worshipped Chaos, even before they knew what it was, simply because many civilizations who worshipped the Chaos Gods openly were offended at the idea of anyone other than the Ruinous Powers telling them what to do.

Maybe the Savlar are hedonistic because of their brutal world. Go ye warriors, and drink, have sex, and do drugs, for tomorrow you may die.

In the interest of new material, here is a spitballed idea regarding the immediate aftermath of the Tau Empire’s Schism. As in, their attempts to try to crush Farsight and his separatists only to find out they were dug in too deeply and thus lead to the standoff situation that persists to 999.M41. Had trouble thinking of a name for the campaign, until I found out the infamous Damocles Gulf is literally the boundary between the vanilla Tau Empire and the Farsight Enclaves. I tried to keep the campaign to the general idea we set out in previous threads of “Taiwan fighting mainland China, and winning”.

The Damocles Gulf campaign is an important marker in Tau history, representing one of the largest battles in Tau history before the Tau joined the Imperium and one of the few instances in which Tau fought against Tau. After the rebuilding of the Tau Empire following the A.I. rebellion and the Fourth Sphere of Expansion, the political winds had shifted once again and the Ethereal council was once more considering the possibility of developing closer ties with the Imperium. Imperial culture had become well-known to the Tau in the millennium since the two empires had first met, and some Ethereals recognized the resonance between Imperial ideals and the Tau’va, as well as the potential of using inclusion into the Imperium as a vehicle to spread the Greater Good. However, these ideas created a political backlash and a series of counter-proposals across the Tau Empire. These proposals ranged from the reasonable, such as seeking to ally with the Imperium without fully joining, to the insane, such as a mass migration of pro- and anti-Imperium Tau across the empire to form separate pro- and anti-Imperial states.

Eventually things came to a head, with a contingent of traditionalists coming to believe that the ideologies of the Tau’va had already become too compromised by outside influence. Riots and violence erupted across the Tau Empire, eventually resulting in a sizeable minority of the Tau Empire including several Ethereals and high-ranking commanders including Commander Farsight leaving to form their own empire. The remaining Ethereals were outraged by this breach of Tau honor. Perhaps more importantly, the schism had led to the spilling of Tau blood by Tau hands, something that had not happened in history since the age of Mont’au and the days before the Tau as a whole had come to accept the Greater Good. This was something that could simply not go unpunished.

In response to the violence and aftereffects of the Schism, the Tau Empire raised a massive retaliatory strike force, headed by several Shas’O and at least three Ethereals. However, Farsight’s counterpart among the reformers, Commander Shadowsun, was not among their number. Although Shadowsun had fought against the reformers in the initial days of the schism, including with Farsight himself in the riots of T’au, she was not part of the retaliatory fleet, having been called away to the eastern front of the empire to defend against a splinter fleet of Hive Fleet Kraken. This may have been one of the reasons why the Damocles Gulf campaign went as badly as it did. Although the commanders were well-trained and their forces outnumbered the traditionalists by nearly six to one, they were still going up against the Tau Empire’s greatest living military strategist, and without a general of Farsight’s caliber on the side of the reformers the retaliatory strike may have been doomed to fail.

(cont.)
Perhaps the biggest mistake was following the traditionalists into the northwestern frontier of the Tau Empire, the area where Farsight had spent most of his military career. As a result, Commander Farsight and the traditionalists had a much better idea of the terrain than the reformers did, including the best places to defend or set ambushes. During the Damocles Gulf campaign, Farsight once again proved how he had earned his name, only fighting in areas where he could nullify the numerical advantage of the reformers, or flanking around the main body of the fleet to strike at supply lines and attempt to cut them off from the empire. When forced to fight in the open, he would often employ unorthodox tactics that caught the more conservative commanders of the reformers off guard, such as jumping his ships into “knife-fight” range so that enemy ships could not fire at them without firing on their own soldiers at the same time. Although victories by the traditionalists seemed to be randomly distributed across the Gulf, they would prove very important for future political events, for these victories were often concentrated around easily defensible points that would serve as the effective borders of the Farsight Enclaves.

(cont.)
The Damocles campaign was ultimately declared a failure. The Tau Empire had the forces needed to wipe the separatists from the stars, but Farsight’s forces were too heavily entrenched beyond the Damocles Gulf and it would cost them at least ten reformers for every traditionalist, a proposition the Ethereals were not willing to entertain. Not to mention, repaying the traditionalists’ violence with more blood would only strengthen the separatists’ claims of being in the right. Instead, the Ethereals decided to play the long game, considering that after a few generations the majority of the traditionalists, including most importantly Farsight, would be long gone. Unfortunately, this has not been the case, as the traditionalists have somehow managed to create their own functioning system within the Farsight enclaves, but Farsight has somehow managed to stay alive for far longer than any Tau would be reasonably expected to live.

(cont.)
This is just a preliminary version, to be rewritten as needed. However, I can already see one major problem with how things are now: Shadowsun swore a blood oath to kill Farsight, and there was no way she would let herself be sent away if she thought Farsight was going to be killed in the Damocles Gulf campaign.

The point of sending Shadowsun away was to explain why the Tau Empire weren’t able to beat Farsight despite their numbers advantage. The idea was that the commanders the Tau sent weren’t on Shadowsun or Farsight’s level, sort of like how Hannibal was able to rampage through Italy because the Romans didn’t bring their A game and wasn’t stopped until he fought against a general of comparable skill in Scipio. They were decent generals, but they were still up against Commander “I invented this maneuver during breakfast and it will be in the history books by dinner” Farsight. The point was more to show off how badass Farsight is than anything else. Shadowsun could have probably fought Farsight on a comparable level, and then won due to the numbers advantage.

She would've won, but it was more important to not let the entire damn empire (even the damn rebels) to get eaten by fucking bugs YOU HAVE HORRIBLE TIMING FARSIGHT

He's got great timing. Attacking while your enemies' best commander is otherwise detained is excellent strategy.

It reads fucking sweet

I like the sound of this.

It's more probable that Savlar was the site of Dark Age industry in making exotic compounds and such rather than just obtaining raw material. Something about the planet making it suited for the process.

Savlar has not native life forms and when man first set foot on it had almost no atmosphere. The atmosphere is has now is a side effect of the old industry. That it turned out breathable, if barely, was just a coincidence. Savlar is now home to extremophile and borderline extremophile life forms of the sort typically found growing next to volcanos on less awful worlds.

Native population of Savlar is descended from the people who used to work there and got stranded in ancient days.

Genetically they are more or less pure human but like Fenrisians there is very minor deviations. They can handle drugs and toxic substances far better than most people.

Bio-mods to help deal with the environment are common on Savlar and in the regiments raised there.

Given the unfortunate chemical composition of Savlar it might actually look pretty fucking fabulous from orbit.

I'm going to suggest that the chapter Rainbow Warriors are from Savlar.

How extreme a situation would the Imperium be willing to send in Last Chancers?

I'm down. I imagine the entire vibe of Savlar's forces is something between the Krieger's exaggerated WWI, warboys, and Eclipse Phase's scum faction.

If their ancestor chapter is unknown it might work to make the Rainbow Warriors a Night Lords descendant that's adapted to Savlar over a couple millenia. They'd have found their brutality fit right in with the world's existing justice system, in which malicious actors are just kneecapped and left in the wastes at best, and were originally a good fit for Savlar because the latter was one of the few worlds that would welcome a chapter of Night Lords, and they wouldn't have had their own order of space marines otherwise. The Rainbow Warriors would mostly police the offworld port cities and the major dig sites for piracy and theft of incredibly toxic archeotech respectively, and even start to take prisoners instead of just executing on the spot because criminals can be put to work. The Savlar themselves and the local Mechanicus have plenty of mining or archeology interests across the planet, and aren't opposed to employing semi-servitorized prisoners taken by their astartes to work. Again, because Savlar is so hostile, the locals so rowdy and well armed, and the local authorities so violent, impressment on Savlar is considered right up there with any other result of being caught by Night Lords, but the locals actually consider it a mercy, and claim rehabilitation, as they do still provide for the nominal survival of the impressed, and their nominal education as they drudge for years uncovering the remnants of the DAoT.

That's good.

Also Savlar could be the one planet where Night Lords don't have to hide. On every other world their fortress is discreet if not outright secret.

It's not that they are anywhere illegal but because the general population would riot if they drew too much attention to themselves.

Not so on Savlar.

On Savlar the Rainbow Warriors have a fortress right in the centre of the capital city. And the citizens love them for it.

On most planets the Night Lords are viewed as crazed maniacs. On Savlar people look at the Rainbow Warriors and go "eh, they're normal blokes, nothing looks wrong about 'em to me."

So how should the Chem-dogs fight, and are they actually penitents or are they just the Savlar militia and navy, with auxiliaries drawn from the impressed criminals?

The main force should be """professional""" soldiers with the sizable penal legions as backup.

Most penal legion goons are there by choice when the alternative was hazard work on Savlar.

So if the Savlar are a survivor civilization they would have had a few working interplanetary ships during the age of strife, that could mean they were in touch with a forgeworld in the system for their cybernetics, and a large pirate population in the system would be good fodder for pre-imperial criminal factions that the Savlar would be inter-meshed with and familiar with fighting.

Or it could be that they aren't a Survivor Civilization and they had no space ships.

It was a bunch of people with a shaky grasp on how some of the more advanced equipment they had worked, trying to survive on an inhospitable world where all the shit used to make it possible had been broken centuries before.

People occasionally came to visit them for their industrial produce and would trade for desperately needed things like gasmasks, tinned food, more water and other such things that they had no ability to produce or obtain.

They were unconquered by outside powers when the Imperium came calling but only because absolutely nobody wanted the place. Everybody looked at the planet, it's people and the cost to benefits never added up. The people would fight tooth and nail for their shitty little toxic rock, the toxic rock would kill more people than the locals and anything that it could produce the locals were willing to trade for in exchange for very little because they were always desperate.

Also none of the short lived empires that arose and fell in the AoS ever offered it a place in their realms due to the cost in rebuilding the place.

When Great Crusade found Savlar and offered them a place under the aegis and care of the Aquila it was a good day for Savlar.

Admittedly they are now under the rule of another distant world and not masters of their own destiny but on the other hand it's a hands off style of ruling and the Imperium has managed to make things considerably less shit for everyone that lives there.

What sort of a chapter are the RWs in Vanilla and what should they be here?

If Savlar wasn’t a Survivor Civilization there is no way that the Imperium would let Savlar exist in anything close to its current form. The very first thing they would try to do is “fix” Savlar, either by rounding up the indigenous population and relocating them to a less shitty planet or housing them in self-contained arcologies until they could make the atmosphere less toxic. Mining and archaeotech salvage would be done by people in full-body containment suits, or by servitors at the very least, to minimize exposure to toxins. The current clusterfuck of Savlar "culture" would be heavily altered at least.

If all else failed they would probably just give the planet outright to the Adeptus Mechanicus. Highly valuable minerals and archaeotech are a much bigger draw to the AdMech, and toxic conditions are much less of a hazard.

If the Savlar fought back, the Imperium might end up wiping them out wholesale mistaking them for Chaos worshippers, especially given how similar the Savlar would be to previous planets that turned out to be Chaos strongholds.

Literally nothing is known about them. They were originally one of the 20 first founding chapters in Rogue Trader (1st Ed.), then GW decided to demote them and the Valedictors to later founding status. They never had any sort of character or culture established.

If you're wondering, nothing ever came about with the Valedictors in vanilla either.

So Savlar, in it's perpetual shit state, is a result of either

1. It is a Survivor Civilization having just about scraped into the catagory somehow back in the old days.

2. Is directly under the management of Old Earth and the Administratum and bad fortune keeps intervening when they try and fix the shit hole that is Savlar.

3. Things at some point got less shit but then went shit again. Possibly a Chaos Uprising or and Ork invasion.

Well if they have a local, equally shitty, scraped together mechanicus forge in their system they could probably manage a just enough of an interplanetary presence to decide their own fate, and it would be easy to expand a DAoT toxic disaster from planetary to system wide just due to industrial scale. A massive, hazardous Dark Age refinery operation would have tons of automation and augmentations in its supervisors, which could lead to the foundations of surviving Savlar peoples and almost-heretek cybernetica priests that Mars has to be bullied into supporting. The biggest question would be surviving the Men of Iron during the age of strive for long enough to even adapt as they did, especially because their system would be so heavily automated. Assuming their ancestors successfully crashed a system wide super-uranium refinery to survive the uprising, the Savlar would be secure in the protection of their horrible planets, free and wild but impoverished and under constant attrition. They might maintain a few ships through the long night, but mostly just to mine asteroids and skip between planets, the very biggest could repel the rare pirate, but the worlds themselves were protection enough to whatever could survive them.

Interplanetary trade for Savlar would be relics and material going to the forgeworld for the slow hereteknical improvement of the Savlar condition. Interstellar trade would be the rare big project that happened when a petty power from the age of strife rolled into the system and paid for the extraction of relics and material. Or they tried to not pay and got bloodied by druggies with death rays that they force to retreat back to their toxic world regardless, only to leave instead of fave an intractable invasion. The Imperium would need the Night Lords at a minimum to dislodge the chem-dogs from their toxic rocks and it's not really worth the price even for the imperium.

Basically this. The Imperium would do something to make life on Savlar better if it had the opportunity. Savlar has enough of a sense of self-preservation that it would probably welcome any attempts to make their lives less shitty, as opposed to Krieg where the dysfunction and stoicism is so ingrained by the time the Imperium figured out what had happened there wasn't much they could do about it.

...

Which Primarch should have discovered Savlar during the Great Crusade?

I'm thinking Corax.

Penal legions are a tricky thing in this timeline. It’s kind of strange, but penal legions had a real strong religious aspect in canon. As in “you have sinned against the god-emperor by sowing strife within the society of man, but you can redeem yourself by dying in his name”. Given the more secular nature of the Imperium here, I doubt that would be the case.

Penal legions might exist. Spending a huge amount of money and effort to keep a large number of people locked up and essentially doing nothing is a waste of resources for a galaxy perpetually at war. However, it’s been mentioned the real horrible stuff gets you servitorized. So penal legions would probably be composed of people who committed less severe crimes, not psychopaths and mass murderers.

Of course, the Last Chancers don’t seem to be normal even by 40k standards. You might get one hard-as-nails guy who thinks he can take the absolute worst dregs you can get without getting into future servitor territory and make use of their skills. Time will tell if he’s right or not.

(cont.)
Of course, this leads to two problems. First, putting offenders out there on the battlefield is going to be a pain in the ass to manage. They’re going to be less disciplined than regular guardsmen, and it’s going to be hard to motivate them to fight. Not to mention the other problems if you have criminals out in the open instead of behind bars. Whose idea was it to put a convicted embezzler in a place where they can steal military supplies? Isn’t putting a bunch of known members of the squat mafia in a penal legion just going to create a potential challenge to the legion’s authority?

The other issue is determining who goes to a penal legion in the first place. Laws are very much not standardized across the Imperium, and are mostly at the discretion of the world in particular. Killing as a result of a duel is perfectly legal on Fenris, but it’s murder on Macragge. However, the Imperial military is very much a pan-Imperial institution. This means the Imperium could be getting criminals sent to them for the penal legions whose “crimes” are ridiculous to every world but the one the person was arrested on (e.g., political prisoners on a shady world).

The only things that are specifically illegal across the Imperium are worshipping Chaos, worshipping the Emperor, or inciting violence between member worlds, which are really not the kind of offenses you want to see in people in a penal legion.

So Penal Legion probably not a thing in the Nobel Darkness.

Everyone just assumes the Savlar Regiments are.

Rainbow Warriors, like all Night Lords descendants, are under supplied and using beat up old shit. Unlike most other Night Lords this is not because the Administratum keeps putting their requests to the bottom of the heap but is because they prefer to use home made stuff over imports as a matter of pride.

The native Savlars heartily approve of this practice, because it gives them a job and instils pride in them that their produce is worthy of the astartes, and it only deepens the bond between citizen and super soldier.

Due to the ramshackle nature of the gear of the RWs and the simpler nature of their facilities they are the Refined Early Astartes breed of super soldier and are typically clad in something similar to Mk5 Power Armour.

The standard issue bolter has been replaced with what appears to be an overly large las-rifle of curious design due to the scarcity of ammunition.

The las-rifle has a variable output and can fire in a number of spectrums up to and including ultra-violet, though this drains the battery something fierce. Also they are excellent for vampire hunting, and the Inquisition makes much use out of the Rainbow Warriors for this.

They have maintained the dishonourable and distasteful, though undeniably effective, methods of warfare of their progenitors.

After each successful campaign a RW is permitted to add another colour to their armour. If one of these individuals is witnessed dressed like a fabulous fag-clown then you may be certain that they have a body count behind them usually reserved for nuclear attacks.

They are disproportionately active for a single chapter and their numbers fluctuate wildly, this is assisted by their breed and typical gear which are relatively quick and easy to produce.

Why Corax?

I have no problem with it but is there a reason for that Primarch in particular?

Savlar is probably an exception, as the people there see military service as a way to get off their shithole world. Of course, you'd think that you'd get just as many volunteers that it wouldn't be necessary

It was posted last thread an alternate origin for Krieg about how the weapons used had fucked them up at a genetic level that made them as they are.

Maybe that is what happened to the Savlars instead.

Thousands of years wading through toxic soup has made them more or less immune to most chemical weapons but at the price that they hardly ever see 40 years.

Attempts to undo this damage by the AdBio have not met with noticeable success in part because the AdBio are mystified at how they work at a genetic level at all or what has twisted them up so much.

>what has twisted them up so much
its clear what twisted them up so much, the AdCybernetica, which explains why the AdBio has its work cut out for it. Also, the so far the Savlar have already fit the description, but they aren't fatalistic because they're naturally short lived, but because the planet is so fucking hostile and they embrace that hostility with wild abandon. A lot of the comparisons have been to the Scum in eclipse phase, which are technically immortal, and the original theme was something like punkish junkies in an army. I figure its more that the Savlar hardly reach 40, partly from an ever increasing amount of toxin in them, but also because they tend to overdose on their anti-toxin painkillers, or lead suicidal charges in their thirties, or volunteer for a new augmentation that fucks up horribly.

They're just as fatalistic as Kriegers, but their outlook should be almost the opposite otherwise.

Makes sense. They live short, brutal lives and when given the choice they'd rather die for something that matters than slowly waste away or die of self-induced drug poisoning.

He would pity them and understand their point.

Should Savlar have it's own branch of the AdMech?

Not hereteks or anything, just an unpopular/poor order.

I could see some Savlar junkies managing to run a scam to get AdMech membership for money/legal protections/access to more exotic chems for better drugs.

I can't see them getting membership in the Mars Priesthood as such but I can see them sending for a siblinghood with the promise of good pay, their own workshop, first dibs on any old tech dug up and all the drugs they want.

Down side is all this comes with having to live on Savlar.

They would attract either the disgraced or the desperate or the mad.