Nobledark 40k part 36: Citizen Khaine edition

One year anniversary sub-edition

Welcome to Nobledark Imperium: a relatively light fan rewrite of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, with a generous helping of competence and common sense.

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Wiki (HELP NEEDED!):
1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium
1d4chan.org/wiki/Category:Nobledark_Imperium
1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Notes

THREAD FOCUS:
>What needs to be done?
>Panic over the fact that 1d4chan is apparently locked to most anons
>Chaos Orks at the heads of precarious WAAAAAAGH!!!!!s getting smacked down by Ghazghkull
>Actually any ideas on major Orks Chaos-aligned or otherwise would be good.
>The Bloodpact and other Chaos realms, and the little whiny Tzarina that made it (so sayeth Magnus)

>Still need to finish Dorn, Fulgrim, Lion, and Angron among the primarchs
>Dornfag has given up but left notes in the 1d4chan page
>We're desperate for proper writeups of old stuff, and both from notes and archived threads
>More Croneldar/Chaos Ork/CSM stuff?

And, as always:
>More bugs
>More weebs
>More Nobledark battles

An idea I had for the squats that I was going to save for the actual anniversary, but I figured I may as well post now.

Destroyermen are the heavy infantry of any squat army. The concept of Destroyermen originally derived from the squat custom of having people who would risk their lives as the first ones to enter an unexplored cavern or mine shaft to see if it was safe to enter. Despite being clad in the best protective gear available, this work was extremely dangerous, as evidenced by the casualty rate, but at the same time it paid extremely well. However, being mostly socialists, a squat clan would often not waste all of the earnings on themselves. Instead, they would put into upgrading and improving the protective suit, making it more likely that the individual performing this job would keep coming back intact. This bizarre method of technological natural selection went on for millennia, until eventually most squat colonies had numerous sets of masterwork craft powered armor scattered among various clans. From there it was a simple leap to go from using this armor for checking for gas pockets and occasional hostile xenos to using them in open warfare against threats like Orks. Destroyermen are often the “tip of the spear” in squat armies, fighting in areas where casualties are likely to be high. Destroyerman armors have often been in squat families for generations, and the living clan members are fiercely protective of them, seeing them as emblems of their clan’s glory and heritage.

(cont.)
Like most squat technology, the concept of Destroyermen and Destroyermen suits was developed during the Age of Isolation, the period in which the Hubworld League was cut off from contact with the majority of humanity. Destroyerman armor is often referred to as the little brother of Space Marine terminator armor, and there is a grain of truth to that statement. Destroyerman armor and Terminator armor actually spring from a common source, the environmental hazard suits used for working in hard vacuum or mining in inhospitable conditions during the Dark Age of Technology. However, whereas Terminator armor was retrofitted for military usage and has been increasingly refined for combat over millennia, Destroyerman armor is much more sedate. This is in part because Destroyermen were never expected to see combat on the level that most Space Marine do, and in part because the ability to efficiently manufacture some of the higher end devices for the armors (like teleporters) was lost during the Age of Strife. In general, Destroyerman armor is more geared towards making sure the wearer and the armor survives rather than making a more efficient killing machine like Terminator armor. There is also the issue of the armor wearer. Although the armor may be high quality, the person inside the armor is still only human, lacking the genetic modifications typical of Space Marines or Sisters of Battle (particularly the Black Carapace of the former) and limited what a Destroyerman is capable of.

Wait, it's been a year? Fuck.

First post was on September 20, 2016. So it's been 355 days if we want to be pedantic.

How extensive is Gazzy's control over the orks?

What percentage of the species does he command?

Jubblowski is an eldar religions icon. To what extent is she venerated?

The Orks that are hard-core Chaos worshippers or hard-core Gork and Mork purists are a minority. The majority of the Ork race only cares about fightin' and lootin'. They'd side with Ghazzy and krump the Chaos Boyz if Ghazzy could convince them with enough promises of loot and fightin' (but if they put up a good fight would that make the Chaos Boyz proppa orky?), whereas the Chaos Orks could get the majority of the Orks to do what they want if they could convince them there'd be good fighting (even if it was to the detriment of the orks as a whole and over the objections of the purists, like fighting an enemy with large amounts of artillery and flamers).

Both sides would like the Orks to follow their ideology but...you know...Orks. Harder to organize than cats.

How would they react to Be'lakor? they were designed to fight for the Old Ones. Admittedly this did not work but would they feel any pull at all
to follow him?

Veeky Forums sure chooses the strangest things to latch onto and form a complete setting around.

Not that strange 40k is a cornerstone of Veeky Forums, noble defiance against impossible odds is the very stuff of legends and everyone loves Lord of the Rings.

This is last alliance of men and elves in 40k.

It's only surprising it didn't happen years ago.

Hm. Not a bad idea for a parallel to work from. If I wasn't waist deep in shit to do, I'd take a look at that theme for inspiration.

though orks need more love to. agh. too much to do.

She is a minor religious icon. The big temples would never invite her to be the focus of a big ceremony, because human and a heathen, but they would allow her to take part in the periphery of a major festival ceremony.

For lesser festivals, or at least the festivals of lesser settlements, her presence would be considered more important as nowhere exodite villages and literally-who enclaves don't get visited by important people and probably don't have their own priestess.

The ceremonies would probably not be anything inherently lewd. Although sex is part of Isha's domain it is merely one aspect of it. She is also the patron deity of surgeons and farmers among others.

She would also only be accepted on worlds that have embraced the alliance between humans and eldar, there are many human supremacists and eldar supremacists who would quite happily kill her for being corrupted by the xenos / stealing the blessings of the All-Mother.

Probably not that much influence. Be'Lakor is an Old One throwback. He became a deamon-prince and stayed that way, the rest of the Old Ones became god-like in a different manner before they created the Krork, Be'Lakor could be considered a different species to what the Old Ones became. The orks would not recognize him easily and his pull on them would be weak or non-existent.

It would help if he was dealing with Chaos Orks as they are also saturated in Chaos juice so they would recognize something akin to themselves in him and he is ded 'ard an' stompy so he might be considered worth following just for that.

Maybe there would be some ancient orks in the court of Be'lakor, gaunt and withered and steeped in kunnin and ancient guile. They would be as bitter and twisted as he himself, the runts and the grots that sold their souls to get even against orkier orks and little by little further damned. They would have moved from bottom of the ork social heap to bottom of the Chaos social heap outcast to the Formless Wastes

Where should this get added in the 1d4chan?

Deep sea nightmare fish ork deamons.

>Jesus_Christ_how_horrifying.holo

Where is pic from?

I have added the Baalite Wheel Faith to the 1d4chan under religion.

Amidoinirite? Also is anyone actually going to do Preatoria?

I think we have a bit on Praetoria in a previous thread. Not as much as the Mordians, and Praetoria still needs quite a bit of work, but it's a good jumping off point. I think it's thread XXVI or something.

Probably Forces of the Imperium. That's where we have all the other unique military units of the Survivor Civilizations, like Interex sagittars and the forces of other minor powers.

It's rather funny that despite all this variation in heavy infantry and super-soldier design across the Imperium, the classic Space Marine won out over the cyborg centaurs (sagittars), souped-up mining suits (Destroyermen), super soldiers spliced with animal DNA (Canis Helix soldiers), and Skitarii simply by being more practical (particularly being easier to implement on a galaxy-wide scale) and having fewer exploitable weaknesses. In other words, and to excuse the Tv Trope-ese, in terms of heavy infantry Space Marines were the Boring but Practical Jack-of-All-Stats. Just like on the tabletop.

Of course, this also means that the two-hearted, fused-ribcage, acid-spitting, "can survive being exposed to hard vacuum" superhumans that are implanted with the bootleg cloned organs of a demigod and clad in top-quality power armor that interfaces with their body are considered the "mundane and low-key" option. As is expected of 40k.

That reminds me of something I was going to bring up.

The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the moral standards of the Old Ones, it was clear that someone crossed a line. The Old Ones may have uplifted the Eldar and the Hrud, but at least they got to keep some semblance of who they were. All the Old Ones basically did was give them bigger guns. The Orks were completely changed from the ground up. In canon there are two possible stories as to the origin of the Orks. One is that the orks were created through extensive genetic engineering of some poor race. Snotlings are described as the original ork. That means the Orks basically went from being smurfs to Hulks in a blink of an eye.

Imagine if humans were in the same position as snotlings, and you went to sleep in a pre-Old One world and wake up post-Old Ones. You're essentially stepping into Attack on Titan. Beings like you are nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of your species is nearly quintuple your height and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with canine fangs as thick as your forearm. Around them are creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like Jurassic Park-style Velociraptors. All of them have seemingly regressed in intellect from the standard you remember, being only concerned with survival. Oh, and the surviving members of your race have regressed even further in intelligence, Planet of the Apes style.

To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch for the SCP Foundation. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way. Dogscape with human flesh.

That's Option A. Option B is that the Orks were custom-designed from the ground up by the Old Ones. The Old Ones, whose self-imposed purpose was experimenting with, tweaking, and spreading life, custom-built a race that was only designed for killing in the most efficient manner possible in complete defiance of their mission statement.

It was suggested before that the Eldar survived the Enslaver plague and the end of the War in Heaven by hiding in the Webway. The Orks may have survived in the same way that many plants are thought to have survived mass extinctions: the adults were killed to a grot but the species regenerated from spores left in the ground. Indeed, this may have been what turned the Orks into the Krork. The fact that all of the Orks’ technological knowledge was genetically encoded into them by the Old Ones belies a critical weakness. If the entire adult population gets killed, the technological information survives (read: whatever the Old Ones thought was key for a rampaging super soldier), but any cultural information, like, say “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees” gets lost.

Take into account it takes millennia for Orks to regain Brain Boy levels of intelligence and you have a recipe for disaster. Much like how in most science fiction humans learn to deal with aliens that have radically different biologies from our own, the Krork may have understood that other species didn’t work like Krork and had bizarre concepts like “non-combatant” or “not wanting to fight all the time” while remaining just as Orky as always in their own politics, especially given that the Eldar looked favorably upon them (and the Old Ones wouldn’t tolerate team-killing). The Eldar are overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies are now…different. And so began the occasional Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that occasionally rocked the galaxy according to the Beast Arises series.

(cont.)
(cont.)
(cont.)
On a related note, it’s rather interesting that the Necron Star Empire decided to wake up within a couple of thousand years of the Fall of the Eldar. From a reader’s perspective this is easily explained as “because it’s dramatic”, but consider the following. After the War in Heaven, the Necrons were said to be most concerned about the Eldar and the other Old One soldier races. Compared to the Necrons they were primitives, yes, but they were numerous enough and had enough Old One-provided technology that they could do some serious damage. In current vanilla canon the Necrons went into hibernation to wait out the Eldar and others. It doesn’t matter that the Eldar had sixty-five million years of power, all they had to do is wait. It doesn’t matter how lucky you are, live long enough and eventually you’ll roll a hundred crit-fails in a row.

Orikan was said to be a good enough diviner that he was able to predict the Fall of the Eldar as far back as the War in Heaven. Orikan or diviner(s) of comparable skill could have gone to Szarekh and told them their model of the future. Sixty-five or so million years from now, the Eldar will shoot themselves in the foot. The Eldar will be reduced to isolated enclaves, and the disaster will cause any other races that have risen to power on the interim to be knocked on their ass so hard they’ll be forced to cobble technology out of their garbage if they survive. The Hrud will be confined to a single planet, the Jokaero are nobodies, and the Orks are so disorganized they will be nothing compared to the Krork. They could have seen the canon 40k timeline for all we know. All the Star Empire has to do is sit out the next sixty-five million years and they can swoop in while the galaxy’s rebuilding and take it for themselves.

So the Necrons do this. They wake up ten thousand years too late, but ten thousand years are chump change on that scale. Of course, divination isn’t perfect, and sixty-five million years is a lot of time for contingency. Chaos did not burn itself out as expected. The galaxy was wrecked during the Age of Strife, but it’s rebuilt a lot more than expected thanks to the Necron’s faulty alarm clocks. And what’s this tyranid thing everyone’s ranting about?

The first few threads were originally billed as Lord of the Rings meets 40k. It's basically that, but instead of a gradual fading of the world and the magic going away over generations, everything is coming back and is building up in a fever pitch to this massive Ragnarok-esque final war that is going to make or break the galaxy for the forseeable future. The good news is unlike Ragnarok no one is necessarily fated to die (though predicted casualties are huge, anyone could die, and defeat is a very, very real possibility) but at the same time there are so many potential futures that nothing is set in stone.

Now is the question of what the Orks were like when they were Krork and what they were like when they were the snotlings that the Old Ones first encountered.

It would be nice to think that the Old Ones had some plan to turn them back after the war, that they weren't petty and cruel like the gods of antiquity. Or as one user in a very previous thread suggested "Space Lizard Wizards with no sense of right and wrong".

Founded in the days of the Rebuilding as the Imperium attempted to recover from the horrors of The Beast the world of Praetoria lies in the Segmentum Tempestus just over the rimward border of the Hubworld League and was, at that time, the last stop before the vast desolation of depopulated worlds that stretched out until distant Inwit.

At the time Praetoria was home to a few prospectors, a single orbiting station of dubious functionality, a few hydroponics farms and more sand than any planet should rightfully have. It was a nowhere place on the periphery of anything of importance with nothing to truly boast about. Save for it’s location that was going to become quite important to the Imperium in it’s efforts to rebuild and secure Segmentum Tempestus. A planet, even one as borderline habitable as Praetoria, could be ideal for passing traffic in this endeavour.

The initiative as seized by the old trade and transport families of Gredbritton who had risen to prominence on Old Earth in the Unification as the Warlord had given them all of the contracts for rebuilding the trade routs across Old Earth. Using this initial wealth they had invested in Rogue Trader writs and moved out into the Great Crusade behind the expeditionary forces. Being just a few extended families and associates they were never capable of operating on the same level of Horus and his Void Born, who were seemingly everywhere, but they never really dreamed of doing so in those halcyon days. They were seemingly just happy to prosper and funnel additional wealth back to the old country to share amongst their people.

The initial families that laid claim to Praetoria, named so by them as it originally had no official name beyond a navis nobilite cartographical code, were swift in building their world into something usable by the Imperium and therefore profitable. Semi-derelict ships, not in short supply at that time to be sure, were bought up by the score and commissioned ship-wrights and tech-adepts lashed them together into ugly but serviceable orbital installations. The Imperium would need places to moor it’s fleets.

The sand was sifted and fused into glass as ice was obtained from comets disassembled mid flight and vast swathes of the warm equatorial regions started to glitter in the dust like spilled diamonds across a grubby tablecloth. Vast hydroponic farms to feed the Imperium’s armies and fleets.

Flat packed refineries and mining stations were loaned to the original prospector families that had called the system home under honest deals that they take from the asteroids and moons of the system all that they wished but would deal exclusively with the old families. The fleets would need a place and parts to repair their weary vessels.

By the time the fleets of the reconquest arrived Praetoria was waiting for it with open arms and friendly smiles with all the basic amenities and supplies that a fleet could need. To the voidsmen of the fleet it was the equivalent of expecting to stop at a run down highway rest stop only to step into a fine hotel with a nice restaurant, well stocked bar, friendly staff and with very reasonable prices. The hand written letter of appreciation penned by The Steward’s own hand and stamped with his own signet ring is preserved to this day in a stasis field in the governor’s palace.

As the resettlement of what was known at the time as Tempestus Wilderness Space continued traffic continued to travel through Praetoria and the world only grew in wealth. In the years that followed as the Wilderness Space was tamed and civilized people rebuilt their ruins into mirrors of old glory trade followed. Initially it was nothing but things from the Hubworld League sold on promise of payment from the Imperium itself or promise of payment in some prosperous future. In time produce of the tamed and civilized Tempestus began to flow into the Hubworlds and Praetoria became a gateway going both ways.

The old generation of founders that knew anything of Old Earth or even remembered the name Gredbritton were gone soon enough as mortals do and Praetoria began to become a world of it’s own in mind and soul. More importantly it became a world of it’s own in the eyes of the Administratum and with this declaration of success came the tithe and that was the origin of the first iteration of the Praetoria Guard.

And that was the inglorious founding of that prosperous world.

>It's approaching midnight. I have to be awake for 6:00 at the latest. I will do more tomorrow time permitting regarding the evolution of Praetoria from service station to moderately big pleyer unless there are objections.

The Eldar like to claim the Old Ones promised the galaxy to them, overlooking the fact that the Old Ones probably weren't counting on dying during the War in Heaven.

So either the Eldar are creatively reinterpreting history as manifest destiny (which isn't unheard of), the Old Ones willed the galaxy to all their uplifts if they died, or the Old Ones are serious dicks who told some nice motivational lies.

There was probably a range of moral positions among the Old Ones. Be'lakor was probably always a prick though.

Does anyone have any preference in what needs to be in the Praetoria fluffing?

It could also have been typical me from arrogance. No matter how long you give them n non necro empire is going to arise without being uplifted.

It might just be me, but beyond the general ideas suggested in the old thread (I liked the whole knights and dragons rivalry angle with the Praetorian Dark Angel chapter being the knights and the Mordian Salamanders being the dragons, plus the whole slobs versus snobs angle) I'd say it's pretty open.

Any suggestions on how the rivalry between the two should come about?

Wow that got mangled. I am the dirtiest of phone posting peasants.

Time passed and the population of Praetoria grew, the tithe contribution increased and the ground settlements turned from towns to cities and eventually started to grow into the hives known today. The original founding families and their cadet branches grew distant from each other consolidating their power and assets each in their own fortified cities and orbitals of which they ruled with almost absolute power. By decree of the Administratum the planet, if it wanted to keep it's contracts with the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Merchant Navy, was obligated to elect a representative for the planet if not an actual ruler as the Imperium had not intention of wasting it's time dealing with myriad squabbling lesser nobility. Typically this seat, arrived at by election by each of the major families, went to a lesser house with little to no power of their own and so could only act as intermediaries and not as actual dictators.

The biggest and most notable exception to this rule being Rodri of house Haagreevz. What made him exceptional was that the majority of his ancestry, bar the strictly patrilineal line was distinctly common in origin and therefore assumed to be poor. This was proven to be incorrect, at least to some extent, as by means unknown though assumed t but unproven to be illegal, he had assumed a substantial fortune. This was a fact that he kept quiet from as many as possible for as long as possible, carefully acquiring favours and potential deals.

He knew, at least for him and his kin, that there was limited scope for expansion on Praetoria. The noble families were taking up all the room at the top and were utterly uninterested in changing anything at the risk of loosing so much for uncertain returns. This to Rodri simply would not do.

Rodri was a risk taker, he wouldn't have gotten as far as he had were he not, and he expended all of his family's wealth in buying out the shares in many promising looking but relatively small companies under several hundred different names. It was a gamble that paid off to the relief of his kin and wealth flowed into house Haagreevz like a fine rosé wine to be put aside for later sale.

When Rodri stood before the parliament on the first day 003M33 he did not do so as a glorified messenger boy feigning timidity and meekness, his spine was straight, his gaze was hard and his head held high. He set forth his proposal for investment in a Merchant Navy and "Protection" Fleet of Praetoria's very own to be commissioned of the Mechanicus and constructed in the worlds own orbital dockyards, for additional funds to be put aside for the armies, for a greater incentive and drive towards improving the structure of the hives and orbitals for the common plebs to whom he himself was not as distant from. The proposal was met with thunderous laughter and derision of the highest order. Who was this upstart little peasant to come before such as they with a demand they demanded, who was he to dictate to his betters?

Through all the uproar Rodri stood unflinching. His confident good cheer turned to cold stone sternness. Who was he? He was the man who was fully capable of bringing every single one of them low or at least making their ever so comfortable lives so very difficulty. He owned the ground that their opulent mansions were stood on. He owned the waste collection businesses that they used. He controlled the water to their share of the hydroponics and had the controlling shares in most of the electricity companies. All the little grimy things that made civilization work but deemed beyond the notice of the high and mighty. He gave them one whole day to mull it over as he was feeling so very generous.

And mull it over they did, although blind panic might have been a better word for it. It was true, he held all the cards as the false names of shareholders and investers peeled away to read Haagreevz to the legal limit of what he could own and Haagreevz in the names of his brothers and cousins of barely above peasant status.

A few did try to challenge him suspecting, not unreasonably, that he did and could not have taken all of this so quickly. It must have been acquired on loan, a dragon made of paper and twigs. True though it had much of it was loaned in Thrones form anonymous off-world investors who would have only benefited with increased ships in the trade lanes and border outposts who needed greater ties to the wider Imperium for protection if nothing else.

The foolish little lords that challenged Lord Haagreevz, and it by God did he make sure they addressed him properly now, were indeed brought low and spent many centuries recovering their losses those that even could; mega-corps, mechanicus brotherhoods and even other noble houses found that they had little choice but to side with house Haagreevz.

For all that he was cut throat to an unprecedented degree in that time on Praetoria and ruthless almost to a fault Rodri was fiercely loyal to his supporters and when the fleets set sail his supporters found that they had been given good shares in the spoils.

What else should happen to praetorian between early M33 and the arrival of the Sisters of the Old Tree in mid M41?

How long can a Space Marines survive in hard vacuum? A human can survive a few minutes or so I think but looses consciousness after a bout the first minute. Past one and a half minutes there is a sharply increasing risk of brain damage.

Or so I have read.

How long should a super soldier manage?

I think there is some limit mentioned in canon, but it might be one of those things we want to dial back in this timeline. Guilliman IIRC in vanilla fought in space for hours during the Battle of Calth. In most cases I assume they just hibernate.

Their body would presumably put them in suspended animation in the case of no air once they loose consciousness, probably they can activate this ability earlier on to conserve their supplies and hold out for longer.

Not much help to the Space Wolves and Templars and such who don't have a Sus-an Membrane.

A Space Marine could maybe remain active for 15 minutes (does this seem right?) and comatose for a few hours. They can remain comatose for a few extra hours if they go into a coma the moment they get shoved out the airlock and don't waste their oxygen struggling.

Space wolves are more human. They might get 5 or so minutes before they loose consciousness. A few minutes after that the brain damages starts to happen.

Iron Hands are so machined up that they can walk around potentially indefinitely in hard vacuum and barely notice.

I'm guessing that this is if they aren't in their power armour. Space Marine Power armour is the best space suits in the imperium.

A Queen Victoria analog that attempts to expand Praetoria in a colonial empire? Even with a limited fleet (Nothing compared to the Imperial fleet, but something that actually managed to get a cruiser).

I’ve always wondered how long cyborgs like the Ad-Mech could even survive in hard vacuum without going into hibernation. You’d think a long time but then you start to realize there are some complications that might make the metal men just as dependent on a spaceship or space station as the fleshies.

The primary issue is going to be that cells, particularly active cells (like brains), are going to need to take in nutrients and oxygen to keep them running. It doesn’t matter how cybered-up they are, the AdMech by definition have some amount of human tissue in them, and that has to be kept alive. The easiest way to get them that would be to recycle CO2 and waste into glucose and oxygen, but that would mean essentially performing photosynthesis, which is a tricky and low-yield process on Earth. Electrolysis of water could be used to supplement oxygen if levels get low, it’s what spacecraft do. The only issue is even a brain-in-a-jar is going to be burning a lot of calories by hard vacuum standards.

Then there’s the issue of heat. A lot of machinery, even the energy efficient stuff, tends to generate heat as a byproduct. In atmosphere you just vent the heat into the environment. In space there’s nowhere for heat to go. It’s been said that if you get spaced you wouldn’t feel cold, you’d feel hot. In 40k humans have generally solved the problem of what to do with excess energy by dumping it into the Warp (e.g., Void Shields) but it would be a bad idea to have every tech-priest carry their own channel to the Immaterium on them. Maybe the AdMech use some kind of Dark Age superconductor in their bodies. I have no clue how deep-space equipment like Curiosity or the Voyager probes do it, but it should be possible to some degree given they can send/receive information.

Though we should still definitely keep the AdMech’s ability to breathe in space, for the reasons that they can do it in canon if nothing else.

Brain is suspended in cerebral fluid contained in a hyper-diamond skull box. Skull box is padded with shock absorbing gel and sponge.

The organic components that remain are support for the brain component and nothing more. These support components are kept in an armored box usually called the rib-box or gut-box or some variation.

Although many of the components of the rib-box are organic in construction none of them are natural. The lung for example is a thick membrane tailored to absorb and process per-filtered tri-mix gas. The heart is not organic at all and is a crew like device that siphons the blood around in a nice even manner. None of the organs look much like anything that would sustain a full human, but then they don't have to. They support only a brain and each other.

The brain itself is not without alterations. Devoid of any sort of human body it is hardwired into the auto-senses of the machine body and can feel and detect as it does. Given that the machine can detect far more than mere baseline human sensory organs additional processors are slaved to the organic brain to sort through and interpret the input into something comprehensible. Further alterations done to the brain usually involving neural shunts to cut off various sensations that could be considered distracting or uncomfortable.

The selection from the Skitarii to be of the elite in the Iron Hands and associated chapters is as rigorous if not more so than that of and of the types of Space Marine but where the Astartes look for physical prowess and compatibility the Skitarii look for mental adaptability. It is a very rare mind that can not only remain sane but acclimatize and find some normality when stripped out of a body and installed in a machine. On the positive side the Iron Hands, being largely unconcerned with the flesh, can recruit from both men and women which doubles their recruitment base.

It could be that she intended to push the Praetorian empire out into the old Wilderness Space and claim those new worlds as her domain. On the one hand Praetoria was instrumental in the making of them, on the other they are the Imperium's.

Much as the British Empire dreamed itself a new Rome Praetoria dreams itself a new Ultramar.

At the time it fails because the Imperium really does not like people fucking with it's stuff or bullying it's people. Does manage to place orbitals at least part owned by the Praetorian crown half private investment around several score worlds so it wasn't a total flop.

As of 999M41 the plans to make the Praetorian Commonwealth are being revisited as like many taking what Fenris is doing as an example.

I will expand on it tomorrow.

Any suggestions for a name for this monarch that sets all this in motion?

WHAT IF GORK AND MORK ARE ACTUALLY JOKAERO

This would be a really good way to showcase the whole "Imperium has no sense of proportional retribution and will confiscate your planet if you start shit" aspect to Imperial life that has been mentioned.

I'll be honest, I hadn't even thought of that but it is good.

I'm leaning to the Old Ones always having been dicks by this point, or at least were big enough of dicks for long enough that it eclipsed their previous less dick behaviour. But so were the Necrontyr if taken as a whole.

There is something odd going on with the Jokaero but that is definitely not it.

It was page 10, I couldn't think of anything else to bump the thread with.

In time the house of Haagreevz fell from favour as such things do and stepped down from the post of Herald of the Parliament gracefully. The position had become in the generations after Rodri no longer a joke but kingship in all but name. The first of the next dynasty to assume the responsibility, an otherwise unremarkable man known as Gwenaël of house Lozach, turned the position into one of legal royalty and demanded a coronation be held. It was suspected that the other lords went along with it as the Lozachs were not the most imposing house and Gwenaël was very old. Indeed his son could not get enough support to take the throne and the crown passed to another family.

In the fullness of time the crown rested on the brow of Eadið Griuugel in theyear 775M34. It was not the first time a Griuugel had held that authority and it was not the first time Praetoria had been ruled by a queen. It was however the first time it had been ruled by a queen under her own undeniable authority. Previous queens, in that most definitely male dominant society, had ruled under the authority of rich and powerful husbands and fathers. Eadið Griuugel on the other hand was the unquestionable head of the rambling Griuugel house and ruled it completely.

Her word was law and although none could say that she was unfair none could either say she had much kindness to spare. What she did have was ambition. In her youth she had travelled far in the Imperium, as many aristocrats did, but where as they had travelled to sneer at the primitives and the lesser people beyond the border and reinforce their notions of Praetorian superiority she had gone to learn. She had travelled to the towering spires and deep lightless caverns of Old Earth, she had walked the streets of Magna Macragge Civitas in distant Ultramar and even spent a year among the rude and rustic people of harsh Fenris. And she had learned, oh yes she had learned and as her wisdom grew it was matched only by her ambition.

Her ambition was the creation of another Ultramar with the Praetoria as it's Macragge. The worlds of the segmentum tempestus would be their subjects and vassal states. Using the already extensive influence of her world over these younger worlds the influence of Praetoria grew to a strangle hold. In the first thirty years of her reign over a hundred worlds were more influenced via media tampering, blackmailing of leaders and advisors and the introduction of armed private soldiers of the nobility to "protect their substantial investments".

Daring as she was Queen Eadið would not go so far as to pursue a course of action that could tamper even slightly with the tithe, she knew at that time that the Administratum and the Arbiters were starting to take note. Although what was happening was merely internal matters and business matters between worlds and therefore not crossing Imperial Law it was becoming in danger of rocking the boat. The Arbiters tended to get twitchy when their boat was rocked.

Things carried on longer than they should as The Harrowing rocked the Galactic West and the Imperium could ill afford to provoke an internal conflict. This carried on until 995M34 and two years after the conclusion of that war when Queen Eadið over stepped her bounds in the eyes of the Imperium when she demanded the release of courier ships owed as part of an unpaid debt

Unfortunately for her those ships were property of the Throne. This event gave the Administratum all the excuse that they needed to send in the Dark Clerks and begin a Grand Accounting of Praetoria and her assets and influences. It was not a good time to be the head of a noble family in the following days. Many had abused their power over the lesser world mistaking lesser worlds for lesser people and people of less worth. To the Imperium there were no lesser citizens and when all those cruel indulgences and petty tyrannies were brought to the light the punishments were fair, but they were not kind

It was decided that for the transgressions, which on some of the more impoverished worlds had been considerable, perpetrated by the crown and the nobility that Praetoria could no longer be trusted to govern itself responsibly. But for all her mistakes and sins Queen Eadið had been extremely popular with both the commoners and the gentry. As a compromise it was decided that she would be permitted to remain as Queen but would have power only in an advisory capacity and that there would be no king or queen after her. She could haveresisted, the Imperium was still recovering from The Harrowing and her world had never been stronger, she could have fought back but to do so would mean to meet all of the civilized galaxy in arms and although her people could have held out for a long time they would not have had any hope of victory. Resistance was not worth the price.

Thus began Praetoria under the unimaginative but reliable rule of the Administratum. True to their word Queen Eadið was the last to wear that crown for more than two thousand years. Praetoria surrendered it's hold on the vassal worlds without a fight and without demanding recompense and the stirrings of inevitable war and the rumblings of civil dissatisfaction and unrest died away.

In a show of generosity the Imperium did allow the Praetorian nobility to keep their orbital stations on former vassal worlds. They had, they admitted, been constructed legally and posed no real risk to the planets they orbited. This mollified the lords of the Parliament somewhat.

It was not an unconsidered gift. So long as those stations remained profitable they would be defended and by extension so would the worlds that had been wronged and so long as the nobility continued to have those stations and value them the Imperium would always have something that they could take off them should they get any ideas.

>should I continue with this or am I doing it wrong?

Bump

Does anyone else want else added to the story of Praetoria and how it got from there to here?

It mentions that the royalty of Praetoria didn't hold power for two thousand years. That would put the return of the monarchy at M36. Something to do with the apostasy?

That said, if the monarchy did return it would be an interesting example of just how mind-bendingly long the Imperium has lasted. Two thousand years and Praetoria's little petty empire building is ancient history.

Also, the names are a nice touch. Showcases how although the high concept for Praetoria is British Africa IN SPESS the cultural comparison isn't 1:1.

I'm imagining that in the Civil War the High Administrators were totally loyal to Vandire. Parliament also loyal but not unquestionably so and not blindly so. They were getting worried and then horrified by Emperor Vandire and the things he was doing.

Thor turns up and stands before the Parliament and shows them what atrocities have been done. Brief civil war on Praetoria between Administration and Parliament. Lords of the Old Houses declare support for Thor.

After Oscar takes the Golden Throne he takes note of who stood by and who stood up and determines that Praetoria can rule itself. The Crown of Praetoria is taken off of its stand and dusted off and the lords elect one of their own to wear it.

The names are a mash up of Brythonic and Saxon.

Rodri is first king of Praetoria. Rhodri the Great was the first king of Wales for example.

By 999M41 what should the surface of Praetoria look like?

Wow there is a lot to read. Gonna need to catch up on the stuff in this thread.

This is what was mention of modern Praetoria in a previous thread, mostly in comparison to Mordia.

>Praetoria discovered in the Great Crusade by the Salamanders.
>Mordia by the Dark Angels with whom they maintained close ties.

>Praetoria is known for it's stiff upper lip, honourable combat, devil may care attitude towards long odds and fierce determination.
>Mordia is known for taking no prisoners, doing what is needed no matter how distasteful, careful measuring of the odds and pragmatism.

>Praetoria is an industrial and commercial prosperous hub world of rich trader families who genuinely do care about the well being of the people in their jurisdiction and share the wealth generously. Their world is also home to the Dragon Lords who traditionally recruit from the first sons of every member of the aristocracy, it is considered the greatest honour.
>Mordia is a tidally locked shit hole that keeps ending up as Black Crusade sideshow. What little wealth the planet and it's people have is spent in preparing for the next war. They have the Knights of the Crimson Order call their world home and who supplement their PDF and IG regiments. Crimson Knights run the tragically large orphanages of Mordia, it makes a good recruitment ground.

>Praetorians generally join the Imperial Army for notions of honour and duty. They earn much prestige for their families and come back with many tall tales to tell. They get invited to all the parties and become a good marriage prospect.
>Mordians generally join for duty and glory. They earn more ration stamps for their families and come back with their rifles. They increase a settlements odds of survival next Chaos Skirmish.

There was another post, but it was mostly about the Space Marine chapters with a mention that Prometheanism is pretty popular on Praetoria because of Vulkan's influences.

That's going to need some revision

It should not be that the Iron Hands "brain in a jar" type super Skitarii is the intended aim.

Skitarii are given such augmentations as it is deemed prudent to give them for their job. The more extreme the situations that they habitually get thrown in the more upgraded they get to cope.

The better they are at their job the more they get upgraded as an investment to protect that talent.

If they get injured and need something replaced then they get machine parts because why would you replace a substandard part with another substandard part if something useful is available?

The more badass a Skitarii is the more metal they are. The more shit they have endured the more metal they are. The very elite of the Mecanicus fighting forces in this regard are the Thallax who are the brain in a jar super warriors. More machine than man they are the legal limit of what a soldier can be before going over to full A.I.

It is from these that the Iron Hands draw numbers.

From the very elite of the elite they take the cream of the crop. They give them any hardware improvements that they don't already have, introduce them to similar demi-god level warriors and give them the most dangerous missions.

Each of the Mechanicus chapters would vary greatly in appearance. SOme look like pic related. Some look like sleeker Centurions with jet packs. it all depends on what their home forgeworld specializes in making.

Due to them only recruiting the vey apex of the Mechanicus soldiery from soldiers already centuries old their method of recruitment relies heavily on there being a constant trickle of such skilled people as they would rather the extinction of their order than lower their standards.

Were it not for the obscene populations of the forgeworlds they would die out. Also the support of the forgeworlds. Iron Hands are extremely expensive to build over the course of their careers and to maintain and keep in good repair are not the cheapest of things.

I'm imaging the original orks looking something like this.

Usually capping out at a little over 2' tall with occasional freaks making it to 3'. Had a life span of 10 - 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 - 10 due to their environment.

Typically river dwelling. In their natural environment they would hunt fish in the morning and evening, graze on vegetation in the day and sleep at night. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant.

They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses. Could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them.

They were capable of violence against each other in a half hearted tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill.

They reproduced sometimes by spores but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. They had no in-built knowledge, that was all the Old Ones. None of them had developed a written language by the time of their "uplifting" and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures.

Their original religions tended to be the following of deamons before the warp went to shit and there were still many good spirits of the warp around. This was as high as they ever got pre-uplift with little pocket kingdoms built on the advice of the spirits. After they all mysteriously disappeared (War in Heaven twisted or killed them one way or another) they devolved back to where they started.

Old Ones were the first contact by aliens that they had and so nobody but the gods remember them as they used to be

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done

Can Khine possess people?

Also what should his relationship be with the fallen Phoenix Lord?

In previous thread someone tried to make a flow chart of the up coming Judgment Day / Ragnarok. Did anything come of it?

They might now have seen much of a difference between farming and reproduction, given they reproduced by and constantly shed spores.

I think snotlings are canonically about 1 to 1.5 feet tall though.

The implication seems to be that they weren't as prolific given that they need to cut pieces off to intentionally cultivate. Pure spore children would be rare although it might have been the only way to get new strains. Spore lands on other proto-ork, exchanges genes, lands in the mud and grows. Prevents genetic monoculture.

It would, combined with the proto-squigs that ate them, be why they never swamped their world.

Makes sense, although the fact that they could reproduce asexually and do so faster upon dying is what probably drew them to the Old Ones' attention in the first place. What was at first a notable feature of a literally who species turned into a nightmare when applied to a genetically engineered super-soldier.

Some animals/plants actually do something similar to this, they will hatch from their eggs early or shoot off all their eggs/sperm at once if they think they're about to die. In the case of eggs (mostly know of this in frogs and insects) the adults are often stunted because they haven't had as long to develop, but it's better than dying. With orks all you need is some to survive (and stunted ones would probably end up as gretchin anyway), so even if a batch ends up punier than normal they will grow back to full size given enough time given how orks reproduce and how the gestalt psychic field works.

Bumping because I swear I have more praetoria stuff planned

...

Shrikes are the Crone Eldar equivalent of Swooping Hawks or Assault Marines, using their rapid speed and agility to strike without warning on the battlefield. Shrikes are a fear, the wailing cries of the Raptor Cults resembling a cross between a hunting bird of prey and a jet engine. However, shrikes are also notoriously vain and haughty. Although they serve Chaos, they will not fight for any given warband out of any sense of common loyalty to the Ruinous Powers, and demand large payments of loot and captives in return for their aid. Lady Malys and Be’lakor have been known to keep their own Raptor Cults on retainer (with threats as much as rewards) in order to avoid dealing with the more independent cults’ notoriously fickle nature. Shrikes do not worship any one of the Big Four (and resent attempts of aligned warbands to convert them), instead worshipping the Raptor God, a predatory god of fear and cruelty that does not seem to correspond to any one of the Big Four, but in all likelihood represents a greater daemon of Chaos Undivided. After the War of the Beast, some of the Fallen were enticed into worshipping the Raptor God of their own accord, becoming the first Chaos Raptors and later Warp Talons. Raptor Cults are surprisingly open and accepting of non-Crones for a Crone institution, but that is merely because most Raptor Cult devotees have shifted the focus of their disdain from all non-Eldar to all who do not worship the Raptor God, not much of a change overall.

Shrikes are created when a Raptor Cult devotee is deemed sufficiently to be gifted a Shrike symbiote. The symbiote permanently grafts to the acolytes’ body, permanently reshaping them into a form more pleasing to the Raptor Cult’s sensibilities of war. Hands and feet are changed into metallic talons, while a pair of brass or steel wings grows from the back complete with their own set of jet turbines. Dissections of Shrikes have only revealed twisted cancerous flesh beneath their steel exterior, suggesting that their internal workings are warped just as heavily as their outer appearance. Shrikes prefer to use their own natural weapons in melee combat, but when fighting from a distance will use sawguns or filched bolters. Shrikes also have the ability to fire razor-edged blades from the tips of their wings. In this respect they resemble the Stymphalian Birds of Earth myth. Whatever they do not steal they defile and leave unusable, having some ability to spread filth from their deformed internal organs.

Perhaps the most gruesome habit of the Shrikes is their habit of taking plunder from the battlefield in the form of prisoners of war. Shrikes prefer their meat healthy and alive, but if this is not possible they have been known to sweep the wounded and the dying off the battlefield to deny them a peaceful death. Once back in their home realm, they impale their victims on [INSERT NAME HERE] trees, techno-organic plants seemingly composed entirely of thorns in the defiance of all laws of botany. These trees insert tiny microfilaments into the bodies, prolonging their agony and death throes of their impaled victims for as long as possible. These trees serve as more than just nourishment for the Shrikes’ sadistic sense of amusement, for these [INSERT NAME HERE] trees seem to feed on the pain and suffering created by the death throes of their victims to create new shrike symbiotes.

Swooping Hawks, Wracks, and descendants of the Blood Angels all consider Shrikes to be particularly insulting abominations, and will take extra satisfaction upon striking them out of the air on the battlefield.

(Need a good name for the shrikes' trees. Was trying to think of something out of Dante, given that just like the Inferno we have trees filled with people suffering surrounded by swarms of what are essentially harpies)

Damn that's good. Really good.

Maybe Gallow Trees or is that too obvious?

The Raptor Cults have always been extremely protective of the trees that produce their symbiotes. Although they treat these trees with nearly quasi-religious reverence, they know other groups are unlikely to do the same and if the ability to make shrikes became widely available then the Raptor Cults themselves would become obsolete. The amount of damage that could be done if shrike symbiotes were available to less scrupulous hands is easily shown by the events of the Phinean Massacre.

In M37, the planet Phineus II was subjected to a prolonged assault by a group of Crone Eldar, who had hired a large Raptor Cult to raid and sow terror upon its people. Phineus II had few defenses that could deal with fast-moving aerial targets like shrikes, and so the shrikes wreaked havoc upon the defending forces for several weeks. It got to the point that many guardsmen were afraid to sleep at night for fear that the shrikes would come wailing out of the darkness, and the shrikes themselves had begun competing amongst themselves for the most spectacular kills.

Entering into this scene were a group of Tzeentchian Crone researchers, who were not aligned with the invading force yet. The Tzeenchians had at their disposal several hundred shrike symbiotes, a rare prize which had been by stolen from a Raptor Cult by one particularly enterprising researcher. In the dead of night, the Tzeentchians kidnapped hundreds of human and eldar guardsmen from their tents and experimented on them by exposing them to the symbionts, wanting to see if non-Raptor Cult devotees were compatible with the gift of the Raptor God.

Once they were satisfied with their experiments, they released the pseudo-shrikes onto the battlefield, who confused and horrified by their warped condition sought out their fellow Guardsmen for help. The Guardsmen, having been driven to their wits end by the constant attacks and lack of sleep, reflexively fired at the incoming fliers, killing them to a man.

The Imperium was horrified when they realized they had slaughtered their own people. The invading Crone Eldar were furious that another group would interfere with their operations. The Raptor Cults were outraged at the theft and subsequent waste of so many good shrike symbiotes.

The Tzeenchian Crone Eldar thought it was funny.

There's not a whole lot here distinguishes the Iron Hands from normal Thallaxes though. To make them more "Space Mariney" I would suggest that the Iron Hands and their successors are unique among the AdMech forces because they retain most if not all of their cognitive function, allowing for much greater tactical complexity and flexibility compared to the other AdMech forces who are all lobotomized to some degree. This gives them the ability to operate in the high speed, high impact operations that characterize the SMs.

"The unique organization and composition of the Iron Hands was initially adopted by Primarch Ferrus Manus during the beginning of the Great Crusade after analysis of combat data proved the efficacy of the Legiones Astartes and the Adeptus Mechanicus' lack of a comparable force. Later, the reforms of the Codex Astartes proposed by Roboute Guilliman were accepted and implemented after calculations showed the chapter structure had great strategic and tactical benefits compared to the more centralized legion structure."
-- Excerpt from "The First Founding: An Overview of the Legiones Astartes"

Tzneetchian dickery at it's finest.

It looks like it's a thing for tomorrow because it's past midnight and I have to be at work in 8 hours.

Is Dragon Lords a just name only chapter or is there any information on them in Vanilla?

Also it's going to be more of an overview of the military down the ages.

Any suggestions?

Bamp

Any other ways that they should be different?

There was this in the previous thread (the only other bit on Praetoria).

>It is not stated anywhere that the Dragon Lords are Salamander successors but honestly who cares.
>Also KotCO are Dark Angels but that's as far as GW got with them. They didn't even get a colour scheme. For shits and giggles I'm going to assume it involved red to some degree.

>DLs are probably one of the blingiest chapter due to living on a prosperous world and being able to buy the few things that they can't make. Lots of Master Crafted Mk8 armour and hand made power weapons.
>The KotCO on the other hand are operating with what can be generously called Mk5 amd accurately described as clattering and clanking Frankenstein plate.

>DLs have master crafted combi-bolters with specialist ammo for every occasion.
>The signature weapon of the KotCO is a sort of extra large las-rifle because ammunition efficiency and las-rifles are about all the local workshops can manage.

>Preatorians are predominantly Promethean due to prolong exposure to Vulkan's influence. It's not Nocturnean Prometheism but it's a close enough relative for it to be recognizable. Also there are communities that follow Yechudism.
>Mordians tend to be adherents to their Small Gods with a minority of Katholians. Their Small Gods were once tree gods, they claim. But those ancient forests burned long ago.

Neither chapter is stupid enough to start being overly evangelical to the locals although they also make no distinction with their recruitment.

>Preatorians display rank on a sash and shoulder stripes, at least the sash on parades and formal occasions.
>Mordians have facial tattoos and wear coloured bars on the chest. They do not do parades and have very few formal occasions.

>Preatorians drink tea.
>Mordians drink """beer""" but only if they can't get anything stronger.

So the main difference between Thallaxi and Iron Hands is autonomy? Thallaxi are mostly lobotomized with just enough brain function to do their job whereas Iron Hands have essentially fully functionality, but are kept in line because they tend to be the hard-core adherents anyway? Along with Iron Hands not necessarily resembling Thallaxi, and can be more specialized for what the job requires, but tend to get Thallaxi-ish as the augments pile up?

Or am I getting something wrong?

Sounds about right to me, but I was the one who wrote this I was never totally down with the KotCO being underequipped to that extent. Even if they can't produce gear locally on the planet, it could still be shipped in from elsewhere in the sector as SMs are simply to valuable as an investment to send into battle with jerryrigged armor. That would be like buying a Ferrari but then not bothering to keep the tires inflated and the brake pads replaced. Even the most underequipped chapters in this AU like the Night Lords and anyone else on permanent Penitent Crusade are well equipped enough to have bolters and such, even if they have to scavenge and scrounge for it.

bump

It's not that the Imperium has cut them off so much as them being on shit warp currents, on a low priority world that gets Chaos tucked at regular intervals.

The currents flow out of the eye which makes approach from any other direction slow. When Chaos comes they use up their supplies quickly and fresh is a long way away.

Also during invasion time they often spread their assets across the PDF. Astartes bolters on a tripod can be operated by a regular human.

This with the new fluff would imply that the Salamanders originally set up something in the Rebuilding when it was time to go into Wilderness space.

The involvement of the Dragon Lords dates back to the founding of Praetoria in the days of the post-Beast rebuilding. It was deemed that the military side of the endeavour would require the substantial presence and use of Space Marines to remove some of the more fearsome and prepared horrors that had moved in during the intervening years. As Primarch Vulkan was the overall commander in bringing the worlds of Wilderness Space back to the light of civilization it was understandable one of his newly minted chapters that set up a way station alongside the more entrepreneurial efforts of the Gredbrittonic founding families.

The head of the space marines in this endeavour was the former Chaplain Commander Xiaphas Jurr of the Afrique League.

Commander Jurr never let the change in position from preacher of the Promethean faith to overall commander interfere with his missionary work and vice versa and it is largely his doing that Praetoria grew into a mostly Promethean world. It was not without practical merit as the forces raised from that world as the years went on all held a faith in common and were all the closer for it. The noble feuds in later years it has been speculated without this vague sense of brotherhood would undoubtedly have bloomed into minor wars.

As Praetoria grew from a minor service stop into a nation the waystation he commanded grew likewise so that in time it was declared a Chapter in its own right with himself as it's commander, a rank he wore well. He and his newly designated Dragon Lords were now distinct from the rest of the Prometheans as whilst he had been influencing the world he commanded from it had been influencing him.

As the population of Praetoria grew the Dragon Lords soon found that they could recruit from there exclusively even with the introduction of the Tithe.

Before the tithe the military of that world was predominantly the house militias and private military companies with only the Red Shirts, the mostly ceremonial soldiers of the Parliamentary Herald, representing the planet as a whole. At the time the Red Shirts were seen as a token force of no real concern and the butt of many jokes due to their lack of real experience and that they were attached to a figurehead rather than anyone with any real power.

This changed when the Imperial Army demanded it's due. They didn't want soldiers loyal to one city, one lord, in contest with their comrades of the same world. They wanted soldiers loyal to the Imperium representing their world as a unified whole. The imposing of a standard uniform was seen as one way to gently erode mental barriers, they were one and all Praetorian.

The distinctive green and black colour scheme of the Dragon Lords was surrendered not long after, coincidentally a few days after the death of Xiaphas Jurr, to their red and ivory as a show of solidarity with the common soldier.

In this time native born Gernebern of Auchmouth, a progeny who rose fast but died a mere few centuries later, took command of the space marines and was the source of much reform within the chapter. It was deemed prudent to have the chapter integrate ever more closely with the common soldiery, slitting the companies up into squads and placing them on long term loan to, at the time, 90 regiments of the Praetorian Guard as specialist squads.

All but one company that was demanded to remain to guard the homeworld at all times.

Despite all the upheavals and political manoeuvrings that could fill a very dry library in their own right it is often over looked the contributions that Praetoria made to the conquest, rebuilding and protection of the wilderness worlds and beyond. Indeed it was in this noble endeavour that Commander Jurr had sacrificed himself.

Were it not for the Red Coat diligence, vigilance and sacrifices the orks, marauders and worse would have just swept right back in and the fate of those that called that place home would have been, at best, pitiable.

>Am I even doing this right or should I stop?

>The Tzeenchian Crone Eldar thought it was funny

So orks started as cute-bolds all innocent and child like?

I'm all for this. It like the ultimate in twisted perversion.

Both good points. The weapons the KoCO use probably vary depending on how well supplies can get to them and how bad an invasion is going. Mordia doesn't have the resources Cadia does to fight off an invasion. Indeed, IIRC, so much resources get diverted to Cadia that some planets who don't know what a Black Crusade looks like are convinced it is a scam designed to keep taxes high (Severan Dominate).

Should we simplify this? Maybe the Crones who hired the shrikes ostensibly hired them to attack the world, but what they really wanted was a chance to steal shrike symbiotes, leading to the above events. Hence why the shrikes were hired to raid an ill-defended world.

Thallaxi seem a little grimdark. Or is that intentional to make contrast?

What is the Prometheanism like?

Do we have any named Mordians?

Pretty much a cross between cutebolds, smurfs, and traditional goblins. If they were ugly, they were ugly like miniature pugs and their cries of WAAAGH would be adorable, not terrifying. They would have been mostly farmers or hunter-gatherers lazing away in little smurf villages, with a bit of tribal warfare. If this was traditional fantasy they would have made the perfect kid-friendly sidekick.

And then the Old Ones came. And it became "show me on the DNA where the Old Ones touched you".