Nobledark 40k part 39: Spooky Scary Necrons Editon

Haven't been in a Nobledark thread in almost a month. Is there any good writefaggotry up for Eversor's yet? I assume most of the other assassin classes can probably stay pretty close to canon, but crazy berzerkers seemed to run against it. I'm pretty sure there was a well received idea for a Gramaton Cleric style assassin right?

Also do Commissars still exist in a world where its frowned on to shoot you're own people as the first answer to a problem?

Eversor Assassins still exist but in a more Grammaton Cleric manner with less gun and more knife.

youtube.com/watch?v=zjUrc72PFZg

1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Eversor

110% loyal to the Throne, drugged up to the eyeballs, extensively augmented and balls deep in the Religio Mortis.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#The_Commissariat

The Commissariat still exists. It's people are officers of last resort, the tangible link between the tribalistic nature of the common man and the greater Imperium, advisors and knowers of things officers need to know but don't need to know every day and also will absolutely shoot you if the need arises and no alternative presents itself.

Is that what the Necrontyr looked like?

Are there any surviving organic specimens?

There's no canonical picture of the Necrontyr, so there's very little to work with. From what we do know, given that Necrons are based on Necrontyr, Necrontyr were big (8 foot or so, it was suggested that the reason the Old Ones scales the Krork and proto-Eldar to their modern size was to match the Necrons in size) and kind of looked like Tau.

They could have been spikier, it's not clear whether the ridge you see on some is supposed to be biological or was part of their armor, and they seem to have a more humpbacked posture. The general consensus among fans seems to be that they had grey skin, don't know if there's anything supporting that.

We have no clue if Necrontyr had a fleshy nose. They could have, or they could have had a single nostril along the midline like lampreys.

The Necrons are also an interesting contrast to the typical Imperium and Chaos civility versus barbarism. The Necrons are essentially an example of "madness of order", showing what happens when you get a civilization with too much order. The Necron Star Empire is civilization, but at the same time it is civilization as a mockery of itself; civilization stripped of heart and all the things that make civilization worth having in the first place. In Necron society, the individual doesn’t matter. In Necron society, you are little more than a cog in a machine. Necrons don’t obey authorities because they are wise or just but because they are authorities.

The tyranids, on the other hand are simply oblivion. There is no choice of submission or death with them. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be bargained with. They cannot be intimidated or frightened off. There is only kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. Chaos, Orks, and Dark Eldar are society at its worst, a society where the id is supreme, primal desires run rampant, and the only rule that matters is "I'm in charge because I'm stronger than you". The tyranids are, if anything, even more primal.

Their females also had breasts. Clearly this is the most important information. /sarcasm

Okay, Maynarkh Dynasty, take two.

Of all the independent Necron dynasties, the Maynarkh Dynasty is perhaps the biggest threat to the Imperium. Even as far back as the War in Heaven, the Maynarkh Dynasty were known for their brutality and cruelty, acting as the Silent King’s pet monsters and wetwork agents. This behavior was no different under the Maynarkh Dynasty’s last and latest Phaerakh: Xun’bakyr, the Mother of Oblivion. Eldar Harlequins speak of countless atrocities and genocides, all perpetrated by Necrons in glowing colors of brass and orange. Indeed, the brutality of Xun’bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty was so great that just before the Great Sleep several Phaerons, normally so subservient as to the point of indolence, approached the Silent King to suggest that the Silent King take steps to make sure Xun’bakyr…didn’t wake up from the Great Sleep. It is rather telling that the Silent King actually agreed with this proposal.

The Silent King may have had more than one reason to try and kill off the Maynarkh Dynasty. Phaerarch Xun’bakyr was, to put it bluntly, infatuated with the Nightbringer. When the Silent King gave the order for the Drazak Dynasty to kill Llandu’gor the Flayer, he had to noticeably take precautions to avoid letting the information reach Xun’bakyr, given that any weapon that could conceivably be used against the object of her obsession would likely cause her to react poorly. Even when the C’tan were shattered and the Silent King ordered the Necrons to go into their long hibernation, the news was kept hidden from the Maynarkh Dynasty, who went to sleep still believing they were following orders from their C’tan overlords. The Silent King may have been able to directly override the free will of Xun’bakyr, but given her instability, he didn’t want to risk the chance of her slipping her leash.

The Maynarkh Dynasty was put in hibernation in their traditional lands, far on the other side of the galaxy from the core of the Star Empire in what would one day become the Orpheus Sector of the Segmentum Pacificus. This was a high-density stellar cluster filled with numerous stars, some of which were…encouraged to go supernova early with a little bit of help from the Oruscar Dynasty’s Celestial Orrery. The Silent King hoped that the constant bombardment of electromagnetic pulses from exploding stars would damage the Maynarkh Dynasty to the point that they would never wake up from the Great Sleep, or at the very least be so damaged that they could only awake into an addled half-life.

It didn’t work. Although the Maynarkh Dynasty was damaged, they still awoke from the Great Sleep along with everyone else. Xun’bakyr’s madness and obsession was, if anything, worsened by the damage from the Great Sleep, to the point that the Silent King could no longer assert any control over her. Xun’bakyr seemed to rapidly realize she had been deceived, having awoken in a time when the great immortal C’tan had either been killed or reduced to hiding and the Silent King was the one trying to give her orders.

Rapidly dismissing the ravings of the would-be king, Xun’bakyr realized that her dynasty now needed a new purpose. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. Xun’bakyr decided that the Maynarkh Dynasty would rededicate themselves to killing all life in the galaxy itself, a creative masterpiece of death and destruction that might even go so far as killing time itself, all to attract the attention of the Nightbringer and to demonstrate her affection for the object of her infatuation. She is rather oblivious to the fact that despite all his paraphernalia and death-associated trappings, the Nightbringer is mostly concerned with sating his own gluttony and power-lust and would rather like causality to keep existing (though in his own image of course).

Xun'bakyr Is obsessive and meticulous, in the long term focused absolutely on her deadly Idol, in the short term honing and perfecting some novel variety of star eater, 4D ionized shrapnel projector, or reality-pin to nail down certain doom. Xun'bakyr isn't a large scale threat only because she is so narrow in the scope of her ambitions. Her armies march along in the wake of the Nightbringer dealing death, and her scouts proceed him demonstrating their queen's new horrors. A blow from one will often be followed by a blow from the other, and together they make a horrible local threat and disaster within a sector, but beyond an additional horror following the Nightbringer's aimless killing spree they are not strategically significant. Xun'bakyr's universe destroying plans coming to fruition is an existential threat, but one that is sadly insignificant compared to many others. Although the rest of the Maynarkh Dynasty generally does not share her obsessions, the dynasty had always been composed of the worst sort of sadists, psychopaths, and war criminals and so jump at the chance to kill people in new and creative ways.

The first overt sign of action by the Maynarkh Dynasty was when the stars of the Caracol binary system went supernova during between Blood Pact and Imperial Forces. Both groups considered it the first shots of a surprise attack by some unknown third party. What they didn’t know was that rather than a military action, it was the result of a weapons test from one of Xun’bakyr’s harebrained schemes. The slaughter that followed was mostly unrelated. Mostly, in that the Maynarkh Dynasty was involved, and there was slaughter, but it had nothing to do with the two stars they had made go nova. Today, the Orpheus sector is nearly lifeless, haunted only by ghosts and madmen and ruled by an even madder queen.

Little bit from that other user there that was really good.

looks good, happy to have another Necron free agent.

Just had a thought about Oscar, there was some debate about the morality of his very long range passive telepathy. Because Men of Gold were made to be interfaces between a massive human population and an Iron Mind or a cluster of them, Oscar might be passively skimming their minds as part of his actual Man of Gold function, and lacking a network of psychic AI godlings to feed all the thoughts to he synthesizes solutions as best as his wetware psychic supercomputer brain can. I don't think this goes away from the tabula rasa idea we settled on early on, it would be an almost autonomic thing for him built into his capabilities, not dependent on actual programming.

Bamp

It i a thing of beauty

Hot damn. You took robo-Curze and managed to dial the batshit up to maximum omnicidal atrocity.

One can only imagine the foul mood Nemensor Zahndrekh was in on he day he found out she had survived the Long Sleep.

Are Commissar Rangers a thing in this AU along with Aspects of Steel?

Could be that there is a Chaos Witch on some old research station that keeps summoning deamns or cloning Tyranids.

Her mission is to conquer one of the Imperium's planets.

Retired Space Marine in a dreadnaught hires some PDF whiteshields and improves them.

It's fucking dumb as hell but kids like it.

It's the only time (ONLY TIME) he was close to actually awake from his lunacy and batshit-insanity, and the occupants of the room actually had to evacuate in a hurry (more like kicked out by Obyron in a flash) as he began shouting and cursing the accursed name of the Maynarkhs to his long-dead gods.

Soon after that the mists of age kicks back in and the old skele-bot could not really remember about the event - accept for his burning hatred of the Maynarkhs, of course - those barbarically bloodthirsty barbarians upstarts wearing the coat of nobility STAINS what is like to be a PROPER NOBLE!!!

I don't understand the Silent King's motives, from which I can remember there being two:
>Return the Necrons back to biological bodies.
>Fight off the Tyranids.

Wouldn't they be much better suited to killing Tyranids in bodies made out of Necrodermis? Seems a little counter intuitive.

Would he be too bothered about the Tyranids?

The long term goal is to slap the Big Red Cadian Button, kill off anything that can feel, wait a few hundred thousand years and biotransfer back into warm bodies grown from prime genetic stock.

Either the bugs will have gone about their merry way before the button gets pressed or they will die along with everything else when the button gets slapped.

Either way the result is the same. Necrons arise alone and remake the galaxy into an form more pleasing to Szarekh.

That's the canon Silent King's goals. Here the Silent King has a wider eye with a view to kill off Chaos as well. He doesn't really care about the tyranids, but is more than happy to ram them into the Imperium.

Really, he probably couldn't be arsed about Chaos if it wasn't galaxy-destroying evil. I wonder what his reaction was on seeing Chaos cultists for the first time.

"I've killed pantheons before. I assume yours will be no different."

Silent King actually tried to get Zahndrekh back under his command.

Silent King took one look at Xun'Bakyr not responding to his commands and went "eh, I'll wipe her out right after I get rid of the savages."

Does Inquisitor Helynna Valeria ever visit Nemensor Zahndrekh?

There was some writefaggery suggesting that the Necrons were actively sabotaging anti-Tyranid efforts because they had nothing to fear from the Tyranids and smothering the entire galaxy in the Shadow in the Warp would accomplish all their goals anyway.

She would have had to at least once seeing as Zahndrekh was the one who freed her from Trazyn's Rubiks Cube, but seeing as she's all about xenos tech and archaeotech in this timeline she would probably have a million and one questions for the Nemesor, some of which might make Obyron's scythe hand start acting up.

It is now.

As is a cartoon about Fuklaw.

>Lets rewrite 40k!
>Still can't stop basing stuff on Milton.

Goddamnit Veeky Forums

At least this time the BBEG has a better reason for being evil than being shanked and going to a creepy sweat lodge.

Not sure this is a valid plan for the Silent King. The Nids eat pretty much all biomass including atmospheres and oceans, so if they strip the galaxy there will be no squishy sapients for the Necrons to soul transfer into.

Cadia's Big Red Button will stop the Shadow in the Warp and the Hive Mind just as well as the Chaos Gods. Szarekh just has to make sure the 'nids don't eat too much of the galaxy before he does so.

There's a reason the galactic landscape at the turn of the millenium has been described as a four-way barroom brawl that happens to be set in the Imperium's living room.

I can't find who is, in Vanilla, the head of the Imperial Guard.

Has it not been stated?

According to Lexicanum, there are nine permanent High Lord position and three that wax and wane depending on what bloc has the most power at the moment. This includes the Lord High Admiral, Cardinal of the Holy Synod, Abbess of the Adeptas Sororitas, etc. I think the Ecclesiarch used to be in this position until some event like the Age of Apostasy or the Nova Terra Interregnum. Apparently it seems there isn't a head of the Imperial Guard in M41. The latest one recorded was during the War of the Beast, and named...Oskar Lowis.

Maybe GW just derped on having a high ranking member of the Imperial Guard around?

Okay, if I have to suffer this, everyone needs to as well. This song's been stuck in my head all day ever since the OP.

Spooky Necron skelebots
Send shivers down your spine
Doomsday Arks will gauss your soul and
Seal your fate tonight

Spooky Necron skelebots
Their hibernation breached
Wake from sleep into half life
From deep beneath your feet

We're so sorry Star Empire
You're so misunderstood
Oscar: We only want to socialize
Isha: But I don't think we should

Spooky Necron skelebots
Neither shriek nor scream
One edict as they wake to life
Obey the Silent King

Spirits of the Warp all ask
“Just what is all the fuss?”
But if they knew then they would scream
“It's death that’s come for us!”

Rogue dynasties aren’t that much better
Trazyn is just strange
Xun’bakyr’s a psychopath
And Zahndrekh is insane (Obyron: *sigh*)

Sticks and stones might break your bones but
Flayers make you goo
Spooky Necron skelebots
Wake from beneath you.

I noticed that we didn’t have any of Arrotyr’s information up either on the Notes page or on the main page. It was mostly written up, but reading through I saw that there were a few things that had to be edited to make it fit into the timeline. I went through and tweaked it a bit with the suggestions, but I wanted to put it here because the bulk of it isn’t mine and I wanted to make sure it sounded okay to everyone else including the original user if present.

pastebin.com/JqAjg7B7

The changes I made, in the interests of transparency
- The suggestion that was raised in previous threads of Arrotyr was a descendant of a War in Heaven hero instead of a veteran, at the same time strongly hinting that it is the reincarnation of the original. If it was the original with no reincarnation it would make him as old as Be'lakor, which means Be'lakor loses a lot of his leverage.
- Attacking Isha to razing Isha's temple, since the Eldar gods were not supposed to be in realspace per Asuryan's orders (plus we get that Ajax and Cassandra parallels), and it fits with the Nimina Demthring stuff.
- Imotekh as the nemesis instead of Zahndrekh, and moving the dates of their scraps to when the Necrons were up and about (put in Eleventh Black Crusade on a whim, it could be any later one if we want).

Here's a thought regarding the issue that was brought up about losing the theme of Arrotyr's fall originally being tragic due to being driven to madness by his vision. What if Arrotyr's entire line was affected by the vision like Fantasy's Curse of Khaine? They were all known to be great warriors, but they also all went mad before their time with visions of fire and apocalypse? This way it makes the vision have more of a direct bearing on Arrotyr.

They can wait the millions of years needed to re-terraform the galaxy after the Tyranids pass through. Hell, they can create solar systems with patience and the Orrery thing.

sounds good on the prophecy angle, and I'd thought it had always been the Stormlord, not Zahndrekh

bump

Those were all needed changes and they improve an already good work

>pastebin.com/JqAjg7B7
It is very enjoyable to read, thank you.

No name for the holder of that seat has been given for 999M41. Or even the existence of the seat. Seems we are free to make one up as we see fit.

I'd steer away from having the Angry Marines be a chapter in this AU. It's a reference too far and comes off as insufferably smug.

If you want a bunch of angry bastards in yellow and red running around and being CQC focused then have them be called the Templars Irate or some such and attach them to the Templar Movement.

Yes it's stupid name but still less so than Marines Malevolent.

Have we decided on what the Demiurg actually are?

>1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Demiurg

>1d4chan.org/wiki/Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Demiurg

There is nothing there.

I love it. It' s so cheeky i cannot not imagine some cute Eldar children singing it while they run around a Wraithtree

It was Zahndrekh originally. It was suggested making it Imotekh because it makes everything Necron not-Zahndrekh related, gives an in for Croneworlder versus Star Empire shenanigans, and Imotekh being a master strategist who can predict the movements of his foes to a ludicrous level is his thing in canon (except the Orks. But dats bekuz even da Orks can't predict da Orkz).

There was some on the notes page, but there's a bit that's up in the air. From what I remember that was generally talked about.

- Race of nomadic traders and miners, organized into brotherhoods of which there are typically one on a small ship, several on a large one (from canon).
- Had to be incorporated into the Imperium on a brotherhood-by-brotherhood basis.
- In their natural born state are silicate vaguely reptilian people
- Are heavily into cybernetics, possibly because they are naturally sillicon-based, some suggested Demiurg patriarchs (though do they even have genders or are they like orks?) are literally one with the ship a la Pilot from Farscape.
- May be an Eldar uplift experiment
- Gave/sold the Imperium ion cannon technology as a housewarming present.
- Yriel's first mate is one.

The closest thing we have to Angry Marines in this timeline are the Blood Angels 1st Company or the Flesh Tearers. There's no Black Rage in this timeline, but the Blood Angels have a tendency to go a little...cross-eyed at the idea of treason.

The War Hounds maybe, but they seem more professional soldiers (like Sparta meets Rome meets modern soldiers) than mindless berserkers. They are also struggling against the inner beast, but their idea of angry when it comes out is more of "burn their city, pave it over, and salt the earth" kind of thing. I don't know. Angron was really passionate and prone to fits of rage, but Kharn was all about not letting your anger eat you alive. Blood Angels are more paladins, which means they are much more passionate when it comes to compassion but at the same time more emotional when it comes to anger.

I agree about what you said regarding the Angry Marines. Alternatively, the Angry Marines are something made up by whoever made the cartoon (based very, very loosely on the Blood Angels and War Hounds). This has done nothing to help Fuklaw's blood pressure.

So Fuklaw was/is real but the AMs aren't? Sounds good to me.

Maybe Fuklaw was stationed with a regiment of Baalite soldiers. In that regiment was assigned Black Rage marines.

War correspondent (these are a thing?) or a rememberancer finds his antics to be highly entertaining. Rememberancer retires or finds safer work or whatever and pitches his idea to a local entertainment company and they love it.

20 years later the cartoon is a well established cultural tradition with films, numerous spinoff series, toys, books and a few high budget films.

Fuklaw finds out and flips his lid. But a portion of the proceeds go to the PDF pension fund so he tolerated it. Barely.

...

Maynarkh Dynasty and Arrotyr up on 1d4chan. Anything else missing?

Thank you.

Does anyone remember what happened with Order of the Old Tree?

There wasn't a Preatoria section back then so I never put it on at the time. Plus someone kept trying to insert their incest fantasy into it and I was kind of put off by the whole thing and stopped writing.

Lukas Bastonne, the Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial Army, is a man both blessed and cursed with a supernaturally good memory. Or at least he is cursed and the Imperium is blessed.

He is the youngest of the High Lords by a good hundred and fifty years but that one remaining purple Cadian eye has long ago waved goodby to notions of youth or innocence or joy. He was bright enough to have skipped the duties of Whiteshield in the Cadian Army and could have transferred straight to officer school with all the perks this would bring, such people considered near as nobility on Cadia. He refused this honour on principle, a man without perspective is not a good officer, a man who hasn't started at the the bottom has no right to ask of those people to do that what he could not have been asked.

Brilliant as he was this state of affairs was only temporary and he quickly climbed the ranks on merit and aptitude, his merciless memory serving him and others very well. But that perfect memory came at a price and that price was that it was a perfect memory. He remembers the face of every corpse that was once a friend, every horror shat out by the Eye of Terror, tortures beyond counting, lifetimes of death and destruction. He used to tattoo the name of every soldier that fell under his command. He ran out of skin a very long time ago.

Lukas Bastonne as of 999M41 is not a happy man. Gone are the days that he doesn't wake up to the sound of his own screaming and he drinks like a fish. Rumor has it that he has gone through eight livers. Unsightly as his drinking habit is none can deny his competence at his job and even pickled in gin he has not lessened in his diligence. His job is all that keeps him getting up in the mourning.

He is a man of no humour or good cheer. He is a man who knows the value of life though knows that for the Imperium to survive that life must be spent, spent but never wasted. He will not ask others to do what he would not, but he is Cadian and they live on the doorstep of Hell. The worst nightmares of other worlds are the every other day on Cadia.

He does not wear the full ceremonial garb to the meetings of the High Lords, or any other meetings. He is from a world where pomp and ceremony go to die. He wears a field uniform at all times, he feels naked without it. He carries his las-rifle at all times because he's a soldier damn it. He rose through the ranks for fear of the incompetence of others. those names tattooed belonged to people to whom he owes it to ensure that the lives of his people are spent, not wasted. That was his driving ambition to get where he is. Now there is nobody above him bat the Emperor, now he can maybe comfort himself a little knowing that lives that are lost mean something, that his friends weren't just discarded.

Under his less than tender command the Imperial Guard is operating at a level of performance as efficient and powerful as it ever has done. He would see all worlds, not as copies of his homeworld, but as strong as it in their own way. Different worlds forge different men and different men slay different monsters and no matter what Chaos and Orks and Necrons and Ffucked up intergalactic Locusts throw at the Imperium somewhere is a soldier that can kill it.

Of his family nothing is known, Cadia has no shortage of lost war orphans. Lukas Bastonne was on some birth issued dog tags about his neck though Lukas isn't a normal Cadian name although his purple eyes are a native trait so it's possible that one parent or grand parent was an off-worlder stationed on to the Gateworlds. Not that it matters, not that it matters at all.

The other High Lords endure him with either hostility, pity or fear but he does not care for their friendship or approval. They know their job, he knows his. And under his command the Guard and the Imperium will march on.

>Is it alright?

I like it, but I'm concerned about how the High Lords are turning out as a group.
They're supposed to be part of the Illuminati and similar shit, aren't they? Or at least some of them are.

Which ones?

Not that guy, but I thought the Illuminati were the way they were because they were interested in gaining power through other means? The High Lords and the Alpha Legion are the main buffer keeping them from fucking things up too much in the Imperium. Except in the cases when you have someone who is a member of both the Hydra and the Illuminati and trying to play things as a double agent.

I don't know. It's all very confusing.

Did Szarekh and Oscar ever meet face to face? I thought they did once before things went to shit but looking at the notes it seems not.

I was going to point out another thing. Oscar and Szarekh aren't as different as they might seem, and these differences would have been less pronounced when the Silent King first showed up in M40. Consider the following: both are incredibly powerful beings, bordering on demigod status (Oscar due to being a Man of Gold, Szarekh due to having all the power of the Star Empire at his fingertips), who have achieved that status by being a fusion of the organic and the artificial, and rule over a massive empire and know firsthand how hard it is to make the decisions required of that. Other than Isha and Eldrad, Szarekh is one of the few beings in the galaxy who could possibly understand what Oscar has gone through firsthand.

Also consider the timeframe. It’s M40. Oscar’s long-term social circle at this point consists of his wife, Cegorach, Bjorn, Eldrad, Galadrea, Trajan, and a handful of others. I’m not sure if he even known Khaine. I mean, he’d obviously know of Khaine, but given what happened the last time Khaine interacted with a demigod and the last time Khaine interacted with Isha’s husband I would assume the All-Mother would conspire to keep Oscar as far away from the Bloody-Handed One as possible. Magnus is dead. Vulkan is dead. Ferrus Manus is dead. Constantin is dead.

(cont.)
It’s been mentioned Oscar has had trouble building relationships in later years because of the fear of loss. He’s not gone to the full-blown “baseline human life is worthless” view of his canonical counterpart, but it’s been mentioned he’s been afraid of really opening up to people after his OG family started dying. Sebastian Thor had to bully his way into the Emperor’s inner circle. The possibility of anyone being a positive social influence at this point in his life, even the bloody king of the Necrons, is an avenue worth pursuing.

So Oscar goes to parlay with Szarekh, hoping that all the things Isha told him about "Oscar, this is a bad idea. I'm serious, those people are psychopaths" is just an exaggeration from the days when the Eldar didn't rule the roost. And the Silent King introduces himself with a very Oscar-esque...

"Pleased to meet you. They call me the Silent King. Well, they call me that, but I haven't been doing much of that in these last few millenia."

And Oscar thinks he might just be a little bit less alone in the galaxy. Only for it to be ripped away like a cruel joke. It doesn't matter whether Szarekh was humoring Oscar as part of the political game or did mean anything he said (or, more likely, at best saw him as a Vercingetorix to his Caesar, a worthy and honorable opponent yet still a barbarian). It still rubbed even more salt in the wound when Szarekh made his ridiculous demands.

(cont.)
Of course, this would be where the contrast between the two becomes apparent. Oscar believes in the inherent value of individual lives. Szarekh believes that when when you set out to right a wrong, it doesn't matter how many more bodies one ends to the pile as long as the scales balance out in the end. Oscar made a conscious choice to follow his path in life, because he was fed up with seeing his people wallowing in shit when they could be so much greater. He doesn't see things in hierarchical terms, heck the Age of Apostasy shows he would step away from the whole thing if he thought it wouldn't explode. Szarekh, despite being an uploaded mind, grew up in a dog-eat-dog world where you were either ruling or you were ruled. He might not even be able to conceive of a world that doesn't operate in terms of a political food chain.

I don't know. This sounded better in my head but putting it down it makes less sense and seems to conflict with canon. Trashbin?

I looked for the Order of the Old Tree section, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I saw a mention of it but I assumed that was part of the Dragon Lords. I don’t remember the incest parts of it (probably for the better).

bampan

I just meant that the ones so far, other than the AdMech representative, don't seem to lend themselves to conspiratorial stuff.
They're all people who do the jobs that need to get done, horrible as some of those jobs may be.
Though maybe I'm misremembering the idea that some of the High Lords (unspecified) are doing shit with Emperor Control Devices (for the good of all, of course) and trying to figure out the big mysteries and whatnot and that's all a step down.

We arent sure, its a very secretive organization

It was Mechanicus factions in the Illuminati that wanted to use Golden Man coding devices to variously upgrade, control, blackmail, and experiment on the emperor. In my mind that fits with the AdMech leader's attitude perfectly.

Also, I've got the impression that the Illuminati have as many cliquish, navel gazing theorists as it has active and effective conspirators, and is actually somewhat closer to an extra surreptitious galactic Freemasons than one would think.

Sounds good to me.

I've been thinking about Oscar's personality and mindset, and the Imperial Court and Imperial Family that have been mentioned in passing a couple times. I assume the Imperial Family actually refers to just him and Isha, and the prospective Impossible Child, but I wonder what the courtiers Oscar and Isha would keep around would be like. Between Oscar's reservations about attachment to the ephemeral and Isha's deific status I think there would be a high proportion of Eldar among them, and at least a handful of Xenos of great note on a more temporary basis. I'm already picturing her majesty's harlequin troop, and the various notable priestesses and advisors she would keep on hand out of ceremony. Oscar might occasionally cherry pick a Magos thats been cast from Mars for his own retention, as much for projects as for the fact that he knows they'll last a significant time.

Oscar and Isha have alsl down the ages adopted countless orphaned and outcast psyker children.

Let's say they have had 5 kids and keep the until 18. In 10,000 years that's 2,777 children. That's tens of thousands of grandchildren.

It was fairly far back in the 1st attempt to do the planet of tea and crumpets.

There was an order of Bene Gesserit concubine-nuns. Praetoria was traditionally patriarchal in it's social structure. There was much inbreeding and infighting and lack of stability in the aristocracy.

To this end the Order of the Old Tree were sent to Praetoria. Each spire lord was offered one of these cute, fertile little bed warmers as a "gift" from the Imperium for the loyalty and contribution of their world down the ages.

As they were all off-worlders it added a flood of new genes into a very stagnant pool. The children were all legally of the union of the lord and his lady, the concubines would never be on the official genealogy.

Because every lord had one and every lord's heir would be appointed one some user kept trying to insist that they developed feelings for their mothers and were assigned blood relatives.

So far as I can remember. Maybe I'm exaggerating or failing to remember accurately.

Would that not defeat the purpose of the order, to prevent genetic stagnancy and incest in the Praetorian ruling class?

Yes. It also stank of magical_realm.

The original idea was just Bene Gesserit in the Nobledarkness.

I like it. He is an example of flawed suffering for the sake of the many.

So what should the Blood Angels think of the Fuklaw cartoons given that the Angry Mariens are a parody of their venerated Death Company?

In this AU how much does the average pleb know of the Great Crusade and War of The Beast?

Oh, that's misremembering. The idea there was the Illuminati were incensed of the idea of a creation of humanity leading it and was looking into ways to control/make Men of Gold (including snooping around Cthonia, etc.). The High Lords and the upper levels of the Administratum think that's bullshit, as they've met Oscar in person quite frequently and see him as a person (a rather annoying person in the Fab General's case, but still a person). So they and the Alpha Legion are the major players in shutting them down and keeping them from getting to the Emperor (besides the Custodes and Handmaidens, of course).

IIRC the Golden Throne is a device designed to write personalities for the Men of Gold, but it wouldn't even work on Oscar now because he's already got one and it is supposed to be used on ones that are still blank slates. Not that the Emperor ever sits in the thing anyway.

Then it was suggested that maybe that's an extreme faction of the Illiminati, and others are more just interested in gaining power through digging up what people don't want them to know, whether it's the Men of Gold, the Iron Minds, the Void Dragon (they don't know, but that hasn't stopped them from snooping to some degree) and anything else the AdMech has hidden on Mars, Xenotech, Necron tech, etc.

And then it got confusing and I lost track of things.

I see. I see the reason it got creepy real fast too.

Some. Big chunks of it aren't hidden, but it is overly mythologized. However, we know they don't know everything. People don't know Horus was seriously considering staying out of the War of the Beast, until his encounter with Chaos showed him that's exactly what Chaos wanted. Instead, they see him as an Anansi/Coyote-like figure who tricked the Chaos Gods over and over again to prevent them from going full force against the Imperium. The further out you go, the less detail you get things in until eventually its seen in a mythic tone.

It's not the Golden Throne that is the psy-graft machine.

The psy-graft was an old artefact with a wiped hard drive. Not unknown in the Imperium, in vanilla the space wolves had one. They were irreplaceable and imperfect.

Golden Throne is a bunch of basalt slabs covered in gold foil. Everyone assumes it is solid gold as if it wouldn't have been weighed in.

Alright then. Sorry, my memory isn't the best - must've jumbled together a few things, again.
And even if I hadn't, what I had been saying was more 'some of the rest should be more inclined to that stuff' rather than anything about the currently written stuff, which are all good. But that won't be necessary, I suppose!

I thought the Golden Throne was something he either took from Ursh (they had no idea what it was, all they knew it was a DaoT artifact and it wouldn't work so it wasn't Chaos corrupted out the wazoo, maybe the Urshii stole it from Persepotropolis), or he found it somewhere in the basements of Terrawatt or Uralia.

The shiny chair doesn't work. No one knows what it does and assumes it's broken. The Warlord/Steward picked out the Golden Throne to represent the future Emperor (at that time he wasn't thinking it'd be him) because it was big and baroque and impressive and symbolic of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire and otherwise only useful for a doorstop.

What if the Tau are the necrontyr?

no, we've already decided against that, and its kinda nonsense anyways

The great spire of the Imperial Palace is located in the heart of the city of Moskgród. Moskgród was not the capital of Ursh but had been the heart of many older empires and later absorbed into Ursh.

It's possible that if the Throne does contain the broken down remains of a psy-graft machine it may have been used by older Age of Strife nations to preserve the wisdom of it's leaders down the ages.

Presumably it worked up until it got 0 maintenance for decades/centuries because Ursh can not into goo tech.

What said.

There is some convergent evolution going on there though. Albeit with differences. Necrontyr are like three feet taller than Tau, have that nose slit (which in this AU we're interpreting as a Jackobson's organ given the way the Tau work in vanilla) instead of a nostril cavity like the Necron/tyr, and lack the Necrontyr's ungodly pain tolerance and faster reflexes.

Of course, Eldar and humans aren't that much different, until you notice the hyper-efficient digestive tract, crystalline bone structure, helical muscle fibers, etc.

Tau and Necrontyr, Eldar and humans, and Jokaero and kinebrach all seem to have a wolf-thylacine thing going on. They look similar but then when you look closer there are serious differences between the two.

That said, there are some hints that this is going to be the big reveal for the Tau in vanilla for 8th edition. So hold onto your butts.

As the guy who suggested the Kaldor Draigo idea a while back, one of the ideas for the dark secret that would make Draigo panic and try to rush to realspace as fast as possible is that the Golden Throne might not be as defunct as people think. Chaos found out about this and is planning to exploit it when they go for the killing blow, paralleling how vanilla!Cypher is trying to return to Earth or how vanilla!Earth has that gaping back door in the form of the defunct human Webway gate.

Given this is the AdBio/AdMech, wouldn't their idea of fixing the problem be just to plant people trees on Praetoria (or in-vitro growth, in the case of the AdMech)?

the AdBio is both full of a wide variety of weirdos, and actually more attentive to the fleshy ones they interact with than the AdMech, seeing as they too are fleshy. It might have been a nod towards not totally freaking out and disrupting the society of Praetorian nobility by making them use gestation trees, or Praetoria might have just got lucky and the order that took up the task didn't favor that method. There was some mention of the Order of the Old Tree had some overlap with the worship of Isha, and that their name is more a reference to the cultivation of family trees than the AdBio people trees.

Though it might be an interesting addition that many of their order are born from a gestation tree they brought to Praetoria, made from pan-imperial stock and engineered for wisdom and beauty. It would be an interesting way to make them more alien to the Praetorians, and more separate from succession and legitimacy matters, but they would remain totally human and Imperial.

I thought it was a group of Sisters, not the AdBio

This. They are a non-militant branch of the Adepta Securitas with suspected links to Isha and very definite links to the most assuredly militant Sisters of the Bloody Brier.

It might be that they were originally founded by some AdBio initiative to prevent genetic mono-cultures from forming in isolated populations in the Imperium. The High Council of Bio-Druids gift the adepts starting this undertaking one of their gestation trees, their most wondrous mundane miracle of the flesh, to get the whole program off the ground.

Typically the Order of the Old Tree originally oversaw young imperial colonies. Typically a colonization effort will be done by one planet and will attract a disproportionate number of people from one particular community who typically share a fair few common ancestors. This makes them all a little samey. It's not that they usually have to worry about degeneration from the inbreeding as such, not unless an additional bottleneck has happened, it's usually a matter of immune systems. The galaxy is full of infectious shit.

One gestation young tree can produce a crop of maybe a dozen healthy newborns per season cycle. Then they have to have at least one fallow cycle for health reasons. A fully mature gestation tree can have up to eighty child-fruits hanging from meat and bone and leaf branches like strange apples with adequate nutrition. A gestation tree to get to full size can take as much as two-hundred years under optimal conditions.

The secret of creating gestation trees is known only to the Bio-Druids. To dispel some rather disturbing rumours Isha and her Handmaidens did inspect the whole process and found nothing particularly harrowing.

As the years went on the Order of the Old Tree found that it's services far outstripped what they could produce, even with a vigorously healthy and fully mature tree. This was when they started running orphanages.

They had always preferred to make female humans with their trees to be let loose into the environment for the simple reason that they and, far more importantly, their offspring were far easier to track. They needed to see how their ever so carefully crafted variations and combination spread and interacted with the baseliners in the event that they would need to prune out detrimental mutations.

But with so much work to do, indeed an entire galaxy to tend, they needed more numbers than craftsmanship. It was at about this time that the original members of the order started to die off. Most bordering on all of the new members had been fruit of the tree and as such this is when the Order became a sisterhood. Not that this concerned the old or new members of the Order, to them parts were just parts, cut and stitch and paint with double helix splice. The transition in this regard wasn't really noticed. What was more noticed was that they were growing increasingly distant from Molech and it's High Council.

It was not a violent or even an upset separation. It was a gradual thing with no recriminations or ill feelings. It was just that anyone who had even seen that planet were dying off and they had increasingly little in common. As a sign of good will Molech let them keep the tree.

With the tree in their possession they could still add new pigments to the bloodline mixes that they required but they needed more. Thankfully the Imperium is not short on blood.

On many of the worlds made impoverished from wars they set up orphanages to take care of the children that society could now not do so funded by grateful nobles they had helped. The younger orphans, those too young to ever even remember their homeworlds and with nobody to remember them, were sent across the galaxy to find new homes far away with loving families from societies of extremely different stock.

In this way they did their part and more to keep the gene-pool from stagnating.

Little by little their influence and contacts grew into a vast galaxy spanning web and always that influence used to contacts called favours in to assist the Imperium which only grew their roots deeper. But for all that they were still only a small order consisting of a few thousand members in a galaxy of quadrillions that they saw as their responsibility. They were spread thing to say the least.

Then along comes Praetoria and a visit from one of the Handmaidens making them aware of the state of the aristocracy there. Typically they didn't bother with the nobility and the upper crust of society. They dealt with humanity as a whole, title meant almost nothing to them. But they saw the predictions. The increasingly insular ruling families had, at most, a dozen generations left before things started to get ugly. In the years before total collapse of the system increased incompetence and mismanagement brought about by the inbreeding would result in much suffering and the turmoil and civil wars brought on in the inevitable collapse would result in the world having to come under direct rule of the Administratum. This would then infuriate the peasantry and result in a world constantly resentful of it's leadership, perfect breeding ground for Chaos cults and other undesirables.

And thus the Order of the Old Tree set it's sights on that great hub of trade and culture.

We all know how that turns out, Order of the Bed Warmers, mothers to the next generation of aristocracy. Aristocracy stabilized biologically. Mentally stabilized and loyalty ensured by watching all of the noble houses from the inside and "pruning" branches that they deem irredeemable.

Next generation of the nobility raised by the Order or at the very least with a lot of Order influence. New batch of lordlings all also receive fertile pretty little playmates. Pretty little playmates who would see them dead for disloyalty to the Imperium and as agents of the Throne (technically) not easily put aside. Some of these pretty young women were children of the tree itself but as the order grew they were an increasingly small minority. Most were just off-worlders raised from infancy by the Order, trained and taught and to an extent remade by the Order.

The Order was not cruel to those that they made into their own. They could be accused of grooming them for sex but sex was only a part of their job and they were not, the overwhelmingly vast majority of them, unhappy in their lives. The door was always open should they want to leave.

Praetoria becomes effectively the home of the Order of the Old Tree, their hidden garden housing the tree. Young Sisters serve the nobility, old widowed sisters serve the poor using their pensions and patronages of the nobility they served in youth to set up hospices and soup kitchens and shelters for the homeless and hopeless. In so doing they were never again short of recruits or popular support.

As the years past it became clear that as far as the vast masses of the hives cared the Order was the better part of the noble houses and if ever it came time to choose they would name those black dressed ordained women their queens and ladies and topple the rest from their thrones.

It wasn't an entirely one sided deal in the acquisition of power. Those centuries prior digging deep roots of favour and influence in the galaxy at large to say nothing of their presence to a lesser extent in the nobility of other worlds gave them a great list of contacts to call on. The houses that they served (had infiltrated) soon found that they had mutually beneficial trade deals going with economic entities they could never have even approached before. They quickly out competed the houses that had not welcomed in the Sisters to their homes.

More trade flows through the orbitals of Praetoria and the world grows richer.

What the fuck, who let the magical realm back in

>Bene Gesserit are magical realm.

You don't think ol' Frank tugged it to the thought of being a space count banging hot space nuns?