Nobledark 40k part 45: SCREEE! edition

It could be that while the Quietude has on the whole increased in technology relative to M30 (though with repeated knockbacks from Chaos incursions and the like), it's population has greatly decreased. Automation and the like has reduced the demand for new soldiers, and so there isn't a lot of replacement when individuals are lost. The Imperium has only just now realized that their latest series of attacks aren't the beginning of a new campaign by the Quietude, but a diversionary tactic to make it seem like the Quietude are a lot stronger militarily than they actually are.

It would explain why a single chapter is able to take on the Quietude, or alternatively the Vlka Fenryka are using the opportunity to call for a Reformation of the Legion to knock some heads on a massive scale. All Space Wolf descendants would know the story of the Quietude and they would be eager to settle a 10k year grudge so long as they aren't doing something like guarding the Eye of Terror.

Normally Oscar would try to avoid starting a war liable to turn into a meatgrinder especially given the Quietude tend to be isolationist assholes, but doomsday is rapidly approaching and the Quietude have to be dealt with now. In addition, it's clear that now is the best time to fight with the Quietude if any fight is to be had, since this time the Imperium knows the Quietude is recovering from a punch to the gut. Hence doing nothing as Fenris marches to war.

Did we ever figure out a solution for the Commorragh size problem?

I would almost go with Commorragh's suns being kept artificially small. Commorragh should definitely have a surface area bigger than Earth, as the Dark Eldar are said to be as numerous as the Craftworlders who have populations in the trillions and Commorragh is the Dark Eldar's primary domain, but more inhabitable space than even the canon Imperium seems way overboard.

Trying to do some synthesizing stuff for what's been said in the previous threads. What should I do if this thread goes down and interest seems to wane? Just put it on 1d4chan if it looks like the threads aren't coming back?

There is the possibility that they aren't stars and only look like they w and the two dyson spheres are smaller.

Or they are smaller and the suns are further away than conventional dimensions should allow, the Dark Eldar having imported additional distance.

Or due to people doing crazy shit like Black Hole in a box vast swathes of land are uninhabitable

It's also been mentioned that the priestesses of Isha do typically have large families.

Does any one remember the Teclis and Tyrion inspired characters? Were they saved?

Fuck off, autistic retard faggot cunt nigger.

I can dig through the archives to try and find them. I remember the general thread of where they were.

Also was the grox thing good enough to go on 1d4chan?

And the Teclis and Tyrion inspired characters are up.

Grox was very much good enough.

Thank you

Well in canon they are pretty clearly supposed to be stars plucked at the height of the Old Empire's debaucheries from people they don't like. It certainly sounds like something the Dark Eldar or Old Empire would do from a thematic point of view if it didn't cause the space problem.

Shaa-Dome would also be pretty big. The inhabitable space of Shaa-Dome would essentially be the surface area of the planet, minus however much space there is between layers, so on and so forth until you reach the Brass Palace. Using Earth as a proxy that could easily reach into the billions of m^2 if Shaa-Dome is "only" as deep as Earth's mantle, the gaps between layers are several kilometers talls and the Crones are only using one side (so it could be much larger). Of course this makes more sense as there is supposed to be a lot more Crone World Eldar.

I can imagine that the average Croneworlder has vast estates or considerable other assets with them as the lord of many slaves.

They would see this as the right and proper way of things.

Population density might be quite low compared to what obscene numbers it could be. Still much higher than the Craftworlders. Also more prone to circular firing squad levels of infighting.

We've not really touched on infighting between the Croneworlders, have we? We've mentioned Lady Malys has to repeatedly bitch-slap them to get them in line, and the four champions of the gods have a personal hatred for each other that goes beyond the fact that they merely favor different gods (aside from maybe the Indigo Crow, but he's weird anyway).

What sort of infighting shenanigans do the Crones get up to?

Poisoning the wine, although it's probable at this point that they would miss the poison if it wasn't included as standard.

Tattooing summoning incantations on the inside of the eyelids of a slave belonging to someone you dislike or just want to fuck with. Every time they close their eyes or blink it reads the incantation a little more. Eventually the slaves head tears open at an inconvenient time (like during dinner, slave may or may not be a food item) and an angry deamon tries to kill everyone.

Finding new and exotic acquisitions for the rape rack.

Seeing if you can make a human-eldar hybrid with a sufficiently altered Daemonculaba setup. Hasn't worked the last 500 times but that's no reason not to keep trying.

Reading the results of that mutagenic substance you dumped into an Imperial Hives water supply and chuckling at the hilarity of three and a half billion families realizing that all their children and all the children they will ever have will be hideously and disgustingly deformed.

Fucking their children (or disguising themselves as a rival and funking their children) in an attempt toy either breed out flaws in the bloodline, exaggerate good features or because you find inbred cripple funny. Either way works.

Basically everything Dark Eldar do but 100% because they love it and not because they ever had to. Also some shit not even Dark Eldar would do because DEldar don't suck around with deamons.

Other than Dorhi are there any anti-human craftworlds?

There's bound to be at least a couple of minors, but Dorhai is the largest and most prominent.

There are quite a few that while not as anti-human as Dorhai, are pretty anti-human. Iyanden wanted nothing to do with the Imperium until Leviathan forced their hand, and while the younger generator are caught up in newfound patrotic fervor the older generation bemoan the fact.

The inhabitants of Alaitoc (that is, not the rangers) are amazingly snobby to any non-eldar, and refuse to associate with them more than is strictly necessary. However, they will at least deal with the greater Imperium in person.

Il-Kaithe refuses to even deal with the non-Eldar sections of the Imperium in the first place. All the negotiation that is made is made through Eldar intermediaries, and they only joined because they felt the writing was on the wall and they had to pick a side, and better the side that and was least likely to backstab them.

Dorhai goes above and beyond in that they will even shoot most eldar on sight. Probably the only way to get them to stand down is to get Isha in front of them, but since Isha is incarnated in Macha's body it's more likely that Dorhai would just shoot any ship out of the sky.

It's also worth noting that a lot of the more militantly anti-human parts of the other Craftworlds immigrated to Dorhai and the minor craftworlds in its political orbit, to the point that it now rivals Ulthwe or Biel-Tan in size.

Additionally, there is a lot of variation between Craftworlders as well. The older generations tend to be more conservative and prone to cultural posturing to make sure the mon-keigh know their place (which because eldar live a real long time, they are basically in charge and this is technically the party line). The younger generations tend to be less so.

If they could get a Daemonculaba out of humans to make eldar babies, it would speed up population growth immensely. Not that it's any less fun to torture their own kin but there are just a lot more humans in the galaxy.

I feel like writing... something, but I'm drawing a blank on ideas. What still needs to be done?

Dorn.

Two of the High Lords.

Interesting Chapters.

Drop Troops of Elysium

Catachan

Particularly whacky WAAAAGH!!!!!!s

Escapades of Legi and Draco

How much intermingling between the craftworlds is there?

>Drop Troops of Elysium

Elysium does, in fact, produce forces for the Guard beyond its famous Drop Regiments. There are Elysian tank regiments, Elysian artillery regiments, Elysian footslogger regiments. They are all, universally, nursing a mild grudge against the universe in general and the Drop Regiments in particular for the way everyone is continually surprised by their existence. "I thought Elysium did, you know, drop troops." "FUCK YOU."

But nobody cares about them. [muffled FUCK YOU in the distance] Let's talk about the Drop Regiments.

The Elysian Drop Regiments are somewhat unique in the Imperial Guard for being descended from a naval boarding force. Elysium was and is a major trade hub in a sector unfortunately plagued with human pirates, Ork Freebootas, and a superfluity of places for them to hide. As a result, Elysium committed much of its PDF force to anti-piracy operations, stationing regiments on board merchant vessels and escort ships for boarding and counter-boarding operations.

However, no war can be won with defense alone, and the Elysian PDF regiments assigned to anti-pirate duty began experimenting with methods of striking at the pirates in their lairs. Thus, the modern Drop Regiments began to take shape. The first attempts were amateurish and improvised, in some cases using civilian shuttles and Void Maneuvering Packs instead of proper assault ships and grav-chutes. Still, a couple of victories proved the concept worthy of further development, and Elysian high command invested in additional training and equipment.

The first battles of the Drop Regiments were void-borne affairs, fought in microgravity in and around hidden asteroid bases. As more and more pirate bases were expunged, however, they were forced to track down their opponents in ever more diverse locales, from fairly conventional planets to burning Mercurial environments to floating gas-giant bases. But, in the end, it was mostly done. The pirates would never be fully expunged from the sector- fucking Orks- but it was safer than it had ever been before. Trade was flourishing, new worlds were being colonized, and the Elysian PDF found itself somewhat underemployed. So, when the next Founding came around, the course of action was obvious.

The modern Elysian Drop Regiments distinguish themselves from the usual run of air cavalry in three ways.

First, they continue to train for operation in a very wide variety of environments. Zero-g and vacuum, high gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic atmospheres, they have the tools and training to operate in them all. Most drop regiments only train to operate within the usual 'human-habitable' range of environments, giving the Elysians a distinct niche and edge.

Second, they have very good relations with the Imperial Navy due to their past as, essentially, naval armsmen hunting pirates. Thus, they have an easier time securing air and orbital support, and have the doctrine and training to make the maximum use of it. They are comfortable with inter-service cooperation in a way few regiments are. This includes good relationships with the Void Wolves, with joint training exercises being commonplace.

Third, general superiority of training and equipment. The Drop Regiments have become a point of planetary pride, and as a prosperous trading hub Elysium can afford to ensure they are equipped and trained to the highest standards. And with far more volunteers than they can accept, the training academies can accept only the best recruits.

Combined, this results in the Drop Regiments being frequently deployed to the stranger battlefields of the Imperium, executing their distinctive lightning strikes in environments an unprepared human could not even hope to survive in, much less fight in.

Thoughts?

In canon, Eldar are said to migrate to the Craftworld that best fits their philosophy if they can't put up with where they were born.

Baharroth was said to be from Anaen, yet his brother Maugan Ra was from Altansar (both here and in canon), implying at least some immigration goes on.

It's worth noting that despite putting out a united front the Craftworlds can't seem to agree on anything when it comes to policy or central organization beyond a Craftworld level. There's a reason why in both canon and here they've been compared to Greek city-states (unified culture and religion despite radically different philosophies, incorporated into a larger, more militant empire (Rome/Imperium), despite being a minority the larger entity tends to look to them when it comes to knowledge). Immigration for them would be like people from Spain moving to Colombia, or people from the U.S. moving to Australia (and vice versa), similar language and not completely alien customs, but still a massive culture shock.

It's worth noting that the reason Old Earth was recognized as the Imperial throneworld is because 1) the location of the throneworld didn't affect the functioning of the Craftworlds all that much, 2) the Craftworlds would see no Craftworld be the center of power than give power to a rival (e.g., Biel-Tan and Ulthwe).

It's kind of like what happened in the whole "Ancestral Puebloan" debate. The Native American tribes claiming descent from the Ancestral Puebloans (more popularly known as "Anasazi", which they hate) met to try and come up with an alternate term for "Anasazi" (which actually means something very offensive) that the archaeological community could use. They agreed that they should use one of their own names for their ancestors (The name "Anasazi" comes from a group that hated the Ancestral Puebloans and their descendants), the problem is that every tribe had their own name for the ancestral group, and everyone wanted to use their own tribe's name. They eventually resolved the issue by going with the relatively neutral "Ancestral Puebloan", because while it wasn't something they preferred, it was something they could live with and was way better than the alternative.

If anything, the Craftworld Eldar maintain a similar cultural baseline in spite of their massive differences, because their shared cultural heritage is all they have left.

Bump

Did you, by any chance, draw inspiration from TTSD videos that had muffled angry Abaddons in the background? I definitely like the write-up, it provides a clear idea of why Elysian Drop Troopers are noteworthy when there are other airborne infantry units and is pretty well-written. Is there anything else you have planned to write up?

Bump.

No and no. I've been away for a few months, so I don't know what the current priorities are.

it's great

It was mentioned last thread that Prometheanism might have some hints of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity among some of the other features that differentiate it from other religions. Does anyone know enough about Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity to suggest some features?

What is the planet Elysian like?

It's good and should be put on the page.

>If they could get a Daemonculaba out of humans to make eldar babies, it would speed up population growth immensely. Not that it's any less fun to torture their own kin but there are just a lot more humans in the galaxy.

I don't think pure practicality and efficiency is the guiding star of the Croneworlders. If it was they could grow legions upon legions industrially Dark Eldar/Krieg style.

It's about status and about entertainment, preferably getting both at the same time.

It has been hinted at that if Isha does have the Impossible Child then the barrier between human and eldar will start to break down and additional hybrids besides Impossible Child and Lofn will be possible.

If this happens and it isn't restricted to the eldar in the Imperium then the Daemonculaba being used to spawn whole armies of disposable half-eldar is a very real possibility.

Also meant to link to

They have a flat hierarchy. They have a pope but it's more of an honourific than the Catholic pope. When descisions have to be made the bishops all get together and vote/argue with a bishop (primate) presiding over the meeting, usually the most senior.

Sounds like we figured out how they twisted Vulkan's arm to make him philospher-king of Nocturne then, they had a vote for who would be pope of the fire-loving Space Baptists and of course everyone would pick the retired primarch. Vulkan was too nice to turn them down.

They may have made him Senior Bishop of Nocturne, by everyone else stepping back rather than him stepping forward, but they wouldn't have made him Promethean High Patriarch. If he was representative of the entire faith he would be in the Collective Synod. If he was in the Collective Synod he would end up as the head of it. Vulkan would have been a High Lord. He would not have reacted well to that.

In any case becoming Bishop of Nocturne would have been an accidental consequence of being the first leader to unify the planet and coincidentally being a Promethean priest.

Before then he was just an ordained priest doing missionary work in his spare time alongside his considerably greater secular authority as Primarch. Much the same as Logar was doing.

Every promethean listened to Vulkan, even those outside his authority, because he was Vulkan; Primarch, Patriarch and Priest. He had been there since the beginning and had guided the faithful for thousands of years and helped the faith adapt as the galaxy changed whilst still remaining true to it's principals.

Nobody could could fill those boots when he died, but then nobody should and that is good.

Probably pretty Earth like

What is TTSD?

If The Emperor Had A Text-To-Speech-Device, a youtube comedy/parody series.

Can't find any notable features of it in canon beyond mentioning the system is filled with a lot of space debris and pirates as mentioned above.

I wonder if they have any problems with asteroid impacts and the like. That said, they could probably get rich off the asteroid mining royalties.

Speaking of Be'lakor and rocks did we ever come up with a name for the psychic Tarellian world? I think it was suggested Slaan was too on the nose because the Hrud name for the Old Ones and other powerful beings (Slaa-hai) implies the Old Ones actually called themselves Slaan or something similar.

I think there wasn't one and they organised with their psychics as a priestly elite, Old Ones were psychic and so are they so they get a certain prestige.

Unlike the astropaths it takes an entire choir of them to send a short message. They refuse to rent astropaths for reasons of pride.

What is the ratling word for ratling?

Andwise Bophîn, formally scribe first class and assistant to scrivener Tomnalas Haranad of the Gothic sector, was at the end of his life. He knew it with leaden certainty. He had reached the point where he couldn’t see a way forward. Voices of the men before him droned on and on as background sound. They were discussing things. Details, numbers, statistics and sorrows upon sorrow. He should be listening. He should be hearing them, knowing what has happened. He doesn’t need to; he knows enough now. He knows more than enough now and far more than he would ever want to.

He had tried to not know. To remain ignorant at first, then in doubt and then in foolish hope beyond hope for some minor mistake or for this to all be a dream or clever and cruel ruse. It is not. It never was and he can see that now. They stop droning on about things he is beyond caring about and he makes his excuses and leaves. There was pity in those eyes. Hardened warriors centuries old from the, Knights of Blood and Dog Soldiers from Æsa’s Claim and more mortal men from other worlds of some he knew and other he didn’t. They who had seen horrors beyond the count of number or seasons pitied him.

And here they were at Haupstemmler Keep. He had seen the body of the late governor a weapon in each hand and most of his ribcage excavated. Some third cousin by second marriage on his mother’s side and fifth cousin of his father. Distant kin who he had only met once but they had spoken over ale and he seemed a good old gaffer with many stories to share. All stories that would be silent now.

Haupstemmler Keep. Last refuge of the kudugin. He stood upon the spot where his world had failed and finally fallen. His wandering feet bringing him to the great rend in those ancient walls, thirty or forty feet wide at the base through which oblivion had flooded in.

Scribe Bophîn stood there for a long time looking through the hole in the wall to the mountains beyond. Jagged rocks for miles and beyond them, the fields of green and gently rolling hills of childhood. This, with the sun rising but before the sins could be seen, this was how he was going to go. The heirloom family revolver was with it’s seven metal stubs in it’s holster hanging heavily at his hip almost welcoming in it’s familiar weight.

Sun was the horizon in the east turning the fields beyond the mountains to gold and the mountains into monochrome of jagged edges and bathing the snowy caps in copper.

Faces of the dead coming to haunt him in those lines and shapes. Others of his people, those who had been away on business and those serving on distant worlds, would be arriving soon. As the highest ranking member of his people remaining, a man of the Administratum and a distant relative of the ruling family he was their ruler now. He was Overthain of Ornsworld. He would be the one they looked to for direction. He would be the one to shape this broken world as it rebuilt and by the gods it would be rebuilt.

Tears flowed freely down his cheeks, burning and bitter. By the gods they would regret setting foot on this hallowed ground.

Wow. What I wrote was so fucking bad it actually seems to have killed the thread.

DOn't know what I was thinking

I thought it was pretty interesting. I didn't know if there was more or not.

Does anyone think we need more battles with non-Imperial, non-tyranid victories?

Literally everything involving the tyranids so far (Tyran getting munched, Kryptman Line, Battle of Ultramar, Lusitan, Doom of Malan'tai), has been a pyrrhic victory or an outright defeat, but there haven't been many Imperial defeats.

The main victories for Orks/Necrons/Chaos I can think of are as follows.
- Orks killing Sisters of Silence to a man at beginning of War of the Beast
- Pretty much entire War of Beast in general, which is either Orks stomping Imperial's shit or at best getting a bloody nose until Siege of Terra
- Doombreed subverting an entire sector of space
- Anaen being destroyed and Ulthwe getting fucked up during the WotB
- Pretty much anything involving the Fallen
- Croneworlders wrecking the Imperial Fleet's collective shit before the 2nd Black Crusade
- Prospero being destroyed in 4th Black Crusade
- Phinean Massacre
- Be'lakor steering Leviathan into Tarellian space as revenge for being thrown down a hole
- Vect using the Imperium to kill his rivals for him and cripple Sansayaam at the same time.
- Chaos burning Ornsworld to the ground in the 13th Black Crusade

Of course, one issue may be some victories might be hard to write. Some unambiguous victories for Chaos would be game over for the Imperium (Emperor dies, Chaos successfully kidnaps Isha). Others are more ambiguous (e.g., would the Badab War count as an Imperial loss? It resulted in a massive waste of lives and resources and gave Chaos five chapters worth of Fallen. Would World Engine count because even though it was brought down in the end it racked up a massive number of casualties?). Additionally, when the Imperium does lose it tends to give a "fuck you" to whoever it loses to (e.g., Exterminatusing Sarosh) to at least give them a bloody nose.

(cont.)
Of course, is that how it is in military matters? Not every battle ends in the opposing force being killed to a man, forces in real world battles are often routed and have to retreat (though is that even viable beyond a planetary level given the way Warp Travel works in 40k?)

The other thing would be differentiating things enough so that it seems fresh or interesting. Everyone knows what a Chaos taking over a planet and dragging it into the Warp looks like. Everyone knows what Necrons waking up and killing all life on a planet looks like. Writing a complete curbstomp for any group unless it highlights some important aspect to a faction, planet, or individual is rather dry.

Forgot to add to the above list
- Chaos burning down Tanith and Tallarn
- Maynarkh Dynasty wiping out entire Orpheus Sector
- Crones manipulating situation on Krieg until it turns into a shithole

How much does the Imperium know about Be'lakor? In canon they barely even know he exists. However, given that here Be'lakor is one of the big three warlords of Chaos, I would assume his existence is better known.

Perhaps here the Imperium knows Be'lakor exists, but they don't know exactly what he is. This is as much Be'lakor giving multiple possible stories to hide his true origins as outright secrecy. The Forces of Chaos (particularly the daemons) have a better idea of what he is, but because Chaos are well known for lying at the slightest opportunity no one believes what they have to say.

The fact that the Imperium even knows Be'lakor exists in the first place was only discovered due to a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the part of the Alpha Legion shortly after the War of the Beast, and they nearly got themselves wiped out for that.

The Imperium knows Be'lakor likes to set himself up as a god-king of mortal empires throughout history, but usually his involvement is pretty subtle and the Imperium typically only realizes he and his gang of abyssal catfish are involved in retrospect.

Overall, they know slightly more than in canon, but only enough to know he's a threat and not enough to know what he's planning or where he'll strike next.

How long has the Octarius War been going on in this timeline?

Presumably as long as Leviathan's been around. Behemoth was M36. Kraken was either in M37 or M38 (having trouble tracking down the date we gave). Leviathan was probably M39 or something? The stuff so far seems to suggest it was before M41 at the earliest.

The current Overfiend of Octarius was suggested to be interested in using the tyranids to augment the Orks natural orkiness, which suggests he probably wasn't the Overfiend when Leviathan hit.

Over a thousand years, then. That's a lot.

Long enough that it's been said the Orks are basically farming tyranids for EXP. Plus there's the whole Bug Boyz thing, though I don't remember exactly what that was about.

Your writing is really not bad, everyone's probably just busy with Christmas Eve and all that jazz right now. It's a little vague though, name dropping the 13th Black Crusade would make it less confusing for people who might not know much about Ornsworld and Ratlings.

Thoughts on why fleet logistics makes complete losses possible: An Imperial Army defeat could involve a desperate Navy defense of evac transports from the victorious enemy's spacecraft, or the systematic massacre of an encircled Hive City before aforementioned Imperial fleet was able to arrive and extract the defenders. Why is the latter a possibility? While an outnumbered starship might be able to make a risky emergency Warp/Webway jump should it find itself surrounded on all axis, ground armies do not have the same luxury. Transport ships are their lifeline, and should said lifeline be cut when an enemy battlegroup drives away their escorts/destroys them, the defenders have nowhere to run, unlike a real world military force.

Tldr; because infantry are reliant on vulnerable transports to get them on- and off-planet, space battles can make or break the ground war, and decide whether an army eventually gets reinforcements/an evacuation, or is instead slaughtered to the last/have no way of escaping the consequences of an enemy victory (like your example of a planet falling into the Warp). I'm still working on how this relates to the Tyranid story I'm working on, but not having Warp-capable transports on hand will play a part in the Imperial defense strategy.

This would contribute to a lot of Pyrrhic victories, because in most cases, the cornered foe does not have surrender as an option on the table (either becoming a POW is worse than merely dying in combat or the enemy just doesn't register the meaning of a white flag, like Necrons) and is not interested in lying down and taking it. Am I overthinking this?

Also, to everyone who's reading this, Merry Christmas.

12th

And then a huge rock landed on him

Perhaps... a huge Rok?

Given the use of Exterminatus to deny assets to the opposition and the time and effort needed to terraform if the wars continue at current intensity the galaxy will eventually reach a state of post-War in Heaven desolation.

Isha and Ceggers remember that and want to avoid it but they can't think of an alternative to the current methods.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYgJ5oTccWY

I just got the reference

Does the Astronomican still eat people.

Kind of. It burns them out and drains them over time, but the number of people required has been massively reduced, and people contribute in eight month shifts. However, most die after less than a year, and few have survived beyond eighteen months.

We never really figured out why the Astronomican eats people, given that in canon the Emperor could power it by himself while walking around during the Great Crusade. Even if we say Oscar isn't powerful enough to do so in this timeline, it raises the question of how the Imperium would have expanded to such a point where it could sustain the Astronomican, given that it requires over a thousand psykers for a year, when there are at best low hundreds of psykers in any given system.

And a Happy Sanguinalia to you too.

It could be that the Imperium didn't have an astronomican until past halfway into the Great Crusade.

Navigators and Void Born were interstellar travellers.

But don't the Navigators still need the Astronomican to act as a fixed landmark?

Not "need" as such. Navigators are Dark Age relics. There was no Astronomican for the Dark Age or Ageof Strife.

It's just really helpful

Wasn't the Warp less shitty during the Age of Strife because Slaanesh wasn't around stirring up trouble and galvanizing the other three? Also didn't humanity have the Men of Gold to act as beacons?

That might be an explanation. Early expansion didn't require an Astronomican becausr you had Oscar in the Sol system. Once the Crusade got going past so many lightyears, it was necessary to come up with an alternative because they were getting to the point where Oscar was getting hard to see.

Age of Strife was moer churned up due to gestation and birthing pains of Slaanesh.

Dark Age was quieter

God I remember writing up something shitty for this thread last Christmas. Bless you crazy bastards for sticking around, let’s hope this thing last long enough for all the Primarchs to wrap up.

Merry Christmas. I got you a write-up of the Octarius War.

There are worlds that they believe they have known war. Cadia, last bastion before the Eye. Krieg, named better than its discoverers knew. Armageddon, world of steel and flame. Mordia, stubborn and resolute.

Octarius laughs at them all. Ever since Kryptmann unleashed his grand plan, Tyranid and Ork have fought relentlessly, unceasingly, across its surface. For over a thousand years. There is almost nowhere you can touch the original surface without digging; mounds of charred corpses, Tyranid growths, and ruined Ork war machines cover the surface too thickly. Strata after strata of fossilized war. To walk on the surface of Octarius is to walk on dead flesh. The sky is perpetually black, an ashen shroud composed of Tyranid spores, oily smoke from Ork engines and guns, dust kicked up by ceaseless orbital bombardment, and the vaporized particles of uncounted trillions of dead. The blackness is broken by a perpetual meteor shower, as broken fragments of millions of shattered ships and shredded naval organisms rain down on the surface from the unending war in orbit. Despite the fact that there is no sun and no stars, there is more than enough light; the eternal thunder of Ork guns lights up the horizon with a false dawn, reflecting off the clouds until it seems the sky is on fire. The ice caps have melted from the ambient heat of trillions of guns and trillions of bodies.

The seas are dyed with Ork blood and Tyranid ichor, and filled with ork warships and submarines so densely packed you could almost walk from one coast to another in battle with tyranid swimmers no less numerous. The skies are clogged with millions of flyers. The earth is honeycombed with endless tunnels, begun for shelter from orbital bombardment or in attempts to outflank a stubborn defense but long since turned into a theater of war on their own, grots and squigs and tyranid burrowers hunting each other through the darkness. Sometimes the diggings get too vast, too unstable, too convoluted, and vast sections of front drop into sudden sinkholes.

In orbit above, ships merge together and battle in the orbitals, amid a vast ring system created by the wreckage of a hundred thousand previous battles. Ork ships and tyranid bioforms clashing at point-blank range and closer, an endless maelstrom of boarding action and bombardments. Destroyed or damaged vessels frequently fall out of orbit to cataclysmic ends on the surface below- or, as both ork and tyranid know it, 'delivering reinforcements'.

Both sides deploy weapons and creations seen nowhere else, ork Meks struggling to keep pace with tyranid hyper-evolution. Vast armies of Mega-Gargants, in numbers not seen since the War of the Beast, clash with Bio-Titans of unprecedented size and ferocity. Tyranids sprout flame weapons in vast quantity, while Doks devise poisons that scythe down even tyranid biologies- for a time, until they adapt again. Unique squig breeds hunt down lictors with incredible ferocity, and fields of razor-worms devour entire ork columns in seconds.

The war extends to stranger battlefields as well. It is a war of ecologies, as ork and tyranid spores attempt to out-compete and strangle each other, a microscopic war of poisons over nutriet-rich corpse-strata.

It is a war of ontologies, a clash of welt-systems, as Ork WAAAGGHH and the Shadow In The Warp strain to overcome each other. It is a war on every possible level.

The war extends throughout the Octarius sector, and beyond; Octarius is simply where it is at its most intense. Vast fleets thrust and parry across light-years, vital systems changing hands dozens upon dozens of times. The sectors surrounding the Octarius sector are slowly ground down to nothing, as ork and tyranid raiding fleets venture further and further outward to fuel their respective war machines. The war expands, and expands, and expands.

Black Crusades split apart to avoid Octarius. Imperial seers try to divine its depths, to control it, to contain it, but are foiled by the psychic maelstrom formed by the clashing of WAAAGHH and Shadow. Khornate warbands and Deathwatch kill-teams vanish without trace.

The Octarius War has become a perpetual motion machine. The orks feed off the war, and the tyranids feed off the orks. Neither can accept defeat or countenance retreat. To withdraw for either combatant would be to forever mark them as something lesser, something inferior, and extermination would surely follow.

This has been going on for a thousand years. It cannot last forever; sooner or later, something will give. And it is uncertain what, if anything, will survive the conflagration when it does.

Holy everloving shit that was fun to read.

It could be that for the early days of the Crusade they did without. Got as far as some of the nearby systems along the relatively safe currents that Horus and his people used in the Age of Strife but it was slow.

Oscar delegated the Legion running and Great Crusading to his Primarchs from the get go because that's why he hired them and a Steward has responsibilities of actually running things.

Free to pursue the Astronomicon project and makes no secrets of this to his followers.

Gets it to work eventually and it illuminates fairly well. By this time the Imperium already has hundreds of systems.

Steward finds that if he gets it started of ther psychics can maintain the fire but it takes a lot of them working together and they have to rotate in shifts. Thankfully the Imperium is big enough now to provide those numbers.

As the Astronomican grows it become difficult to handle. The warp-flow goes "lumpy" and the lumps are dangerous proportional to the size of the flame you are trying to generate. Given that the flame is bright enough to see across light years the lumps are pretty lethal.

Alliance with eldar happens. Eldar are persuaded to send some of their specialist to Old Earth to look at the thing. Then they back out of the hall slowly because what the fuck are they even doing?

Start absorbing shock absorbers and buffering jars and shit to it. Life span of resident psychics jumps dramatically and it's considered an actual job rather than a death sentence. Eldar and human technicians keep on tinkering with it and adding more shit to it like lenses and spectrum filters.

And that's where the Astronomican is at now. It can't be tweaked any more, they have hit the hard upper limit on what is possible with a psychic lighthouse.

Expected lifespan without the safety features even with the best medical care would be the aforementioned 18 months tops. With the eldar designed safety features and medical care you can get maybe 30 years tops.

Damn.

Is 30 years too long? The whole nature of the Astronomican is still supposed to be one of the darker aspects of the setting. Even though psykers aren't being shoved into the thing like firewood and tortured like in canon, it's still at its core a group of people nobly sentencing themselves to an early death in order to make normal life possible for the rest of the galaxy.

30 years, especially if you consider the amount of time it takes for the Black Ships to find them and the training necessary to control psychic abilities enough to use the Astronomican, means that you get people dying maybe in their late forties to fifties. Which while shorter than normal, isn't incredibly shorter than the lifespan of the average joe with no access to rejuvenants, which has been said to be fairly close to life expectancy today.

>Free to pursue the Astronomicon project and makes no secrets of this to his followers.

Definitely, even with the reasoning of not wanting Oscar to suddenly grab the idiot ball like in canon, the primarchs would have noticed it was becoming more difficult to travel further out and Oscar would have said he was working on fixing that.

>And that's where the Astronomican is at now. It can't be tweaked any more, they have hit the hard upper limit on what is possible with a psychic lighthouse.

I suppose theoretically it would be better to have a series of small psychic lighthouses to light up space rather than one big one. The more landmarks you have the easier it is to figure out where you are, even in an illogical realm of pure thought.

Of course, the reason the Imperium doesn't do this is either it lacks the resources to do it (making one Astronomican was a pain in the ass) or it requires something akin to the Men of Gold or the Iron Minds, which humanity did do before Age of Strife. Or just make a bunch of Pharos devices, which it is implied some species did.

So here’s a question. Right now we have two slightly different accounts of the first encounter between the Imperium and the Tarellian mage-priests. In both accounts hearing the accounts of the Tarellian gods gets Isha interested because she thinks they sound like surviving Old Ones and hopes to find other survivors of the War in Heaven and the Fall, only to be bitterly disappointed.

In the first version, the Tarellians try and bullshit the rest of the galaxy by claiming their mage-priests are surviving Old Ones. Then Isha accidentally calls their bluff when she asks if they remember her. They drop the bullshit after that.

The other is that the Tarellians believe their gods walk among them. When Isha hears about this she assumes the stories of the Tarellian gods are to be taken literally, she goes to Tarellian space but only finds statues in temples.

So which one are we going with? Do the Tarellians try to bullshit the rest of the galaxy or not? Or do we go with both? The timing of this implies that Isha's interactions with the Tarellians happened when the Confederacy was rather stable, which means it would have to be during the Great Crusade when the Eldar were still doing their own thing.

That sounds good, but I for one will be posting these threads until I am done with Fulgrim.

In other news, my brother was looking through my drawings and wants a tattoo of Oscar, so I'm gonna be redoing that drawing

What the fuck was Vect doing at Cthonia at the end of the War of The Beast?

I will drawfag anything for the person that answers this quandary.

That's obvious. He was trying to dig up the secrets of Oscar's creation. What it would take to kill him... what it would take to control him... what it would take to create more of him.

Fair enough. Do we have any inkling of what he got? He had Crone warships with him, and this was a while before Malys's rise as well as his full domination of the dark city, could it be that he brought her with him in the raid and their discoveries were part of their long term trajectory towards the dark wedding and the end times?

Hmm. I think we can assume that he got *something*, because the expedition being a bust is incredibly boring from a narrative standpoint. But what?

Perhaps... they found some fragments of the process used to create Men of Gold. Not enough to create Men of Gold of course, but perhaps... enough to upgrade themselves, just a bit. Enough to place them head and shoulders above the rest of the Dark/Chaos Eldar, make them exemplars of their type, place them on a trajectory to eventual rule.

Hell, maybe that's part of why Malys is so confident in her interpretation of the Starchild Prophecies. She's already got a little bit of Man of Gold in her.

Which she would have gotten from Vect putting it in her.

Oh my.

>Hell, maybe that's part of why Malys is so confident in her interpretation of the Starchild Prophecies. She's already got a little bit of Man of Gold in her.

But would that give Vect an unreasonable amount of power over Malys? If she gets threatening just turn whatever Man of Gold tech she has in her off and possibly cripple her in the process.

Part of the reason why the alliance between Vect and Malys is so threatening is the two are highly accomplished in their own right. Malys isn't solely defined as Vect's love interest and Vect is not the same for Malys. It's a relationship of equals, and both don't necessarily rely on the other to get shit done (indeed, from what's been written their famous on-again, off-again relationship is almosy their hobby). They would both be highly threatening even if one or the other didn't exist, and the two together just makes them twice as dangerous.

Yeah, the Man of Gold augments thing is a bit too out there for me. Can’t Malys be the biggest baddie of Chaos simply through sheer skill, insanity, and evil?

I don't think that sort of augmentation can be turned off.

Maybe, but I think that whatever they found on Cthonia, it should be something momentous.

If that was their first meeting then they both foundn love.

It wouldn't need to diminish Malys if its an edge they've both posessed for their very long relationship and both outgrew as their foremost power. It would just be the basis of one of the many mutually assured destruction scenarios where the bleak marriage falls apart. In the face of a fight Vect would need to find some way to shake Malys' immense personal might in hope to survive, and making a move of that kind would probably prompt reprisals from her benefactors in the Warp.
This could also be it. The nominal loot was cultural treasures, technology, and somewhat significant knowledge of the Men of Gold, at least to know that the ones the Chaos Gods claimed to still have were too corrupted to verify or really count anyway, but the real result was the planting of the seed of Malys and Vect's horrific romance.

You know what, I think it's almost better if Vect's Cthonia expedition is a momentous failure and waste of resources, because it shows the universe's acts of cosmic black comedy aren't only limited to the Imperium. Heck, the Imperium has it's very own trickster god, and what would be more lulzy than the Dark Eldar slogging through defenses, taking grievous casualties, and finally breaking into a sealed vault expecting to see an ancient human superweapon only to find a scrap of paper with Ceggie's handwriting that says, "Love and peace are the strongest weapons." (We also need Ceggie to be more active, considering his stuff is pretty thin compared to Isha)

Though if this is indeed how Malys and Vect meet, then that paper would be doubly ironic.

Also it indicates that Ceggers has DaoT WMDs stashed in the Black Library.

Bumpan

Vect versus Malys would be like Batman versus Superman. Malys would try to kill Vect by punching her way through his bodyguards and defenses, only to find when she finally reaches him the "Vect" that she kills is really a slave surgically altered to look like him. Then she notes a present on his dais labelled: "Apologies to my sweetheart".

It's a black hole in a box.

Meanwhile the real Vect is on the other side of Commorragh enjoying a drink of something. Malys is no stranger to scheming but Vect definitely has the edge on her there.

It could be that no matter what Vect found, he isn't going to tell anyone. He's not just going to admit that his raid was a bust, because that would make him look weak. On the other hand, if he did find anything, he likely wouldn't say what it was because it gives him the element of surprise. It could be a Schrodinger's gun thing for any post-999.M41 things: left up to the reader's imagination.

It could be he was expecting some ancient god-tier technology and what he found was merely "okay", and not worth the slog the Raid was.

This would be before the official alliance of humanity and Eldar, but it would make sense that Ceggers would be interested in keeping any sort of WMDs out of Crone Hands.