The Conclave

Well, my first IC posting since about a year. Its kind of open ended: maybe it'll spark some new RP's, maybe not, but it's done its job....

...which is to link the downloadable zip of the Conclave Archive I had stored on my hard drive.

Hope you enjoy.

Many thanks, Mac.

The reading begins...

Post intended to thoroughly stir things up

Posted on the Nexus thread before I saw this one, but just to reiterate, count me in...provisionally and sporadically, but with growing enthusiasm.  I probably will use characters at least connected to the old stories, but I firmly agree that anything we do now should be able to stand alone, without requiring a knowledge of the background.  Too early to say when my first real contribution will appear, but judging by the excellent posts already in evidence, just staring at the IC thread could do wonders for my long-dormant muse.  Jolly well done there!

A couple of questions about dates, as I know the official 40k timeline has moved on (skirted over elsewhere, but I don't think we managed to answer them):

1) Does anyone remember the IC year where AD2 left off? (IE, the last time I posted IC)
2) What year is currently "present day" in official fluff?

I can't answer #1, but officially the answer to #2 is 999.M41 -- GW rewound time to before the 13th Black Crusade, which also means that Medusa V and a lot of the things talked about in the Ciaphas Cain books haven't happened yet.

I would have it that there is no official present day in the WH40K universe. Things are set at whichever point in the time-line GW deems appropriate, although their time-line largely runs out at two minutes to M42. Calling 999.M41 the present day isn't really viable, as it'll just end up being an endless instant.

The current standard around the 'Clave (although not official by GW's standards) is to add 39000 years to the current date, making it  presently 013.M42.
Not perfect, as it sometimes means being a bit creative regarding official events that are all galaxy-ending cliffhangers as of 999.M41*, but it's at least an easily agreed on standard.

*A few of my characters have required me to make some insinuations regarding the outcomes of the 13th Black Crusade, as one of them fought in it, but a lot of that is just NOT pretending the Eye of Terror campaign didn't happen.

Things progressed a-pace on Facebook, so back to here

We are proposing starting... something

Not a great commitment, not something to blast forward. Something leisurely. Something allowing for other commitments we sadly appear to have acquired since deciding to grow older.

Something... NEW

So..

NEW - Characters (though, I'd expect the odd old head to rear up)
NEW - Narrative with new THEMES
NEW - Central Driving Menace
NEW - Timeline

None of which have been firmed up.

So, soon. Hopefully not Blizzard *soon*.

The proposed timeline would be sometime around the beginning of M42 - I'm thinking, approximately 250.M42, give or take a decade. GreenEyes is dead, the Mentirians are scattered and thus the Puritan Council has been disbanded, and many of the characters from that era have retired, grown too old to be useful, or are dead. The mortals, that is. For the immortals and the long lived, they will have moved onto more grandiose schemes, though an old eye or two may be cast this way.

Those who were busy transcending the mortal coil during those events and times are likely fighting their own battles in / around the Eye and would be otherwise engaged.

That would leave us enough hooks and enough leeway to progress, enough links to the past to remain familiar, and enough time to have passed for things to have settled.

****

And so, my character concept

An Istvaanian by philosophy, and a librarian / historian by trade and speciality. He is based nominally out of a world not far away from Cadia, but has recently moved on and is presently ship bound. The Inquisitor has deep and ranging knowledge of Inquisitorial schisms and conflict. He has been taken aback by the publication of the information in the IC thread, and is keen to understand where this might go. He has a wide network of contacts and operatives. He isn't averse to direct action, but it isn't his preferred method of operation.

His operatives are usually known only by codenames.

His vessel is the Black Hand, a heavy set Cruiser.

I have taken preprepared liberties, I hope this is okay.

Quote from: Dosdamt on July 03, 2013, 10:59:57 PM
Things progressed a-pace on Facebook, so back to here

We are proposing starting... something

Not a great commitment, not something to blast forward. Something leisurely. Something allowing for other commitments we sadly appear to have acquired since deciding to grow older.

Something... NEW

So..

NEW - Characters (though, I'd expect the odd old head to rear up)
NEW - Narrative with new THEMES
NEW - Central Driving Menace
NEW - Timeline

None of which have been firmed up.

So, soon. Hopefully not Blizzard *soon*.

The proposed timeline would be sometime around the beginning of M42 - I'm thinking, approximately 250.M42, give or take a decade. GreenEyes is dead, the Mentirians are scattered and thus the Puritan Council has been disbanded, and many of the characters from that era have retired, grown too old to be useful, or are dead. The mortals, that is. For the immortals and the long lived, they will have moved onto more grandiose schemes, though an old eye or two may be cast this way.

Those who were busy transcending the mortal coil during those events and times are likely fighting their own battles in / around the Eye and would be otherwise engaged.

That would leave us enough hooks and enough leeway to progress, enough links to the past to remain familiar, and enough time to have passed for things to have settled.

****

And so, my character concept

An Istvaanian by philosophy, and a librarian / historian by trade and speciality. He is based nominally out of a world not far away from Cadia, but has recently moved on and is presently ship bound. The Inquisitor has deep and ranging knowledge of Inquisitorial schisms and conflict. He has been taken aback by the publication of the information in the IC thread, and is keen to understand where this might go. He has a wide network of contacts and operatives. He isn't averse to direct action, but it isn't his preferred method of operation.

His operatives are usually known only by codenames.

His vessel is the Black Hand, a heavy set Cruiser.

Hmmm... maybe I should make a DiValdite... or a Zedkielite.

*goes rummaging through digital drawers*

The timeline moved backwards?  That's just...no, there are no words. >:(  I second Ben's motion to jump forward a couple hundred years anyway, as I was under the mistaken impression GW had already done.  I do like the idea of adding 39000 years to present day dates for general Conclave stuff, but without the plot device of hundreds of years having passed to muddy the waters, I'm not sure this particular story would work. 

As for the taking of liberties, by all means...I still get a warm glow whenever someone mentions one of my characters/locations IC, and the writing so far has been thoroughly enjoyable.  One thing I am loathe to point out but probably should, for the sake of continuity - last we saw Secret's Hold, I'm pretty sure Charax literally destroyed the entire planet.  That said, I did have a fondness for the old place, and the scene currently going on there has a lot of promise...in which spirit, here are some possible explanations for it still existing:

---

1) Perhaps Charax only appeared to destroy it, instead merely temporarily scouring it of life/hiding it in the warp.

2) Either he, Amon Dull, Escellon or some other demon made an exact copy of the planet for nefarious purposes yet to be revealed (which amounts to "a demon did it", but it's not as if we've never used that one).

3) It is conceivable that I'm not remembering this right and it was a different planet we nuked.

4) There could have been more than one Secret's Hold, all on obscure deathworlds and made with similar materials (Di Valdi having visited Balkoth and Mentirius there hundreds of years before the Amon Dull Saga really kicked off, they might have moved their primary headquarters in the meantime...or maybe the Hold was always spread across multiple planets, its component parts linked by warp gates...I do quite like that idea, though it would need further development...)

5) It's also possible I'm being too much of a purist.  Clearly GW have no qualms about retconning stuff, so maybe we shouldn't be too militant about it ourselves...

---

As for my own character(s), I'm still at the vague ideas stage, although having a date set in my head now makes things easier.  I think I'm going to focus on members/associates/unknowing agents of the Mentirian organisation, which will by now have been decentralised and become an underground, secret handshake kind of a deal.  I'm sure there will be an Inquisitor or two in there somewhere, but I'd expect most of the members/puppets of members not to be Inquisition personnel...after all, with a few notable exceptions, the bulk of its members in the early days would have been people unofficially employed by Mentirius, rather than his peers.  The Book of Mentirius (which needs a more original name) would have to still exist within their network, acting as a history and manifesto, but officially it would have been listed under "to be burned with extreme prejudice" ever since his death.  Which reminds me of another thought I had...

Ben mentioned forbidden manuscripts, their dissemination and suppression, as as a theme, and we seem to have several such floating around IC.  There's the data bank in the first post, Taren's testament in the second, Mentirius's own book, and potentially Sargoth's Book of Doom or whatever it was called...although I'd imagine the latter ended up in Charax's care, along with its bearer, after the attack on Delan's Point.   What I'm wondering is, are there any others we should consider?  It seems to me that if we aren't careful, we could easily end up with a whole hosts of references to "The Book", with different readers making different assumptions about which book is being referred to in any particular post.  So far I've been assuming that the data bank that contains the most sensitive/comprehensive information and is therefore the primary plot device, but clearly the others will play a part somewhere. 

I've also been pondering the strangeness of Imperial politics...given how totalitarian the state is, you'd expect more straightforward political dissidence to exist, as in dissidence totally unconnected to the influence of Chaos or any particular alien race.  I know there's a strong rationale behind the Imperium being so brutal, what with how many enemies it has, but surely plenty of its citizens would disagree, especially given the lack of information many of them would have about the wider galaxy.  There can't always be a convenient cult to hand for for the discontented to join up with.  Obviously rebellion on a wide scale would be grossly impractical, but some of the more isolated planets must be rife with conspiracies, and they can't ALL be the result of outside influences or malignant religions.  Maybe it's that there are so many demons, aliens and untrained psykers around around that no half-decent conspiracy lasts long without being hijacked, but we're talking about a staggering number of planets, each inhabited by billions.  If Recongregators within the Inquisition - an organisation theoretically dedicated to preserving the Imperium the way it is - can object to the way things are enough to actively try and change them, then why not some of the common people?  Maybe they do, and get so swiftly crushed every time they try without some otherworldly power backing them up that no one bothers to record it...there's probably an obvious answer to all this, but if so, forgive me - it's been a hell of a long time since I read any official fluff.

I'm reluctant to go against continuity, and it has been a while since I read the fall of Secrets Hold (which I don't think is in the archive), and I mostly remember that Secrets Hold was destroyed and an epic battle between Charax and the Keeper of Secrets.

Perhaps my memory is at fault.

Quote from: Mentirius on July 04, 2013, 06:24:41 PM
The timeline moved backwards?  That's just...no, there are no words. >:(  I second Ben's motion to jump forward a couple hundred years anyway, as I was under the mistaken impression GW had already done.

To be fair, the Ciaphas Cain series -- though the Cain-related events themselves are set in M41 -- was "archived" and "made available" in M42; among other things, we have references to Jenit Sulla (a minor character that Cain doesn't like) surviving to be a Lady-General and writing her second autobiography in what I think is 101.M42 (keep in mind as well that Amberley's using this as source material to supplement Cain's version of events, so from Amberley's perspective it's even further on in the timeline).

So it's not like everything's been moved back to pre-Eye Of Terror levels.

On a few points

I imagine there are dissidents who aren't chaotically driven or motivated. How much there is would be debatable but I am certain there would be. For sure, a good portion would be organised and funded by the Inquisition. There would be seeds around, and perhaps some would organize themselves, but I'd be uncertain about the amount of spontaneous dissidence. If you factor in the wall to wall propaganda, the indoctrination of the Imperial cult, you'd end up with a very pliant populace. I wouldn't be surprised if there were chemicals in the water and food as well

/tinfoilhats at the ready...

However, if you removed those chemicals from the water and the food...

I would too assume that the databank is the primary driver, and I think around that you can have periphery ideas and statements that try and reinforce the ideas therein. I'd imagine supplementary information - pictures, written reports, vids, to all be part of the wider databank, perhaps even electronic copies of documents and books.

I don't honestly recall whether Secret's Hold was entirely destroyed as in the entire planet, or not. I don't see there being a break in continuity though, and it's a great twist regardless. I like the idea so much I don't see why we shouldn't just leave it, and to hell with whether Charax went full planetary smashing or not.

I don't remember anything past the keeper of secrets being smooshed

Quote from: Mentirius on July 04, 2013, 06:24:41 PM
The timeline moved backwards?  That's just...no, there are no words.

In the grand scheme of things, it didn't move forward at all - the 'advancements' (and I use the term with regard to the IMO dubious nature of those developments) at the end of the Eye of Terror campaign are an anomaly, rather than the norm.

The 40k universe, for several editions, has sat at "a minute to midnight". That's a deliberate and conscious design decision. The Eye of Terror campaign was - as far as I'm concerned - an ill-conceived attempt to change that, which ultimately failed.

Per the last two editions' timelines, the 13th Black Crusade begins at 997999.M41. Literally about 16-17 hours before the end of the 41st Millennium - the 40k equivalent of 9am on New Year's Eve. The conflict fits squarely within M42, within the purely hypothetical realm of "Warhammer 41,000". The only other significant element of the campaign - the Third Phase Expansion of the Tau - was moved to an earlier point in the timeline, preceding the 13th Black Crusade by years.

40k is not - and was never intended to be - an advancing metaplot in the vein of the Forgotten Realms, Shadowrun or the World of Darkness. It's a backdrop. More importantly, it's a colossal backdrop, one that dwarfs the sum total of recorded human history. There is - and never has been - a rule saying that you have to set your games and your narratives at the bleeding edge of the timeline. The 40kRPG lines have ably demonstrated this, with their own timelines sitting around 815-820.M41. The iconic Eisenhorn and Ravenor novels are set decades before "present day". From Imperial Armour III onwards, the narratives of each campaign Forge World creates are set at different points in the Dark Millennium. There's a particular tendency over the last decade to stop trying to push forward and instead work on filling in the inconceivably vast gaps in the timeline... because ten thousand years and a million worlds are a vast canvas to create upon, without needing to advance things.

In short - there's nothing wrong with taking a greater interest in the largely-unexplored past of the setting, rather than focussing on the manifold impending dooms that comprise the future.

Quote from: N01H3r3 on July 04, 2013, 09:32:13 PMThe iconic Eisenhorn and Ravenor novels are set decades before "present day".

And hence "Xenos" ends up mentioning Tyranids something like two hundred years before they were first discovered on Tyran.
Similarly, I'm told that the latest codex back-dates the Necrons long before Sanctuary 101, shoehorning in any number of previous conflicts through generous retcons.

The problem with going backwards through the setting is how much stuff has only been introduced very late in the setting as a genuine threat - and somewhat by necessity. The Tyranids wouldn't make a very convincing contribution to a "two minutes to midnight" doomsday threat if they weren't progressing at a huge rate.

Will be posting IC over night for you guys.

Have a new character concept well in hand, and progressing nicely.

Going to be a wily one for a change, something against type. I did RP very direct characters before, but I do fancy a change of pace and something moving behind the scenes. I am sure we'll see other developments from the rest of ye's at some very near juncture. I'm just happy to be writing something while I am inspired to do so!

I am also trying to throw in a few hooks - some politicking, some Terran bound discussions perhaps, to stir things up further.

Likewise, I'll have another post ready for tomorrow (despite endless cups of tea, I doubt it'll be ready tonight).

Expect another familar, but subtle, nostaliga kick in the mivonks, and I'll finally be revealing some of my hand.

Quote from: MarcoSkoll on July 04, 2013, 10:35:29 PM

Quote from: N01H3r3 on July 04, 2013, 09:32:13 PMThe iconic Eisenhorn and Ravenor novels are set decades before "present day".

And hence "Xenos" ends up mentioning Tyranids something like two hundred years before they were first discovered on Tyran.

Hardly unsurprising. The series has numerous continuity mistakes, much like most of Dan Abnett's early stuff (his later material has been more about establishing unexplored areas of continuity, which neatly sidesteps the issue). Hell, the Eisenhorn trilogy has internal continuity issues (instances of forgetting which gender the pilot is, Eisenhorn smiling at any point after the early chapters of the first book).

QuoteSimilarly, I'm told that the latest codex back-dates the Necrons long before Sanctuary 101, shoehorning in any number of previous conflicts through generous retcons.

Sanctuary 101 is frequently and woefully mis-interpreted. Necron encounters with the Imperium pre-dating Sanctuary 101 can be found in early sources such as the Necron Fleet rules in BFG: Armada, so they're hardly a development of the new codex.

Beyond that, Sanctuary 101 does not represent first contact. It represents the point at which the Imperium as a whole officially recognises the Necrons as a singular specific threat (indeed, it's frequently pointed out as being the last of a campaign of attacks). That necessarily requires numerous examples of prior contact known by elements within the Imperium - primarily the Inquisition and the Deathwatch.

In short, Sanctuary 101 is the point at which the Imperium changes from "that was an attack by an unknown Xenos aggressor that demonstrates particular qualities" to "that was an attack by entities dubbed 'Necrons', which resembles numerous attacks both previously and subsequently".

---

All that aside, historical consistency is a laughable dream. Our comprehension of our own history isn't consistent, and we aren't plagued by the inefficiencies of a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy or the vagaries of warp-based interstellar communication and transportation (which inherently add uncertainty to timelines, as has been acknowledged since the original 40k rulebook - 40k dates are preceded by a check digit that denotes the accuracy of the date).

History will be inaccurate. But it's also a wellspring of potential that has too long gone untapped, and which presents arguably greater possibilities than attempts to progress the setting (which invariably close off avenues of development, particularly in settings where the future is several dozen impending apocalypses all racing to see which one ends humanity first). For both 40k and Warhammer (which receives similar treatment), the future is death... and death basically closes off opportunities to tell stories (not all of them, but a lot of them - there are fewer things you can do with a dead character or faction than with a living one).

There's no points I'm specifically going to argue against there (as it's way too late), but I will say I don't think it's a solid reason why the setting is suddenly doomed by adding a few years to the clock.

A million world empire that has survived for ten thousand years, including through many major civil wars, probably isn't going to disappear in any particular hurry. (Blowing up Terra might work, but it's not that hard to find ways to not write that).

Also, to quote K: "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet". The big named threats have always just been the latest in a long line to me; it's a bit too contrived to believe that all the biggest threats to humanity happened at the same time.

Hopefully there's a fair few hooks around the place in that post. J doesn't have a last name yet, but it'll come to me in time. I figured a source for her would help to fuel some things - would the Puritan Council really cover everything up? Did they have the political will and clout?

I'm suggesting perhaps. At least, there would be a version of the truth and that's what it is in the mainstream and has been widely distributed, and it has held for 200 or so years, give or take, depending on the timeline we agree.

Obviously we need to broaden out the cast a little more now. I'm going to work on demonstrating J's modus operandi, and I think Macabre should be adding another post in the next 36 hrs.

From there I feel there's a good baseline to work from. That leaves us a direction of travel to agree.

Quote from: MarcoSkoll on July 05, 2013, 03:40:23 AM
There's no points I'm specifically going to argue against there (as it's way too late), but I will say I don't think it's a solid reason why the setting is suddenly doomed by adding a few years to the clock.

Because that's the way the setting is designed. The phrase "ten minutes to midnight" (or whatever unit of time you choose to employ to indicate something imminent) is indicative of this.

Countless different permutations of The Apocalypse are on the brink of happening... the only question is which one will arrive first.

QuoteA million world empire that has survived for ten thousand years, including through many major civil wars, probably isn't going to disappear in any particular hurry. (Blowing up Terra might work, but it's not that hard to find ways to not write that).

A million-world empire that has fluctuated in size and might across those hundred centuries, and which is the only thing standing against species-wide extinction for mankind. Every passing century chips away at the foundations or the fringes, and it cannot persist forever. The closing centuries of the 41st Millennium show that it is a crumbling edifice in the face of an untold variety of different dooms. Since at least the 5th edition rulebook, the era from 750.M41 onwards has been dubbed "The Time of Ending", an era when basically everything starts going wrong. Within a quarter of a millennium, the Imperium encounters and suffers massive losses at the hands of the Tyranids, faces a major inter-Chapter conflict amongst the Adeptus Astartes, confirms that the Necrons are a major threat, encounters - but lacks the available resources to quell - the Tau Empire, experiences two major Ork onslaughts centred around a world only a stone's throw (relatively speaking) from Terra, and discovers that the Golden Throne is failing and that nobody alive knows how to fix it.

The 13th Black Crusade sits at the end of that quarter-millennium like a capstone, a giant flag saying "and you thought the last two and a half centuries were bad...".

By comparison, the background that came out of the global campaign for that event was frankly anticlimactic.

QuoteAlso, to quote K: "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet". The big named threats have always just been the latest in a long line to me; it's a bit too contrived to believe that all the biggest threats to humanity happened at the same time.

It's a contrivance, yes. A contrivance to provide a perfect storm of strife and desolation galaxy-wide that can play host to any single battle or peril you can devise.

To the point: GW aren't, and won't be, progressing the setting. The 40k universe during the latter days of the Dark Millennium is too valuable an epoch to conclude, particularly where licenced products are concerned. The clock stops at ten minutes to midnight. The end is near enough to taste.

What that means here is that you don't have to worry about what you write being invalidated or impinged upon by GW's material - it won't be, as you're sailing into uncharted territory... and that's surely a good thing.

Quote from: N01H3r3 on July 05, 2013, 11:18:57 AMBecause that's the way the setting is designed.

Intended to be designed, perhaps. But when the setting is known to have already survived apocalyptically scaled events, things like a small Xenos species without long range FTL travel don't exactly convey crushing doom to me.

I guess my overall point correlates with your summary - I'm not really arguing that GW needs to put new batteries in the WH40K clock (frankly, given a lot of their recent writing*, the results would probably stink), but that it's fully plausible to extend the setting - at least for fan purposes.

*And slightly less recently, the way they tried handling Storm of Chaos with "Oh look. They've given up and gone away". (I never felt the Eye of Terror fluff was as bad, in comparison. At least something happened).
The only good thing about that ending was that it confirmed a theory a friend and I have that Grand Theogonist Volkmar is a time lord. Who else could single handedly confront an invincible army, tell them to remember how they've been beaten before and make them run off? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ecycHAZtaM#t=34)

Quote from: N01H3r3 on July 05, 2013, 11:18:57 AMTo the point: GW aren't, and won't be, progressing the setting. The 40k universe during the latter days of the Dark Millennium is too valuable an epoch to conclude, particularly where licenced products are concerned. The clock stops at ten minutes to midnight. The end is near enough to taste.

What that means here is that you don't have to worry about what you write being invalidated or impinged upon by GW's material - it won't be, as you're sailing into uncharted territory... and that's surely a good thing.

When you put it like that, aye, it certainly is.  I'm a lot more comfortable with the idea that GW will never move beyond that point than I would be if they intended to but not for a while. 

Personally I never had a problem with the timeline stopping where it does; I just object to their having said it was going to progress, encouraged Inquisitor players/writers to involve our characters in the 13th Black Crusade and then changed their minds about it afterwards.  If they were happy with the eleventh hour setting, they should have stuck with it, rather than roping so many people into an experiment that ultimately seems to have failed.  My involvement in Inquisitor peaked around the time of the Secrets & Lies campaign, and at the time most of the Conclave were using that as "present day", so as a result pretty much all of my characters are tied to the very end of the timeline.  That does bring greater freedom for stuff written later, but it also puts the onus on us to explain how the Imperium still exists hundreds of years post-apocalypse...after all, if there really is no hope for mankind at the turn of the millennium, then any fiction set much later but presenting the galactic situation in a vein we're familiar could itself be considered a contradiction of the canon. 

Part of the problem for me is that a few years ago, someone told me GW already had moved the timeline forward a few centuries beyond the end of M41, when they introduced the background about the Golden Throne failing.  Having been out of the loop for ages, I (rather naively) took them at their word and have since been imagining an Imperium that fragmented into isolated star systems, an Emperor truly on the brink of expiring, a drastically shrinking Astronimican, alien races colonising the galaxy, whole sectors losing contact with Terra...an "If you thought it was bad before..." situation, as you said about the 13th Crusade (which I remembered as something of an anti-climax, but assumed they would stand by, since it was all deemed canon at the time).  To me, an apocalypse whose culmination could be pinpointed to the minute, or even the year, always did seem rather fast for an entire galaxy...I had no problem believing that even when the Imperium's back was broken once and for all, it could take another millennium or so for the dust to really settle. 

In fact, I was quite inspired by the idea of a dwindling, post-Imperial humanity struggling to survive as isolated pockets of resistance in a galaxy now dominated by their enemies.  I had all sorts of "where are they now" concepts for any characters of mine who might feasibly still be living through this.  To me, the end of the Imperium shouldn't have to mean the death of every single member of the human species...look how long the Eldar survived after the birth of Slaanesh.  Foremost in my mind was the question of how long the Inquisition would be willing to flog the dead horse, before giving up on their role as enforcers of the status quo and looking for alternative ways to preserve some small fragment of humanity.  You can't be the Secret Police without a state, but any Inquisitors who outlived the interstellar infrastructure would have a lot more knowledge than most of the Imperial nobility/military/etc and some would surely be in a position to act. 

For example, there are other galaxies.  Million upon million of them.  The existence of the Tyranids proves that at least one of those galaxies can support life, since there must have been something to eat wherever it was they came from, and if there are two places where life arose independently then it seems probable there would be more.  If the warp is another dimension then it must be Universe-wide, and if warp travel doesn't have any consistent velocity then sailing to other galaxies shouldn't necessarily take the untold aeons it would in physical space.  Failing that, the Imperium has stasis technology.  If the long way worked for the Tyranids, why not Inquisitor Cracked with an ark populated by would-be colonists?

This is all just speculation really; I'm not suggesting GW should move into such murky territory.  They've spent a long time adding detail to their established backdrop and it works for them.  Apart from anything else, the wargaming potential would plummet when the armies started running out.  The only thing I really take issue with is the retconning of the 13th Crusade, and then only because they made such a big thing of it at the time and until now no one ever told me they'd changed their minds.  I would have been fine with setting Amon Dull way back in the past, if "no canon beyond eleventh hour, ever" had been their official stance when we started writing it.  But I hate retconning my own material, and having set it in the theoretical "present" so as to chime with those events, I feel an obligation to stand by those dates.  Which is all a long-winded way of saying I agree with Ben - jumping a few centuries ourselves has to be the way forward, at least for this particular story.  But for me, that means giving a fair bit of thought to how things must have changed.

Not a rant, just a ramble.  If I didn't like the 40k canon as it stands, I wouldn't have spent so many years playing games and writing stories set there.  And as for Secret's Hold, if no one else remembers the planet being nuked then fair enough - I still think Mac's post is awesome, so forget I said anything. :)

QuoteTo the point: GW aren't, and won't be, progressing the setting.

As I've already pointed out, though, they've extended feelers well past the Ten Minutes To Midnight point throughout the entire Cain series. There's even one point where the Golden Throne Is Failing stuff is explained away as something trivial or nonessential giving up the ghost, and as a result the Throne and the Emperor are still fine.

That all sorts of horrible things happen in the back end of the Dark Millennium is actually a bit of an "oh, is that it?" moment when you consider that humanity is still alive and well at least a couple of centuries later. That's the vision of the 40Kverse that I personally prefer -- yes, it's a horrible place to live, but there's also no point taking it too seriously, because there's a real danger that the entire setting swallows itself up with constant reiterations that the grim darkness of the far future is grim and dark.

Putting the Cain series aside for a second, we also have Cadian Blood which is set either during or after the 13th Black Crusade, and features Cadians talking about the sorry state that Home (ie, Cadia) is in. There are probably a couple of other things as well, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

Officially, the timeline may well "stop" at ten minutes to midnight, but it's not like GW haven't already explored what happens next.

Quote from: Koval on July 05, 2013, 06:10:23 PMThere's even one point where the Golden Throne Is Failing stuff is explained away as something trivial or nonessential giving up the ghost, and as a result the Throne and the Emperor are still fine.

Quite. Given the Golden Throne is ill understood enough that it can't be fixed, it's difficult to say that any flaw in it is terminal... or even necessarily a flaw.

For the sake of argument, that's the line I took with my (long forgotten) M44 story. Whatever happened to the Throne, the Emperor still appears to be alive. Or, at least, that's what they're telling people - and as the Astronomicon hasn't gone out, it's believed.

Without the might and the logistics of the Imperium, though, Inquisitors simply become men / women willing to act. They would struggle resource wise, save those who have perhaps accumulated some wealth, contacts, or other resources for themselves. So having a thoroughly crumbled Imperium would be counter productive to the ability for us to operate an effective RP

I think also having the Golden Throne and Astronomicon breaking down would also be counter productive. Having it become intermittent might be interesting, but it would feth with communications and warp travel.

Now, I would argue that pretty much anything else could go. Having Necrons rising out of many tomb worlds, having Space Marine versus Space Marine conflict, having the 13th Black Crusade going on all around, Tau Empire rising up with their new Broadsides and whatnot - I see there being plenty to go at in that sense.

But I would fear any significant disruption to the mechanisms of travel, communication, and resource would hinder an Inquisitor too badly.

Onto other business, though. How's everyone coming along post wise?

Quote from: Koval on July 05, 2013, 06:10:23 PM

QuoteTo the point: GW aren't, and won't be, progressing the setting.

As I've already pointed out, though, they've extended feelers well past the Ten Minutes To Midnight point throughout the entire Cain series. There's even one point where the Golden Throne Is Failing stuff is explained away as something trivial or nonessential giving up the ghost, and as a result the Throne and the Emperor are still fine.

The first thing I learned when I got my first peek behind the curtain working for FFG... the things you can do with the source material varies by time and place.

Time was, every Black Library novel had to be from a human perspective and set in a fairly broad contemporary era. Now there are novels and short stories from alien perspectives, and ones set in other eras.

The first Ciaphas Cain novel was a decade ago - around the same time as the Eye of Terror campaign. The series began already delving into M42. The subsequent change to the general approach ("don't advance the setting") wasn't going to be applied to novels that are selling well, particularly as the universal approach to all published material is to assume that some or all of it is inaccurate or misleading ("everything is canon, nothing is true").

QuoteThat all sorts of horrible things happen in the back end of the Dark Millennium is actually a bit of an "oh, is that it?" moment when you consider that humanity is still alive and well at least a couple of centuries later. That's the vision of the 40Kverse that I personally prefer -- yes, it's a horrible place to live, but there's also no point taking it too seriously, because there's a real danger that the entire setting swallows itself up with constant reiterations that the grim darkness of the far future is grim and dark.

On the other hand, I regard the Ciaphas Cain series as having as much bearing on the actual 40k universe as Blackadder has on history. It's entertaining, but it isn't an accurate image.

QuotePutting the Cain series aside for a second, we also have Cadian Blood which is set either during or after the 13th Black Crusade, and features Cadians talking about the sorry state that Home (ie, Cadia) is in. There are probably a couple of other things as well, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone leap to prove me wrong. A day can't pass without someone arguing on the internet.

Thing is, Black Library have one mandate - to produce fiction that sells. And, whatever you think of its output, it certainly achieves that mandate. If a concept serves a story and doesn't veer too far from the accepted conventions of the background, it'll be allowed. But that's Black Library. They're run independently of GW (both, along with Forge World, exist under the same corporate umbrella, and there are shared resources, but they work on their own projects and approach them from their own perspectives). Black Library choosing to publish a novel that presents certain concepts does not mean that GW will follow suit or is otherwise required to even acknowledge them. Forge World are much the same in this regard.

QuoteOfficially, the timeline may well "stop" at ten minutes to midnight, but it's not like GW haven't already explored what happens next.

GW haven't. Two freelance novellists have been permitted to explore their own particular visions of it in a limited manner. That's actually a huge difference. Similar has been done for Warhammer Fantasy. Doesn't mean that - in the broadest sense - the Storm of Chaos isn't presented as an impending doom rather than an anticlimax.

---

The thing is, the Conclave of old spent an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to fit within the gaps between discrete lumps of canon... yet somehow also developed into something that couldn't quite fit. Many of the stories being told presented themselves as having a scale and scope that rivalled that of major canon conflicts... while somehow existing only on the fringes of the setting.

What we have now is a situation where the restrictions of the canon no longer apply... but there is no consensus as to how the setting would proceed during and after the 13th Black Crusade (a conflict where, like the 3rd Armageddon War, the canon produced during the campaign suffered from the necessary inclusion of all the factions in the war and a need to still have a setting left afterwards - it's very difficult to have a showdown between two factions if you want to include everyone, and you can't continue to sell products if you allow the apocalypse to happen in your setting).

To me - having invested a signficant amount of time invested in the setting - the idea of the beginning of the end (what the 13th Black Crusade, with it's super-ominous sounding name) being a wet blanket of a conflict because of the ill-conceived idea to let fiction be directed by wargame results doesn't sit right. The setting should be in a noticeably worse state after the war than before it... because anything less means the Imperium as a concept is a colossal overreaction.

That is, at least, my stance on the matter.

Quote from: N01H3r3 on July 05, 2013, 09:34:23 PMparticularly as the universal approach to all published material is to assume that some or all of it is inaccurate or misleading ("everything is canon, nothing is true").

As soon as we get to Games Workshop's stance on canon, though, we end up in a situation where we're both (indeed, all) right as well as wrong, and as such the statement "this is as far as the timeline goes" is essentially just as valid as "we have a glimpse of sorts beyond the end of the timeline" and "we just don't know".

QuoteTwo freelance novellists have been permitted to explore their own particular visions of it in a limited manner.

But ultimately these visions have been allowed to go through rather than shot down or tweaked/redacted, so with "everything is canon" (to use your paraphrasing), my personal reaction is "therefore one can refer to these things" (and with "nothing is true", I interpret that as a giant "YMMV").

---

As regards the interaction between the Conclave and GW canon, I personally like to think of the Conclave (and related projects) as AU fanon, where everything that's happened has happened, and then we have a few extra bits of our own tacked on as well -- keep in mind though that I don't intend that in a bad way (and bearing "nothing is true" in mind, surely everyone that writes fluff of any type does it to some extent).

I'm sure everyone has a completely different approach, though.

QuoteThe setting should be in a noticeably worse state after the war than before it

To my mind at least, it probably is. I don't recall the Imperium coming out of the Eye of Terror campaign especially well.

Well, with some unexpected free time this afternoon I've managed to come up with something.

Once the rustiness goes, I hope I will find it easier to get things written down - as short as that was it took me a couple of hours to get it to what I hope is an acceptable level.

Anyhow, enter Inquisitor Maritsau: a man whom worries what the truth will mean for the Inquisition.

Real life holidays will keep my input limited over the next couple of weeks, but I will be reading eagerly.

Ruaridh

Having gained a passion for the intricacies of the Adeptus Mechanicus over the last few years, I thought I'd try something different this time around. Magos-Juris Automachus Oshek is a threatening figure, who has little or no regard for the lives of anyone involved with the Conclave's iniquitous past. Factions within the Adeptus Mechanicus have decreed that the Conclave is a Heresy against the Machine (for reasons too heavy with exposition to go into yet), and its architects are to be hunted down and eradicated...

...this, for reasons of narrative convergence, will bring him into contact with others exploring the secrets of the Conclave-That-Was.

I may still bring the Eldar into this as another faction (as cruel, enigmatic and mercurial as ever), elsewhere, but this felt like something sufficiently distinct from what I'd done before, and yet similarly inhuman in its utter disconnection from the norms of humanity.

Just a touch of insight into J. I wanted to expand on her MO, and came to a happy conclusion along with a better idea of her operation.

Looking good so far - nice to see two more posts in there. Great to see the thread moving forward.

Extra long post is up, sorry it took so long.

Hope you enjoy.

So, there's a power vacuum and now an ideological attack on Terra, and we have movements on all sides - some heading to Secret's Hold and others making moves to manage the Terran situation. I might suggest we could use some Terran presence to help manage that situation. J will be heading to Secret's Hold, meeting Havoc, Hound and Cog en route. It would be good if we could trouble Menti to begin Taking people through the depths of Secret's Hold - or at least give us a strong indication of what's in there and let others wander through.

Ye gods, those are some weighty posts...thoroughly enjoyable stuff, if a little intimidating in light of my own failure to produce anything yet.  I have a ton of ideas for this story; it's turning them into actual words that presents more of a problem.  To say my linguistic skills are rusty is a gross understatement...

Anyhow, I should be able to grab a couple of hours on this after work, so with any luck a shortish post should appear some time this evening.  In a worst case scenario where nothing fit for publication comes together in time, I'll throw some of the aforementioned ideas on this OOC so people aren't left high and dry. 

Quote from: Dosdamt on July 07, 2013, 11:20:59 PM
I might suggest we could use some Terran presence to help manage that situation.

Hmmm, a Terran presence you say...


There's some really good stuff in this story and I'm not sure I should stick my (even rustier) oar in at this juncture, but I might be able to offer something Terra-based... Will have a think on it...

Pious, Menti, I can only recommend just chucking something out there. Throw down a few hundred words, even if rushed.

Momentum and looking to post perfection can be a killer sometimes, and if we are to learn a lesson from before, it's that we shouldn't be afraid of posting away a couple of hundred words to keep things going. I've got another weighty post coming but from there I'll be posting reactively, as that will be the final scene setting post I need to create. I'll be working on some background and round about stuff as well, as I have a few ideas I want to keep quiet-er, and discuss with a few individuals, to get their view.

Right, I'm up to 400ish words but I'm afraid I really do have to go out now, and this post simply is not finished...it's not a matter of polishing, I just haven't introduced the thing I've been building towards yet and am loathe to post it half-done.  I might be able to get it up later, if I get in early enough, but otherwise it'll have to be tomorrow.  Definitely no later than tomorrow though - I do agree with what you've said about momentum.  I'll also knock out some OOC stuff as soon as I can.  Sorry again for the wait!

No worries. I'm just trying to play the people poker right now while I can. I suspect someone else will need to take up the mantle occasionally.

It's a veritable who's who over here. Dosdamt summoned me, and I'd like to register my interest.

Pious, getting things rolling on Terra would be good

I've left it open, with regards to the election of a new Lord Terran of the Inquisition. Might you be wanting to fill that slot? Take advantage of the chaos? SIMPLY KILL SOME HERETICS? All good options

It would be good to get some politick going, J has a presence on Terra and she tried to use it alot

Welcome back Pious and Sargoth!  If this keeps up we'll soon have literally everyone back on here...

Charax: That Was Awesome.   Why do I get the feeling this foreshadows another showdown with Nathan? ;)

I've now posted on a rather smaller scale, introducing...something for Secret's Hold.  The Mentirians can wait; I found an old plot hook I couldn't resist.  Expect gribblies.

Somehow, I just knew you couldn't resist gribbly.

*puts on tinfoil hat*

Well, after last time, I know what to expect at least....

*sharpens pointy stick*

Ready

On topic, I'm readying another post, it's already looking a little behemoth-y at 2415 words, and I think I'm about 1/3 done. I may post a portion of it to keep things moving, mind, if that seems sensible. There's more backstory on J, and a portion of Terran politick.

I've ALMOST caught up with the IC thread and I'm working my way through this OOC thread.  I am glad to be back....VERY EXCITED to see everyone here!
Expect a post...SOON.

Luke/Maltheus

Since this thread at the moment seems to be Old One-heavy, should I be doing my best to hack through the posted archives before embarking on catching up with the IC posts, in order to stand a chance of understanding the weight of the matters being discussed?

A brief message up: a little fun to occupy anyone who wants to try and crack it whilst I get another post sorted.

Qrsao 1: Ropps – Mjhkgoro. Kpjmoobdia rj Qrsao 2. Poibozujtq sr Sgdoqrps. Fgjibdfo, kgoso ypdia jtp hoqqoiaop. Hjirsato, D sh qrdgg svsdrdia xjtp pokjpr ji jtp Kpjbdasg Qji.


I suspect it's got multiple levels.

Looks like there's a letter missing. I'm guessing it should be:

51 72 73 61 6f 20 31 3a 20 52 6f 70 70 73 20 ef bf bd 20 4d 6a 68 6b 67 6f 72 6f 2e 20 4b 70 6a 6d 6f 6f 62 64 69 61 20 72 6a 20 51 72 73 61 6f 20 32 2e 20 50 6f 69 62 6f 7a 75 6a 74 71 20 73 72 20 53 67 64 6f 71 72 70 73 2e 20 46 67 6a 69 62 64 66 6f 2c 20 6b 67 6f 73 71 6f 20 79 70 64 69 61 20 6a 74 70 20 68 6f 71 71 6f 69 61 6f 70 2e 20 48 6a 69 72 73 61 74 6f 2c 20 44 20 73 68 20 71 72 64 67 67 20 73 76 73 64 72 64 69 61 20 78 6a 74 70 20 70 6f 6b 6a 70 72 20 6a 69 20 6a 74 70 20 4b 70 6a 62 64 61 73 67 20 51 6a 69 2e

Or, not in hexadecimal:

Qrsao 1: Ropps – Mjhkgoro. Kpjmoobdia rj Qrsao 2. Poibozujtq sr Sgdoqrps. Fgjibdfo, kgosqo ypdia jtp hoqqoiaop. Hjirsato, D sh qrdgg svsdrdia xjtp pokjpr ji jtp Kpjbdasg Qji.

...and the post is up.
It feels good to be part of this all over again!!!

Luke

For those confused and with limited time to trawl the archive....

PLOT HOOKS

1) Archive reveals corrupt Inquisition!

It contradicts official history! People might try to prove it a forgery, verify it, use it as a political weapon against the Inquisition, look for people assumed dead (like Maltheus) and any other loose ends.

2) Sanguinius on Terra

Is this actually true? A vile heretic, posing as a primarch and saint? What the hell is this?

3) Secret's Hold.

Drawing lots of Inquisitorial (and other) types to see what's there. Maybe something is there]...

Hey everyone, account brushed off and ready to post  ;D

Thanks for that Sargoth, that's a nice little list and as good a place to start as any.


(Also, almost certain that all my characters are dead because REASONS and it makes it easier that way. What was I even thinking with a Witch Hunter called Von Helsing? That serebite storyline with weird resurrection stuff? Bah, time to bring forth a new age of fire and blood!)

Ah, apologies for the hugehugehuge post. More scene setting and Terran politick.

I'll start posting smaller posts. I promise.

Yes, I did wonder at all the doorstoppers in what I assume are the formative stages of this revival :P

The arbitrator describing the incident appears to have confusion as to which sex the individual was, starting with "He" and then using "her" a lot. If I'm not mistaken about this being the incident Macabre posted, it'd be the former.

Also, you mention a pistol - I'd read it as the individual genuinely not being armed and the reaching for an absent firearm being a way to invoke suicide by cop.

There were three individual strikes, I would hazard that Ben's character was investigating another strike-site. And the unfortunately dead patsy may indeed have been female and armed.

Fair do's.

But, in whichever case, the sentence is confused about the sex of the perpetrator.

That it is Marco, and thanks for spotting that (and actually reading my post of 4.5k words)

The use of the Tiresias Configuration should become apparent soon (referencing Blizzard soon there, btw).

I've tried to leave Terra open, and draw in some of the history of the Conclave there as well, as Ishigiru was elected to be the Lord Terran. That will allow us to have that Terra bickering, backstabbing and bluffing we're all so fond of.

I am afraid I lied, I have one more probably will be quite large post to come, that I'll be writing up, and then from there I'll move things forward to Secret's Hold.

Thanks!

EDIT - Marco, Koval, if you gents are still looking to get involved, I'm around to bounce ideas off. Drop me an email, and I'll give you a hand getting something up and running. Same goes for anyone else lurking who is maybe tempted to get involved as well.

There has been some (very) brief discussion behind the scenes between Koval and I about playing a couple of characters with a bit of shared history.

We've got one of our Dark Heresy sessions (via Skype) this evening, so that might get some more discussion then.

I'd like to echo the offer to bounce ideas around with.  I may have been in absentia for quite some time, but I have been 'actively creative' for that time.  I'm sure we can work up something fun.

Great post, Dosdamt!  (I read ALL those words too!!!)

Two posts up, one in the parent thread and one in a new one called The Sleeper must Awaken. The latter being a personal thread to explore off-scene stuff related to my characters which will coalesce later.

More in another day or two.

(the astute amongst you will notice that I've recycled an old IC post of mine from a personal thread that never went anywhere because I couldn't think of anything to do with it at the time.)

Aliestra... Landen still hangs out there o.O

Hopefully nothing to do with EVE Online's Aliastra Corporation (https://wiki.eveonline.com/wikiEN/images/b/b8/Aliastra.jpg) :P

Quote from: Dosdamt on July 12, 2013, 05:16:57 PM
Aliestra... Landen still hangs out there o.O

What's THIS?  Plot lines converging already?  It almost makes me hear the laughter of a child in the back of my mind.

I would not expect to see Landen any time soon, he's not a Charaxian Cruiserweight, but he's waaaay too heavy weight to see the light of day any time soon. He's "in the Eye"

Vispe has had an introductory post, it's not long but I wanted to get something written down as soon as possible or I'd never end up joining in.  It feels odd to be posting again, but I'm looking forward to future involvement!

Right. A post from me, introducing Inquistrix Joaana* Rall.
*Not a typo.

Koval may enjoy the reference to Saint Agrius - and given I chose to bring back Chain as the tech-priest**, he probably also knows whose skull it is.
**He deserved more than the four lines of dialogue he got in Defiant Echoes - even if he did manage to use those four lines of dialogue to pull off a "Big Damn Heroes" moment.

I had to check to see if I'd spaced Ekkehardt (it turns out that his cause of death was never made explicit), so it's either his skull or Riley's.

Nope.

It's the servitor's. And now we know what happened to the servitor.

Thanks for posting, gents

So I've been in touch with the wider group, and a few people are preparing posts (maybe not as I literally type this)

Charax unfortunately had a hiccup, or we'd have had more plague daemon hijinks this week. Unfortunate, but he's re-writing.

I'm beavering away on a monster, working with Inquisitor Maltheus, Mentirius, *and* Charax to put together an interesting collaborative post. It's currently running at a gargantuan 4.6k words, and counting. It's also about 20% done, give or take. I may break it down into 1/3 portions, if it can be, and try and post them through a little quicker!

Things are starting to come together now. I'm expecting the final few intro posts from people over the next fortnight, and then we should be good to start pulling together.

Let me know if anything else needs spelling out, otherwise this is looking *very* exciting

Cheers all, and good weekends all round!

I'll get mine up as soon as possible

Quote from: Dosdamt on July 20, 2013, 12:49:52 AMThanks for posting, gents

Oh, you'll come to regret it. It's only so long before I start trying to work out how many song lyrics I can hide in the same post.

I still have to try and beat the time I managed to fit about half the lines from "Strawberry Fields Forever" into a very repetitive discussion thread (not on this forum, mind) before anyone noticed. ;D

Quote from: Dosdamt on July 20, 2013, 12:49:52 AM
I'm beavering away on a monster, working with Inquisitor Maltheus, Mentirius, *and* Charax to put together an interesting collaborative post. It's currently running at a gargantuan 4.6k words, and counting. It's also about 20% done, give or take. I may break it down into 1/3 portions, if it can be, and try and post them through a little quicker!

Oh my days. That would work best if it were split up into more than just three parts; if it's too much of a doorstopper, you run the risk of people switching off.

not to mention the character limit on posts! ;-)

im enjoying the read gents, even if most of the backstory is lost on me :-)

And Maritsau arrives on Terra.  I have ended that in such a way that anyone else on Terra who feels like meeting Maritsau is free to enter the scene.

I hope that at 2337 words, that wasn't too much to deal with in a single chunk!

Ruaridh

Am I the only one who thinks these 'monster' posts aren't actually that huge? I read pretty fast, even on a screen.

Sorry I've not produced anything. Tried to throw a Ministorum charactcer together but it really wasn't working (plus Shard had a similar idea.  Still invested, though. Just need to step back and think...

I .think. I'll have time to sit down and hammer a post out my notes to intro my guy before dawn Monday.
We'll see.
He's a techpriest specialising (with an almost uncanny knack) in cogitator, data bank and repository maintenance and the like.
Unfortunately I didn't realise until I was already reasonably set on the character and concept that it sounded dangerously "40K hacker lol", butt that's not how I'll be playing him anyway.

For doorstop posts - I've got to agree with Koval on this.
If I have to hit Page Down a dozen times on the same post, the risk that I'll leave it for later (then tomorrow, then whenever I next have a free evening) increases exponentially.

Personally, I like the long posts. I remember in the "old days", waiting and and waiting for one of the RP'ers in your story to respond and continue the story. Then, when they finally did post...it was awesome if the post was nice and long...worth the wait. Sometimes the short posts kept you wanting more...and not in the good way.

Just my two cents.

I agree that monster posts can turn people off, and I as a general rule would prefer not to, however if there's a need to include the information then I believe it's important to get it down.

There's a lot of stuff in this next post that is kind of crucial for a few narrative purposes, and for what Menti, Maltheus, Charax and I have planned.

I do think there's merit in breaking it down into smaller chunks. I could very reasonably break it into three or four chapters.

By all means go for giant exposition, character establishment etc. posts, I think that's the most engaging way to do that sort of thing, but if the entire play is done in ten-thousand word blocks, the sheer length of the posts might make reading them a drag, and will also probably necessitate a very drawn-out posting cycle.

I agree. I took some time out to divide the post into portions, and have come up with three titled chapters

- Losing Limbs and Alienating People - the forging of Jacqueline Dubois
- The Terrible Comfort of Knowing - the terrible purpose of the Tiresias Configuration is revealed
- Ghosts of the Past I / II - the events of the past, that influence all futures

Apologies this is taking so long - I will be posting Losing Limbs and Alienating People this week, the rest likely next week as they're the areas which need more collaboration and hence are going to take inherently longer.

I've spoken with Macabre and Charax, who should have posts up this week.

Van Helser, I may do a brief response post which your post would seem to imply?

Go for it.

Loved that post by the way - the Magos was beautifully done.

Ruaridh

Hello everyone, I'm new here and I was wondering where should I go to become part of a warband?

WELCOME TO THE CONCLAVE

"Becoming part of a warband" isn't really the idea, but if you design yourself an Inquisitor along the same sorts of lines as other people in this thread have done, there are definitely ways into Welcome To The Truth. My own character Markus Krenn, for example, started life as a name and two ideas (one for him, the other for his operative Giovanna Rossi), but is in the process of developing further from there.

The problem, I admit, is working through the huge wealth of material on which Welcome To The Truth relies. It's not especially easy for me to get into it, and I've been on different iterations of the Conclave for the past nine years. To that end, I quote Sargoth:

Quote from: Inquisitor Sargoth on July 10, 2013, 09:53:51 PM
For those confused and with limited time to trawl the archive....

PLOT HOOKS

1) Archive reveals corrupt Inquisition!

It contradicts official history! People might try to prove it a forgery, verify it, use it as a political weapon against the Inquisition, look for people assumed dead (like Maltheus) and any other loose ends.

2) Sanguinius on Terra

Is this actually true? A vile heretic, posing as a primarch and saint? What the hell is this?

3) Secret's Hold.

Drawing lots of Inquisitorial (and other) types to see what's there. Maybe something is there]...

There's also the Brief History of Everything (http://www.the-conclave.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2368.0), which is basically how people that weren't involved in stuff from Way Back Then can catch up without spending two months reading the archive. :P

Feel free to drop me a PM if you want some insight into one person's approach to character creation. Throne knows I make enough of them. :)

Post up.

Shorter, scrappier and generally not quite as good as I was working towards, but I'm vacating the country for a couple of weeks in three hours, and it's better than nothing.

Magos Baader is being brought in to investigate some chewed-up data banks, by forces unknown but of serious weight.

And Baader himself comes across as a bit of a stuck-up tit, on re-reading.

I'll try and keep up with current events, but I'll probably not be posting more than once in the next fortnight.

Anyone that wants to claim patronage of Baader, or responsibility for requisitioning him, just PM me and we can sort something out - at this point it'd definitely be easier for me in terms of story management if there was an easy slot to write him into.

Hi all, my next post is in progress! A few others are punching through as well. I've broken off the next chunk, got feedback from Menti and Maltheus, so should be the next few days, Maltheus by the weekend.

Yes...I am tweaking and retweaking and most importantly...trying to find time to actually write my post.  But the goal is for the weekend.  I'm having a lot of fun with this.

Nephew...message sent, response received, and response responded to.

Alright...my post is up.   I think, at this point...I am just waiting for Dosdamt to put his post up.  Maltheus will have some more screen time after that...and maybe Novus will get his guidance...

Anyways...enjoy.

Inquisitor Maltheus
(Luke)

The name Novus is not a particularly fortunate one. I now can't avoid imagining the psyker from our Dark Heresy game. :P

And... well, I'd put him this way: one of my assassin's skills in that game is Slap (Novus) +20. No, I'm not joking - it is actually on her character sheet (http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy3/MarcoSkoll/Miscellaneous/CIMG9953.jpg).

That said, the other character sheets and escapades from our game include items literally described as "Bitching cassock", "Holy barf bag of the Emperor", "Hover Renault Espace" (although it perhaps loses out to the "Grimdark Mini Cooper"), "Two score and ten hues of umber" and "The cricket bat of testicular smiting".

*Bitchin'.  The cassock is bitchin', no "g".

I have fond memories of Acolyte Ripley.  I'll be interested to see where the character has gone over the last couple of centuries.  Not so bright-eyed and enthusiastic now I would assume.

Ruaridh

Indeed not the same bright eyed seventeen year old boy that once had delusions of what the inquisition actually was.

I have already had a lot of fun with him as Novus.  I look forward to developing him more. By the way...anyone know what happened to ONI?  I sent Leon Holst an email but it was returned by a mailer demon. Unfortunate.

Looking forward to more...I have quite a few new characters that I can't wait to work into the narrative.


Thanks,
Luke

Hello

Sorry for the touch of radio silence. Couple of painful busy days. I'll be getting up a post by the weekend. I've got inspiration, no difficulties on that front, just a touch of awful RL.

-Dos

Returned from holiday, going to get read up and start writing something a bit less stand-alone ASAP.
So probably days and days away...

I'm sorry for another dump of exposition and history, all, but, this post was necessary because it will influence things very strongly going forward, for Maltheus and I and that thread of the story

I don't mind driving things a little for Secret's Hold and Terra, so I'll get to tide you forward posts next. Sorry this took so long

Post up. Sorry it has taken so long.

Post up.

Looks like things are heating up pretty quickly in some other plotlines...
This will get interesting quickly, it seems.

Purely to avoid things getting messy, is there any point in each individual plot having its own thread?

I've been wondering that too. This isn't so much one story as it is several - actually, it's so many plots I've lost count and can't reliably remember which are related to each other or which characters are involved in the same things...

A lot of the overall framework is being/has been discussed off board (through FB and other mediums).

To be honest, unless you've read enough of The Archive, things will seem incredibly disconnected currently. All of the contemporary plothooks have been set up by me (likewise I've been a pig for referencing past 'clave tropes), but Ben has been focussing a lot on past events and developing his character and it can be difficult to seperate which from what (see: Archive).

Most of the others are currently investigating the Terra incident or focussing on revealing the location of/supressing/spreading etc the Archive.

Plothooks thus far:
The Archive
The Terra Incident
The Oncoming Political Fallout From The Inquisition Declaring Exterminatus On Mars
(I have one other before I'm done)

So, just to summarize where I'm going

- Ghosts of the Past - is a setup for Maltheus and I, it summarizes and infers events at the end of ADS2 which are important to Maltheus' character
- Dubois - is a new character of mine, and I have to write a character to get into their head. I had a sketch in my head of her, but I needed to go over things. the loss of the arm, for example, shapes her character and her actions. Same with the Tiresias Configuration.

Interaction between the threads has been limited so far, but should start to come together. My next post is on Terra, and I'll drive something at Secret's Hold, so we can get into shorter posts (thank the Emperor) and begin to interact

The thing Krenn and Rall have between them will (I think) relate to Secret's Hold.

This Mars business sounds worrying. And not necessarily in a good way (though this may just be because I'd prefer to stick to fanon-worlds rather than doing anything with, well, Mars). I'll have to read things properly to see what the reason behind it is.

Quote from: Koval on August 30, 2013, 07:08:11 PM
This Mars business sounds worrying. And not necessarily in a good way (though this may just be because I'd prefer to stick to fanon-worlds rather than doing anything with, well, Mars). I'll have to read things properly to see what the reason behind it is.

Mars is perfectly safe, it may be a bit eleventh hour, but it'll be fine (as the message states), my characters know full well that the Inquisition would never let it happen but it is a means to an end. Consider 1/ that Mars is an ally to the Imperium of Man and not part of it. 2/ what it would mean to them when the Mechanicus find out that the Inquisition has just declared the final sanction on their most holiest of worlds.

My characters first goal is to isolate the Inquisition - for Mars this would mean that those of the mech-priesthood who hold pacts of friendship with the Inquisition would probably turn their backs on them, and those who already mistrust the Inquisition would turn to outright hostility.

Similarly, consider the philosophy that my characters adhere to:  institutions are symbols which are given power and purpose by its people (see: sociology - symbolic interractionalism), which is perhaps one reason why they are successfully turning things upside-down - to kill a Catholic would mean little if you had the means to threaten the destruction of Vatican City.

Ultimately, these are a sideshow, a distraction, a misdirection in lieu of something far more audacious.

I'd assumed we were still in the prologue phase, since the first metaplot RP was always going to be a bit of a lumbering behemoth.

I figure the threads will be intertwining within a couple of weeks, or the next couple of posting cycles.

If my latest offering looks like it bears no relevance whatsoever to the plot so far, you're probably right. Similarly, it's not supposed to make much sense, or have a structure.

That said, given that the Brief History of Everything mentioned the Silver Heresy (probably the organic result of Dosdamt citing it as the main thing dominating a later period of the Green Clave, and me trying to remind myself what it actually entailed), I figured that I should do something with a character that, frankly, has lived for far too long.

Hello,

This is a new account, but I was active towards the end of the old forums after many of the old-timers have left. My main character was an Inquisitor Kyana Olenson, and the main 'bits' I did was 'The Holy Plague' run by Carolus Grey, 'Shades of Grey' by Sargoth, and a few other things here and there - all sadly lost to the internet, as far as I can tell.

So most of you don't know know me, but I know you. I remember reading various parts of AD and other 'golden age' RPs with awe, both at the quality of writing, but also at the intricacy of the world and intersecting characters it produced - possibly an advantage over collaborative writing over single-author works. I think trying something like this again is a fantastic idea, especially as it might prove to be the Conclave's swansong given general attrition without replacement.

I'd be keen to get involved, but:

1) I've become a fully trained and practicing medicae since I started my career as a liminal figure on the conclave four years ago. Even getting up to speed with all the communal backstory is a daunting time committment, let alone actually trying to create and contribute.

2) My writing and plotting might be rusty, and even at its best might be too low a quality. Also, adding new stuff into the mix might dilute the nostalgic gleaming.

So I might not be able to contribute, and doing so might not be a good idea anyway. If you're collectively unkeen, absolutely no worries - I'll avidly read from the sidelines. If it's more the merrier, I'll try and get stuck in.

Bw.

Quote from: Merriweather on September 05, 2013, 01:05:00 AMAlso, adding new stuff into the mix might dilute the nostalgic gleaming.

I assure you, I'm new as far as all of this stuff is concerned. (Yet, I know I've been lumped in as one of the "hoary veterans" by some people's accounts. So mileages obviously vary*).
*Although, given my article archiving habit has put me in quite a central community position - and I don't shut my trap at any other time - the conception is understandable.

As such, it shouldn't be a problem. The setting has been advanced on for the simple sake that new stuff can be comfortably introduced.

As there are a few plots developing here (all of which will eventually intersect, I'm sure....) and it will make sense at some point to create individual or smaller group threads..what if we developed a naming convention of sorts to distinguish or identify threads that are involved with the overall storyline?

For example, I post a thread dealing with Maltheus and Novus.  Ben is also involved....We call it "Strawberry Fields Forever".  It takes place at Secret's Hold.  AND it has to do with the overall story arc (which we haven't named...but let's go with the Welcome to the Truth title for now....).  SO... the title could read as such:
"Strawberry Fields Forever (WTT, SH)"

Just an idea....and once the interactive threads pick up this will all start to come together more. 

Or you can all tell me to go pound sand....I'm good with that too. 

Luke

I second this motion.

Works for me - nobody needs to force their current line into the main plot, and we can blend at will.

Does this mean we need some sort of indexing?
If Ben and Luke meet (Strawberry fields), but are primarily focusing on (or even just maintaining) separate threads (Lemons and grapes, respectively), do we start quoting thread and post number in an OOC thread to keep track of things said/done in Strawberry that impact Lemons?
Duplicating IC posts in all relevant threads seems inelegant.

Would it be worth going back and cutting those posts that form a separate thread out, and putting them in... well, a separate thread?

I will go with what I know from the previous boards....where things got very epic and expansive rather quickly...and there was no need to duplicate IC threads at all.  (Occasionally, the last bit of a previous post would be copied and pasted just for continuity's sake...but full duplications were not necessary.)  My suggestion is simply to mark the title of your post to indicate if it's part of this OVERALL story arc or not.  If you wish to further sub categorize...then that would work as well....but this does NOT need to get too complicated. 

For instance...I am about to post my follow up to Joe's (TheNephew's) latest post.  I think it's time this can be moved to it's own thread.  I can move it to it's own IC thread, entitled whatever I think would work...and place in parentheses the bigger story arc initials or numbering....
Just need to know what we are going to call it....are we going with 'Welcome to the Truth' as the larger story...or a new name?  I'm good with whatever....
Luke

Hi all

Apologies for not being around

I had a bit of a family issue, and haven't been around for the last three weeks or so

Normal service will be resumed shortly

Hello guys,

I was swallowed whole by work. Am I too late to the party, or can I make an entrance. If so, will post over new year.

Bw,
Merrweather

To be honest, this has pretty much petered out.

I'm still around and willing to make contributions (the character I had devised was one that I did want to explore) but, as previously said, I am not familiar enough with the Old Conclave to be hugely proactive in guiding a story based around it.

Without the input of others, contributing to this has been secondary to exploring my solo narratives.

Unfortunately this was an Old Guard project, many of whom are now in their 30's with outside commitments. Chances are it won't resurface again (although I will probably cannibalise the plot into a solo story instead).

Hello

Sorry all - as above, I had a family issue - we had a death in the family, I had to go back to Ireland, and have experienced all manner of horrible over the last couple of months. Strangely enough, I've been pondering storylines and updates over the last couple of days

I can't promise anything, but I am tippy tapping again on a keyboard.

-Ben

I'm half-heartedly poking something that should eventually turn out to be related to a strain of this.
Maybe I'll get it mostly done some time this year and stuck up here.

So maybe the big plot thing can continue crawling along in a not-quite-dead fashion, rather than just rotting away.

For what it's worth, I too came into some hard times and life swallowed me whole.  Well, a divorce...a retirement, and several other unnamed heresies later, I'm still kicking around if anyone wants to accept a near 40 year old writer to join them in this or any other Inquisitor related writing.  I will always love this universe and style of writing.  Thanks for keeping this forum alive. 

Great to hear you're around again. Flexing my writing muscles after so long would be a good thing. Whether or not old plots are picked up on again there is potential to get the IC forum running at a slightly less glacial pace.

Ruaridh

If anyone is still monitoring this, hello.

Hi.

It's fair to say I would expect no one to be around.

But I need to write and, strangely, after a(nother) continental move and two work promotions I find myself in more control over my time.

And I feel inspired for the first time in *years*

So I will put out the feelers, and more importantly, I'll be trying to write.

-Ben

Well, I've done what summoning I could. I'm in contact with InquisitorMaltheus, Mentirius, Macabre and more. Those who return, will, and for the rest, I will continue to plug away.

-Ben

Well, I can see I'm going to have to refresh my knowledge of all this, which is going to be a challenge, seeing as it was all a bit over my head in the first place, with all the references to stuff from before my time.

(It's all a bit odd that I've ended up in charge of the place, given that I'm too new to remember that era of a black and green Conclave).

I'll try to catch myself up over the next few days.

Quote from: Dosdamt on February 29, 2020, 05:40:51 AMI'm in contact with InquisitorMaltheus

I know you sent through a message about this, but I've not heard anything more since I sent a reply, so I'm not sure you received it.
(I initially thought about sending this via PM, but I figure that Maltheus might possibly see it here).

If Maltheus needs an e-mail updated, can the request please be sent through from the specific e-mail address you want me to use? (Send the request to theconclaveforum at gmail.com).

As the 'Clave is registered as a .co.uk site, I have to at least try to comply with UK data protection law, which doesn't allow me to use someone's personal data without their consent. (Although I have no reason to believe that it's not an honest request, that's not concrete enough legally).

Quote from: MarcoSkoll on February 29, 2020, 06:10:13 AM

Quote from: Dosdamt on February 29, 2020, 05:40:51 AMI'm in contact with InquisitorMaltheus

I know you sent through a message about this, but I've not heard anything more since I sent a reply, so I'm not sure you received it.
(I initially thought about sending this via PM, but I figure that Maltheus might possibly see it here).

If Maltheus needs an e-mail updated, can the request please be sent through from the specific e-mail address you want me to use? (Send the request to theconclaveforum at gmail.com).

As the 'Clave is registered as a .co.uk site, I have to at least try to comply with UK data protection law, which doesn't allow me to use someone's personal data without their consent. (Although I have no reason to believe that it's not an honest request, that's not concrete enough legally).

All good. I did forward it on. I am sure he's just working through a few things, like we all are. Damned IRL, eh?

I'll be honest, the only names I recognise reading that list are Inquisitor Sargoth and Inquisitor Maltheus, and *only* because those were the players' forum handles as well.

Everyone else, well, all I can say is I wish I knew more!

Do we need to consider as well how the recent changes in lore (and the Cicatrix Maledictum) impact on what people wanted to do?

Hello again,

This is just popping my head in to confirm I am on board with coming back and giving this story another go.  I've been in lengthy discussion with Dosdamt about where we want to go with it and ideas are coming fast...I'll be the first to admit I wasn't as ready as I thought I was last time, but we agreed that we'll always feel the itch of unfinished business if we don't try and do this vast mythos justice and finish what we started.  Not to mention it would be a damn shame, because when we do get this out I'm certain it will make great reading. 

For anyone who doesn't remember me, my primary characters from the old days were Inquisitor Mentirius (deceased), the daemon Amon Dull (effectively deceased), Inquisitor Amaurn (MIA, though perhaps not for much longer) and the oft-mentioned, rarely seen spectre of ex-Inquisitor Balkoth (retired/deceased/behind you).  Mentirius was "born" on the Conclave, while the other three originated with my home campaigns of the table-top Inquisitor game.  What there was of my solo writing centred on the complicated rivalries between these characters and their networks, but in practice most of my threads on here were collaborative to the core - I can't imagine writing Amon Dull without poor heroic Inquisitor Maltheus to torment or Charax the Eternal to go a few rounds with, and Mentirius would never have existed as the character he was without the involvement of Lord Inquisitor Taren, the Eldar Alundirel, the two Inquisitors Nexus and more.

Anyway, my new characters will be connected to the old and will be seeking either to uncover or protect their remaining secrets, and those of Balkoth in particular.  Whatever now remains of "The Mentirians", which included most of my old selection of supporting characters and extras (or at least the non-daemonic ones), I'll be leaving largely in the capable hands of Dosdamt this time around. 

Nevertheless, I've forgotten so much and there is a lot of recapping for me to do before I'll feel sufficiently familiar with a) The story so far, especially the new extended cast; b) Some crucial details of the old Conclave continuity; c) Obscure areas of long-established GW lore relevant to the story; or d) All the recent GW developments with Guilliman, Yvraine, the Great Rift etc.  I'm particularly interested in how that last one might affect things, as I only found out about it very recently and it must affect some key elements of the setting like navigation, astropaths and so forth.  Anyway, I've already done a lot of reading and will keep going, so if all goes well I might be ready to attempt IC writing within the next few days.  In the meantime I'll try to visit this forum regularly and am happy to exchange ideas with anyone who'd like my OOC input.  I will do my very best not to peter out again. 

One thing I noticed reading through this thread (I started with the OOC, reflections on the IC thread still pending) is that the Adeptus Mechanicus are coming up a lot - which is great for me, because most of my intended new faces are from a secretive group of rogue tech-priests up to their necks in heresy!  Expect forbidden tech McGuffins aplenty once I get all my ducks in a row, starting with something buried in the ruins of Secret's Hold.  Yes, it does seem to have been nearly seven (!) years since we last tried this.  But the tale still wants to be told.

It is never too late.

Quote from: Mentirius on February 29, 2020, 07:07:12 PMd) All the recent GW developments with Guilliman, Yvraine, the Great Rift etc.  I'm particularly interested in how that last one might affect things, as I only found out about it very recently and it must affect some key elements of the setting like navigation, astropaths and so forth.

The short version, as I understand it, is that Warp travel is simply "a bit more dangerous" on the Sanctus side of the Rift, but on the Nihilus side (half of Ultima and most of Obscurus, if I'm reading the map right), the Astronomican is obscured and it's like sailing at night without a lighthouse to guide you. Still possible (because otherwise, nobody would've been able to come to defend Baal), but much more difficult. Also, they had to forcibly sever a load of Astropathic relays to stop Astropaths in Nihilus from going crazy.

For what it's worth, I understand the Carthax Sector (Pacificus) to be in Sanctus, and the Abraxis Sector (Ultima) to be just over the border in Nihilus. I'm not sure whether this information affects the Secret's Hold stuff, but I understand most of the tabletop stuff these days happens around those two sectors.

Aaah Maltheus, old friend, it does an old Daemon Prince's bones good to see you again.

It has recently been imparted upon me that there are some members who do not know of the great rivalries of old, the epic battles that were fought...some who do not know of The Eternal at all...

An Education May Be Required

From what I remember, Secret's Hold is in the Segmentum Obscurus somewhere on the "northern" fringes of the galactic map, but Imperial geography was never my strong suit - so I'm guessing we're probably in Nihilus then?  Perhaps we should try to knock up an annotated map at some point with key story locations marked or something. 

In theory, Secret's Hold being in Nihilus probably has more narrative potential anyway, if we're going for an "out in the sticks" feel for that branch of the story.  However, given that astropaths are necessary for IC Conclave communication, any difficulties there will be significant for our Hold-bound characters.  Not to mention, those who want the Conclave Archive suppressed might have a much easier time making headway if the information originated on the "dark" side of the Rift.  I still need to do more reading but cautiously, I think I like these new GW developments.  We can always use more giant tears in reality, right?

EDIT: Charax returns! An excellent development. I was just re-reading your post in Welcome to the Truth with the virtual minions trying to call home, and it is wonderfully ominous.  "Wake Him"...

I've got well over 4.5k words ready to go and an intent to write further Terran machinations once I get back through the thread in detail. I'll be aiming to post no more than 1500 words at a time, giving three more posts to come (though logical chapters will need to be kept together).

RE impact of new lore - I'll be referencing Ultramanian Recongregators in one of my next posts. The Inquisition itself would probably be riven with new factions and warring with the return of old Roboute. I wouldn't expect a bunch of wildly independent Inquisitors to suddenly hold hands and hug one another. I imagined the Recongregators would be the first faction to get excited about his return and formed a faction centred around it. Thorians probably see as vindication and a reason to go hunting down more Primarchs / Saints / whatnot to mess around with. Horusians the same. There's definitely fertile soil to explore.

@Koval - I'll try and synthesise something easy to consume from the Conclave Archive (see the literal link in the first post of this thread.). It's all the old AmonDull threads including the conclusion of the first Saga.

Excellent to see Charax back.

EDIT - 6200 words unposted, and more to come.

I've finished re-reading Welcome to the Truth and...well, damn, that's a lot of words.  My memory really did fail to do it justice.  So much foreshadowing, so much amazing writing, and most of two afternoons in the reading (although I admit to going slowly and taking some notes).  I still have to finish my reading of the wider canon changes, or at least the important parts, so most of what I have planned will have to wait a bit longer, but I did make a short IC post that should speak for itself. 

What reallly struck me about the thread was that it feels like an introduction -  a very long and awesome introduction, but even the later parts of it have a feel of "something about to begin".  I know for a fact we don't quite have everyone introduced yet either, although admittedly we can't be sure all these writers and characters will still participate after our seven-year hiatus.  What I think we do have is distinct plotlines emerging, and it will probably be easier to read in the long run if we don't try to keep everything in a single place.  So, I move we treat this thread as Part 1 or whatever, and branch off into new ones when we reach an appropriate stage - no idea how to tell when that is, but if it gets to page 10 IC then we might have left it too late.  I tentatively suggest the following at least deserve their own threads once we've finished setting the scene:

- Plots and politics on Terra: This could conceivably run throughout and alongside everything else, and should probably include Mars and anything else Terran-adjacent.

- Secret's Hold: I'm pretty much seeing this as a giant pseudo-game of Inquisitor, lasting from when more characters start to arrive to whenever they leave and the dust settles.  How exactly it ends up going down is anybody's guess but if it ends up interspersed with events from around the galaxy it is going to get very confusing.

One other thing I notice is that each protagonist, by necessity, has their own cast of supporting characters and it all adds up to dozens of named, speaking roles.  This being the case, we might also benefit from a well organised Dramatis Personae, at least when we know who is definitely in this time...not that I'm volunteering to write such a beast, or at least not today!

Excited by the reference to Scarab by the way Ben, that angle could be interesting.

Yeah I wanted to throw in a curve ball - Scarab... alive? Could he be? How did he die? Who even knows!

Agree with the expansion into other threads. Terra; Secret's Hold; Ghost Worlds (DuBois and AdMech); Ghosts of the Past (continuing the various threads / flashbacks, and digital archeology, where relevant); and a Returner's thread (once we have our returners confirmed).

I will help put together a Dramatis Personae list - happy to start the thread and get contributions.

We remain open for other contributors (Koval, Marco, we have a LONG email chain if you want adding, otherwise happy for us to bounce ideas in this thread).

I'm up to well over 8k of drafted material now, so please be warned - there's plenty to come!

-Ben

Quote from: Dosdamt on March 02, 2020, 09:42:25 AM
We remain open for other contributors (Koval, Marco, we have a LONG email chain if you want adding, otherwise happy for us to bounce ideas in this thread).

The offer is greatly appreciated -- maybe if I join, that'll clear up some of the confusion I'm experiencing?

Right, I've finally caught up with the Era Indomitus and these are my initial thoughts on how it could affect our story:


Time

Apparently the Great Rift opened in 999.M41, the same year the 13th Black Crusade and Guilliman's resurrection happened, and pretty much at the same time as the Amon Dull Saga was in its last stages.  For us, this should make it very easy to believe that no one really knows what the hell happened on Delan's Point, Aithol, Secret's Hold etc, and that entire fleets going AWOL for months (looking at you, Vhogart) might easily be ignored...for my money, it is actually extremely convenient when it comes to sorting out our contuinity.  I think the most recently canon event is the end of Guilliman's subsequent Indomitus Crusade, when he went home to Ultramar to defend it from Nurgle - these events seem tentatively placed in 111.M42.  On the other hand, the official canon on dating now is up the spout - the wiki I read claims time actually passes at different speeds in different regions now, which I suppose is both a blessing and a curse from a writer's point of view. 

I propose that as many of our events are linked directly to Terra and to the years immediately preceding the Great Rift's emergence, our characters mostly adhere to the old school of chronology.  I'd been under the impression "present day" for GW was around 200.M42, but having read all this I feel like adding another eighty years after the Indomitus Crusade before we kick off is probably a bit much.  Perhaps we could go with 120.M42 or thereabouts?  (I'll have to amend Amaurn's announcement from two hundred years to "over a century" or the like, but that's no big deal...)


Space

So the galaxy is now split in half by a giant warpstorm, with various others scattered around.  You can see it in the sky from pretty much everywhere, psykers have nightmares etc, astropaths and navigators have a harder time than they used to.  Nothing immediately story-breaking here, or at least I don't think so.

Having done my reading now and looked closely at the Indomitus Era galaxy map, I'd place Secret's Hold, Aithol and most of the historical Amon Dull locations in the far galactic North-West towards the rim, which puts the Eye of Terror pretty much right between us and Terra.  This being the case, the region would probably never have had a perfect view of the Astronomican, and since the Eye of Terror comprises one end of the Great Rift we're also excellently placed for a minimum of effective change to have taken place, relatively speaking.  It also places us in Imperium Nihilus, of which Dante of the Blood Angels has apparently been appointed Regent, so despite actually being closer to Terra than Baal (I assume that is the Nihilus capital) the area is debatably outside of direct Terran jurisdiction.  Travel from there to Terra would ideally skirt the western edge of the galaxy, around the Eye of Terror and then aim inwards, approaching Terra from the galactic east.  I find all of this pretty interesting, especially given our "Fake Sanguinius on Terra" plotline, with half of the Imperium now under Blood Angels rule.  Perhaps someone wants to stoke a civil conflict between elements of Imperiums Sanctus and Nihilus, or at least create the fear of one?

Terra has also been repeatedly attacked by hordes of Chaos, and the general implication is that pretty much any and every world in the Imperium is now a recent, current, or imminent warzone.  Also, there is now a region in Obscurus called "The Stygian Sector", comprising eighty-one star systems and ruled by forces of Tzeentch!  Compared with Mortarion's three system "empire" at the other end of the galaxy, this blows my mind (and makes me glad I have a Lord of Change held in narrative reserve!  Maybe that was its plan all along?)

Oh, and it turns out the Tau empire, Ultramar and all the known Necron dynasties are about as far from this region as they can get, so probably no need to worry about any of them meddling with our heretekal (?) skullduggery. 


Politics

First off, as we all know, Roboute Guilliman has been ruling as Lord Commander of the Imperium since not long after his resurrection.  Given that over a hundred years have gone by since then, this will no longer be news to anyone not lost in the warp, in stasis or similar during this period.  However, it probably is still a source of enormous factional conflict within the higher echelons of the Imperium, E.G. Inquisitorial Recongregators/Thorians vs Amalathians/Monodominants.  Xanthites are still out in the cold though, as well they probably should be, and Istvaanians stir the pot while Horusians cackle in the corner.  I think it appropriate for our narrative (and frankly something of a relief) that Guilliman's Indomitus Crusade to retake parts of the Imperium has "recently concluded" in canon.  Since then he has been defending Ultramar before setting off to other wars...I think the implication is that he is very distracted right now and won't have heard/cared about what we're doing if there are some potentially large ramifications.  He isn't sat on Terra, ruling the Imperium, he's off fighting wars for now and corruption may fester freely in his absence.  Which brings me neatly to the central issue for the Inquisition:

Guilliman is a Radical.  He fired five of the twelve High Lords when he arrived on Terra, and had millions purged in an attempt to rid Terra of corruption.  Corpses burned in the streets, open war raged in the underhive, and several Chaos fleets attacked Terra during his few years on the homeworld.  He hates the traditional Imperium and wants it reformed in major ways.  The guy uses heretek on his flagship to this day, for the Emperor's sake.  He actively hates Puritanism and has consistantly tried to suppress it.  He effectively legalised (a degree of) technological innovation through Belisarius Cawl, the AdMech ArchMagos who resurrected him and seems little more traditional in his outlook than the outright heretek cell I've been planning.  He even formed his own official body of historians to try and undo the sort of revisionism our own Puritan Council is so fond of.  Where I'm going with this is that effectively, a hundred years on, the Puritans ARE the Radicals on Terra now!  This doesn't upset anything we're doing, just shifts the balance of power a little, but Guilliman hasn't been on Terra for a long time and old habits die hard...

Which brings me on to another emerging theme - it seems to me that under Guilliman, the Adeptus Mechanicus has grown ever more powerful while the Inquisition is falling out of favour (see his desire for new technology, together with his dislike of "redactionism", religious fanaticism and general grimdarkery).  Within the Mechanicus itself, the rise of Cawl's radical faction (pro-innovation, not necessarily anti-xeno/archaeo-tech) to some degree of prominence has riled up a lot of old traditionalists, but he has too much support for them to bring him down, although there are hints he might be starting to "go too far".  He made a new generation of "better" Space Marines, which ended up being adopted pretty much Chapter-wide by initially suspicious Astartes.  He even asked Guilliman to make him Fabricator-General of Mars, although the Lord Commander decided to keep the Treaty of Mars and refused him. 

Add to all this our ex-Lord Terran Ishigiru having allegedly ordered an Exterminatus on Mars itself, and I humbly suggest the wider conspiracy surrounding our story constitutes not just conflict between New Radical and Old Puritan factions within the Inquisition, but also within the Adeptus Mechanicus and between the two institutions as they look to the future.  The Indomitus Crusade having recently concluded, what is next for Terra and the two Imperiums?  Should the administration continue to move in Guilliman's new direction, or resist?  The Adeptus Mechanicus leadership will no doubt have strong opinions about who should be the new Lord Terran of the Inquisition, and the Inquisition will no doubt be concerned by the growing dominance of the Mechanicus, not to mention the rise of Radical thinking among tech-priests. 

The search for more Blackstone, a psych-reactive material from which the Cadian Pylons were made by the Ancient Necrontyr, in order to alleviate or even close the Great Rift, seems to be a central theme of their expanded activities.  Belisarius Cawl believes the material can be polarised in two ways; either charged negatively into "Pariah Stone" that negates the warp and can be used to stabilise areas, E.G. the Pylons, or positively into a highly psycho-reactive material capable of storing vast quantities of warp energy - including the raw stuff of Chaos - and unleashing it as a weapon, E.G. the Blackstone Fortresses.  Necrons know how to work the stuff, although they've apparently forgotten some of the details, but despite having far greater logistical resources at their disposal, the Adeptus Mechanicus mostly seem to just dig up old Monoliths etc and move them to strategic locations.

And so, without further ado, I present my first McGuffin: the xeno-tech isn't In Secret's Hold, it IS Secret's Hold.  The whole thing is made of blackstone (as I now remember I always intended, I just didn't realise it had evolved into a major 40K plot point!)  There are literally chunks of what one wiki called "the most valuable material in the galaxy" lying strewn around the area, to say nothing of the surviving structure, and thanks to Macabre's instigators, now the whole Inquisition and at least a few of the Adeptus Mechanicus know where it is.  Not only that, but the implication, however small, is that Secret's Hold's former owners and their networks might conceivably have new information about blackstone and/or how to use it.  It's a good thing we're a long way from any tomb worlds, but all the same, there's a hell of a plot driver for you. 


That's it from me for now.  Let me know what you think and if I've missed anything relevant here. 

well, the last seven years have certainly shaken things up, story-wise

For my part, a condensed writeup of Charax is long overdue, Over the years I've nuanced and iterated his background in recognition of the fact he'd gotten a bit Mary Sueish, so it will serve both to codify these changes and get people up to speed.

Charax hates Mortarion - always has - and sees him as yet another overlord. This is, of course, the great irony of Mortarion's existence, he overthrew the warlords of Barbarus only to enslave his people to the Emperor and then to Nurgle. Charax has been with the Death Guard from the beginning and recognises this hypocrisy. He also wasn't a big fan of the purge of the Dusk Raiders from the legion. None of this was much of a factor while Mortarion was on the Plague Planet, but now he's up and fighting - Charax's forces have not taken part in the attack on Ultramar, let's put it that way. He's in torpor upon his flagship, and has been pretty much since he was last seen. He works through agents and spends time in contemplation and planning. Until the signal was received.

Dawn has fallen quite thoroughly. She is revelling in her newfound power and status, acting as Charax's vassal in most ways. She's not a puppet, though - she definitely has her own ambitions and she is reckless with her authority, as seen when she committed Charax's forces without consulting him. She technically has no authority over the Death Guard at all, but they give her a degree of respect owing to her connection to their master. She's acting as administrator of Charon's Point, although in name only as she delegates all of the hard work to subordinates. Charax has kept to the deal he made on Delan's Point: She has not been asked to act against the Imperium, but her old allegiances are giving over to her ambition

Charon's Reach is a front for Charax's presence. and is based in the Maelstrom, so on the other side of the galaxy from Secret's Hold, but summoning knows no distance and the rift makes travel very fast for those skilled in manipulation of the Warp...

Noctilith is certainly of value to Charax, and he has a history of experimentation with psychoactive substances like Wraithbone. Knowing what the Hold is made of, and the vast quantity of material there, he may well come looking - or be persuaded to take it as payment for aid.

Oh, and people know of him now, however vaguely. Given the effort he took in creating the data-wraiths to purge this knowledge, this will likely irk him greatly

Noctilith is a way better name for blackstone, I forgot about that!

Incidentally, while Charax's name is obviously all over the Conclave archives, Amaurn might strategically leave him out of the cock-and-bull story he's trying to present the Inquisiton with as the "true" story of events. 

I loved Dawn's meeting with Landen, and what you've done with the character generally over the years.  I look forward to seeing more of her as the plot thickens.

Presumably Charax had more on his mind in 999.M41 after consuming Escellon/fighting Greeneye etc than going back to Secret's Hold for the noctilith...maybe this incident with the signal reminds him he'd been meaning to get around to that?  Although being seen in person by a bunch of contemporary Inquisitors might make it harder to recover his secrecy...time for a cunning plan, perhaps.

I was thinking he'd play more of the chessmaster this time. His last appearance was quite bombastic. He's consumed a lot of power, moreso even than from Leon San V, and while it would have been tempting to convert that power into raw killing potential, there are a lot of ways that can be used (I can't for the life of me actually find Charax's final battle with Greeneye anywhere, to be honest)

As such I think this will be more Dawn's game than his. He will have his part to play, and will appear if circumstances warrant, but he is far more of a threat as a subtle influencer than a rampaging monster.

Besides, there's no way Landen's going to manage to steal an Imperial Fists Ironclad, surely?  ;D

Which thread was it where Landen / Dawn met - I can't for the life in me remember. I'd like to re-read. I am very much inclined to have Landen be absent from this whole thing - there's an outside chance of having Vincent / Othello involved. I've got enough between DuBois (Fanham, Grixos) and any other Mentirian I bring back....

Junious is the most likely candidate, heading to Secret's Hold.

Welcome to the truth, post #19

Hahaha read the damned thread

.... Isn't that Arkhan's ship?

I don't think so. It's not intended to be, anyway

Ok sweet. it's coming back to me now. I had some ideas about how Landen might isolate, attack, and then rip apart said giant vicious shippo. I'll have a think how much I fancy writing that any time soon (I have ideas backed up in my head I'm trying to get out!)

Quote from: Charax on March 02, 2020, 10:44:04 PM
I can't for the life of me actually find Charax's final battle with Greeneye anywhere, to be honest)

Well, I'm not sure exactly where it dwells these days but it was one of the later threads of the first Amon Dull saga - very brief synopsis as follows:

Inquisitor Maltheus once had a headquarters called Honor's Hold, that was situated in a populated Imperial city.  Having become entangled with Amon Dull in the course of his duties, he received a goading message from one of its fragments (the "Greeneye" personality he'd met before) which originated from his own HQ.  When he rushed back there he found Greeneye had not only infested Honor's Hold, but taken over the city and possessed everyone in it.  At some point during Maltheus's subsequent attempt to fight through a horde of brainwashed children, penetrate the Hold and confront the daemon, Charax turned up looking for a fight and all hell broke loose.  The daemon princes mostly fought in the sky overhead. Charax tore off one of Greeneye's arms, Greeneye burned out some of Charax's guts, and at the climax of the battle they plummeted to earth with sufficient force to reduce the city to a smouldering crater (thankfully Maltheus had gotten out by then).  They then fought on to a near standstill at the crater's epicentre.  In the end a champion of Malal we'd been using as a cosmic hatchet man for Amon Dull fragments ("Goscarrigen", if I remember correctly) turned up and backstabbed Greeneye to finish it off, at which point Charax left to lick his wounds and Maltheus...well, continued to have an extremely bad day (in fact I think this might have been when the Erica Stark incident came to its inevitable conclusion).  As far as I remember, I think Charax had expended much of his Leon San V and Escellon-derived power on a private non-combat-related project before things reached this point, although I must admit I can't recall what that was.

Quote from: Charax on March 02, 2020, 10:44:04 PM
I was thinking he'd play more of the chessmaster this time... As such I think this will be more Dawn's game than his. He will have his part to play, and will appear if circumstances warrant, but he is far more of a threat as a subtle influencer than a rampaging monster.

Aye, I guess this makes sense...certainly no one we've seen on the page so far this time would have much chance of standing up to the Big C, and I do enjoy the menace he presents from the shadows.  Regarding Dawn, I'd better clarify something I've been holding back because I now realise it could be relevant: the gribbly something I foreshadowed lurking in the vicinity of Secret's Hold is intended to be the Slaaneshi daemon responsible for Dawn's "death".  Not Escellon/the big Keeper of Secrets obviously, but the daemon in the sword she appropriated from Mentirius's stash and ultimately failed to control (the rest of the stash is boxed up and buried under the jungle in the burned wreckage of his ship).  The idea is she left the sword behind - the Drukhari leader disarmed her before striking the mortal blow, according to the original text, and I don't remember anyone else picking it up.  Being bound in the sword could have protected this daemon from being consumed by Charax along with Escellon, but given the forest was subsequently ravaged by an unnatural fire started during the battle, I figure the metal eventually melted, the daemon was freed, and when the jungle regrew, it spread itself thinly and infested everything.  In the absence of any single sentient host, it has been using a gestalt of various animals and plants to achieve something approximating conscious thought, but what it really wants is a human skin suit, to get off the planet and let the good times roll.  Anyway, I hadn't even considered this angle but if it pulls that off then it might make a good foil for Dawn down the line.  It's an exalted daemon at best, definitely no match for Charax, but probably still a potential threat to one of his minions.  Alternatively, one of the Inquisitors currently bound for Secret's Hold might just spank it right out of existence, or else bind it themselves. 

Re: Landen involvement, in the unlikely event I find myself overflowing with time and writing juice down the line, Amber and her Khornate warband need a daemon patron and could probably be involved in this story somewhere if we're doing Forces of Chaos besides Charax.  If you do fancy following the Charax/Landen alliance subplot later, it is conceivable said warband would undertake this Ironclad mission for him, although I suspect he might still have to weigh in personally given the scale of the undertaking...  I don't plan on using her as a protagonist or anything, but I'm interested in the character from a "where are they now" point of view, since I last left her on a daemon world in the Eye of Terror.  I figure she's a chaos-armoured badass by 120.M42, fresh from fighting in the Blood Crusade or similar, and an "insane suicide mission for Khorne" cameo would fit quite nicely with my current mental picture of her.

Quote from: Dosdamt on March 02, 2020, 09:42:25 AMKoval, Marco, we have a LONG email chain if you want adding, otherwise happy for us to bounce ideas in this thread.

While it'd be nice to rejoin at some point, it's going to take a while.

I've already got a lot of Inquisitor projects that need juggling (Revised Edition, several different things to have ready for Salute, new Dark Magenta articles, potentially getting another event on the schedule sometime soon, etc), so I'm not sure when I'll have the time to fully catch up.

No worries Marco.

I'm up over 10k words ready to post now, so i'll probably drop some this weekend!-

Wotcha wotcha all!

Right, I've finished finally reading through all these email dialogues and the new OOC responses and have a few things to say (some of which I've already said to Ben).

Firstly is just a correction of lore; Necron tombworlds now stretch across the entire galaxy (thanks to new lore about their differing dynasties), so they could crop up and Secrets Hold could even have been something of Necron origin. Secondly, the T'au now have a 'stargate' bridging their empire to the galactic north-east, so again they're becoming more prevalent in the Imperium (slowly). In fact, I really wanted to create a T'au ethereal character as they were an army I was hugely invested in long ago and I loved the character arc of Aun'Shi (seriously, he's awesome)!

Now, down to brass tacks; after reading the OOC threads new posts thoroughly, I've realised that everything I've tried to achieve with my Rephexisian characters is somewhat pointless now because Guilliman is doing it all for them. I suppose they could be something of an extremist philosophic movement who have considered some of the primarch's concessions as 'too soft'. The Rephexisian Philosophy is another Recongregator ideal inspired by Danyael's cynicism at being betrayed twice by members of the Inquisition (the first time leaving him crippled, the second time costing him an arm). Essentially it's based on the sociological school of thought called Symbolic Interractionalism. Basically, it runs on the notion that we as people give institutions identity and power by how we interact with them. Transposed, this means that the Imperium is broken, fractured and failing because of how people interact with the varying institutions. It's the whole Gormenghast syndrome kinda thing....

Even so, I feel I'd need to rewrite the posts I'd done before to make it fit right. And I'm changing my Inquisitor's surname because after seven years 'Jezebel Magdalene' just sounds pretentious now.

I discussed with Ben about including another character of mine instead (although he seemed adamant about running both threads), Inquisitor Svetlana Odesskr. Now she was/is a character I drafted out in my head a long time ago in a very tortured epic not unlike Landen Dosdamt (even her name is a playful anagram too). She stands as my only Xanthite character, and I've found out how I can slot her into history and the present. After her own personal history I already have in my head (I.e how she became an Inquisitor), I can easily see her as a pre-Black Library Mentirian; one who refused to follow his new 'enlightened' path. That would explain her absence from the larger events of the Amon Dull Saga (especially if she left in disgust) and it would certainly make more sense for her to head up the Lighthouse* endeavour than Jezebel.

Now here is where I get a bit knotted, because I was bouncing the idea with Ben about bringing both Jezebel and Svetlana's character threads together, but that may make things convoluted (especially considering I'll need to be jumping between past and present with Svetlana to include her history)? The only way I can conceive of it work is, if I bring Sister Rebekah (who, despite her bleak cynicism is at heart a Rephexisian, and at one time worked alongside the man himself for a decade) and Svetlana together. But I'd need to bring back Morael [from the very first post; Librarian of the Angels Porphyr chapter (currently on a lone crusade to erase a personal stain of honour) and Inquisitor Danyael Rephexis's son. He was sired when Danyael was hunting his mentor Augustus Chaylon on their recruitment world. I'd mention here too, that despite the fact that Danyael's Inquisitorial career was sponsored by Brottenheim, he had never actually met the man, and his tutelage was largely handled by Augustus (also a pre-Black Library Mentirian/Balkoth agent in secret from Brottenheim - but one who eventually fell to the Ruinous Powers)] with a convenient prophecy about future events.

Well, it was Moreal and Rebekah that first released the Archive together. I can imagine that Morael has a vision of future events and sends Rebekah to Svetlana to ensure that the Lighthouse either does or does not come to fruition (I haven't decided yet). Plus their could be a redemption angle for Svetlana herself, especially if I later include Morael. I could even have it as a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I had, at some point in Svetlana's story, had her on Necromunda engaged in a lesbian relationship with an Escher ganger called Sonya Kalashnikov. Perhaps she's languishing there in a state of ennui until Rebekah finds her and actually inspires her with the Lighthouse endeavour idea....

I don't know, on future reflection, I'm not convinced.

* Alan wanted to know: "I also wanted to ask about the prodigal son - "you tried to cage a god in a laboratory" - is this Fake Sanguinius, or something else entirely?  Because I'm intrigued!" - it's 'someone' else. If you *really* want to know, I will tell you, but it's something truly unexpected and special! A revelation, if you will....

The following is an extract from the Giant Email Chain in which I replied to the above message from Macabre, posted for the sake of general clarity and because why not (I've limited this post to the relevant part of the email):


Becky, it is great to hear from you at such length and you raise many strong points; nevertheless, I'm afraid pretty much agree with Ben here - the more of this material you end up using the happier I'll be.  Sure there are some details here and there that might need a fiddle, what with the whole Indomitus Era retcon issue, but for my money Danyael Rephexis and his network are at the heart of this story and as crucial to it as Junious or Balkoth and their factions.  Also I think they're awesome, politically and as individuals.  I will now pontificate at great and agonising length about why I think this and how I think potential inconsistencies might be resolved.

Firstly, you're entirely right about my Necron/Tau lore gaffe - the fact is, I was going from a map of the galaxy when I wrote that part of my summary and have not read the recent lore for either of these alien civilisations.  It sounds to me like the Tau might still have trouble getting to Secret's Hold if they're largely spread along the galaxy's eastern edge, given we're in galactic northwest etc, but if you or anyone else really want to write a Tau character for this and have an idea for how/why they're involved, by all means go ahead.  There were Tau involved in the Nexus Schism after all, and Amon Dull did briefly visit him on one of their planets, so there is a precedent for having them around, albeit peripherally.  In theory that could provide a modern Tau agent with a route in.


Necrons are obviously appropriate in light of the dynasties factor, plus we now have a sizeable quantity of necrilith lying around...also, I'll say up front that along with other alien substances I intend to have my rogue tech-priests using both necrilith/blackstone and necrodermis/living metal in various ways, which they/Balkoth would presumably need to have plundered either from the Callidus Temple (unlikely) or from some actual Necrons at some point(s) in the past.  Part of their heavy veil of secrecy would probably be an effort to avoid serious Necron attention over the years, since they've been amassing these sensitive resources and are aware of the risks involved.  Of course, they wouldn't have the sheer volume of bodies etc to take on a dynasty in any kind of protracted conflict, so if one of the big Overlords found out about them the Factory would be effectively done for.


How plausible any of this is, well, I don't actually know!  I've just been looking up various xenos materials from the 40k universe with psychic, anti-psychic or otherwise interesting properties, factoring in a few centuries of Balkoth as a Deus Ex Machina, and adding them to the inventory list.  If any proper Necron lore disagrees with letting me do that, please tell me and naturally I'll think of something else.  This is essentially the main reason I intended to leave them out of the Secret's Hold/heretek factory storyline, other than in the form of stolen/scavenged tech – cool as they are, I don't personally know quite enough about Necrons to be comfortable writing a Necron character, and if they do get involved they have the potential to dominate or derail large sections of the plot quite easily, so they would have to be handled well.  Again though, if you or anyone are set on bringing them in and can do it better than I would, they'd certainly be interested IC and I'm not against the idea - just a bit ignorant myself!


Regarding Danyael Rephexis, his philosophy and his plans... I've been musing hard over this and I think most of it can still work, at least based on what I've seen of the characters so far and what I know of the Imperium.  Politically, the reason I think so is the same reason we can have a monodominant candidate for Lord Terran of the Inquisition, a hundred and twenty years into the Era Indomitus: Guilliman could not plausibly succeed at what he is trying to do.  Whether he likes it or not, the future is still grim and dark.


He is one man; yes, he's a Primarch, but he isn't the Emperor, and even the Emperor failed to build the Imperium he wanted.  He tried, but he centralised too much power, kept too many secrets to himself, made everything utterly dependent on his own continued input...then got half-killed in battle and ended up on life support, incommunicado, reduced to an impotent sybol in whose name any decision could be justified.  The Imperium quickly became the opposite of what he wanted, and in his name. He famously hated religion (well, famously OOC), explicitly forbade his followers to worship him and yet once he was silenced, within hardly any time time not worshipping him was a crime punishable by agonising death. He is still in that state more than ten thousand years later and unless rumours of a Thorian-style return pan out, likely to remain so.  Even his supposed talk with Guilliman happened off panel, presumably for canonical deniability.


OK, so Guilliman's alive now and in charge.  He apparently spent a few years - literally single figure years I think from filling in the blanks - on Terra cracking heads, including killing a lot of supposed dissenters.  This would certainly have been a huge paradigm shift at the time. But what has he been doing for last century since then?  Making War.  As in, the same thing the Imperium has been doing non-stop since the Heresy.  Not statecraft, not reformation, not really anything new at all unless you count his permissiveness towards Cawl's innovations.  He's reformed the Imperial war machine to a degree, but what else? The biggest physical changes he's made that I've read about are forming a small body of historians that nobody seems to fear, and introducing the Primaris Space Marines – absolute best case scenario, this might mean by now he has most of the Space Marine Chapters on his side. They're a powerful military force, but how much of a role do they play in governing Imperial society? Sweet [EXCOMMUNICATE] all. Guilliman's priority is clearly consolidating/expanding territory, not ensuring governance of the territory he holds is as wise and fair as possible.  He'd love a utopia, he just doesn't have the time or the resources to build one. And in that war he's been leading from the front, fighting duels against daemon Primarchs and frankly nearly getting himself killed on a pretty much daily basis.  If/when he gets unlucky, what happens to his vision?


I think the Imperium will slide back to business as usual almost immediately, and I think many in the Inquisition would realise that in advance.  Unless Guilliman can hold onto life and power for the millennia it will surely take to actually restructure these institutions down to the roots, all the old Imperial conservatives only have to bide their time.  I'd potentially compare Era Indomitus to, say, the Age of Apostasy - such political extremes surely usually only survive as long as the dictator who holds them together, and afterwards there is always a backlash.  Would someone like Rephexis, so experienced and cynical about the Imperial establishment, really be prepared to leave all mankind's eggs in one big shiny basket with a target on it, even a heavily armoured one?  Guilliman's enlightened empire is a great idea, for sure - it just doesn't exist, at least in the present day, and it never will unless someone not neck-deep in military campaigns rolls up their sleeves and starts putting the ideas into practice, changing hearts and minds.  It isn't just the official leadership of the state that has to change, but the actual machinery of governance and most of all, the culture underlying the state, since it is from that culture that citizens learn what power to give which symbols. If anyone would be able to see past the bombastic Indomitus veneer and perceive the fragility of all these so-called reforms, I think it's Danyael.


Look at the Ecclesiarchy, as Ben pointed out recently - they aren't going anywhere, even if they have lost a bit of sway in certain circles.  They own most of the physical property on many planets.  They have their own armies. They're deeply integrated with every other Imperial institution, and their scripture forms the moral and spiritual basis for most of Imperial law.  Guilliman clearly hates them, but what do the people believe?  Likely the same creed they did in 999.M41, with a few extra bits tacked on.  They'll rally behind the Puritans when the time comes because they've spent ten thousand years as a theocratic, repressive culture founded on fear and blind obedience, and the man who is trying to change that has been doing so from a great distance while fighting for his life.  The vast majority of the Imperial population would obviously never meet him in person, probably never even hear a real quote from his lips, but they all must go to church on a regular basis.  That is where the masses will be getting their version of Guilliman's proclamations, and I'd wager what they're being told on most planets has as much bearing on what he actually says as it does on the opinions of the Emperor.


Then you have the Mechanicus – sure they've loosened up a bit, in that they haven't actively tried to kill Cawl or Guilliman yet, so far as we know. Nor have they publically declared the Treaty of Mars void or anything similarly drastic in response to E.G. the Cawl Inferior. But even after a century of innovations, the success of the Primaris project and generally increasing the political and military power of the Adeptus Mechanicus as a whole, Cawl had to ask Guilliman to make him Fabricator-General, and Guilliman had to refuse because even he doesn't have the clout to tell Mars what to do. This tells me the political ground Cawl's faction are currently standing on within their own institution is about as steady as the ground Xanthus or Quixos must have occupied within the Inquisition. The real power base in the Mechanicus is surely as old-school as ever, and all the additional influence Guilliman is allowing to slip into AdMech hands surely can't bode well when he and Cawl are killed or ousted.


I could ramble on, but I'm sure you get the point. I could have this all wrong but think there is absolutely a need for Rephexis and his philosophy in this political climate; if anything, Guilliman's return has upped the stakes by raising the very possibility of real positive change. On a character level, I think Danyael might have been initially encouraged, filled with hope even after the purges on Terra etc...then a hundred years of the Indomitus Crusade, which he endures patiently while doing his level best to help the recongregation renaissance along, hoping to see the Lord Commander return to build on what he started when the Crusade ends. Which it officially does in 111.M42, and then...Guilliman goes home to Ultramar to defend it against Nurgle. Which he also does, and fair enough I suppose, but then...off he goes to yet another battle front. This is phrased in such a way, at least on the wiki I read, as to indicate that GW don't intend it to be a quick detour. I think this is what his reign as Regent looks like for the forseeable future.


So, maybe the forces of ultra-conservatism are already rising again and Danyael Rephexis sees a need to try and prevent a return to the old ways, or maybe they never left and Guilliman's reforms are more vague intentions than actual legislation in many areas. Perhaps an aging Danyael has simply had enough of glacial concessions to progress and lost faith in Guilliman's ability to deliver on his promises in time to make a difference. Maybe he sees himself and his followers as agents of those very promises, trying to fulfil them on the absent Primarch's behalf. Perhaps it just seems to him that the Inquisition should be best able to clean its own house, and to stand up to old dragons like the Ecclesiarchy and the Old Mechanicus, where Guilliman is best placed doing what he's doing. Maybe he simply has the foresight to see dark times coming, or maybe it was when they decided to canonize Vhogart that he decided to make a stand. Maybe a little bit of all these, or something else entirely.


Regardless of the emotional specifics, I feel like there has to be a moral position in here somewhere to fit a Rephexisian agenda. From where I'm standing, the Imperium is still very much a dystopia...a slightly more optimistic one than we remember, but surely optimism serves little purpose when you're doomed. The Imperium exists, speaking from beyond the fourth wall, to provide an ideal environment for endless war so that GW can sell model soldiers, not as an attempt at a fair or even functional society. It does the former very well, even in the Era Indomitus, and thus I would argue it surely continues to fail at the latter. Nothing changes, Alessio...


Moving on, Inquisitor Svetlana Odesskr sounds like a promising character, and her presence in the story would be a personal boon to me because I've been hoping someone else would want to write a Xanthite Mentirian angle...I feel they should be represented as a faction if we're looking to weave all the old threads into the new era, but it's been a long time since I did something like this and I may well have my hands full getting Amaurn and Balkoth's various associates onto the page (well, a combination of that and compulsively writing giant rambling emails). I appreciate you might be facing similar problems with the number of characters you could end up responsible for, but speaking purely as a potential reader, I'd very much enjoy seeing both Svetlana and the Rephexisians represented separately. Splitting off Act 2 into several threads might conceivably help there at least; I always found the more widely spread my characters were the more of them I was comfortable juggling. To my mind, Danyael Rephexis needs an active agent on Terra and it sounds like Svetlana likely has a different agenda, so I'd support keeping Jezebel in too, even if you do change her surname.


Morael and Rebekah I see as essentials – as you say, they were instrumental in the uploading of Conclave Archive and the Secret's Hold coordinates, which is the prime mover for everything else, and the early scene with them discussing the whole business definitely stayed with me after reading. I distinctly remember thinking "awesome, an interesting Astartes character – tell me more!" Rebekah has a great voice too... Really, on re-reading the whole of Welcome to the Truth last weekend, I couldn't help noting that it was your idea to start all this, and your characters I/we meet first and most often in the early stages of the tale. They set the tone for everything that follows, and I don't think it could be remotely the same story without them. I like that these people have such detailed histories, familial relationships and little quirks, having created a great many Mysterious Strangers in my time (see earlier discussion re: Balkoth's origin). It is strangely gratifying every time one of their backgrounds connects to one of mine – it makes the whole "Conclave canon" setting feel more real for me somehow. If you can find a sufficient volume of inspiration then I'm entirely ready to follow all their subplots to the end, and meet more of your extended cast as we go. With that said, they are your characters and these are largely your creative decisions to make. I'm a fiend for biting off more than I can chew, so take my advice with a pinch of salt I suppose.


Speaking of creative decisions, I think you're right to raise the issue of editing/rewriting existing posts and we probably should discuss that briefly. My usual inclination is to aim for a bare minimum of such changes, but I'm still not an expert on new lore – as demonstrated by the Tau/Necron thing – and I feel quite strongly that we should eventually end up with a finished story that can either stand alone, or alongside both the old Conclave material and/or the current GW stuff, without any irreconcilable differences. A story that a stranger with at least middling knowledge of 40K and no experience of the Conclave could read and enjoy. For me, the satisfaction of resolving unexpected continuity conflicts in interesting ways is part of the fun with this kind of fiction, and I do believe we're up to the challenge.


Therefore, I do support the retcon approach provided we only use it on M42 events and only when absolutely necessary, E.G. when dates, names or actions run directly contrary to established background or our vision of where we're going here. If we find mistakes we can't pretend we meant all along, we should probably fix them or it's just going to confuse people. We also might eventually remove any early posts foreshadowing characters/plotlines that never ended up panning out, though I'm loathe to give up on anyone's participation before we have to so I'd probably leave that for the very end. Anyway, you're best placed to know how much of your early material might need tweaking now, but I hope it isn't too much and I'd certainly vote against removing entire characters unless you really don't want to write them any more. I'd also like us to sort any recent retcons out as a priority if we are doing it, so we can get a handle on what exactly is canon before any plotlines progress too far.


As for the Lighthouse and the prodigal son...in that case, I'd rather you didn't tell me! Looking forward to unexpected revelations is also part of the fun, after all, and if you think we're better off being surprised by this then I'm inclined to agree. (Hopefully you have to keep Rebekah and the others in now, or you'll never get a chance to unleash this doozy! Mwahaha...)

I'll admit that writing that post took a lot of effort. I have not done this for a while. There was also more that I wanted to add in, but the details can happily wait until a few posts down the line.

But in any case we have another "in" for Secret's Hold, as whatever's there has obviously attracted the Oracle's attention. I may write a second part tonight.

Aye, this was fun to read - as I said in the chain, it feels right for some refugees from the Silver Heresies to figure into the tale, and the destruction of Hyrcania was a suitably epic flashback.  I always enjoy a chaos cult with a bit of humanity to it, and Heartbreaker One is a nice bit of foreshadowing for the plethora of doomsday devices we're likely to see in the course of these events!  The Oracle character also fits in well with this narrative territory; several key Conclave events have been prophecy-based before and characters trying to predict/control the future by various means seems likely to remain a theme.  I agree about spreading out the details when recapping old events - I fully expect the "Ghosts of the Past" series to run throughout the M42 story, and while I'm in no hurry to explain things like what exactly happened to Amon Dull, Balkoth and the Delan's Point survivors at the end of M41, I imagine we probably will do some more Aithol flashbacks eventually too. 

Speaking of which, I'm planning a lengthy post for Secret's Hold myself, introducing one more Inquisitor and some of his associates, though I still haven't decided whether to put that in a new thread or add it to this one.  I guess I'll see where things stand when I finish it, as I also haven't written anything like this for a long while and am pretty rusty, but the ideas are coming along.  In the meantime I'd be happy to learn more about the followers of Pennatus, and I know Ben has been working hard on an opening for the upcoming Terra thread, so we should see some of that up soon too. 

And it's up! I don't mind whether we keep OOC thoughts for the whole thing in one thread, or we separate out.

As suggested, my thought is that we keep the threads separate for now because as we get down into the detail and our characters interact, we'll need to make sure we have the space for shorter posts if we're going to have rapid fire dialogue.

I've posted two threads

- A Love Letter to Terran Politics

There's another HUGE lot of writing to come after this, but as you might imagine, things will simmer to furiously boiling head. Conflict is inevitable, in the end it will come down to which side everyone wants to be on.

- The Ghost Worlds

We catch up with the incredibly sinister Jacqueline DuBois - Mother, Ampulex - as she navigates her recovery from losing a forearm. The Tiresias Configuration is being pieced back together and she needs help to finish it. What secrets will the array reveal? Who is Fanham? And more to come...

Ok - Terra is as progressed as I'd intended to get it by this point.

I'm going to save any work I've done to update the Ghost worlds for another week. That way, we keep the threads broadly moving at a post every week to fortnight, from individual contributors, which seems reasonable to me.

-Ben

I've started the Secret's Hold IC thread - I also resurrected the old source material thread on this board for location-specific OOC discussion, not that I won't check here too.

The game is afoot - or, rather, a game is afoot and DuBois is the only one playing (for now....)

DuBois didn't really have a face (still doesn't), a personality, or anything really until I really got into her and started writing her.

She's turned out to be pretty terrifying, with more horror and dark to be revealed in the next few weeks...

And (Inquisitor) Amaurn is officially back - expect violence!  While he might theoretically be headed for Terra to play politics, I think Ben's chapel scene set the tone nicely for the kind of politics he'll likely be playing...

Just a taster of the post to come... There's... Well there's a lot more to come on this post. I've committed to posting it this weekend, so it'll go up this weekend. More Monday morning Sydney time, than today, I'll give you that.... Still. On track and hitting the milestones!

-Ben

Alright! Apologies for not sticking quite the schedule as promised, but I've got it out so I'm happy with that. 14.5k words and a *massive* revision to one section took a little longer than I'd hoped, but it's come out MUCH better for it.

The return of Junious is important for a myriad of reasons, so I wanted to really zero in on who he *was* before I elaborate on who he has *become*.

We've got a small cast again of folks around him, after he lost basically all of his retinue on the Point. Bess is a character we dug out of the previous ADS - Scarab too. More to come on both of them.

I've tried to emphasize the changes Bess has been through - her encounter with Balkoth being the most pivotal of the moments that have influenced her. She is still, at heart, the same compassionate and beautiful person that she was written as before, she has just been tempered in the crucible of conflict. My next posts on Junious' retinue will explore Kely, his ever present / mysterious friend from Aithol, and Junious' connection with the Eldar being a herald of Morai-Heg. Finally, we'll get under the hood on Amaarti and Scarab.

Three seals, purpose, and heading towards Secret's Hold at a rate of knots!

A significant post. Who DuBois is, and who she is, continues to be revealed.

I just posted "The Language of Birds" on the Secret's Hold thread, which I split into two posts for reasons of character limit.  It is very much a single episode of the story, albeit it a very length one. 

TLDR: it's an introduction piece for Sairzrias the Narrator, an exceedingly old and pompous Lord of Change responsible for creating Amon Dull way back when, and Bu'Ran of the Many Tongues, an unaligned Greater Daemon with designs on godhood that Amon Dull created.  So technically Sairzrias is Bu'Ran's grandfather.  Agents of one or both of these two should be turning up all over the place going forward. 

EDIT: Oh, and I removed the "On" from the thread title because it was annoying me. 

I posted in the Terra thread - this is the first half of a collaborative two-parter I co-authored with Dosdamt/Ben using a shared online document, in which Amaurn meets/conspires with Lord Inquisitor Zjivek, the leader of the Puritan Council.  Ben will post the second half tomorrow, picking up where I left off. Both halves contain a mix of both our writing.  In total it is a pretty long scene, intended to establish more of who Zjivek is, together with some more of Amaurn's story and his role in the politics going forward.  Fear not, after this the thread should swiftly descend back into violence!

And so the broader plot continues to emerge.

We're learning more about DuBois - who she is, what kind of monster she actually is, and what her game plan for the future actually is. I love DuBois - she's a conniving, vicious, cruel and yet caring, doting, and provides her team with patronage. She is rapidly becoming a favourite character of mine.

Just posted on The Keeping of Secrets: the second chapter of Inquisitor Rahn's story, in which he is called on to do battle with a (significantly) bigger fish.  Please continue to humour my warp-bound weirdness!  It is spread over two posts for reasons of character limit.

Coming soon on The Keeping of Secrets: the untold story of Delan's Point, or some of it at least.  A few key snapshots to join up the dots.  I've been studying the Archive for some time trying to get a handle on this one, so exactly when it materialises remains to be seen, but I think it's beginning to come together.

I concur regarding DuBois - having watched her evolve from a quiet bookish type into a predatory master manipulator has been an enjoyable ride, and I look forward to throwing daemons at her in the present day!

Another two-parter up on the Terra thread - the first part is by Ben/Dosdamt and follows Inquisitor Qi as she investigates the Ultramanian traitor, while the second is mine and deals with Amaurn's first attempt at a political assassination.

I've posted Ghosts of the Past, Volume IV on The Keeping of Secrets, divided into three posts.  It flashes back to M41 to cover events on Delan's Point from several angles, picking up where Welcome to the End left off, before returning to M42.120 with Inquisitor Palici at the end.  This is not meant to be an exhaustive or definitive conclusion for Delan's Point; just another tribute to the old days to tie up some of the hanging threads and further ground our present-day story in the past.  I have focused on the escape of Junious and other cell members through a portal opened by Balkoth, and the arrival of the Puritan Council strike force in the closing stages of the battle, met by the last stand of Mantis and his Mentirians.  There was a lot more going on that my point of view characters didn't see, and that remains open for speculation for the time being.

Some characters do die in this story.  Not all of them were created by me.  I've only let the hammer fall where I felt like it was logical, foreshadowed by Archive material and necessary for the narrative.  In most cases, I have tried to leave things open as to the fate of the various combatants.  I also stayed away from Arkhan and Charax entirely, bar some mentions in dialogue - that strand of the battle might warrant some proper attention of its own at a later date, but given the context of these flashbacks within The Keeping of Secrets, I didn't feel like this was the time.

'Thus Spoke Panoptikos' posted on The Ghost Worlds in two parts.  This is my first contribution to the story of Jaqueline DuBois, seen here through the eyes of Rune Priest Elpis - a low-ranking tech-priest serving the Forge City of Fabraxis, a secretive splinter faction wary of discovery by Mars.  Elpis is not a typical tech-priest by any means, but she represents the current direction of Fabraxis recruitment and a window into some of their thinking.  Tech-priests from Fabraxis have appeared in The Keeping of Secrets and will continue to crop up in various places going forward.  We have plenty more in development for them. 

Next week we'll have a connected episode from Dosdamt and see what DuBois makes of all this. 

Slightly later than intended, thanks to some weekend shenanigans featuring some lost and rearranged items in the apartment, but here it is. A linked post, continuing the diplomacy between the Fabraxians and DuBois & Co, and then, well, violence. There are many folks who do not want this alliance to stick. Where's it going to go? Who can say...

A relatively short instalment on A Love Letter to Terran Politics this week.  This one is an important flashback to Amaurn's recent past, featuring a confrontation with his alleged Imposter and a cameo from an old friend.  I doubt anyone else remembers Inquisitor Friedle but I've never been opposed to giving myself Easter eggs and I see no reason to stop now!  Amaurn lacks a proper retinue but he does have a supporting cast of sorts out there, though they're all far too disreputable to go anywhere near Terra.  We might see more of them later, though probably not for a while.

Next week, back to the present and Amaurn will be going after Inquisitor Odion, the second target on Zjivek's list.

I've posted on the Terra thread again: Amaurn vs Odion this time, otherwise known as 'Fellow Inquisitors' since I realised the phrase comes up in several places.  This chunk is a bit longer than the last one but still fits into a single post. 

So, we had been intending to get something up this weekend, as has been our usual habit so far.  As it is, I'm afraid neither of the next two instalments have ended up finished in time...work is being done on them daily however, so normal service should resume soon.  For anyone keeping up with the story, sorry about the extra wait. 

Currently on the horizon, though not necessarily in this order:

A Love Letter to Terran Politics - The Ultramanians react to/investigate Amaurn's rampage so far.  The plot continues to thicken, conspiracies abound. 

The Ghost Worlds - A big old battle sequence from the PoV of Rune Priest Elpis, who is not much of a fighter herself, featuring various daemons and cultists of Tzeentch against Fabraxian Skitarii and Inquisitor DuBois.  This thing will be a monster when it's done and is most of the way there now, I promise!

The Keeping of Secrets - The present-day introduction of Junious and his network is in the works, though I'm afraid it might still be a while.  We're keen to get it right after all that buildup so please bear with us here.  There is a lot more story still to come in this thread.

Right, I have finally have a solid new chapter up on The Ghost Worlds - sorry it has taken a while.  What I've posted is actually only half of what I wrote for this Elpis instalment, but there was so much action to get through that it just kept growing along the way.  I have now divided it into two substantial episodes, because there has to be some kind of limit to how much text I'm prepared to put up in a single sitting!  This week's half is called Division & Subtraction, spread over two posts for character limit, and ends on something of a a cliffhanger (I'm afraid I had to break it there for structural reasons).  I'll post the other half next week under Deus Est In Machina.  I am quite pleased with this as I've developed a fondness for writing Elpis, but due to the general content, I feel the following disclaimer might be warranted:


Warning: Contains Heresy.

Just to be clear on this, Elpis has lived most of her life "outside" the Imperium for all intents and purposes, so her character and theological musings should be taken in that spirit.  My depiction of these tech-priests and Skitarii is in no way intended to be representative of the Adeptus Mechanicus or STC technology in general – Fabraxis is a Heretek forge, and while they do still worship the Machine God, they do so in their own deeply heretical way.  They've gotten away with it so far because they operate in the shadows on the very fringes of the galaxy, but they dabble in a lot of forbidden research/lore and have recently attracted the attention of Tzeentch...and of course Inquisitor DuBois, who already tried to enlist a supposedly open-minded Magos from the legit Adeptus Mechanicus to help with her discovery and ended up losing an arm.

Anyway, we do have a lot more background worked out for Fabraxis but it was created purely for the story.  Anyone who feels like E.G. Abnett goes too far with inventing things/stretching the lore...please don't send stormtroopers to my house?  I plead artistic licence – this whole project is as much a tribute to old-school IC Conclave fiction is it is to the core canon, and a lot of questionable stuff got invented in the Nexus/Amon Dull days which I nevertheless enjoyed.  When in doubt, blame the warp. ;)

And I've posted the second half of my Heretek/Tzeentchian battle sequence in The Ghost Worlds, spread over two posts again.  Make of this madness what you will!  Elsewhere in the Ishkar system, similar shenanigans will be going on aboard the Tomb of Kaires, which we will get to in due course...  Next up, more developments on the Terra thread.

A lot later than intended, but posted nonetheless! An update on how Qi is tracking and moving through the labyrinthine world of Terran politics, and poor unfortunate Yun working through the literally labyrinthine underbelly of the Inquisitorial Fortress.

Hey, theoretical reader(s) - just a quick OOC update to apologise for my own lateness and assure you that I'm at the editing/post-production stage for another big two-part chapter, this time for the Terra thread to pick up where Ben left off last week.  The chapter deals with Amaurn's attempt to hunt down Ymaar, fellow radical Inquisitor and comparably overpowered character, on behalf of his current allies.  The first half of it should be ready to go up in the next couple of days.  I'll then post the second half on Saturday to try and realign with the weekend. 

I realise we've gotten a bit patchy about the regularity of our IC posts...I'm afraid that is likely to be the case for a while, but unless we explicitly say otherwise, please assume we haven't given up on any of these story threads!  The project remains very much alive, even if our time is a bit more limited now than it was back in the Spring.

Quote from: Mentirius on August 10, 2020, 04:30:34 PMI realise we've gotten a bit patchy about the regularity of our IC posts...

Case in point: this next post is taking longer than expected to finish off.  I'm still working on it but have revised the ETA to "as soon as humanly possible".  Sorry all.  I can at least guarantee there will be plenty of it when it comes.

Yes, to add to this. Much work drama and many real life things have prevented a regular discourse and regular chippings away at my current storylines. Regular service to be resumed as soon as real life stops being a jerk.

I've posted on the Terra thread - this instalment is called The Hidden Sword, and forms the first half of a two-part story in which Amaurn must leave the Inquisitorial Fortress in pursuit of Ymaar.  I'm afraid this half is all stalking and scene setting, but the payoff has been written and polished.  I'll put that up next weekend for sure.

This vision of Terra is an earnest effort to stay true to all the sources I've encountered, though I can't promise I got it completely right.  Most of our tale is intentionally set "in the cracks" of it all, so hopefully there's room for a bit of improvisation.  Amaurn is hardly a reliable narrator anyway, so if I have made any flawed assumptions he can take the blame!

The second half of Amaurn/Ymaar is up...I'm calling this one Invincible.  A very violent post all around.  I hope it was worth the build-up!

It might be a little while until the next instalment on the Terra thread after this, as I'm currently figuring out another Rahn episode for The Keeping of Secrets, while Ben has more DuBois flashback revelations in the pipeline for The Ghost Worlds, but this is by no means the end for the thread.

So, we're back after a moderate hiatus.  Ben has more material in the works, and I've just added a new Inquisitor Rahn instalment to The Keeping of Secrets - a retrospective focused on his early training back in M41, entitled "Welcome to the Inquisition".  I realise we use the word "Welcome" in our titles a lot but hey, the phrase ended up as a motif at some stage and I couldn't resist another reference, incorrigible cheese addict that I am...

Today's IC post is the start of a lengthy new sequence split into five segments, the rest of which will be set mostly in the present, comprising an extended story arc within the thread.  Next week I'll be bringing back a formidable old villain from the second Amon Dull Saga, against whom Rahn and the rest of Redacted's crew will be set.  All this has already been written, although given it has taken me several months to do it, I appreciate that any regular readers might reasonably have given this thread up for dead by now (the forum even asked me if I was sure I wanted to resurrect an out-of-date topic when I made the post!)  Anyway, here's hoping there's at least one of you out there who still keeps the faith, and if not then no hard feelings. 

Long live the In Character board!

New "present day" post up on The Keeping of Secrets, featuring Inquisitor Rahn's first attempt to interrogate a problematic prisoner...there is plenty to more to come from this arc, but hopefully this segment should give an idea of what he might be in for next time.

Full disclosure here: this villain I've brought back from the old AD2 project is not one of my own creations.  Credit for the original character, who I'll try to avoid naming on the OOC thread in case of overt spoilers, goes to Inquisitor_Sargoth, a fine writer and one of our main collaborators back then.  If you fancy delving into the character's background, check out A History of Violence followed by Blood, Pain & Darkness within the Conclave Archive.  As the character was last seen IC being recruited by Balkoth at the end of M41, it did feel appropriate to explore what happened to him after that, and I feel like he makes a good foil for Rahn, but I didn't actually get permission to use him here.  Sargoth, if you end up reading this - thank you for the inspiration, and sorry for the shameless appropriation!

I've just posted the finale to the Pain & Purpose arc on The Keeping of Secrets - this entry is entitled "The Toll", and is spread over three posts by reason of being absurdly long.  For anyone who read the previous instalments, I hope this is a satisfying conclusion.

This may be the end for the arc, but we have plenty more material planned for the thread, and the wider project remains alive and kicking.  I'm afraid I haven't finished the next entry yet but writing is in progress and I will get it up as soon as I can. 

Ave Balkoth

EDIT: Coincidentally, the last part of The Toll was my 100th post on this iteration of the forum...I finally got my OOC Inquisitor's Seal! ;D

Lines of communication have been restored after appropriate sacred unguents and violence were applied to the machinery that disobeyed the commands of the most holy machine spirit. Works are in progress.