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...)
