Hello! I'm back too!
I don't know how much time I'll have.
For those who don't know, I'm a bit second/third-generation on all this (in that I didn't start until the Conclave was on the Specialist Games forum), although I have fairish idea of what happened beforehand. If anybody has a copy of 'Aboard Stark's Hope' (or whatever it was called), I found that a very good (extremely lengthy but very readable) introduction to everything. Here I'm looking at Charax, who I'm convinced has an awful lot of these files (though I'm not sure where).
In the meantime, you can get a very decontextualised introduction to the cast-as-it-was by reading the start of the thread which immediately succeeded Delan's Point, and which is definitely in Macabre's archive. I can't remember what it was called as I can't open .rars on this computer (I'm on a lunch break at work). I realise this isn't very helpful, but I will get more definite information this evening. In the meantime, there is a brief info-dump in 'New Friends, Old Enemies' - you want the conversation in which Mantis is talking to Sargoth and Karius, which is probably on the 2nd/3rd page (quite a lot of the thread consists of background-filling by myself and Sargoth for our own characters, but we were pretty peripheral to the major storyline when the Conclave petered out, so don't be too worried about that stuff. That said, Sargoth was surrounded by all kinds of prophetic stuff, so 'he just died at Delan's Point' would not be an appropriate outcome).
Generally speaking, though, if you're worried about continuity, just don't assume anything about the past. I think we're setting this 100-200 years after the original events.
If it helps, at the time these events came to their unresolved terminus, most of the characters were being drawn towards a meeting on a planet (or possibly moon, I can't remember) called Delan's Point. To oversimplify (really, really) radically, the factions were:
1) A daemon prince called Charax, who tended to intervene dramatically and unexpectedly;
2) AmonDull, the Big Bad, a daemon prince aiming to set himself up as a Chaos God;
3) A group of radical Inquisitors and their allies, all caught up (one way or another) with the legacy of an Inquisitor called Mentirius, who had vanquished AmonDull in his previous appearance;
4) A group of Puritans (and purported Puritans) called the Puritan Council, who didn't care or know much about AmonDull, but were very excited about the idea of destroying a large gathering of radicals, heretics and Xenos allies
[5) A mysterious figure called Landen Dosdamt, whose storyline never progressed very much and whose involvement in all this was a little unclear to me, but whose character development threads exhibited some of the best writing on the Conclave]
The Puritan Council were mostly from my generation. The major players amongst the radicals were very much from the previous generation, although there was a significant group from my generation. Most users had characters on both sides. At the time of cessation, the newer generation (in OOC terms) of radicals had joined the older generation on Delan's Point, where they were meeting to discuss the renewed AmonDull threat. The Puritan Council were also heading towards Delan's Point in great force, but Charax beat them to it and was in the process of killing lots of people.
The background is actually a great deal more extrensive than all this implies, and goes all the way back to something called the Nexus Schism, which I am pretty unqualified to describe (though I think it would be fair to say that it was definitely). There is definitely a recap thread somewhere on this very ancient-history stuff.
