BL Mysteries

[b1soul]

@DukeLeto

 

"I think the OP was about mysteries per se rather than a specific imprint or story style. The question was what mysteries (being mysterious by virtue that we know little or nothing beyond a codex timeline entry or something) are people interested in.

 

The thread kinda started heading down the book series/imprint route and we all (inc me) got excited about DAoT and whether that should be a series (or not)."

 

It sounds like the imprint I'm interested in would be something like WH40K Origins or WH40K Tales

[DukeLeto69]

@DC has already made good points regarding DAoT. Black Library only has so much capacity to release novels/shorts etc and it would make more sense (to me) to focus those efforts on content that ties in very strongly to the known IP and game setting.

 

DAoT would be so "alien" to what we are familiar with in W40k as to be completely different. There are countless Sci Fi books out there that any of us can choose to be a proxy for DAoT if we wanted to. Personally I want all that stuff to stay in the mysterious dark age past (having been burned sooooo badly by Dune and Butlerian Jihad) and focus on the 10,000yrs between HH and DI which is more than enough and fits better with the known IP.

[Red_Shift]

Yeah...that's what the wikia says, seems reliable though based on what I've heard posters mention

Perhaps some of the surviving Iron Men got really good at impersonating humans...perhaps an Iron Man with more benevolent programming, who was designed for more academic pursuits. Who knows...maybe a radical Inquisitor has one in his retine without anyone outside knowing its true nature. Or maybe he disguises it as an advanced servitor/cogitator

You should read "ancient history" by Andy Chambers, which details a lot of the men of iron, men of stone stuff - narrated by an old sailer with a half mechanical skull which is heavily implied to be some kind of ancient parasitic machine intelligence. There's loads of room for those kind of characters in 40k and I hope warhammer horror goes into those ancient mysteries a little.

[Plasmablasts]

Just going back to the original topic, a couple of the mysteries for me are:

 

1) What would happen if the Grey Knights enacted the Terminus Decree?

 

2) What interactions have there been between humanity and the Necrontyr in the past? The Pariah gene, the C’tan phase sword and the Tesseract Labyrinths possessed by the Grey Knights are all (or have previously been) linked with the Necrons.

[b1soul]

@Red_Shift

 

"You should read "ancient history" by Andy Chambers, which details a lot of the men of iron, men of stone stuff"

 

Thanks a alot for the suggestion. Apparently it's in the old Dark Imperium and Let the Galaxy Burn anthologies.

 

Has there been confirmation that the Men of Stone are silicon-based replicants?

[Mellow]

If the Grey Knights enacted the terminus decree I suspect that the device that Vulkan made and slotted into the Throne would cause large explosive death to the whole of Terra.

[b1soul]

How does enacting the terminus decree help the Imperium?

 

Is it a last-ditch mutual kill in the event Terra is overrun?

[Lord_Caerolion]

I've always been of the opinion that it's an "off-switch" to potentially birth the Star-Child, which is left as a last resort in case it doesn't work.

[Xisor]

I've always been of the opinion that it's an "off-switch" to potentially birth the Star-Child, which is left as a last resort in case it doesn't work.

What happens when a Genestealer cult gets to Terra?

 

What happens when Genestealer magi start being fed into the Golden Throne, into the Astronomican?

 

----

 

I'm increasingly fond of the idea that the Pariah gene and the Sensei/Perpetuals are two sides of the same genetic coin.

 

It puts the Sisters of Silence in a fascinating position, trapped between the Emperor and, potentially, the machinations of the C'tan, and the Illuminati (ye olde Cabal).

 

And what's that, you say?

 

There's that alien dead god who thrives on psychic sacrifice to be the antithesis of Chaos who is able bit dubious and seems to be the result of a shadow conspiracy of 'enlighted' and dedicated minds? A conspiracy with a honking great =][= on the shoulder plate...? Where this conspiratorial gathering may have been present at the death and rebirth of a child of the Emperor, who may using said child to regather the other children of the Emperor to their auspices, so that one day the ultimate sacrifice may be made, to "kill" the old and bring forth the new?

 

To kill all Aeldari and in doing so, defeat Chaos for all eternity by bringing forth the birth of something new?

 

To, at the moment of the Emperor's death, sacrifice his prodigal children, scions and legacy? - the Custodes, the Sisters of Silence,the Perpetuals, and the Grey Knights, the Primarchs, together in making the ultimate sacrifice?

 

To bring forth the Star Child, Ynnead?

 

The new god who is definitely not the punchline to a twisted joke on the part of the dark Guardians of the Black Library, who categorically don't have a reputation for leaving rubes in their wake that make Herr Doktor Faustus seem like he had prescient attention to fine contractual detail?

 

 

Sometimes I wonder if maybe I should probably get a tinfoil hat, or two.

[b1soul]

Are the "Sensei" in the old lore and the "Perpetuals" in the new lore the same thing?

 

 

Or are the Sensei the Emp's descendants, which you means the Emp shagged women

 

EDIT:

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Sensei

 

Wow...seems like Perpetuals are a retcon of the Sensei

[Mellow]

It’s been a theory for quite some time but Ollanius is older than the Emperor so he therefore can’t be his child.

[Xisor]

The expansion, in my mind, is that the Emperor's lineage, what sets him apart from the rest of humanity, is wrapped up in the binding of the Pariah Gene (I like the idea of the SoS being a form of Sensei - the "hidden from His psychic sight" element lines up pleasingly, for me), and whatever makes a Perpetual perpetuate.

 

In that respect, in the really old lore, the Perpetuals are more like the pre-Emperor shamans.

 

But, given that it's only a temporal distinction that separates "ancestor" from "inheritor", the arrow of time, then I think distinguishing between the mad-old ideas of Shamans and Sensei can be sort-of set aside.

 

Or rather: shuffled in. The gulf of time, and the ability to factionalise and schism, to me makes it 'nice' (if vague) to think of the Shamans and Sensei as both Perpetuals and Pariahs.

 

Same way that, really, 'The Illuminati' are nowadays "just" the Cabal.

 

E.g., I'd the Emperor is only distinct because of his singular character and the deeds surrounding his life, that genetically he's not dissimilar to the people that are Perpetuals, or Pariahs, (or carry the necessary genetic markers to allow such feats), then all I'm really pointing at is the branches feeding into and out from, and indeed, *around* The Emperor, e.g. his cousins.

 

It was said that all the Shamans died in creating the Emperor, but that's fairly hefty (and BORING!) Narrator license.

 

So what if it were only the active ones? The ones that were known about, "registered", in pre-Emperor days.

 

All seems plausible to me, just a matter of pinning down some canon lines, or that at least allude to it, and weaving a more interesting story around it.

 

Origin stories: tedious, in principle. Might as well hark back to Kipling's Just-So.

 

Blasts-from-the-past: excellent. Surely we all knew the Emperor had a long-lost twin sister?!

[b1soul]

"Ollanius is older than the Emperor."

 

We don't know that...

 

The Emp was born around Neolithic times

 

Oll was an adult in Bronze Age

 

Kinda unclear who is older

[Mellow]

Ollanius was born 15,000BC

 

The Emperor was born 8,000BC

 

That’s 7,000 years of pretty clear.

[Rob P]

Is this ''Neolithic times'' from the dubious vision in MOM? Or elsewhere?

[Knockagh]

Ollanius was born 15,000BC

 

The Emperor was born 8,000BC

 

That’s 7,000 years of pretty clear.

Clearly an uncle. The timing seems right. Can you imagine a Bronze Age family wedding. Oll drunk in the corner with the emperor running about trying to steel some champagne. Stone cups of course.

[Xisor]

 

Ollanius was born 15,000BC

 

The Emperor was born 8,000BC

 

That’s 7,000 years of pretty clear.

Clearly an uncle. The timing seems right. Can you imagine a Bronze Age family wedding. Oll drunk in the corner with the emperor running about trying to steel some champagne. Stone cups of course.

Now we're getting somewhere!

 

Who wants a DAoT series when you could get a high-fantasy, galaxy-spanning, hunter-gather/early-settler Shaman 'Dawn of Humanity' series?

 

Not all the habitable world were Terraformed that way.

 

And the Emperor was able to drag a (shard of the?) Void Dragon to Mars in pre-medieval time.

 

I'm improbably cheery about this idea!

[b1soul]

@ Mellow

 

Where did you get the 15,000BC figure from?

[Mellow]

The audio drama Perpetual. Oll estimates he is around 45,000 years old by the time of he Heresy.

 

So that for me is newer lore than the Emperor being born in 8,000BC. Whether that date gets retconned or updated in any novel printed from now is anyone’s guess.

[Rob P]

For DAoT you could just pick any sci fi out there and say that it could be the DAoT. I mean, I love the idea that Event Horizon could be set in the 40k universe and that's set not far from now.

 

In terms of mysteries, i'm not after a specific thing, but I do like the idea of stories set between 30k and 40k that add great new massive arcs (e.g. The Beast Arises). There are literally a thousand big stories that could fit into that 10k years.

 

On the other hand, I am a little torn re the importance of the Horus Heresy and how it led to the stagnation of the Imperium and how that doesn't quite have the same impact when you have 10k years of 'not the inevitable 40k' i.e. self made disasters for the Imperium.

[DukeLeto69]

For DAoT you could just pick any sci fi out there and say that it could be the DAoT. I mean, I love the idea that Event Horizon could be set in the 40k universe and that's set not far from now.

 

In terms of mysteries, i'm not after a specific thing, but I do like the idea of stories set between 30k and 40k that add great new massive arcs (e.g. The Beast Arises). There are literally a thousand big stories that could fit into that 10k years.

 

On the other hand, I am a little torn re the importance of the Horus Heresy and how it led to the stagnation of the Imperium and how that doesn't quite have the same impact when you have 10k years of 'not the inevitable 40k' i.e. self made disasters for the Imperium.

Yep in my head cannon Event Horizon is most definitely set in the same universe as W40k but thousands of years earlier before anyone knew about or understood the warp and therefore before the invention of the Gellar Field.

 

Timeline between 30k and 40k has tonnes of events that could/should be explored by BL. The biggest that jumps out for me is The Apostasy era.

[DarkChaplain]

I'd honestly just like a Beast Arises style Badab War series.

 

Maybe every other month, keeping it running for two years to allow for the authors to actually work things out with one another and the editors to avoid the pitfalls of TBA. It also needs to be handled with a HH-style meeting of involved authors to actually nail down the key points, characters and direction, to avoid characters disappearing between novels or sudden shifts in direction (like the Men of Iron getting removed for Sisters of Silence and Deathwatch).

 

With something like the Badab War, you thankfully already have established background material, unlike with the Beast where it was a relatively blank slate, and only introduced "recently" in the timelines as a reference preparing for the series, before it was put on ice for years due to management changes. So getting a good overview of what needs to happen and who was involved in what should be much easier, while having the authors working out twists as a group to properly prepare for them.

It'd also allow for a lot more perspective shifts than TBA allowed itself, since many Chapters and forces were involved, while the war was still contained in one region rather than all over the galaxy, with one protagonist Chapter at the center and only sidelong mentions of the rest of the Adeptus Astartes...

 

Give me a proper 12 book series detailing Lufgt Huron and the Astral Claws' fall from grace. Have Robbie MacNiven contribute Carcharodons, focused on Tyberos the Red Wake. Give Guy Haley a reason to bring back his Novamarines. Flesh out the Red Scorpions, Mantis Warriors, Lamenters, Minotaurs etc. There are so few "traditional" Chapters involved in the Badab War as we know it (no Blood Angels, no Space Wolves, Ultramarines, Dark Angels, Imperial Fists, only Salamanders really) that it'd be a really fresh sheet of paper for authors to draw on.

[bluntblade]

I'd hand the Lamenters to AD-B, for starters. Then put Wraight and French in the mix too, ideally handling the Astral Claws and Red Scorpions.

 

And keep Kyme away from it, except in an editorial capacity. Sallies need room to grow.

[Mellow]

I’m glad they didn’t put the iron men in TBA as they would be insanely powerful and even if they managed to neutralise the threat of the Orks humanity would have no real way to get rid of them a second time.

[Mellow]

I really like the idea of Badab war though. Any new series should be already mostly written and then released on a book per month time frame. Anything longer and I end up forgetting half of what they wrote in the earlier movels.