This pleases me greatly.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Isn't there one of the founding Space Marines who is literally called "Corvus Corax"? I assume if Corwin had been taking on a pro-wrestling alias in a Western rather than Asian milieu, he'd have gone with that rather than Watari Karasu. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The "HERO OF THE IMPERIUM" part, meanwhile, is a reference to the in-universe books about Ciaphas Cain. These books are, essentially, a cross between Flashman and Blackadder.
Cain is a complete and utter coward, is also self-loathing because of this, AND constantly end up in situations where he HAS to be "brave" to stay alive. These situations have given him the title of "Hero of the Imperium", much like "Hero of the Soviet", to his own disgust. See also the "Commissar" part. Very much in the "Morale officer" sense of the word from the Soviet.
Being an utter coward, as noted, the fact that his involuntary heroism gets him sent to progressively worse and worse warzones in a universe that is already as grim-dark as it gets? Forces him to ever greater heights of "bravery" in order to protect himself and what few comforts he can get.

The books are very much tongue-in-cheek, written as his VERY VERY high-level, not for actual publishing, memoirs. Essentially, the true stories that people are NOT to find out about. And, in various places around the internet, his title is deliberately all-capped as seen above, in order to poke even more fun at poor Ciaphas.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

They're pretty fun reads IMO.

But yeah, more or less this, tho with Corwin one assumes it would be the Family I-Don't-Know-How-It-Happened-But-There-I-Was gene more than cowardice having him fall into situations requiring his notable attributes of courage, steadfastness, etc.

"So, no shit, there I was, surrounded by 145 Earthforce enforcers..."

Peter Eng
--
Yeah, I've listened to the adventures of the All-Guardsmen party.

My first thought on this is of a man wandering the galaxy, getting into trouble everywhere he goes, and righting wrongs in order to get out of trouble, as he searches for a place miserable and evil enough that he can call it home.

Peter Eng
--
"Orron IV wasn't miserable enough for you?!"
"Too clean."

Adapted from the end of S4E5 Red Dwarf (Dimension Jump)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

The biggest reason I'm saying that this hypothetical Marine should be a Lamenter, though, is this: in the grim darkness of the far future, there are no heroes, only darkness and the laughter of thirsting gods. This is an old quote from the setting, and in the case of the Lamenters chapter it's just not true. While other Space Marines will simply stamp civilian humans flat if they're in the way, the Lamenters actually fight to protect them. In a universe where heroism is a foolish endeavour and honour is as dead as the guy on the big shiny chair, the Lamenters fight like... well, they fight like Eyrie guys.

The best example is the defence of Slaughterhouse III during the Corinth Crusade. This was a mining planet overrun by Orks that had human slaves on it, but it was out of the way of the main thrust of the Crusade. The Lamenters found out and petitioned the Crusade leader to try and save the planet. They were granted permission on the understanding that they wouldn't get any reinforcements or support from the other Imperium forces in the Crusade. So... they didn't. They just sent three hundred Marines to the planet, along with one battleship and its escorts. And... they won! They infiltrated the camps, destroyed the Ork orbital defences, and freed all the slaves. Slight problem: they hadn's realized just how many human slaves the Orks had captured, and it was impossible to get them all off-world. The Chapter's Techmarines tried to jury-rig some captured Ork battleships so they could be used as transports, but even then there just wasn't enough space to get the slaves free. The Lamenters force was down to 200 surviving Marines at this point, and they were having to repel endless waves of Orks. So they tried, and tried, and tried, buying as much time as they could. The Lamenters were then presented with a horrifying solution by the freed slaves: they'd secreted bombs throughout the planet's mines, and the slaves were willing to set them off, sacrificing themselves to die free. The Lamenters had no choice but to let them; by the time the offer was made, they were down to less than a hundred Marines, and in addition to the Orks on the planet's surface, more were coming from space. Slaughterhouse III was utterly ravaged within minutes, unusable to the Orks and setting off a chain of infighting. Meanwhile, the Lamenters got away with nearly four hundred thousand freed slaves. By the standards of the Imperium, it was a glorious victory. To the Lamenters, it was defeat in all but name; they had gone to save lives, and nine tenths of the people they'd tried to save were dead in the dark. Because of that, they refused an enormously important battle honour - and this is 40K, so the battle honour was also a relic of ancient technology that could generate massively durable personal energy shields. Rather than win them plaudits for their honour, this actually made other Space Marines like the Lamenters less; the other chapters thought they were disrespecting the people who had offered them the reward.

What I'm saying is that the Lamenters don't act like normal Space Marines. They have these weird, frightening things like "morals" and "ethics" that simply get in the way of a marine's normal heretic-purging and xenos-scum-annihilating duties. So if you're going to have one Space Marine bring the joys of bolter and chainsword to the UF-verse's very shittiest places... a Lamenter is the one who'd actually bother. The rest would probably just see humanity coexisting with aliens and start blasting until Gryphon had to mince the guy out of existence.

TL;DR: The Lamenters Chapter needs to go in the Gryphon Home For Abused Characters

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Given the preponderance of high-tech flamethrowers in 40K, a fight between an Asagiri Katsujinkenryu disciple and a Sister Of Battle would actually be a really hard one to call...

I get the feeling one of them might get along well with the Wrex types.

>
>Given the preponderance of high-tech flamethrowers in 40K, a
>fight between an Asagiri Katsujinkenryu disciple and a Sister Of
>Battle would actually be a really hard one to call...

Isn't Juniper a pyrokinetic?

That'd be cinematic as hell, heh.

"Venerable Brother-Sergeant Aramis of the Third Company of the Lamenters Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, Hero of the Penitent Crusade, Defender of Corinth."

"Wrex."

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Pyrokinetic and telekinetic. I suppose she could just pick the Sister up and throw her away…

“Juni-chan, where’s the crazy woman in the silly armor?”
“Neck-deep in the cranberry bog, I think. I wasn’t really paying that much attention.”

--
Jen Dantes - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lady of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

"You're right about the bog, but she's in it up to her ankles."
"How is that possible - oh."

Peter Eng
--
Google says a cranberry bog is seven to ten feet deep.

(It also made me think I should maybe go and watch the series he and Lewis did a few years ago playing Space Hulk Tactics, but that's a separate problem. :)

>If this was a serious attempt, I'd recommend the guy be a
>dimensionally-displaced member of the Lamenters chapter. The Lamenters
>are very much the chew toys of the Imperium.
(snip)
>In a universe where heroism is a
>foolish endeavour and honour is as dead as the guy on the big shiny
>chair, the Lamenters fight like... well, they fight like Eyrie guys.
(snip)
>So if you're going
>to have one Space Marine bring the joys of bolter and chainsword to
>the UF-verse's very shittiest places... a Lamenter is the one who'd
>actually bother.

With the above for reference, I can kind of see how this would probably go down. I don't know for sure that I'll do it—I've got a whole raft of things I want to try and pick back up now that the semester's over and I can breathe a bit—but it seems like it would be just about workable if the wind blew the right way.

>The rest would probably just see humanity coexisting
>with aliens and start blasting until Gryphon had to mince the guy out
>of existence.

It strikes me that this would basically be a cranked-to-11 version of that scene from Batman: Year One where Jim Gordon sizes up his crooked colleague of whose shit he has had enough.

>TL;DR: The Lamenters Chapter needs to go in the Gryphon Home For
>Abused Characters

They do seem like strong candidates.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Aren't Space Marines, like, eight feet tall with obvious cyborg bits? Nobody's going to be mistaking G for one of those anytime soon. (As for the other, his "dead god-emperor" impression is notoriously unconvincing, mainly on account of he is none of those things. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

If you believe some of his history, he's known as being powerfully charismatic, with people following him almost fanatically, brilliant, psychically active, having wandered the world and possibly the galaxy during his time, communing with and even cowing Gods...There's talk that splinters of his psyche have ended up who *knows* where....

Stop me if you're heard this before :)

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

meanwhile the god-emperor of mankind is living in a one-bedroom apartment with three roommates and works at the local dave and buster's. this is his penance. a really sunburnt nerdy kid with an eyepatch puked on his shoes and hit him in the knee with a bowling ball. ave imperator. gloria in excelsis terra. now go clean the toddler piss out of the ball pit.

"Aren't you a little short for a Space Marine?"

Zoner didn't even dignify that comment with a response.

Peter Eng
--
Okay, MZ doesn't even have enough obvious cyborg bits.

Zoner is the 5th Chaos God. The one the others fear. :)

An inconceivable amount of posturing.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

Craig

----------------------------
IAMTW-Nominated Author

Author of the Battletech Novels, Icons of War and Elements of
Treason: Duty

Co-author of Four Outcast Ops novels -- African Firestorm, Red Ice,
Watchlist, and Shadow Government.

Honestly, I was just talking about this with a friend. I can take 40K in small doses (I have fond memories of the original Dawn of War!) but I can't really call myself a fan because I hate all the factions. My friend's suggestion was to just turn my brain off and revel in the insanity for a bit, but eh. Hard for me to do.

As another friend told me many years ago (paraphrased), "The good guys are fascists and communists because the bad guys are Sauron." Entirely accurate, but doesn't make the fascists or communists people I would want to identify with!

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Particularly frustrating to me because an essential moral lesson of The Lord of the Rings, front and center in the text and we know (from his letters) that Tolkien put it there on purpose, is that even if your opponent is the Devil incarnate or local equivalent, going fascist will only make the situation even worse.

The ultra fascism is just about the only thing *keeping* it all from getting worse. The elves will sacrifice whole sectors to save a worldship, the Tau will welcome you into the fold, then sterilize you, the Necron simply want everything living to not be, the Tyranid want to *eat* everything living, and will Innsmouth a world to help that along, and Chaos feeds on change,, anger and violence, pestilence and decay, and all forms of excess, Cenobite style, depending on which god you’re talking about.

And Humans are targeted by all of them, with the last four drawing and being drawn to humans because of how the Warp works.

(As for Orks, it kinda depends. Might get enslaved, might just get murdered for being too soft and thus no fun, might get eaten...generally not a good time regardless)

All that said, the term good guys is *extremely* relative. There’s like, three guys (and the Lamenters) in the entire 40K canon that aren’t *complete* assholes, and ones an absolute coward with Incredible luck (both good and bad), one is the next thing to a literal angel (and is also unbelievably dead), and I can’t think of a third off the top of my head.

I think anybody who actually proclaims that the Imperium is capital-g Good should be asked for clarification, possibly while backing away very slowly, but for that universe, they’re kind of the best option there currently is. Says a lot about how screwed the 40K universe is, I think.

Yeah, see, Tolkien's philosophy rejects that premise. Given a choice of two terrible options you have a moral duty to find a third one. He does put his thumb on the scales to the extent that Eru Iluvatar is always looking for Mysterious Ways™ to help out someone who is earnestly in pursuit of that third option. The WH40K setting explicitly doesn't have that ... but, he would say, you still have to try.

To haul it back around to vague relevance to UF, I can imagine that one result of having that one Space Marine get crossripped into UF might be that a few galactic do-gooders decide to take a trip back to WH40K-verse and Fix It. Probably not Gryphon, Utena, or any of the other leads, they have too much on their plate already. If I were writing it (which I ain't) it would be Illyana Rasputinya's idea, with Hellboy and some of the other BPRD regulars roped into it. Think Shepard's 11 but much heavier on the supernatural mojo, because you're right, the first thing that needs to happen is someone needs to establish some limits on what Chaos is capable of.

Having typed that, it occurs to me that Anthy might have some ideas on how to go about it...

This is it exactly. The setting is written such that Chaos is so absurdly overpowered that literally nothing can be done in the long term, that it's a constant struggle just to run the red queen's race. That kind of writing is I'm sure very grimdark but frankly comes off as artificial angst. There's no way to suppress Warp corruption? No way to detect it outside obvious physical manifestations?

Then, too, the idea that freedom of thought encourages corruption seems like lazy writing in the face of countless examples of Imperium fascism driving humans straight into Chaos' arms.

>
>Having typed that, it occurs to me that Anthy might have some ideas on
>how to go about it...

Eh, they're just eldritch horrors. Spank them and send them to bed without supper.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

"Go! To! Your! Room! ... I can't believe that worked."

--G.
"Oh no." "What?" "I sent him to his room. ... This is his room."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I suspect most of the Æsir would take the view that the root cause of the Grim Darkness of the Far Future's problem is that their universe only has evil gods. There's no celestial balance of power and/or terror; it's just the jötnar, the dökkalfr, the svirfneblin, and the legions of Niflheim and Muspelheim all doing whatever the fuck they please, everywhere, all the time. The closest they ever came to a founding divinity figure like Odin was the Emperor, and instead of fathering the Æsir and uniting the other gods of Asgard into a pantheon fit to oppose Surtr and his minions, the best he could come up with was 20 morally-ambiguous beefers in power armor.

(Also, the fact that the plane where the gods and demons live is also hyperspace and where magic/psionic power comes from is really awkward and problematic. Skuld and the rest of the gang at the Celestial Operations Bureau would say that whoever designed that cosmology was either incompetent or just inexcusably lazy. The whole place needs to be swapped to a new, more intelligently designed server. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"This what happens when you install Windows ME on Yggdrasil..."

The other thing about the Emperor is he explicitly did NOT want to become a divine figurehead. My imperfect understanding is he realized that the Warp is just a supernatural reflection of the minds of sentient beings, and tried to create a ruthlessly atheist society so as to take power away from the Warp. Of course the minute he died he was made into a god figure because, of course, power.

>
>(Also, the fact that the plane where the gods and demons live is also
>hyperspace and where magic/psionic power comes from is really
>awkward and problematic. Skuld and the rest of the gang at the
>Celestial Operations Bureau would say that whoever designed that
>cosmology was either incompetent or just inexcusably lazy. The whole
>place needs to be swapped to a new, more intelligently designed
>server. :)

I still can't shake the feeling that the solution is to create a true sense of hope in the galaxy. Massive positive feelings in the most cliche anime ending sort of way. Silly, I know. Lazy writing? Usually. (A video game expansion came out recently where it was actually done fairly well, but...still. Easy to screw up.)

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Close! That seems to have been his end goal as far as folks can tell - that wouldn’t have really *solved* anything, but it would have helped.

(Incidentally, The Chaos Gods *do* also represent good aspects, but, like the Force, negative emotions are easier and more satisfying for most involved.)

> Of course the minute he died he was made into a god figure because, of course, power.

Not quite, here, see, one of the Primarchs was like, ultra religious, and he wrote a book about how Big Daddy E was a God. He’d go around spreading this book and teaching, *directly* against E’s wishes, and got yelled at a few times for it. After the Heresy (Lorgar, the religious one, was on the Heresy side, by the way) the book was found and people were like ‘Yeah, Emps WAS divine, wasn’t he?’ And things snowballed from there. I think it took a few thousand years before the Imperial Cult took over good and proper.

> I still can't shake the feeling that the solution is to create a true sense of hope in the galaxy.
> Massive positive feelings in the most cliche anime ending sort of way. Silly, I know. Lazy writing?
> Usually. (A video game expansion came out recently where it was actually done fairly well,
> but...still. Easy to screw up.)

That would be pretty much impossible to do while there’s still so many existential threats floating around. And also mildly dangerous. The last time a someone devoted a lot of their people’s emotional energy and desires to one thing, the Eldar birthed Slaanesh, the Prince Of Excess, tore a hole into psychic hyperspace hell, wiping out about 70% of their species and dragging something like 2% of the galaxy into the tear. Not to say it *can’t* work, but there’s risks.

Of course, all this is mainly so that the tagline Of “In the 41st millennium, there is only war” can be made true. It’s all honestly a bit bleak for me, not a big fan of much of it. I’m not *defending* much of this stuff, I’m just a horrible pedant about in-world consistency, I suppose.

I think I ought to clarify some stuff about the 40K Lore here. Buckle up everyone, it's time for another exciting episode of Traitor Being A Gigantic Fucking Dork.

Not only (as was pointed out elsewhere) did the Emperor not want to be a god for reasons of starving the Chaos Gods, the Emperor is just as bad as the rest of the clown show. He's a literally omnicidal fascist dictator who effectively did nothing but screw over every other species in the galaxy. Not only that, but the Imperial Truth of strict atheism only really applied when it suited the Emperor's needs; the cults on Fenris were fine, the people worshipping Sanguinius on Baal were fine, and so on. No, for my money, I'd wager the Æsir would think Big E was just one more evil deity, just one with a more tangible physical presence than the others. And with a much bigger, much shinier chair.

No, the real problem is the Old Ones. See, those guys were actual gods, or at least close enough for government work. It was them who created the Aeldari (space elves), the Orks (space... guess), and other stuff besides. They even designed something called the Akashic Records, which is a psychic library of past and future technologies that they used to build their empire among the stars. Why'd they do all that? Because they wound up fighting a war against eldritch horrors that lived in the cores of stars who conned an otherwise innocent race of terminal cancer patients into becoming robot skellingtons.

Warhammer 40,000 is a very serious and sensible setting.

Basically, by the standards of the Æsir as seen in UF, the Old Ones were the founding divinity figures of most of the major players in the galaxy, a bunch of good gods arrayed against the evil of the C'Tan. Aaaaand they lost. Badly. They sowed the seeds of their own destruction too. The Necrontyr initially asked the Old Ones for help with their "we would like to not die at forty full of so many tumours we're legally a meatball marinara sub" problem, and it was only after they were rebuffed that they started listening to the C'Tan. It was the C'Tan who transferred the souls of every single Necrontyr into deathless silver warriors, and they did so in a way that makes Mondasian cyber-conversion look like getting a tattoo of a robot. The Necrons, as they are now, are almost completely soulless, just personality engrams running on eternal hardware. Even then, despite all that, they managed to break free and shatter their eldritch gods with a surprise attack at the moment the things were at their strongest (which, not gonna lie, that's a very Eyrie move) and keep the pieces in giant Lament Configurations because fuck those guys.

This was all something called the War In Heaven, because anything involving two sets of ancient precursor empires throwing down is automatically called the War In Heaven. It took place sixty MILLION years prior to the 40K setting. The Old Ones are all dead or KIA, their war turned magic hyperspace into Super Turbo Fuck You Land, and the C'Tan managed to screw everything up so badly that the universe never recovered. Ragnarok came and went and the wolf ate the sun; it just happened to give the wolf terminal food poisoning.

The Aeldari survived by being master psychics and using the webway to build beautiful societies. The Orks survived by being genetically-engineered bioweapons that are pretty much impossible to eradicate. Then, about ten thousand years prior to 40K, the Aeldari did what we in the trade call A Little Fucky-Wucky. See, the War In Heaven was what created the Chaos Gods - but only three of them. Khorne, the god of blood and skulls and edgy 80s metal album covers; Tzeentch, the god of change and sorcery and pretending everything was your plan all along; and Nurgle, the god of stasis and decay and smelling like the wrong end of a seriously ill yak. If you know anything about the 40K setting, though, you know that there are four...

Sixty million years of pretty much total galactic supremacy, however, meant that the Aeldari were so bored that they sought ever more insane delights to amuse themselves. It's that amazing line from Trial Of A Time Lord: "Ten million years of uninterrupted power, that's what it takes to be really corrupt". Their partying, in fact, became such a gargantuan display of cosmically unhinged debauchery that it birthed a new Chaos God. Slaanesh, the Dark Prince, the god of excess and hedonism and absolutely terrifying fanfiction involving Hogwarts Castle getting tentacle-hentaied by the giant squid that lives in the lake. The Aeldari were such powerful psychics, and so omnipresent, and given to such powerful emotions, that they partied a new evil deity into existence. They were largely informed of their actions when the new deity blew a giant hole in space and ate hundreds of Aeldari planets.

I would like to reiterate that Warhammer 40,000 is a very serious and sensible setting.

This all went down at around the same time that the Emperor won his World's Best Dad award by letting his baby superhumans get scattered across the galaxy by the forces of the other three Chaos Gods. Eventually, he tracked them all down, which is something of a feat considering he wasn't completely certain how many he'd lost to begin with. Two of them he murdered after introducing them to the others. Of the rest, eight rebelled, nine stayed loyal to their totally indifferent father, and whatever the fuck Alpharius and Omegon were doing was anybody's guess, including theirs. This is the famous Horus Heresy, which only added to the general up-fuckery that's been going on for sixty million years in this hellhole of a galaxy.

And then it gets worse. The Immaterium felt shadows at the edges of the galaxy. Individual psykers had the feeling sardines get when a shark swims over them and blots out the sunlight with its terrible body. Then they appeared. Huge swarms of biological nightmares that adapted to whatever you threw at them, turning verdant worlds into barren, lifeless rockballs with all the terrible efficiency of an apex predator. These are the Tyranids, a hive mind species whose gestalt consciousness is so vast it drives people mad for just being near them. And because this place can never catch a damn break, the prevailing theory is that the Tyranids are running from something even gribblier.

Congratulations, you now have an potted history of Warhammer 40K. Everything sucks and is broken and broke because it sucked! Skuld and Corwin are taking a look at the source code for this place and finding new and exciting ways to hate! I didn't even talk about the fact that the only humans who make any technology are all accidentally worshipping one of the C'Tan, which is buried deep beneath the surface of Mars! Everything is terrible!

... And that's why I play T'au. They're the faction I think would fit easiest into the UF-Verse as a whole. Their most iconic unit is the XV-8 Crisis Battlesuit, which looks like something from Robotech crashed through a bunch of the more realistic Gundam shows and wound up in 40K by mistake. They're actively inventing new technology. Their response to aliens is to diplomatically invite them into their pluralistic, multicultural empire rather than nuke 'em til they glow and shoot 'em in the dark. They're by a VERY long way the most optimistic, hopeful, positive faction in the entire setting of Warhammer 40,000. This is why the new lore has the Ethereal ruling caste be literally mind-whammying the rest of the T'au via pheromone control for nefarious purposes and the Empire running a lot of shady-looking re-education camps.

That's how I think they'd fit into the UF-verse: as extremely dangerous villains. They're motivated by a higher purpose, their calling to serve each other and those around them in a framework called the Greater Good. Their best friends are the Kroot, mercenary bird-people who take on the characteristics of people they eat, and the Vespid, blue space wasps that use dangerously unstable crystals to zap people. Their cause is right and just, and if you disagree, well, their standard infantry longarm makes a DL-44 look like a paintball gun with a leaky gas cylinder. Anyone piloting a battlesuit gets to have something a lot bigger and shootier. The most common armament at that scale is the burst cannon, which is a GAU-8 if it shot plasma bursts instead of bullets and did so at ridiculous speeds. They're a roided-up Covenant with a bunch of varyingly-willing alien allies in tow and enough giant robots to give Clanners pause, all led by a council of inscrutable blue Jedi-looking motherfuckers. Unity of purpose, diversity of options, and enough firepower to level a mid-sized plane of existence. Even Gryphon would need at least a couple of weeks. =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

I'm gonna drop a link to the 40K wiki here. This is Commander Farsight. He's a good T'au, one who rejected the authority of the Ethereals. His mech suit is big and red and has a great big sword that chops people into little bits. I'm not saying he'd fit into UF? But aesthetically he fits in.

No, the third good guy, who I forgot about, is a specific Tau commander, named Shadowsun, who’s against the Ethereal Caste because of their bullshit ethereal smell mind control. And possibly a little bit possessed by a Chaos blade.

(Incidentally, as far as I can tell, that Tau lore with the ethereals pulling mind control stuff was there from like, the second edition they were in. I remember reading it WAY before Shadowsun rebelled)

The Tau are basically the covenant. Their designated melee guys, the Kroot, even bear a striking resemblance to Jackals.

Not entirely sure of the timeline on that, but there’s a well known tradition of Games Workshop cribbing ideas and getting cribbed from, so, either way.

Edit: Whoops, that’ll teach me to read almost everything and only glance at the last paragraph! Everything’s the same except this note saying I’m a dummy~

Edit 2 son of edit: wait, it’s *Farsight* not Shadowsun, you’re right, god I’m terrible even with fictional names.

Edit 3 edit harder: Also, your link is broken, with https://http/ being in front

> a genetically caste-based society
>following a caste which seemingly *didn’t exist* six or seven
>thousand years ago

This is true in the sense that the Ethereals were outside of traditional pre-unification T'au society, but describing the T'au Empire as "genetically caste-based" is a bit reductive, and mostly Games Workshop's fault. The T'au are essentially five distinct subspecies capable of extremely rapid adaptation, but "Caste" was the moniker chosen for them by 2000s GeeDubs basically Because Reasons. The Air Caste, for instance, were initially adapted to glide on thermal updrafts using membranous wing structures... but now they've adapted to voidfaring and low-gravity environments instead, as well as the stresses of fighter combat. There is a lot of intermingling between the four non-Ethereal castes, but much less between them and the Ethereals. It's essentially four differing nations coming together under the continued rule of a basically-unelected leadership class with no connection to the nations they rule over beyond feeling entitled to their obedience.

I have no idea why a British company would do that. None at all. None. =]

Also, saying the Ethereals didn't exist six or seven thousand years ago is an amusing turn of phrase because, well, neither did the rest of the T'au as we know them. six to seven millennia ago is M35, wherein the Imperium survey teams found a bunch of Stone Age xenos living on a single planet and marked it for routine colonization and purging. Then a Whole Buncha Shit Happened and the initiative got lost in the bureaucracy of the Imperium, and by the time the Imperium got back there the T'au had unified into an interstellar empire with extremely potent technology.

>They also have *no* goddamn idea what the hell a Chaos is

That's not the case. The T'au have contact with a lot of psychic, Warpfaring races; the most famous are the Nicassar, who have been described as "gigantic flattened-out polar bears" and whose existence as psykers the T'au keep very secret from the Imperium of Man. They do know about the Warp, and Chaos, and the threats of the Immaterium. They just view it, ironically, in much the same way as Eyrie characters would - a problem they can Science! their way out of.

Indeed, the Fourth Sphere Expansion (the T'au Empire expands all at once in big expansive blobbings called Spheres) used an experimental drive system for all their colony ships, and it... worked a little too well. It blasted the entire expansion fleet into the Warp, wherein they were becalmed and subjected to attacks by basically All The Daemons. Outside the Warp, the T'au gave up the fleet as a disastrous loss... until decades later, when comms beacons flashed up using their codes out of the giant space hole where the fleet had been eaten. It turned out they'd managed to get out of the Warp and were now massively far away from the rest of the Empire, but were connected by this stable anomaly. This became the Fifth Sphere Expansion, and it's actually going okay! Except for this minor problem where they've run into the Death Guard.

These guys, for the benefit of people who are not 40K Turbospods like myself, are the Space Marines who got corrupted by Nurgle the Plague God. Typhon, the Herald of Nurgle, is orchestrating a dramatic campaign of destruction against the Fifth Sphere Expansion, but the T'au are holding firm. Nurgle's plagues are at least partially daemonic in origin, but the problem with using them against the T'au is that they barely register in the Warp, so the daemons controlling the plagues don't have much traction and instead it's just a more conventional "I am spraying green ichor from literally every hole in my body and also my blood is full of evil flies, what do???" kind of plague - which the T'au, whose medical technology is incredibly advanced because they care about not suffering billions of needless casualties, are much better at dealing with than the previous victims of Typhon's plagues.

My point is, they definitely know about Chaos, and about fighting it, and about killing its adherents. Which is good! Screaming plague cultists are much safer when cauterized by rapid-fire plasma weaponry. =]

>No, the third good guy, who I forgot about, is a specific Tau
>commander, named Shadowsun

I know you already corrected this, but I have to say something about the name you picked: Commander Shadowsun is very much a T'au who believes in the Greater Good as espoused by the Ethereal Caste, and she and Farsight absolutely hate each other. He thinks she's the stooge of a corrupt regime that exists only to perpetuate Ethereal power, she thinks he's a traitor to his people who broke away from reasonable Ethereal rule to become a military despot. So confusing the two was just... very, very amusing to me. This is because I am a gigantic dork. =]

It's a shame, too, because Shadowsun's design? Is fucking rad as hell. Link below to an picture. =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

We hope you have enjoyed Pointless Nitpicking Theatre. =]

The castes, okay, I originally figured it was more like how bees or ants worked. You have the soldiers, the foragers, what have you.

With the Ethereals, what I meant was, they seemingly just *popped up* one day and united the various warring tribes of T'au. The lore I know (Which is just past 15 years old now) had one just walking out in the middle of a war between two groups and everyone just immediately stopping fighting and listening to them, with no records of anyone like this person before. Thus, 'didn't exist'.

Yeah, lore has *absolutely* continued past what I know about T'au and Chaos. They've clearly learned a lot.

Shadowsun really is awesome~ but that link doesn't work either, if you pull off everything past the .jpg it'll actually show on click-through~

EDIT TO ADD: Also, in my defense, I meant ‘genetically caste based’ to be versus the one that’s just...purely societal. “Your great great great great grandfather handled trash so your whole family can only ever handle trash” sort of arbitrariness. Just...wanted to say that.

Peter Eng
--
Appendix A:
...And Your Enemies Have Followed You Here.

I’m also fond of some of the memes, like the Angry Marines, or Cultist-chan. And of course the now, possibly forever defunct If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device.

(Check out Hunter the Parenting!)

That reminds me of a WH40K quest I once read on SufficientVelocity: In The Beginning, There Was Man, where the last remnants of humanity (including a down-to-the-last-minute resurgent Emperor) embark on an emergency exodus to a new universe -- the Starcraft universe.

Surely, this cannot go horribly wrong!

(actually, for a good portion of the quest, it didn't. Thanks to some very lucky dice rolls, at least two loyal primarchs made the journey with them, and the goddess Ynnead successfully incarnated and joined them on their exodus... plus a whole lot of other crazy stuff!)

Sadly, the quest itself is long dead, having ground to a halt in 2016.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

Given the way the UF multiversal cosmos is constructed, I feel like "keep those assholes well the fuck away from anything we're even vaguely attached to" may be one of the few things--possibly the only thing--on which the Q Continuum and the Time Lords have ever agreed to the point of active collaboration.

>Appendix A:
>...And Your Enemies Have Followed You Here.

Yeah, that's... a concern too.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

L.

Seriously, the whole setting being almost relentlessly grimdark where it isn't black comedy is the brand. That's the whole point. If you change that, it ceases to be 40k (IMO). And that's just fundamentally incompatible with UF (also IMO).

Honestly, the whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as something which was semi-recently made explicit canon in the DC multiverse, which is that there is this diseased corner of it that does nothing but spawn Batman-focused AUs that are so absurdly, egregiously wangsty that they're unsustainable - they collapse under their own weight. Which is both meta as hell and (again IMO) a very good description of a disturbingly large (or maybe just plain disturbing) number of Batman writers and/or fans. Fine, let them play in their four-letter-word-that-starts-with-S-but-isn't-sand box and keep them away from everyone else. :P

I wrote this a few years ago in a YouTube comment on a Lewis and Ben Space Hulk Tactics video, and I don't think I can top it:

"Every piece of WH40K lore I've ever seen has felt uncannily like poetry written surreptitiously in Social Studies class by a pubescent heavy metal enthusiast in about 1982. It has exactly that same combination of delirious pretension, Darqueness For Its Own Sake, and poorly conjugated Latin verbs."

--G.
mortus portus, brothers
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

also the hypothetical teen is British, so they're into punk and soccer (or at least the hooliganism) and doodling skulls and mohawks and CHAOS DETH SPIKY BITZ on everything.

That's an angle I hadn't considered. There is a certain resonance with the Norse creation mythos, the part where the sons of Borr slay the primeval giant Ymir and build the world from his corpse.

>(Skuld and the rest of the gang at the
>Celestial Operations Bureau would say that whoever designed that
>cosmology was either incompetent or just inexcusably lazy. The whole
>place needs to be swapped to a new, more intelligently designed
>server. :)

This was where I was going with "Anthy may have some ideas." The Trinity of Cephiro have some experience with overhauling a plane's fundamental cosmology.

(Having read the rest of the thread, though, I quite like the idea that "let's keep this clusterfuck of a universe as far away from our homes as possible" is the only thing the Q and the Time Lords have ever completely agreed upon.)