It was leading to rabbit holes of character arguments that spiraled into hellish domains where finding a feasible 'out' for Sunset grew dire indeed. After several attempts I've decided to just rip out the rootNearing the end of Schola Arc, and future planning. · 6:54pm Jan 14th, 2022
So, as I begin to near the final rise in action for the schola arc of Sunset of Battle I'm looking more and more ahead to what I want to do with the story and where to go next. My general plan is to do a time-skip to when they are novitiates and start the next arc in-media res. But what to do and who to have as the antagonists?
I have a scene/large portion of a future chapter written with Sunset and squad up against some jean stealers on a desert planet. It is a Mad Max-esque type scenario with them having to carry some precious cargo back to friendly lines while being chased by swarms of pants hungry lunatics.
Another idea I have is for Sunset to be on a seeming idyllic world that has been colonised by a group of Tau that got lost in a Warpstorm way back in the First Wave of expansion and is a 'lost colony' as a result. I want to explore with it a race (or in this case just culture) encountering for the first time aliens, and the ramifications this has for their society. Especially when it is a bunch of Murder-Nuns not too happy to see their graveyard world (proper term escapes me at the moment) being desecrated show up.
I also, tentatively, have ideas for Sunset encountering the aeldar, but I think that is better left for a much later story arc when she is older and more experienced.
But, does anyone have any ideas they'd think would be interesting? I make no promises, obviously, but I am curious. Sunset on a tombworld? Sunset on a 'Training Exercise' with Space Marines? Something else?
Oooo! I'm wondering if the aeldari would recognize the touch of Isha on Sunset?
Do the Battle Nuns do training missions with the Space Marines? Because if so, that sounds pretty cool.
As for other ideas... I can't help but be slightly inspired by the Cain books here, Orks on an iceworld. Where you not only have to deal with the bloody greenskins, but the planet itself doing it's level best to kill you.
Tombworld... uhm, that would be like near 90%+ fatality rate with the way Necrons are. Cool idea, but maybe save that for a darker section.
Also, if you are going to do the Tau world, Sunset's morality is going to take a major hit. Here are some peaceful aliens, they didn't even know they are trespassing. MURDER THEM IN THE EMPEROR'S NAME!
Remember:
Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean. It is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself.
One of the things I want to see is Sunset grappling with the Zealous Xenophobia the Imperium has. Doesn't matter if the aliens did anything wrong or not, they are Xenos so obviously they need to die.
But yes, I would like to see Sunset be captured by the Eldar at some point in the story. Maybe have to grapple with staying with or going back to the Imperium.
Lore-wise, Genestealer Cultists and Tyranids don't really go for desert worlds unless they're literally in their path (lack of Biomass). Tomb Worlds...Although they may be bad on the tabletop, lore-wise again, Necrons are at the very highest tier, and tend to slaughter sisters (Sancutary 101). Even Space Marines have issues with them.
I think that your Tau idea has merit though. Of course, you could just do a classic arc where they fight against Orks. No moralising or anything complicated needed - they just fight orks.
You could also do a mini-arc with an OC race. The Imperium exterminates minor alien empire on a daily basis. The 'Codex factions' are just the ones that managed to survive the Crusades.
Another idea, a world seceding from the Imperium for whatever reason (but without being corrupted by chaos as that can get pretty dark at an early stage).
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I imagine they would.
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I'm just turning ideas over in my head and jotting down potential ideas. Sanctuary 101 was a decent book, but man, did the Necrons get worfed hard in it when a single squad can run around willy nilly inside a tomb world. At the moment I feel like the Tau idea might work the best, especially for the merging of themes between MLP and Warhammer. Friendship and War and all that.
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Worth noting that the Tau are JUST as bad as everyone else, it's just better hidden. I've seen a lot of people new to the setting think that they're the good guys (or at least less bad).
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Two words: Fourth Expansion.
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Sounds like an interesting direction to take things. Though Sunset better be VERY careful with how she promotes any ideas like not immediately murdering every Xeno she sees.
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The initial idea came to me in the form of a scene from an alien pov where a young local comes across Sunset as she is sitting outside a cave her squad is exploring, just chilling 'on guard'. The alien was at first shocked, but mostly at seeing a living human, as all they knew were the ruins strewn across the world from when it was exterminatus'd during the Great Crusade period. The colonists had assumed that since the ruins were so old that whoever had built them had gone extinct. I wasn't sure where to go beyond that, however.
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There was a C'tan shard, I believe of the Void Dragon, that got released from a damaged stasis vault. It knew who humans were despite being imprisoned i the vault long before humans arose, it encountered a company of Sisters of Battle,helped them escape and put the smackdown on the necrons. It's been speculated that humanities war with the men of iron involved using time travel as a weapon and they traveled back to the tail end of the War in Heaven and ran smack dab into the Necrons of that time period.
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Uh...You mean the one that got corrupted by Chaos?
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Hmmm, Sunset being alone gives potential... I can picture this in my head and it does sound interesting.
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I don't know if the Tau themselves were corrupted, but the human auxilaries certainly were without the commissars and Imperial faith to keep the horrors of the Warp at bay. At least, that is my understanding.
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I like the theory that the Void Dragon is imprisoned beneath Mars, and that it is the source of 'Machine Spirits'. I don't know much more about it that what I just expressed however.
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Mm hm. My biggest issue is avoiding devolving into Tau bashing. Especially right now... Mother Effing Railguns... the Storm surge rules... and just... My head hurts with all we've learned about the upcoming codex.
I mean, I get it. Tau only have shooting phase. But what I've seen is just... oof.
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I believe according to current lore, the Void Dragon was never fully shattered and had a whole bunch of shards broken off of him(her? it?) and what Big E dueled was a mostly intact,thought greatly weakened Void Dragon. The Outsider was never shattered and fled somewhere in the galaxy and is currently rumored to be hiding out in a Dyson Sphere-like object in the galaxy's halo.
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The one beneath Mars is a Transcendent Shard - basically when enough C'tan Shards fuse together they start to resemble something along the lines of what they used to be, and the one beneath Mars is the biggest one.
Regarding the 4th sphere, they didn't fall to Chaos (although it can be done, it's very hard for Tau to fall), but they were corrupted. The fifth sphere were extremely disturbed by what they had turned into (basically a cross between black templars and world eaters with guns).
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No, every single C'tan was shattered, even the Outsider (that was only ever fanon anyway, him being hidden etc.). As I mentioned below, escaped C'tan Shards (or just ones that the Necrons weren't able to enslave) fuse together to become more like they used to be.
The exception being The Flayer, who they actually killed, and who cursed the Necrons with the Flayer curse (and in some bits of the lore, him dying fucked up the universe so badly nobody can even remember what it was like before he died - as the C'tan are fundamental parts of the universe (like if you somehow managed to kill Tzeentch, the concept of Hope would cease to have ever existed).
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Tzeench isn't hope, Nurgle is hope, more precisely, desperate hope, which is why he took Isha. Tzeench would be the drive for knowledge. Tzeench and Nurgle are also very counter to each other, where one is change, the other in entropy.
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Tzeench is explicitly hope. Slaanesh is Love, Nurgle is Life, and Khorne is Courage (and Malal/Malice is Justice). Specifically, the corrupted forms. What the gods represent isn't one of the things we have to work out, they've been set since 3.5. Although the gods do a lot of things as well, each one is a corruption of one of those aspects.
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The chaos gods aren't the twisted aspects, they are those aspects, along with the darker aspects. Chaos isn't supposed to be black-and-white,but all the shades of the rainbow. It's a fan theory, as GW's never really released anything toprove or disprove anything, that several events across the multiverse,including the War in Heaven, sent so much negative emotions into the emperian in such a short period of time, that not only did it cause the reality between realities to twist and warp, but also caused the Realms of Chaos to bloat. According to the fan theory, there has been untold universes eaten by chaos, sometimes primarily by one god, sometimes by multiple gods. The Great Horned Rat ate the world that is no more(the Warhammer Fantasy world) and now his attention is being drawn to the 40k universe.
I also hate the official canon that the chaos gods woke up during different times in humanities history, triggering terrible cataclysms and that all of them, with the exception of Slannesh, were awake for possibly millions of years and they each discovered humanity, which triggered a series of tragedies.
I'd love the skaven to be made canon with 40k. You'd get the horde rules of the Tyrannids mixed with the weird science rules of the Mechanicus.
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I know-that's what I said, Tzeentch is hope etc.
Regarding the Skaven, out lord and saviour, KELDOR DRAIGO showed up in End Times (written by Matt Ward, because who else), so they're technically canon.
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*forms the sign of the Aquila*
Have you brought the hams?
Ah, I see you're a beardsman too!
ROCKET BOOTS GO!
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From what I understand of the 4th Sphere, their human auxilaries were corrupted and seeing the humans turn into murder-monsters of the Warp drove the soldiers of the 4th Sphere crazy. To the point where they would just straight up murder any human they saw afterwards for fear of that human turning into a host for a daemon.
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Interesting! Hmmm,,, Could I use this in some fasion.
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Maybe the Void Dragon, Death Bringer or another C'tan knows of Equestria and as such, their shards know of it too? There could be webway portals that exit there. They hate the ponies for their mastery of magic, but were unable to best them or reach them?
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Well, the portal had to come from somewhere...
I don't know at this point how much cross-over I'm going to have between the two realities. IE, Ctan in Equestria, and vice versa. I have some things set in stone in regards to the two, but not who has gone through the portal before Sunset, oddly.
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The old ones. Just like the webway, they created the initial passage that became the mirror portal. They then created the webway, which a few entrances/exits are in the Equestrian continent. The old ones originally created Tartarus to house C'tans, but were wiped out. Maybe Big E also knows of the world of magical, intelligent quadruped and part of his Webway Project was to find a way to access the stable magical energies of Equestria as a way to further weaken the chaos gods.
Maybe some of the villains of Equestria were using gifts a chaos god gave them.
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All interesting possibilities. They would involve more direct story stuff set on/in Equestria if used. I'm leaning more towards Equestria being more of an unknown or mystery, and the connection having been made in the other direction, with very little cross pollination between Equestria and the Warhammer universe. *pondering*
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Pretty much, which is not normal Tau behaviour at all. They all saw something in the warp too, and it didn't go well with them. Latest Tau lore even has the Ethereals instruct the 5th sphere to do the Uriah Gambit on them (sending them to the front lines in the hope they'll be killed).
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Well considering that the assassins knew of Sunset's origin and of Princess Celestia, there has been some cross-pollination happening. Plus, when Sunset was tumbling through the mirror, she wasn't ripped apart by daemons or dissolved by the caustic nature of the warp, so the mirror portal acts like a less stable part of the webway that intersects Nurgle's garden, because pappy screwed up her body with an assortment of diseases, but Isha and possibly the Emperor saved her.
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I just wish we'd gotten the teased Tau vs Deathguard story/novel, rather than Deathguard going, 'lol, we got Ultra Smurfs to fight, again.' Seing the Tau actually face a full-on Chaos force and realising what it is the Imperium actually fights, and the dawning realization of the true horrors out in the galaxy and that they really are only small fries that have gone pretty much unnoticed by the Big Nasties would have been fun. But no... The Tau can't actually have more than a stalemate at worst, and driving off enemies they should be crushed by at best. I'm looking at you, Hive Fleet.... Leviathan? I want to say Leviathan... >.> Has any faction been more 'Worf'd' in all Warhammer than the Nids?
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I think the planet itself was called Equestria, with the capital being Equis Prime, if I read it right,
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Her would-be murderer never mentioned the princess, or Celestia.
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Planet is Equis, the girls are 'Equestrians', or 'Orphan' if you prefer.
I fully grant I could have muddled that up at some point while writing and used both Equis and Equestria interchangably.