All-Purpose Warhammer 40000 Fanfiction Thread

While I'm normally not into WH40K, someone on AH.com came up with a rather interesting idea a few days ago.

On the eve of the Horus Heresy, Sanguinius has a psychic vision of the burning of Prospero and warns Magnus about it. Magnus initially flips out but once he calms down, the two of them try to warn the Emperor that Horus is up to no good. They end up running into the Human Webway like Magnus did in canon but when Tzeench shows up, Sanguinius interrupts its corruption of Magnus. A battle of wills in the Warp ensues, heavily favoring Tzeench for obvious reasons... until the two primarchs accidentally look into Tzeench' mind and gain an innate understanding of the Warp that makes them untouchable to Tzeench and allows them to get away from it. Tzeench still gets the last laugh however because when Magnus uses his newfound resistance to Warpy shit to cure the Thousand Sons' flesh-change for good, Tzeench dumps it into the Space Wolves instead (which Magnus realizes just a second before passing out from the exertion).

Speaking of which, when Leman Russ arrives to Prospero, Sanguinius tries to reason with him but Russ assumes Sanguinius is full of shit, brands him a traitor for siding with Magnus and sics the Wolves on Prospero anyway. Magnus himself is lying in a coma from the exertion it took to get rid of the flesh-change, so Ahriman is in charge of the Sons for the time being.

This is where the story is currently at.

edited 19th Apr '16 3:19:44 PM by amitakartok

That last bit breaks my WSOD. Sanguinius was beloved by all of his brothers, even the eventual Traitors (before they finally threw their lot with Chaos, that is). That Russ, one of the most steadfastly loyal of the Primarchs, would refuse to give Sanguinius a chance to properly explain himself or give him the benefit of doubt is too much for me to swallow.

He did give Sanguinius the chance to explain himself. He merely got the impression that Sanguinius was corrupted, seeing as he just admitted to dabbling in Warp sorcery in direct defiance of Nikaea and is now claiming that the Emperor's favorite son lied about the Emperor's order to annihilate Prospero. What's more, Russ repeatedly asks Sanguinius to show evidence, evidence Sanguinius does not have (since it was a vision), so when Sanguinius insists to astropath Terra and ask the Emperor whether he really ordered Prospero's destruction, Russ assumes that Sanguinius is trying to stall for time until the rest of his legion arrives.

edited 20th Apr '16 2:39:02 AM by amitakartok

... Still WSOD-breaking. This is Sanguinius we're talking about. He's pretty much the most loyal of the Primarchs to the Emperor, and his brothers probably knew it.

Here's the scene in question.

... Nope. Not convincing me in the slightest. Remember that Russ was one of the Primarchs who did not like Horus becoming Warmaster over all of the Imperial forces, the Astartes Legions and their Primarchs included. And as one of the loyalist Primarchs, his bond with Sanguinius should be much stronger than is depicted here.

Suit yourself.

The readers still expressed interest in finding out what Russ' reaction is going to be when his Rune-Priests all go Wulfen from using their powers. Way I see it, massive rageboner will ensue.

New chapter posted for Legacy of Angels (the What If? I posted about above).

In this update, a Thousand Sons group repelling a Space Wolf boarding party discover the Wolves' new affliction the hard way when one of the boarders, upon getting fatally shot by a melta, violently transforms into a Wulfen and rips them to shreds with his bare hands. One of the Sons barely manages to get a vox off to Ahriman, who is quite unnerved by this.

On the ground, a Sons position is about to get attacked by Russ and his Wolf Guard, so the Sons' commander orders his troops to run while he and his personal guard try to delay Russ, with the Space Wolves figuring out what's going on and holding fire out of respect while the Sons are dropping guns and helmets and readying melee weapons. Considering that Russ is personally present, the outcome is a Foregone Conclusion, though things get ugly when the Sons' commander is fatally wounded by Russ and uses his own life to douse Russ in Hellfire that roughs Russ up pretty badly... until Russ decides to stop fucking around and goes into some kind of psyker Super Mode that blows away the Hellfire, makes all the runes on his armor glow azure, triggers a mini warp storm sensed by every single Navigator in the system and has Tzeentch quite pleased.

At around the same time, the Space Wolves have had enough of the Sons' constant use of sorcery, so their Rune Priests start a ritual aimed at temporarily cutting the Sons off the Warp. Problem is, all the Rune Priests suffer Power Incontinence and none of the other Wolves present realize what's happening until the priests all suffer Explosive Overclocking of the Ludicrous Gibs kind.

In the instant before he died, as his soul was burned to nothing, Ohthere Wyrdmake recalled the words he had spoken at Nikaea, and the condemnations he had heaped upon the Crimson King and his sons. And he knew then, that the matter had come full circle.

Has anyone read The Roboutian Heresy?

An interesting fanfic that shows what would happen if different circumstances and decisions would led to the canon Traitor Legions staying loyal to the Emperor and canon Loyalist Legions becoming Traitors?

Sounds a lot like the Dornian Heresy to me.

The author was inspired by Dornian Heresy but created his own version because the leader of the Traitor legions was Rogal Dorn and Guilliman was never corrupted but instead formed his own independent kingdom after the civil war.

The Roboutian Heresy author didn't like that tidbit since it suggested the Ultramarines are so perfect that they never turned traitor despite the fact the Horus Heresy novels have shown Guilliman and the Ultramarines were not perfect and are still human. So he created The Roboutian Heresy to show that even the canon loyalist legions could have join the other side had things turn out differently for them.

Despite the changes, some things still stay the same like Cypher is still a secret ally of Imperium and Fabius Bile still turned traitor. However, the fanfic has hinted the 40k version of The End Times is coming.

Anyone know if Shinji and Warhammer 40K went back on hiatus again? I don't want to start reading the re-boot only to hit a brick wall a few chapters in. My heart wouldn't be able to avoid breaking.

I haven't kept up with it in a long time, but if I understand the trope page correctly, that is the case. At this point, I've pretty much given up on Bpen ever completing a fic.

Sorry if this is a better question for the main W40k thread. Can daemon princes choose what they look like? The main villain for a story I'm planning first appears disguised as a lowly chaos fury, but it would kind of bring the whole thing down if that's not even possible.

I highly doubt they can, but not sure.

Tzeentech aligned daemon might can. And less maybe Slaneesh-aligned.

Khorne-aligned are out of-it's beneath them.

Technically speaking, while a Daemon Prince's appearance will always clearly show which Chaos God he owes allegiance to (in case of Tzeentchian Daemon Princes that employ drastic Shapeshifting, this would apply to their true form), the exact details do vary from one individual to another, because said details are often based on personality traits, specific feats that they had committed in their mortal life (e.g. a Khornate Daemon Prince responsible for some especially gruesome slaughters may have those atrocities represented by his hands being constantly blood-drenched if they were committed by his own hands, or blood dripping from his fangs if they were cannibalistic in nature, or his whole body being Wreathed in Flames if he's a Pyromaniac), incorporation of artifacts that the Daemon Prince has a particularly significant connection to (e.g. at the time of their apotheosis, they were wearing a suit of Powered Armor that had endured countless trials and ordeals), and even the patron deity's own whims.

edited 4th Dec '16 2:32:41 AM by MarqFJA

I know there was a Slaanesh-aligned Daemon Prince in Malodrax named Shalhadar the Veiled who could make himself look like pretty much whatever he wanted, like an actor putting on a costume.

Well, there you go.

Thanks everyone, I'm thinking of just saying he was "disguised" and leaving it up in the air if he was shape shifting or setting up an illusion. Either way I want to do some BL reading before starting.

After binging through the Lexicanum's timeline yesterday and reading about things like humanity using non-FTL O'Neil cylinders for interstellar colonization and that human ship that dropped out of the Warp after 20,000 years, I started to think.

One of the early human colonization fleets that used the Warp for FTL travel sometime around the 18th millennium was ensnared by the Warp's eldritch tides and ultimately revert into realspace way off-target in what Imperial records call the Koronus Expanse, sometime in the far future. Since their Warp technology predates Navigators and astrotelepathy by several millenia, they lack the means to navigate the Koronus Passage or communicate through the warp storms and consequently remain cut off from the rest of the galaxy, with no knowledge about where they are, when they are, how they ended up there, or what's going on outside the Expanse.

They ultimately manage to make it out of there sometime between the 50th and 60th millenniums to find a galaxy with a radically different power structure. Namely, the Imperium eventually buckled under continued assault from their enemies and went down kicking the Tyranids out of the galaxy. They are still around, but only in a capacity roughly similar to the Eldar's in the 41st millennium, with the power vacuum having since been filled in by the Tau who now dominate the galaxy to the same extent the Imperium once did. As for the Eldar, they are now almost completely extinct, with occasional Harlequin sightings every few centuries being the only sign of their continued existence. The combined fall of the Imperium and the Eldar, aside from shifting the galaxy's power structure, also had a rather welcome side effect: the gigantic drop in the number of psy-active souls in the galaxy caused a noticeable calming in the Warp, with Warp storms shrinking and some dissipating entirely. That's how the Koronus colonists made it out of their area of space.

So to sum it up, instead of the Eldar as the remnant, the Imperium as the top dogs and the Tau as the rising underdogs, the Imperium are the remnant, the Tau are the top dogs and the Koronus colony are the underdogs. Like stated above, the colony have no idea they're in the future and no idea about what happened in the meantime, basically giving them a clean slate.

What are their chances if the Tau have been actively running extermination campaigns against the Orks and immediately respond to any Tyranid sightings? How would a first contact between the colony and the Tau go if we consider that the Tau are pretty much the only race in known space willing to negotiate if not shot at on sight? How edited would be the Tau's historical accounts about the Imperium of Man and how would the colonists react to it?

Assumptions:

• Chaos is still a factor, but they're not as active as before because the Gods are underfed.
• The Tau have been actively running extermination campaigns against the Orks in the meantime, but those freaks are just too stubborn to die.
• Scattered remains of the rear of the Tyranid swarm are sighted every now and then, but there's no Astronomicon to lure more anymore and the Tau immediately respond to sightings with all-hands-on-deck campaigns to prevent them from ever regaining strength.
• Imperial remnants are still found in remote areas of the galaxy. Refusing to accept their decline, they stubbornly insist on fighting to restore the Imperium to its former glory, something they haven't a chance in hell at accomplishing. Oh, and they refuse to consider the Koronus people as kin, calling them abhumans who never basked in the Emperor's light (33,000+ years' worth of evolution is enough to cause visible differences).
• There's a sizable population of humans living in Tau territory, but the Tau have finally wised up to the nature of Chaos (after a nasty civil war between Farsight and the Ethereals) and keep the humans' population growth under strict control with measures like Fire Caste-enforced family size quotas, wholesale purging of entire bloodlines if a psyker is born into the family and aggressive genetic experiments aimed at permanently eliminating the psyker gene while simultaneously spreading the gene that produces blanks.

... Two questions are of paramount importance before considering anything else:

1. How in the name of all that is holy did the Imperium manage to kick out the Tyranid Swarm, when all analyses by the Imperium's most trusted experts (i.e. Inquisitors and military leaders who are actually competent at their jobs and aren't letting anything distract them from the current crisis at hand) continue to hold that 1) the three major Hive Fleets, each unfathomably vast for a singular force by the standards of the WH40K Milky Way galaxy in its known history, is but a tiny fraction of the totality of the Tyranid Swarm, 2) said totality of the Tyranid Swarm is due to arrive in less than a century (give or take a few decades), and 3) and the Imperium will need to increase its already high rate of military recruitment by 500% (which requires conscripting pretty much every man, woman and child across Imperial space) just to have a nonzero chance of surviving the arrival of the Swarm's main bulk?

2. How did the Orks get reduced to being manageable by the Tau through extermination campaigns? The Tau have time and again proven to be badly matched against the Orks, what with the Greenskins being too unpredictably chaotic for the Tau's highly disciplined manner of waging war ^{First note} Ciaphas Cain notes the only viable long-term approach to fighting Orks is to assume nothing on their part (or, to put it in another way, assume all possibilities are equally probable). Whether you assume that they have a plan or that they don't have one, you have a roughly 50/50 chance of them proving you horribly wrong at any given moment. It's further compounded by the fact that not all Orks are guaranteed to follow their leader's plan (if he has one), or to remain as plan-less as their leader is (if he doesn't have a plan). ^{Second note} And yes, I know there are some Tau commanders who have made a name for themselves by proving adept at combating the Ork menace. But tell me... How many of these commanders have ever faced even one Ork Waaagh! the size of what the Imperium would deem a "relatively major" Waaagh! by their standards? Or an Ork warboss who is unusually cunning for a warboss? There is a reason why the Tau Empire is considered the Naïve Newcomer of the Galaxy's array of major factions.. And by the end of the 41st millennium, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka should've been in the best position to rally the single biggest Waaagh! in the last 10,000 years of Orkish history, and that's counting the first and second Waaagh!s that he had mobilized against Armageddon. Specifically, he was last sighted kicking Tyranid ass on Octarius and generally being poised to shift the balance of the Ork-Tyranid war there in the Orks' favor.

>Tau

>Same extent as the Imperium

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *ugly laughter, rolling on the floor wheezing*

Exactly that way. They had no way out of the situation either way, so they gave everything to take the bugs down with them.

Not through the Tau's own doing. Orks always go where the biggest fight is and the Imperium vs Tyranid giga-war made them go "zog yeah, lotsa gits ta kill". So they did what Orks do: Waagh'd the biggest clusters of enemies they could find, regardless of casualties.

Lacking a fear of death is an asset if you were literally made to fight, but becomes a liability when you're so hyper-aggressive that your side is getting themselves killed faster than you can replenish your numbers. And considering that Orks literally grow from the ground, that's saying something.

As for the Tau, how did they survive, you might wonder? Simple: they took one look at the conflict and went NOPE. They didn't kick ass and take names, they stayed the fuck out of it.

Do note that the Tau have had less than two millennia's experience fighting them at the time. Add another ten thousand years to it and they've gotten quite a bit more experience at it out of necessity.

Well the Orks suddenly intervening would be a good way for the swarm to get thinned down so that the Imperium could beat them. If the Orks are the most numerous race in the galaxy, reproduce through spores, and fight a whole lot, they could kill a lot of Tyranids (as they're doing in the Octavius/Octarian war right now) before they're overwhelmed.

Pretty much.

Point is, the Tau didn't end up as top dogs because they fought their way up. It happened because their rivals killed each other off.

It actually earned them an extra dose of resentment from the Imperial remnants, who now regard the Tau as carrion eaters who opportunistically exploit the weakness of others to gorge themselves. And there's no denying that there's a grain of truth in that accusation.