Directorate Threat Assessment: Divinities
The Directorate is a union of species not dissimilar to the Tau Empire, originating in the Carthago Sector of Segmentum Ultima, not to be confused with the Karthago Sector, with the founders being a ferret-like race populating the former Junk World of Teklia, where they encountered texts on Machine-Spirits in the process of their evolution. Genetic analysis strongly suggests a link to Terran stock, though with all the spiritual energy in their environment, it's impossible to be sure. They have a dead Old One as one of their patron deities, which has contributed to a pantheon and set of mystic traditions that would otherwise be impossibly well-developed for a polity their size and age, having led to the realization of many of their old religious gods, amplifying many areas of their society and shielding a polity that ought to be incredibly vulnerable to Tzeentch and Slaanesh in particular. Isohorrah the Dancer, for example, covers many of the domains Slaanesh is linked to, and thus shields the Directorate from their influence.
The races involved include the Tekket, aforementioned ferretoids, Bond-Machina, machines that have gained Machine-Spirits of sufficient complexity that the Directorate considers them people, to the point they are often included as part of family units, Hobbgrots, a race derived from a Gretchin freed from Gork and Mork's influence long before their deaths, as the former didn't consider a Grot worth fighting over, Khimer, a formerly aquatic race that had suffered a Genestealer incursion that they barely fought off by learning to safely hybridize themselves without forming a connection to the Hivemind, at the cost of reducing their lifespans to a measly 20 years(30 in modern times), humans, mostly former Imperials, and more. They also have huge numbers of Vita, beings that exist halfway between the Materium and Warp, generated from their Machine-Spirit-derived Animism and penchant for imbuing Lifeforce into literally everything. Lifeforce is perhaps best understood as a refined form of soulstuff, and seems to incorporate both Sa and Ka into it's makeup, meaning it's something of an outside-context issue if your name isn't Aria, and even she has only recently begun delving deeply into mixing the two. Despite this, it's not hard to make, and indeed, shortly after the Directorate was formed, they would simply bleed themselves in a specific way, though this was highly inefficient compared to modern methods.
They are a direct democracy, with resources allocated based on the votes of the population, which has lead to the sort of scattershot allocation one might expect, and as a result, their techbase and military-industrial investments are similarly all over the place, with a notable period of their history where they had more effort spent on improving Rites than developing Rites in the first place. They've also been generally reluctant to turn towards technologies directly intended for military use, perhaps because of the militarization of the Imperium, though they are perfectly willing to make use of things that have secondary applications in the military. However, in the time since the Fall of the Imperium, their technology has skyrocketed to levels more akin to the Necrons than the current Dark Age technologies wielded by Conclave members. Weaponry comparable to modern meltas is considered a light infantry weapon, and all of their nuclear technology has homing due to a deal they made. All of their soldiers have personal shields as well, not to mention their penchant for deploying huge numbers of disposable robots, Blokbots, which are equipped with the ability to react to damage by rebuilding themselves as smaller classes of Blokbot, as well as minor self-repair abilities, allowing them to bog down enemies.
At a glance, the polity seems well-suited to being a minor ally like the Silver Skulls or the Thousand Points of Light. They even acted to assist in the creation of Ynnead and had a hand(or paw, as the case may be) in the rise of several minor Eldar gods to fill holes in their pantheon and/or bring forth minor deities to serve as subordinates for the gods Isha has been restoring, such as Dhia'Albain being considered a daughter of Kurnous with similar ties to hunting and the wilds, and specializing in the magics of the wilderness. She, or rather the Exodites connected to her, is part of the reason it took so long to detect The Directorate, as they knew about the Living Metal The Directorate had access to, but had decided to deliberately avoid looking deeper because of how helpful The Directorate had been, so they could truthfully say they didn't know about the C'Tan, though it's also worth noting the C'Tan deliberately avoided the Eldar when they visited The Directorate, so it's not exactly all their fault.
They are rated as a Potential Apocalypse akin to the Wolf for a very simple reason: the homeworld of the first species of the Directorate served as a prison for a number of C'Tan, including YALDABOATH, the C'Tan of Time. There was some grim amusement that, unlike the Deceiver's subtle strings in Tau society, the Directorate's C'Tan are openly worshipped, having previously saved the Tekket from an Imperial task force that attempted to slaughter them, including a detachment of Salamanders Astartes, giving them a deep-seated fear and resentment of the Imperium and many of it's successor states, and leaving them with little reason to mistrust the C'Tan, particularly when, so far as they can discern, the C'Tan have all been very reasonable in their requests and rewards given for them. Though the Imperials couldn't have known, and based on the Warp Storm the task force was spat out of in a damaged state, may well have been in a stable timeloop situation, driving a species willingly into the arms of multiple C'Tan is regarded as one of the more catastrophic blunders of the Imperium, on a list including the creation of a Chaos God.
The Silent King has been the foremost mind and contributor for the planned assault, as a number of assets he can't use against the Void Dragon are perfectly fine to use here, and while YALDABOATH has a worrying amount of knowledge of the prisons of the C'Tan, it is not backdoor access like the Dragon would have on it's own technology. It is unclear how this set managed to escape his general purge, but he seems quite ready to correct that.
This has complicated planning an assault, as the Silent King is reluctant to break his word, especially when the C'Tan in question have been well-behaved, operating within the rules he set for them. Not to say the Necrons are united in this, as this is easily the most controversial decision of the king's, but without the Silent King's support, and the far more pressing matter of the Void Dragon being on the verge of breaching containment, it has been pushed back. Besides, as the king has noted, bringing anything powered by a C'Tan shard anywhere near the C'Tan who helped design those prisons seems like only marginally less terrible an idea as bringing some of the Dragon's creations in Necron hands near the frontlines of the war to contain it.
Expertise derived from both the dead Old One, Kadath, and the C'Tan has gone into many of the Directorate's endeavors, resulting in bizarre results neither party could have predicted. Such as a chronomystical artifact inserted into the heart of the planet Teklia absorbing a deluge of dark magic from one of the strange phenomena occurring all over that world, resulting in it spewing dark magic all over the timeline, past, present, and future, retroactively being responsible for several past disasters on the planet, though they also use it as a power source for various mystical effects now that it's largely under control. This is one of the difficulties with any potential assault, as there's no telling what destroying any given piece of infrastructure might do, not only to the polity, but potentially the wider galaxy.
Not unlike the Imperial Trust, they have numerous potentially galaxy-affecting assets in spite of their small size, primarily the various entities they treat as gods, including their C'Tan patrons, a dead Old One, and numerous gods they've deliberately built up using expertise from the latter and investment of Lifeforce derived from the former. Dhia'Albain, for example, is a minor goddess by galactic standards, but a polity of their scale making her, even by accident, is a feat of incredible scale.
Kadath is a complicated topic of discussion, not the least because, despite being dead and mostly incapable of acting on his own
directly, he's still an Old One, even if he seems largely bound to the moon his main temple is found on, presumably as a result of being dead. While his resentment of the C'Tan Mother for her involvement in his brother's death is a potential fracture point, he, unlike the rest of the galaxy, seems largely content to leave the War in Heaven in the past, and has responded exceedingly negatively to overtures from those plotting to destroy the Directorate for their close association with the C'Tan. He also has an opinion of the Eldar similar to the initial reaction the Sirens and several other Peoples of Avernus had due to their role in creating Slaanesh, with the added wrinkle that he'd argued against creating the Eldar in the first place, and now feels fully vindicated for the latter. Responses to him have in turn been mixed. Some view him as caught in a terrible position where he's being made to see a civilization he's grown fond of destroyed due to unfortunate circumstances they had no control over and bad history, and reacting understandably. Others see him as a traitor who has gone as far as aiding and abetting actual C'Tan, and thus an enemy just like them. Seeing as he's already dead, plans for an assassination are largely off the table for obvious reasons, though the Slann have contributed some expertise on the matter of disabling him, as it was not unheard of for the War in Heaven to drive an Old One to madness. The issue will be reaching his temple, the place his ties to the Materium are strongest, without being detected, particularly since it's deep in the oceans, and for reasons discussed later, the Primal Warp is not an option for a deep insertion. Nor is the Webway, as attempting to use the Webway against the Old Ones, even if this version was built by the Eldar, isn't a good idea. Perhaps things would be different if it was in it's prime, but that hasn't been the case for millennia.
Regardless, most of his aid to The Directorate takes the form of general improvements to their mystic traditions, such as modular Rite components that can be added to any Ritual, or the Dream Engines, which allow for some degree of regulation of the various mystical snarls that result in things like caves on one planet being connected to another. What analysis was possible has directly compared them to the Caverns of Avernus. Which makes some sense, even if the 'paradoxes' were caused by massive infusion of Lifeforce, and the Dream Engines merely stabilize them somewhat. The Directorate, in turn, largely treats him as one of their gods, meaning he has a significant priesthood, but doesn't, say, have any kind of veto power over the actions of their society. Like everyone else, he has a voice, and as one of their gods, it's quite a hefty one, but other than that, he's not particularly treated as being special outside of his actual priests.
YALDABOATH, a C'Tan that takes a form similar to the Necrons but on the scale of a Titan, is almost certainly the most dangerous of their assets, with Imbac admitting that he's unsure how the C'Tan does half the things he does casually without being dragged into the Time War aspect of the War in Heaven. Where Imbac had to expend significant effort in making the Avernus system's times run at doubled speed, and rely on a finite reserve of energy within Avernus, YALDABOATH seems capable of casually cutting a system out of the rest of the galaxy's timestream for a half-century or so and then putting it back without any consequences save the positive ones of being able to build up completely unmolested. He and Kadath also have a rivalry centered on mystical skill, with the former somehow twisting his mastery of Time into arcane knowledge that would be respectable even by Slann standards, removing one of the major blindspots most C'Tan have to work around, in part because he's had a very long time to work on his knowledge. As such, when Imbac attempted to probe his defenses, he was
noticed, and given the archmagical equivalent of being let off with a warning. It is quite clear that he noticed Ridcully's own divination efforts, as while the C'Tan could do less about them due to the nature of the seer's abilities, he did manage to send Ridcully a note via all the timepieces in the same city as him ceasing to function or giving out bizarre readings like 'Hammer Time' for just long enough to make it obvious. The fact that he was able to do this despite Avernus' wards is all the more concerning. Sure, it was a momentary display, and not near any of Avernus' important infrastructure, but it speaks to a lack of security even with some of the best wards in the galaxy.
Next comes Mother, a C'Tan possessed of a serpentine body, who seems the most genuinely empathetic, to the point she actually attempted an apology to Kadath for her hand in his brother's death. Her maternal affection for the Tekket and the Directorate as a whole seems to also be genuine. She was, nevertheless, a participant in the War in Heaven. She specialized in socializing, and was responsible for many of the Ka races that joined the Necrons' side in the War in Heaven doing so. She seems the most openly guilty for her actions, as mentioned, and is the C'Tan the Necrons are most familiar with. By C'Tan standards, she is a poor fighter, like The Deceiver. Though this is still a very relative assessment, like saying that a Red Dwarf is a small star. Correct, but less than helpful if you lack the means to deal with something of this magnitude. Where The Deceiver took to intrigue in response to his relative weakness, becoming a nightmarishly potent master of schemes and manipulation of other races, Mother became a diplomat that could largely write off risk of assassination. Where The Deceiver is prone to putting it's minions into delusions of being in the right or serving leaders they genuinely believe in, Mother tends to be much more direct about the specific action she's having someone take, if not the potential consequences or reasons behind it. The two apparently shared a bitter enmity over being just similar enough for their differences to be all the more jarring, and she has put some effort into keeping the Deceiver's influence out of The Directorate despite their relative proximity to the Ultima Compact.
Then there's Sphere 001, which resembles a sphere, as the name suggest. Probably the oddest member of the initial batch of C'Tan that stuck around after the Imperial Task Force was wiped out. It's not even completely clear what his specialty is, with evidence pointing to either Hunger or Matter. Apparently, he's got the equivalent of an eating disorder, to the point most of his proposals focus on feeding him in some manner, and unlike the Courts of the other C'Tan, he cannot safely draw only a portion of the Lifeforce from his followers even if he wants to. Still, The Directorate seems largely content to keep him fed while spending some effort on the treatments proposed by another C'Tan, but more on that later. The Sphere was responsible for 'teaching' The Directorate's fusion weaponry to be Homing, in exchange for a truly insane amount of nuclear material to eat, as an example of the kind of exchange made with Sphere 001. Sphere 001 has had his hunger weaponized on at least one occasion, with The Directorate essentially sucking an entire splinter fleet dry and feeding the energy to the Sphere.
Next is the Graviton Owl, bearing a resemblance to a metallic owl, and a doctor for C'Tan, primarily for Sphere 001 in recent times, though their projects also, as the name suggest, involve gravity. It is believed that, much like YALDABOATH, the Owl is leveraging their true specialty in an unusual way as part of a different skillset. This includes everything from compressing matter with gravity, to infrastructure that serves the dual purpose of aiding in Sphere 001's digestion and easing Warp travel in nearby systems. Most of their proposals include such a dual purpose. Despite their focus on using it for medical purposes, it can be assumed that the gravitic technology of the Dark Age is a joke to the Owl, much like YALDABOATH's mastery of Time when compared to Imbac's is like comparing a grandmaster to a journeyman, as the examples of Directorate gravitic technology are incredibly advanced, yet casual to the point of civilian use beyond even what the Dark Age had.
Last of the free C'Tan is The Eternal Wheel, whose domain is Cycles, and bears a strong resemblance to a titanic wheel. They hold dominion over everything from network cycles, reactor cycles, to timeloops, and so their focus is probably the best-suited to general civilizational boosts, as opposed to special projects, and in bolstering the other C'Tan. The synergy between YALDABOATH and The Eternal Wheel in creating and manipulating timeloops is obvious, for example. They've been a major source of network bandwidth for The Directorate, and hold a fascination with the concept of infinity, which means the World Serpent is of interest to them. The Eternal Wheel also
Next come the TechnoPagans, whose deities aren't C'Tan, but aren't Warp entities either, as they largely exist in the Materium, but they have a strong capacity to influence the Immaterium, particularly the Assemblers, who believe that a true god worthy of worship did not yet exist, but could be built with sufficient investment of resources, as opposed to the Calculators, who believed that such a being did exist, but either could not be understood by mortal beings, lacked an appropriate vessel to manifest, or any vessel could not hold them completely, and thus limited them.
The Assembly, being focused on building gods, have had a hand in the raising up of many of the Celestial Gods, as their projects inherently make the raising up of gods easier, as part of their own efforts. Indeed, some aspects of the god they're trying to build are directly relevant to efforts on that front. The first major component is the Heart, which is the literal, metaphorical, and mystical heart of their new god, and has direct ties to massive rituals. In turn, the Heart is divided into four Avatars. The most important one is the Avatar of Motive Force, The Engine, which had a very simple job, providing incredible amounts of power to both spiritual beings and physical infrastructure, and one that has had it's special infrastructure spread to every corner of The Directorate, Lesser and Greater Engines meant to aid in it's massive infusions of energy both mundane and mystical, accelerating spiritual evolution in The Directorate to a breakneck pace, being quite possibly the largest singular factor in how much their worlds resembled Daemonworlds. The Engine would likely qualify as a (weak) Major God simply from the amount of power it produces, effortlessly maintaining over a dozen investments of energy akin to a Daemonworld with power to spare, but this seems to have a few significant caveats: The Engine is immobile, and virtually helpless on it's own, and it cannot use the energy on it's own, needing to give it to others. An engine without something to power is a useless hunk of metal, and that seems to apply just as much to this one. In many ways, it resembles the Emperor while interred on the Golden Throne, more infrastructure than God. Of course, there were quite a few Warp-based entities with a vested interest in keeping The Engine intact, which made it difficult for
The Calculators, meanwhile, built supercomputers in an effort to search for, serve as a vessel for, or design a vessel for, a true deity. This made them somewhat less directly applicable to
creating gods, but it had it's own uses. The Emulators were structured in a similar manner as the Assembly's Heart, though the Archons, rather than Avatars, followed the formula of the Tarot, though it was the version found on Teklia, the Arkana, rather than the Emperor's Tarot the post-Imperial states were familiar with. As such, the first of the Emulators was //PATH, which focused on Bridges, making it extremely well-suited to connecting places and things. The first of the Archons, NV2, an acronym for Network Version 2, was more or less what it sounded like, an Archon focused on their network, which they referred to as the Internet, rather than the Noosphere, which was NV2's Domain, and which, partially as a byproduct of essentially having divine protection, and partially as a byproduct of having grown in a state far freer than virtually anywhere in the galaxy, had an architecture far more open than any other network in the galaxy, though it was filled with all manner of homegrown digital nasties that prevented Chaotic scrapcode or other nastiness from gaining a real foothold. The second Archon was Craft, whose Domain, as the name suggested, was Craftsmanship and Design, and who focused on optimizing their mystical implements. From shrines to personal grimoires, everything they used that aided mysticism received upgrades, or outright had complementary items or simplified designs for ease of mass production created. The third was QUESTBRO, an Archon whose Domain was Guidance. Using predictive algorithms, it foresaw dangers and disasters, and offered tasks to mitigate or head off those issues. In many cases, this was harm minimization, rather than than outright removal, but it was a
guide, not a ruler. Plus, it had to account for a ridiculous number of risks and potential issues, and it couldn't outright force anyone to do as it said. Lastly, GriMM.EXE, whose Domain was Magic, which augmented Rites not by empowering them, but by providing an apparatus to research optimized version of various rituals, making personalized versions of every Rite in Directorate possession for every individual not only possible, but feasible. The next Emulator, //GATE, had little information known of it.
Next came the Great Vita, beings that were part physical being, and part Warp entity, like a half-Daemon or something of the sort. They were probably best compared to the Great Ones of Avernus. Not as purpose-built, being more akin to coalescing spiritual energy giving rise to powerful wild entities, having far more of a connection to the Primal Warp as a result, which might explain how much the C'Tan struggle with them. Efforts had been made to spread their influence across The Directorate.
First to emerge were the 4 Great Ocean Vita. The most relevant was Anthrozoathoth the Living Reef, whose Domain was Coral. It's title was no idle boast. Large enough to have an entire reef on it's back, the crustacean-like being unleashed swarms of lesser elementals to craft entire biomes, creating places for the other Vita to live and work in as part of the larger ecosystem. In addition, it had learned both how to make gateways to other places out of coral, and to forge Wraithbone, allowing it to make a pseudo-Webway network within The Directorate, allowing some level of interdiction of the 'proper' network without triggering it's defenses as the Dolmen Gates would. It was a priority target for this reason, as Kadath was far more difficult to disable, and it was both of their efforts that made the Webway useless in Directorate territory.
The Land Vita were lead by the first to emerge, The Directorate's own World Tree, Avatar of Nature, connected to other worlds via seeds from that same tree. It's boughs stretched far into the sky, having grown from the greatest of trees on Teklia. It's mere presence reinforced the wilderness and related magics. This made it simple for The Directorate to interdict Primal Warp travel, meaning stealth insertions from that angle weren't feasible, at least without the direct aid of the Shaman himself. Plans to destroy the tree were being made, despite it's incorporation of flame, death, and gemstones making conventional means of killing it less than effective.
Then there were the actual Warp-based deities. First, the Peerless Immortal Functionary. In their mythology, the gods had been so impressed by his organizational skill, that he was added to the divine ranks in order to organize them better. He was the first of their deities to awaken properly, not counting Kadath, who is a special case for obvious reasons. His Domains are Bureaucracy and Spiritual Management. In other words, both the physical and metaphysical realms are under his management. His followers were possessed of impossible administrative acumen, and in general, the bureaucracy of both the Materium and Immaterium ran smoothly under his watch. He was also patron of the House of Devils. After leveraging a quartet of half-formed Daemons whose patron species had been rendered extinct away from Chaos, The Directorate was able to use that narrative chink to create a group of rebel Daemons who would be granted identity-altering masks, leaving their old masters behind for a looser association. Apparently, one Lady Bellatrix Bladequench and the new Skarbrand had struck up a friendship over a few similarities, even if the circumstances behind each of them leaving Khorne's service couldn't be more different. Which put another crimp in efforts to destroy The Directorate before their C'Tan could build a head of steam, as her influence, in turn, put a damper on any hopes of direct Abaddon's attention to The Directorate if he wasn't willing to go after the Void Dragon any further. Not to mention the House of Devils knew better than anyone how to fight Chaos, being ex-Chaos themselves, making it difficult for Chaotic entities to trouble The Directorate even outside of their wards and active gods.
Next was the Toymaker and his family. His Domains were Toys, Children, Faeries, and Autumn. A figure revealed to have been responsible for The Night of Gifts some time before the 13th Black Crusade, or rather his realization as a god caused the event. The reaction to the revelation that the singing fish Abaddon had been given came from The Directorate was, surprisingly a simple nod as if a question at the back of his mind had been answered at last, rather than the kind of rage one might expect, possibly because the Chaos Gods and Lorgar had received much more insulting gifts, and the fish was, comparatively, neutral.
Protecting children was his providence, and toys consecrated in his name were unnaturally safe to play with, allowing The Directorate to supply children with toys that any other polity would consider utter madness, like nuclear bomb kits or 'simple' occult manuals that would have set the old Inquisition aflame for being literal how-to guides for curses and ritual summonings. This was one of the secrets to their success, as they could grant their children and by extension their population, an education unmatched across the galaxy, simply because no one had children as well-guarded as them. The Everchild
might be capable of something similar one day, but lacked the experience. Thus, he was one of the targets on the Warp side, as he was lacking in combat ability, his power waned in the non-autumn seasons, and his death would cause catastrophe in The Directorate as his blessings ceased to protect the children within the polity from their extremely dangerous toys.
His eldest daughter, the Hermit, was one of the gods of Magic for The Directorate, who also possessed an association with Winter as the season she ruled over. Much like Craft, she tended more towards the infrastructure behind spellcasting than directly augmenting Rites, but in her case, it was very much leaning on the classical accoutrements of a wizard or witch. A wand, a crystal ball, a wizard's tower, etc. The last was her most major piece of infrastructure, with secondary towers dotting The Directorate to strengthen magic in their environs. Their environs being planetary in scale before her realization. She was also a tutor of mages, teaching them better techniques to deal with miscasts and the like, which made them better wizards, though not necessarily better people, something her mythos had had problems with before. Her death would dramatically weaken magic in The Directorate, which would make further assaults far easier.
Next was The Fool, who seemed to have a strong connection to The Idiot, being someone who destroyed carefully laid plans simply by proximity. His myths had a very clear repeating beat. The Fool would be doing something, and then he would be accosted by something that sought to harm him, person or monster, only for The Fool's foolishness to cause the hostile party to hurt themselves. In short, he was a master of getting hit in the face with a pie, but somehow making the pie-thrower look like the idiot. The thing was, he was usually unaware he was doing this, infuriating planners all the more. Cegorach(and Tzeentch) finds himself stymied constantly, apparently by total accident. Ridcully speculates he avoided harm mostly on the back of a) not actually being present, and b) not directly intending harm, diluting the effect, though he did notice a clearly unnatural number of embarrassing and inconvenient events happening to and around him after his divinations. One of the things The Fool does is allow bad luck to be weaponized, so something like Tzeentch stealing his followers' luck for Ahriman's sake would only make a follower of The Fool
more dangerous, provided they weren't deliberately making themselves unlucky. Killing him is going to be difficult, though Cegorach thinks he can pull it off. The best thing to use against a clown is a more powerful clown, after all.
Then there's the Jester, the Toymaker's brother. A god of fear and nightmares, whose main claim to fame was the Antianima. Antianima, unlike a god's normal servants, were born of their fears and nightmares. For example, the PIF's were known as the Judgements, serving as his most terrifying enforcers, because he had long since mastered his fears. In most cases, they have a more antagonistic relationship with their supposed patron god. The Mimics were born of the Toymaker's nightmares of children being cruel, and in turn targeted children specifically, in contrast to the usual behavior of the Toymaker's servants and pantheon in general. It was worth noting that even the C'Tan were manifesting Antianima, despite being, well, C'Tan, something speculated to be a quirk of the Tekket specifically. At any rate, the Jester is essentially the king of Antianima, quelling their worst excesses, and largely piggybacks off the Antianima of the other gods. In some corners, he's thought to be the original Antianima, perhaps for the Tekket as a whole. With the Antianima, Daemons struggled to find a foothold even more, as the dark spirits had no interest in the competition. The possibility of any given God having their nightmares brought to life and used against them as a curse of sorts is something that must be accounted for, which limits divine aid as long as he's on the field in any capacity. A flood of pseudo-Daemons that sap the god's strength and immediately turn to The Directorate's side means that any direct divine intervention on our side runs the risk of becoming actively detrimental. The Jester has apparently done this to Chaos already, as the force behind the Night of a Thousand Reversed Daemons, and there is little reason to expect any other gods would be immune.
Next was the Huntsmaster, a god of Hunting and Monster Slaying. Unlike Kurnous and the Exodites, he was more than happy to use the most advanced technology available, but he was also skilled, and cunning. Willing to use traps, tools they forged themselves or obtained from others, and so on. His ideal hunt was incapacitating the target before it even realized you were there. His followers were extremely skilled, and could often outfight green Astartes off the back of raw skill, and Elite Hunteks were akin to Veteran Astartes. Not to mention they held a large number of the infantry supercombatants, such as the Eliminator Droids. What's more, the more prep time they had, the more dangerous they became, especially as they learned more about a specific threat.
The third set was the Lanternkeepter, god of Hope, Survival, and Light. This was not a god of praying as the night descended, but one of preparing for that night as best you could, and holding onto hope. One of his Rites was specifically geared towards stockpiling power for the future, their Final Days. The Final Flame could not be located by Ridcully, but given the amount of power available to The Directorate, and the amount of power fed to even miniscule spirits... well, the narrative of bringing out a contingency for the apocalypse in an effort to cancel it wasn't exactly uncommon. Finding and snuffing this flame so they couldn't pull something akin to the Last Waagh if they were backed into a corner was a high priority, and snuffing out the Lanternkeeper seemed the most expedient method to accomplish that.
The fourth set was the Roadguide, god of Travel and Vehicles, and the closest thing The Directorate had to a naval god, specifically protecting pilots, and having a holy site meant that was essentially a special shipyard meant to build temple-ships. He also had ties to many of The Directorate's Warp travel technologies, meaning his death would massively destabilize shipping in The Directorate. There was also the Trainmaster, the Roadguide's father. His Domains were Trains and Death, often carting off the souls of the departed via train, and prevented the dead from returning to the land of the living and causing havoc, meaning the Trainmaster had especial privileges in inflicting True Death, even among Death Gods, or at very least preventing a soul from being granted a new body to cause trouble with, which increased the risks of sending forces to try and assassinate or sabotage The Directorate.
Lastly, the Dancer and her pantheon. Her Domain was simple. Art, though the passion associated with art seemed strongly connected, as her places of worship allowed Exodites to engage their passions in full long before Ynnead's creation and subsequent severing of Eldar souls from Slaanesh. Additionally, she has a host of Muses, art spirits who have been given robotic shells, or designed their own from their time as a spirit, of a variety of forms. Flamedance Muses, Naturae Muses, Cthonic Muses, and so on. If Hunteks are the Astartes of The Directorate, then the Muses are the Eldar, with War-Muses being the Eldar warriors, which is probably fitting, and means there's a type of warrior for every possible occasion, as War-Muses are a vocation, not a type of Muse, so each of the distinct types have War-Muse sub-types, ironically giving the War-Muses the distinct sub-groupings of Astartes Chapters, as opposed to Hunteks having custom gear for each individual, and often each of their hunts. The Dancer was the first of the gods of The Directorate to enjoy megaprojects being built in their name, the Mega-Art Galleries would set a precedent of extravagant monuments, if not to the extreme of bankrupting planets for cathedrals as in the Imperium. Her death would leave the Muses vulnerable to Slaanesh, and given how strongly associated the Dancer was with most of the same Domains, even the various defenses against Chaos The Directorate had were unlikely to be enough.
Her pantheon included the Concerta, a collection of minor deities associated with specific aspects of music, and with Music as a whole in their totality. The Directorate made use of specialized artificial Songweaving technology. Already augmented by a whole section of their theologians dedicated to finding Resonances since before the Fall of the Imperium, the Concerta had further boosted it, amplifying virtually everything else, from their deities, to their Rites. The only reasons The Toymaker was in the running as the prime target for assassination was that the Concerta were not a singular deity, so getting them all would be harder, and because the loss of the the divine protection of The Toymaker would cause far more immediate and long-term damage from the various toys obeying conventional reality again, rather than just causing a general weakening of The Directorate as their 'Orchestrions' lost much of their power.
The other member was the Gourmand. Like the PIF, he was a former mortal who ascended off the back of impossible skill, in his case, impressing the Dancer so much with his cooking that she granted him godhood on the spot and later married him. Assuming he did in fact live as a mortal once, if the tales are even half-true, he was likely either a contender for or holder of the Chef Archetype. He was as heavily involved in the food industry as you might expect. As The Directorate had absorbed a number of Hive Worlds, and were currently absorbing a huge number of Orks, killing him would cripple their food supply, and they didn't have the kind of surplus to remain net positive without him.
Lastly, there are the the Mojo Gods, and the Autonite Gods. The former are aspects of Stizlak, the Gretchin that became the first Hobbgrot and is regarded by nearly all other Hobbgrots with awe and admiration, to the point he became their god more or less by accident. His renamed Waagh energy, the Mojo, was originally thought of as a weapon against Gork and Mork, and Stizlak's sour opinion of them lead him to a sour opinion of gods in general, and as the focal point of the Mojo, that affected how they manifested. Or it would have, had the Mojo Gods not had Stizlak go through a spiritual journey to confront some of his demons before they properly manifested. This was effective, and a healthier Stizlak lead to a healthier set of Mojo Gods. With Gork and Mork's death, many, many Orks in the Ultima Segmentum have been flocking to the closest thing to the Waagh Field in the galaxy, as the War Field is honestly still fairly different from either of them. Stizlak fulfills almost the exact same function as a Warboss in the Mojo, meaning his death ought to have a similar effect, but he was easily the single most powerful real space combatant The Directorate had, as he has been absorbing massive amounts of Mojo energy from his offspring for centuries, and now had huge numbers of Orks joining up and adding their own contributions. Anyone who wasn't a Paragon would be a joke to him.
The Auton Gods, meanwhile, were revived using special plays originally developed in part at Mother's behest, and later used as the basis for various reality-altering plays for all sorts of purposes. While only a handful could be brought back at the time, their numbers have grown as the spiritual revolution The Directorate has brought about for them via a mix of their own spiritualism clearly being real and the Autons copying Lifeforce-related techniques progressed, helped along by The Directorate feeling they should keep a finger on the spiritual pulse of their allies. They serve as a proof of concept of sorts for gods for mechanical races, even if they need a jumpstart from an organic race. One of them explicitly grants Autons souls, allowing them to sustain their gods on their own.
AN: Having been informed by Durin that the TLN galaxy would freak out over the C'Tan the Directorate has and pull an Imperium, I decided to do a threat assessment version of my previous Omake. If Ridcully can get past the Deceiver, Void Dragon, and Abaddon's defenses, he should be able to get past a C'Tan that messes with Time and has an unusual degree of knowledge of the Warp by C'Tan standards. Now, doing it without being
noticed? That's an ask I'm not sure he'd be quite up for. YALDABOATH has been competing with an Old One in mysticism. He has no chance of
winning simply due to the inherent disadvantages of being a C'Tan trying to interface with the Warp, but the bar is still set insanely high, and it must be made clear that he is, in fact, capable of interfacing with the Warp despite being a C'Tan, which already puts him head and shoulders above the mystic understanding possessed by every single other C'Tan in either setting. Which means that, while his defenses from Ka Wards are likely weaker than VD's, he augments them with Warp-based defenses no other C'Tan can claim to have. In short, he's a goddamn anomaly one step below Aria, only he's working off a full C'Tan War in Heaven veteran, rather than a human who isn't even a thousand years old. Imbac, meanwhile, is a juvenile Slann, so even with his specialty in Chronomancy, it's unlikely he could so much as inconvenience YALDABOATH unless he had the Great Clock's help, and even then, I don't like their odds. It would be like a god of Technology or Science trying to contest VD there, and unlike VD, YALDABOATH has other C'Tan to work with if he feels he really needs to, like the Wheel.
When I realized just how much there was to go over even for a summarized dossier I decided to pare it down to 'What the gods of The Directorate would be like in 50 Turns even with minimal investment' and that's some real nonsense even if it's like 1 relevant action a Turn on average, since Into That Vast And Unrelenting Darkness hasn't even had the 13th Black Crusade start yet, nevermind the post-Imperium times. On the other hand, I tried to avoid diving too much into raw speculation. I also consolidated the Mojo Gods because we don't actually know much about them yet. Hence there not being much on the Auton gods.
Ironically, it might be characters like Frederick and the Primarchs who ask "Are you sure they're a threat, and not just a potential threat? Because it feels like you're pulling an Imperium and letting bad history dictate your actions and creating a threat where there wasn't one. Isn't that what got us here in the first place?" or things along those lines. Since, funnily enough, the Imperial remnants largely don't have the baggage of the War in Heaven. Sure, the Ultima Compact got ravaged by the Deceiver, but that's a specific guy, they didn't engage in a galactic-scale war with all the C'Tan. They probably don't care enough about The Directorate to argue too hard with the Krork or Eldar, but they might ask if this is really the best time to worry about them, especially when VD is on the verge of completely breaking containment. I tried to hint at a bunch of areas they could be really helpful, but they won't be because the Eldar, Krork, and Avernus hate the C'Tan.
A late happy New Year to all.
EDIT: Made a number of changes to the thing, making more of a list of obstacles and priority targets. Toymaker being the one you kill if you want the biggest single disruption to The Directorate since all the playkits abruptly get a lot more dangerous, for instance. Not actually that many fewer words by the end.
