Just thinking about our likely space marines. If we involve them in the resurrection of the World Soul by acting as a supporting congregation of the Faithful, I wonder if they'll have some link to the WorldSoul.
Dharok inherited Lorgar's connection to its remnants, making him a Shaman without needing to perform his own vision quest, but he has a closer relationship with Lorgar than the other marines will, and has an awakened Mythos as well.
For these marines, I wonder if accompanying us on the remainder of our adventure through the Umbra may count as a collective Vision Quest for Shamanic initiation.
If it does that would save a lot of effort.
It would also make it a lot safer to grant them the psyker mutation next turn, assuming they're not automatically psykers. Now, granting a thousand people a mutation is probably months of work, but hopefully we'll get enough breathing space to do so in the next turns, while we consolidate our hold on Colchis and do some build up. I'd personally like to follow that up by granting them the Shapechange mutation so they can adopt regular human form, but other things may take a higher priority.
When they're psykers they can also start learning useful powers like Precogntion and Psychoportation. An army of space marines with those powers would be hellish to fight.
We probably need Lorgar to teach them to become fully actualised people anyway, so he can include psyker lessons as part of that.
On that note, one of the powers of Telepathy 4 that Lorgar has is the ability to have entire conversations in the blink of an eye. That should allow Lorgar to teach incredibly quickly, as he can do hours worth of one-on-one teaching in seconds.
The other thing we may be able to do to substantially empower them is to have Thalassa make the Aegis power armour, as it's probably much better than the Mk II armour they currently have.
Fighting a 3rd circle want the creator firepower.
We're not. We're fighting two Hecatonchieres. The Shard of Winter is only here as a projection that can just talk.
As I mentioned above, we have three challenges:
1) 'Kill' the two Hecatoncheires
2) Thalassa dreams the Terraforming engines into existence and repairs the physical world
3) Lorgar resurrects the WorldSoul
For #1, Settra's existing army hopefully has it well in hand. One extra War Sphinx, even a heroic one is a marginal difference
For #2, we have a problem. Settra is refusing to split his own forces. That means that if the site of engines is defended, our Circle would have to defeat them without support. This is particularly problematic with the way mass combat works, where a horde of chaff can gradually wear a small group like our circle down.
Making the space marines gives us an army of our one to lead, making us much better at mass combat.
This in turn means we can risk splitting our circle, say sending Lorgar and Thalassa and the marines to the engines while Dharok and Fan accompany Fan to attack the hecatoncheires. This means we can actually send a stronger force against the later. It also opens up options such as having Fan capture the hecatoncheires using Ultimate Darkness Internalisation. We know they're powerful enough spirits their presence can contaminate the world, so if we can capture them and having Lorgar redeem them and Thalassa reformat their spiritual nature into something that promotes rebirth rather than Oblivion they may be able to have the opposite effect.
For #3, we know that people with True Faith can support each other's miracles. Having a chapter of his sons with True Faith will hopefully make it more likely that Lorgar will succeed.
