A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)

[Karugus]

Personally I take the judgement of the High Priest of Vaul forswearing ever crafting anything again because to him to forge something is an intimate act of worship to a dead god over voters insisting we aren't horrifically and permanently mutilated.

You are Aresh-Vul, and you cannot bear to pick up a hammer again, for your god is dead, and the anguish of his lack is beyond you to endure.

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Vaul is dead. Those of the Pantheon who died are dead. The old ways are dead. That is the core premise of this quest and it hasn't changed.

 

[Professor Vesca]

This is what happens when you create 40k Lore that allows you to play Disney songs.

I wasnt gonna share this but the threadmarked bit made me think of this as a song that represents our craftworld and our outlook.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPdSZRMrnA0

Personally I take the judgement of the High Priest of Vaul forswearing ever crafting anything again because to him to forge something is an intimate act of worship to a dead god over voters insisting we aren't horrifically and permanently mutilated.


Vaul is dead. Those of the Pantheon who died are dead. The old ways are dead. That is the core premise of this quest and it hasn't changed.

Click to shrink...

How can Vaul be dead? He was more than just some dude in the warp. Vaul is as much us as he was his own entity. How can he die when we are still alive?

 

[frostgiant]

Vaul is dead, And I plan to Beat his murderers with hammers.

But no seriously guys, We know he's dead, Their are literally parts of our souls that aren't working anymore beacause he's dead, and we were able to tell Isha was alive because those parts were working and the avenue for the curse. It hard to pull the "He lives on in our hearts" when we can scientifically prove through studying our souls that he is dead, At best we can try to carry the lessons he gave us forward, at least what ones of them are applicable. I'm pretty sure "Vaul Lives on in us" Falls flat when you can study our souls and find the Parts that are meant to connect to a now dead god.

 

[dgr11897]

How can Vaul be dead? He was more than just some dude in the warp. Vaul is as much us as he was his own entity. How can he die when we are still alive?

Click to shrink...

I mean, I will say that even if Vaul isn't dead in some ways that Matter, the Old Ways are dead, or at least dying. The Eldar who Were are gone, the vast majority of our strength, of our gods strength is gone. An empire that once ruled the stars is now gone. There's no rebuilding something like that, even if we weren't critically weakened and lacking the vast majority of our strength and technology, the galaxy is no longer what it was when the Dominion was founded. So Instead we build something new. For Vaul isn't a God of pitifully clinging to what was, no, Vaul is a God of Creation, of Crafting, of Forging and Reforging. The Dominion is dead, but we can make something new, and perhaps someday, something better.

 

[Karugus]

How can Vaul be dead? He was more than just some dude in the warp. Vaul is as much us as he was his own entity. How can he die when we are still alive?

Click to shrink...

Because one of the highest experts on Vaul in the entire Empire and the greatest expert after the Fall Vaul has absolutely confirmed he's dead, bold included. The greatest deva of the god remaining literally cannot bring himself to embody those themes because the damage was so utterly catastrophic.

'The gods live on in our hearts' sounds pithy and nice, but it's a crock of shit that ignores the entirety of canon and the greatest subject matter expert in quest. Our hearts have been reached into and torn out, those connections are at best gone, or at worst leading to fucking Slaanesh barring the few gods who survived.

It's bad storytelling to try and underplay the cataclysmic mutilation of our people, and it's really bad form to just ignore the definitive opening statement of our PoV character just because you don't like what he has to say.

 

[Vehrec]

This is what happens when you create 40k Lore that allows you to play Disney songs.

I wasnt gonna share this but the threadmarked bit made me think of this as a song that represents our craftworld and our outlook.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPdSZRMrnA0



How can Vaul be dead? He was more than just some dude in the warp. Vaul is as much us as he was his own entity. How can he die when we are still alive?

Click to shrink...

Good song. Vaul is still dead. "he was more than just some dude in the warp" Yes, and the bits of him in his worshipers are dead to. Dead like bones scattered across a desert, dead like sausage in a butcher's case. Dead like alligator leather shoes, or dead like Terry Pratchett, despite the fact that GNU TERRY PRATCHETT keeps his name moving.

 

[Professor Vesca]

I mean, I will say that even if Vaul isn't dead in some ways that Matter, the Old Ways are dead, or at least dying. The Eldar who Were are gone, the vast majority of our strength, of our gods strength is gone. An empire that once ruled the stars is now gone. There's no rebuilding something like that, even if we weren't critically weakened and lacking the vast majority of our strength and technology, the galaxy is no longer what it was when the Dominion was founded. So Instead we build something new. For Vaul isn't a God of pitifully clinging to what was, no, Vaul is a God of Creation, of Crafting, of Forging and Reforging. The Dominion is dead, but we can make something new, and perhaps someday, something better.

Click to shrink...

We shall forge with the hands of Vaul, with the hammers of Vaul, upon the anvil of vaul. We shall forge with the pieces of the world that was, the world that will be. With every artifice we shall make Vaul whole again, just as we make ourselves whole again. He stands in every suit of armor, he looks back with unseeing eyes in our every reflection. When the forge is shut and the fires are darkened, a red light peeks from under the crack in the door, and the shadows of footsteps walk back and forth in the smithy. A voice we cannot account for sings in our choirs, calling forth from the world of dreams the stuff of reality.

When we move through the crawlspaces of the craftworld he is there with us, handing to us the tools we need to put ourselves back together. And to bring about his healing. He whispers in our ears the knowledge we need to craft wonders again in His name. His hand guides the stylus upon the drawing board to make new and anew.

How can he die when we yet live?

(I dunno you kinda inspired me to expand on the lore that the Vokharii, perhaps out of some instinctual truth, or perhaps as a coping mechanism, reject the idea that Vaul is dead. We say he lives, that Slaanesh is a keeper of secrets, and what is Slaanesh's biggest secret but that Slaanesh is a liar. Slaanesh says he is dead? Our greatest smiths say otherwise. He lives because we say he does, and we refuse to allow something such as the Soulthirster tell us what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot believe).

Because one of the highest experts on Vaul in the entire Empire and the greatest expert after the Fall Vaul has absolutely confirmed he's dead, bold included. The greatest deva of the god remaining literally cannot bring himself to embody those themes because the damage was so utterly catastrophic.

'The gods live on in our hearts' sounds pithy and nice, but it's a crock of shit that ignores the entirety of canon and the greatest subject matter expert in quest. Our hearts have been reached into and torn out, those connections are at best gone, or at worst leading to fucking Slaanesh barring the few gods who survived.

It's bad storytelling to try and underplay the cataclysmic mutilation of our people, and it's really bad form to just ignore the definitive opening statement of our PoV character just because you don't like what he has to say.

Click to shrink...

Maybe it wont be the Vaul that was. But that does not mean Vaul cannot also grow and change, just as we plan to grow and change. Maybe Vaul too can slips the chains of death, just as we plan to.

The old world is dead.

The new world struggles to be born.

Now is the time of monsters.

Maybe its just how we cope with the loss of Vaul. Deny. Deny so hard that through our stories it begins to become truth? After all a big part of what defines a god is the stories the people tell about that god. Slaanesh's birth scream was so traumatic to us, that we were psychically deafened. In that moment the gods may very well have been dead, and that death reinforced by the stories we now tell.

Vaul is dead, and he remains so because that is the story we tell. The story of the dead smith, consumed by Slaanesh.

But gods change along with the stories the people tell about them. We just have to believe in a different story. Even if its not true.

 

[dgr11897]

To explain what I mean when I put out that Vaul's not Dead. Is that, well. OK, so as a species once capable of reincarnation the Eldar would probably have better words to describe this, but basically, Vaul is Dead, but not Gone. The difference for the Eldar of one day returning from death through reincarnation, and a true death and being forgotten after. Yes the vast majority of his power is gone and perhaps even the shards of him that were in our souls yet wither. But the Idea of Vaul. The Things he Taught the Aeldari, his ideals and his desires, his Name, still lives on. He's not forgotten. And all of that being around and alive, and perhaps even beginning to thrive as much as it can in this dark age, that is a powerful thing when Gods are beings of narrative and ideas. Because I think those things are just as much "Vaul" as the mass of soul power that Slannesh ate. Worship Empowers gods, and while Vaul is Dead, his worshippers are not. And if things go well, maybe one day he will truly Live once more.

Because one of the highest experts on Vaul in the entire Empire and the greatest expert after the Fall Vaul has absolutely confirmed he's dead, bold included. The greatest deva of the god remaining literally cannot bring himself to embody those themes because the damage was so utterly catastrophic.

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This was Pre-soul Analysis. Let's actually read the relevant part of the report on said analysis again.

for your gods, it is now clear, were more closely bound to your people than either of you ever imagined, and much of the vast strength your people commanded of Eld was not of soul or body, but godly blessings wrought into your very bones and flesh—and those blessings are lost forever with the deaths of the gods that granted them.

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Note the two bolded sections, this first part implies we discovered the whole Devas thing, and the Blessings woven into the flesh of the Eldar. But note, those Blessings were explicitly upon the Flesh of an Eldar, not part of the soul.
And while this does say the Blessings are gone, well, a Daemon can receive blessings from a Chaos god, but those blessings are not the Daemon itself, no? The blessings may be gone, but the Piece of Us that is a Deva of Vaul may not be. Perhaps it is diminished, and diminished further by the knowledge of his death, but I doubt it's gone out fully, given what we've managed in terms of actions in Vaul's domain.

Side note. The Nature of Slaanesh as being basically another Eldar god actually gives significant hope for the future. We made a god of the type our Old Gods were, without the help of the old ones, once before. Now we just need to figure out how to do it on purpose, and maybe, someday, in a distant future, with the help of our surviving gods, we can put everything back to right, back to how its supposed to be.

 

[LOLROFL]

Don't think we can realistically fit CIWB on any Escort hulls other than the Ketch (even the Schooner would be troublesome).

The inclusion of Holo-Fields (which is a non-brainer) only costs 1 System slot but Holo-Fields+Grav-Shield is such an infuriatingly good combo against non-AoE attacks (AoEs are rare in space combat) that ideally we will want them on pretty much any ship that can reasonably fit them.

Grav-Shields however cost 2 slots leading to a total of 3 once the Holo-Fields are factored and that is quite a bit for the smaller ships as outside of the Ketch Hull (7 System slots) 3 slots represents either half or the majority of a ship's system slots.

For reference this was the winning design from the Frigate vote:
[] Void-Sail Ketch
-[] 1x Heavy Starlance -1 Heayv slot
-[] 1x Fatetwister Cannon Weapons Battery - 1 Weapon slot
-[] 2x Æthersail - 2 System slot
-[] 1x Plasma Thrusters - 2 System slots
-[] 1x Las-Lance Point Defense Battery -1 System slots
-[] 1x Holo-Field -1 System slot
-[] Trade in one weapon slot for 1 System Slot
-[] Grav-Shield - 2 system slots

Based on this the obvious approach if we want to fit a CIWB would be to drop the PD and one Aethersail to free up the two System slots needed for the CIWB, while the reduction in speed kinda sucks most of the other Frigate designs that we've seen from other Factions only had 1 Aethersail and 1 Plasma Drive so having the same engine loadout probably isn't that bad.

Unfortunately almost all our existing ships tend to use hulls which prioritize Weapon slots over System slots (only the Ketch doesn't) so it makes coughing up the extra System slots for CIWB a bit troublesome as we'd essentially be inverting the ship's inherent Weapon slot bonus just to reach System slot parity with the hull forms that favor more System slots.

Regardless, I wouldn't go all in on CIWB over PD as while CIWB does hold an advantage in NEP cost and the ability to hurt starships a CIWB at least on the escort scale only has 1/6 of the weapons of a PD battery and I doubt it gets any better the bigger a ship you get.

Each PD battery is 60 individual weapons (for an Escort anyway) whilst CIWBs are 10 individual weapons (again, for escorts). This might soundlike a lot, but keep in mind even a piddling little destroyer is pushing a full kilometer or more in length---ships in 40k are VERRA LORGE.

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That reduction in volume of fire and the increased size of the weapons hampering tracking are why Mechanis stated that CIWB's are worse at dealing with strikecraft and ordinance compared to PD (kinda vague as to whether CIWB actually has a relevant range advantage).

Essentially, the difference is that Point Defense batteries are (comparitively) small, fast-firing weapons that are very good at tracking fast moving targets (fighters, ordinance, boarding craft,) but lack the power to do more than maybe some surface damage, in the same way a machine gun or Bofors mount would be effective for engaging most world war era aircraft but won't do much of anything to a battleship's main belt, whilst Close In Weapons are more like dual purpose guns---trading some of their effectiveness against fast movers to also be a threat to other ships, even if, lacking the power of full ship scale Macro-Weapons, they are only effective at short range.
And yes, screening with point defense and or CIW batteries is definitely a thing. Effectiveness may vary--- if you're going for "#AmericanAAscheme" you're talking about probably at least one CIW battery and two or three PD batteries, but given most ships are mounting either one or none of either (and often the latter) even one is better than a lot of ships get.

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I'd say with Escorts we could either design a 2nd Frigate scale escort with CIWB or just field enough Nettles which do have PD to complement a CIWB refitted War Ketch.

For our Capitals we could either figure out if going #AmericanAAscheme is feasible or go with a similar approach as the escorts where we have say the Carracks rocking PD while the Brigs have CIWB.

Edit:
As is the Holo-Field+Grav-Shield combo makes any ship equipped with it infuriatingly difficult to damage with Weapons batteries and the only real counter other than overwhelming numbers is either strikecraft which can keep making attack runs until they hit us or AoE weapons like Nova Cannons.

Nova Cannons are limited to the Imperials and any Orks which have managed to loot them (so less common than Imperials) but strikecraft are universally available to all factions.

With how common strikecraft are we will generally get more mileage out of PD as strikecraft are the only thing that will be able to consistently catch our ships other than Necrons and other Eldar.

 

[frostgiant]

Maybe it wont be the Vaul that was. But that does not mean Vaul cannot also grow and change, just as we plan to grow and change. Maybe Vaul too can slips the chains of death, just as we plan to.

The old world is dead.

The new world struggles to be born.

Now is the time of monsters.

Click to shrink...

Oh great, First we start with the Pithy "he's not dead, He lives on in our hearts!" The we move on to slapping his name and face on a stick waving it around saying "he ain't dead look"

Jesus people, Its not like we are talking about a competly Idea based person, Bro literally had a "I", and a personality. This is just a Faceless God like a natural god, the eldar gods where weird like this. Trying to Say "Vaul lives" when we know he equiviqually is dead, Then slapping vauls name on something like we can try to Fraken stein another god feels incredibly disrespectful, TO THE GUY WE WORSHIPED.

Like jesus, He's dead, Things can be dead without having to start going, "He lives on in us" And "He can never die because he's in our hearts". Bro's dead, We had Priests who literally interacted with him at the top of our hierarchy, This is Disrespectful as Fuck to the Primary god we worship, and know died.

Not everything needs to be "Fixed" Not everything needs to turn into a Moral feel good, Sometimes Bro can be dead, Quietly Moured and move on past his with what he showed us, Instead of trying to make everything some sort of Heavy handed Metaphor for "he lives on in us!"

 

[Professor Vesca]

To explain what I mean when I put out that Vaul's not Dead. Is that, well. OK, so as a species once capable of reincarnation the Eldar would probably have better words to describe this, but basically, Vaul is Dead, but not Gone. The difference for the Eldar of one day returning from death through reincarnation, and a true death and being forgotten after. Yes the vast majority of his power is gone and perhaps even the shards of him that were in our souls yet wither. But the Idea of Vaul. The Things he Taught the Aeldari, his ideals and his desires, his Name, still lives on. He's not forgotten. And all of that being around and alive, and perhaps even beginning to thrive as much as it can in this dark age, that is a powerful thing when Gods are beings of narrative and ideas. Because I think those things are just as much "Vaul" as the mass of soul power that Slannesh ate. Worship Empowers gods, and while Vaul is Dead, his worshippers are not. And if things go well, maybe one day he will truly Live once more.


This was Pre-soul Analysis. Let's actually read the relevant part of the report on said analysis again.

Note the two bolded sections, this first part implies we discovered the whole Devas thing, and the Blessings woven into the flesh of the Eldar. But note, those Blessings were explicitly upon the Flesh of an Eldar, not part of the soul.
And while this does say the Blessings are gone, well, a Daemon can receive blessings from a Chaos god, but those blessings are not the Daemon itself, no? The blessings may be gone, but the Piece of Us that is a Deva of Vaul may not be. Perhaps it is diminished, and diminished further by the knowledge of his death, but I doubt it's gone out fully, given what we've managed in terms of actions in Vaul's domain.

Side note. The Nature of Slaanesh as being basically another Eldar god actually gives significant hope for the future. We made a god of the type our Old Gods were, without the help of the old ones, once before. Now we just need to figure out how to do it on purpose, and maybe, someday, in a distant future, with the help of our surviving gods, we can put everything back to right, back to how its supposed to be.

Click to shrink...

Yeah its like... the image of the old Vaul is the old Vaul. That Vaul is probably never coming back. But Vaul is more then just that person, that figure, that entity, that mass of soulstuff.

Vaul is our ingenuity and creativity, our industriousness and enthusiasm for creation. Vaul is the god of forging, reforging, making and remaking. The eternal craftsman. Maybe there is no one whispering divine commandments in our ears right now, maybe Vauls presence is ephemeral, like a wisp upon the wind.

Thats why he is the single voice in the choir no one can account for. He is the red flickering light peeking out from under the door of the smithy when everyone else has gone home to rest. He is the shadows walking back and forth in a forge that should be cold and dark. He is the figure in the suit of armor, pulling children from the wreckage, or swinging his mighty hammer that none can name and none come forward to admit to. He is the person bouncing ideas in the halls of his academy. The wiseman none recognize encouraging a student or giving just the right ideas or advice at the right time to connect the pieces of a brilliant idea or work of artifice.

He is the unseeing reflection gazing back in the darkened mirror.

Thats what Vaul has been reduced to, and from such things Gods are born.

Oh great, First we start with the Pithy "he's not dead, He lives on in our hearts!" The we move on to slapping his name and face on a stick waving it around saying "he ain't dead look"

Jesus people, Its not like we are talking about a competly Idea based person, Bro literally had a "I", and a personality. This is just a Faceless God like a natural god, the eldar gods where weird like this. Trying to Say "Vaul lives" when we know he equiviqually is dead, Then slapping vauls name on something like we can try to Fraken stein another god feels incredibly disrespectful, TO THE GUY WE WORSHIPED.

Like jesus, He's dead, Things can be dead without having to start going, "He lives on in us" And "He can never die because he's in our hearts". Bro's dead, We had Priests who literally interacted with him at the top of our hierarchy, This is Disrespectful as Fuck to the Primary god we worship, and know died.

Not everything needs to be "Fixed" Not everything needs to turn into a Moral feel good, Sometimes Bro can be dead, Quietly Moured and move on past his with what he showed us, Instead of trying to make everything some sort of Heavy handed Metaphor for "he lives on in us!"

Click to shrink...

Im not fixing anything? I am saying that if we are devas of the gods, and that gods can be reborn through their devas, and that gods are born from the stories and faces the people give to them, then the logical conclusion is Vaul is only dead so long as we keep saying that he is dead. And that even IF he is dead, that doesnt mean its permanent or forever, if we dont want it to be.

I dont understand any of what your saying about 'disrespectful'. At the very minimum this could simply be how a people in mourning cope with the loss of the entity they were very close to. How is that disrespectful? If anything your the one being disrespectful and callous toward a people who are still hurting.

 

[Karugus]

This was Pre-soul Analysis. Let's actually read the relevant part of the report on said analysis again.

Click to shrink...

I'm not going to just dismiss the High Priest of Vaul being so utterly ruined by the loss of his god just because we got told 'yeah, when Vaul died Aresh Vul pretty much literally had the part of his soul that was so bound up in Vaul ripped out'. We just got told that the gods were so closely bound up that the loss of them inflicted more damage than we had previously understood. I think it's oversimplification to say we just lost the blessings but everything Vaul related is fundamentally intact. The man literally cannot forge because it's too spiritually agonizing- it didn't stop becoming spiritual agony just because a Seer said 'you were more connected with Vaul than we thought'.

There are maybe a few hundred billion of Eldar left alive if we're being optimistic, Slaanesh was forged in the heart and souls of hundreds of trillions of Eldar over a far larger timespan than a measly 10,000 years. I'm not saying we can't do anything with our natures as Deva, but I am saying Vaul fucking died, and he emphatically did not get left in the heart and mind of Aresh Vul his foremost servant. That's an objective fact. But we know that there can be Daemons of Chaos Undivided, we know you can be a Deva divorced from a higher power. That's a way more intriguing and palatable than pretending billions of people wouldn't be shattered wrecks of their former selves after their souls were flayed bare if they just had a positive can do attitude. That's just insulting to the billions of people *on the Craftworlds themselves* who were driven violently insane by the loss and the grasp of Slaanesh on their souls.

 

[random_npc]

Oh great, First we start with the Pithy "he's not dead, He lives on in our hearts!" The we move on to slapping his name and face on a stick waving it around saying "he ain't dead look"

Jesus people, Its not like we are talking about a competly Idea based person, Bro literally had a "I", and a personality. This is just a Faceless God like a natural god, the eldar gods where weird like this. Trying to Say "Vaul lives" when we know he equiviqually is dead, Then slapping vauls name on something like we can try to Fraken stein another god feels incredibly disrespectful, TO THE GUY WE WORSHIPED.

Like jesus, He's dead, Things can be dead without having to start going, "He lives on in us" And "He can never die because he's in our hearts". Bro's dead, We had Priests who literally interacted with him at the top of our hierarchy, This is Disrespectful as Fuck to the Primary god we worship, and know died.

Not everything needs to be "Fixed" Not everything needs to turn into a Moral feel good, Sometimes Bro can be dead, Quietly Moured and move on past his with what he showed us, Instead of trying to make everything some sort of Heavy handed Metaphor for "he lives on in us!"

Click to shrink...

Vaul is indeed dead, the greatest mass of power and will that was Vaul is gone, yet Vaul is not dead for some of his power and will remains and carries on his legacy. For a god like Vaul, death is not binary, it is a spectrum. Before we understood that each and every Eldar is in a very literal way, a piece of their gods we thought Vaul was totally dead, for everything we knew to be Vaul had been slain and consumed. However, now we know that our souls are very strange Deva of Vaul we know some part of him still lives. It is the difference between Vaul being 100% dead and 99.99999% dead, and that last 0.00001% of Vaul that still lives is massively important.

Think of it like Wolverine, if he gets hit by some massive death beam and every last bit of his flesh and blood are vaporized, he would be totally dead. But if someone then noticed that a few specks of his blood remained in nooks and crannies of his adamantine Skelton, there is a chance he will be able to regenerate. It's not a perfect analogy, coming back from this will be far harder and far less complete for Vaul than it would be for wolverine, but the general idea of there being a few cells left that might remake the whole is the same.

 

[Professor Vesca]

I'm not going to just dismiss the High Priest of Vaul being so utterly ruined by the loss of his god just because we got told 'yeah, when Vaul died Aresh Vul pretty much literally had the part of his soul that was so bound up in Vaul ripped out'. We just got told that the gods were so closely bound up that the loss of them inflicted more damage than we had previously understood. I think it's oversimplification to say we just lost the blessings but everything Vaul related is fundamentally intact. The man literally cannot forge because it's too spiritually agonizing- it didn't stop becoming spiritual agony just because a Seer said 'you were more connected with Vaul than we thought'.

There are maybe a few hundred billion of Eldar left alive if we're being optimistic, Slaanesh was forged in the heart and souls of hundreds of trillions of Eldar over a far larger timespan than a measly 10,000 years. I'm not saying we can't do anything with our natures as Deva, but I am saying Vaul fucking died, and he emphatically did not get left in the heart and mind of Aresh Vul his foremost servant. That's an objective fact. But we know that there can be Daemons of Chaos Undivided, we know you can be a Deva divorced from a higher power. That's a way more intriguing and palatable than pretending billions of people wouldn't be shattered wrecks of their former selves after their souls were flayed bare if they just had a positive can do attitude. That's just insulting to the billions of people *on the Craftworlds themselves* who were driven violently insane by the loss and the grasp of Slaanesh on their souls.

Click to shrink...

Our entire faction quest is fixing the flaw. Making ourselves whole again.

If Vaul is a part of us then that would include him too. Because his power, or whatever is left of his power, is invested into us. Slaanesh didnt get all of it, and part of breaking the curse Slaanesh placed upon us is challenging (or destroying) the connection Slaanesh is exploiting to claim all of our souls.

By this logic if we wanted Vaul back, we have the tools to do so. It wont be the same Vaul, he wont be anywhere close to what he once was. But we can have him back if we want it. And to be honest, considering who the Volkhari are and what they are trying to accomplish, I could very easily see them trying to do that to spite Slaanesh. To reclaim the visage and name of Vaul from the gullet of the Soulthirster because it is not worthy to hold on to that.

Like so what if they were driven insane? They dont own Vaul. They dont have sole claim to the gods of the Aeldari, we do too, and unlike them we are still alive. The gods arent for the dead, they are for the living, the people who are still here. Because it is the people who are still alive who will tell the stories that sustain and shape them.

 

[Randino Treviani]

wasn't this a "Phoenix court"? wouldn't the reforging/restoration of our souls inherently mean that Vaul himself is eventually reborn a new?

 

[Karugus]

Vaul is indeed dead, the greatest mass of power and will that was Vaul is gone, yet Vaul is not dead for some of his power and will remains and carries on his legacy. For a god like Vaul, death is not binary, it is a spectrum. Before we understood that each and every Eldar is in a very literal way, a piece of their gods we thought Vaul was totally dead, for everything we knew to be Vaul had been slain and consumed. However, now we know that our souls are very strange Deva of Vaul we know some part of him still lives. It is the difference between Vaul being 100% dead and 99.99999% dead, and that last 0.00001% of Vaul that still lives is massively important.

Think of it like Wolverine, if he gets hit by some massive death beam and every last bit of his flesh and blood are vaporized, he would be totally dead. But if someone then noticed that a few specks of his blood remained in nooks and crannies of his adamantine Skelton, there is a chance he will be able to regenerate. It's not a perfect analogy, coming back from this will be far harder and far less complete for Vaul than it would be for wolverine, but the general idea of there being a few cells left that might remake the whole is the same.

Click to shrink...

We've literally seen that the strongest Deva we have of Vaul, almost certainly an Exalted Deva- cannot bring himself to craft anything. The greater the nature of the Deva, the more catastrophic the damage to the person. Pointedly, almost all the really ancient Eldar died in the Fall. The correlation there is not that the Devas are sheltering fragments of the god to be reforged, but that the Devas were torn apart by the sudden removal of that connection in the fall.

Our entire faction quest is fixing the flaw. Making ourselves whole again.

If Vaul is a part of us then that would include him too. Because his power, or whatever is left of his power, is invested into us. Slaanesh didnt get all of it, and part of breaking the curse Slaanesh placed upon us is challenging (or destroying) the connection Slaanesh is exploiting to claim all of our souls.

By this logic if we wanted Vaul back, we have the tools to do so. It wont be the same Vaul, he wont be anywhere close to what he once was. But we can have him back if we want it. And to be honest, considering who the Volkhari are and what they are trying to accomplish, I could very easily see them trying to do that to spite Slaanesh. To reclaim the visage and name of Vaul from the gullet of the Soulthirster because it is not worthy to hold on to that.

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No. Our entire faction quest is altering ourselves to mitigate and remove the burden. It's explicitly not to make us whole and it's a huge part of why we ideologically can never coexist with Biel-Tan. Because the Vulkhari fundamentally accept that they can never be made whole and must be reforged anew. Trying to put together a false parody of the god our people knew so intimately and personally is just fucking insulting.

The whole takeaway people are just casually dismissing by insisting we can rebuild Vaul is that *we don't need to*, that the fraction of divinity intrinsic to a Deva or a Daemon can be unbound from a god. And I don't know about you, but if I saw trillions of people dragged into eternal damnation because their souls were bound to a god, I would be pretty damn reluctant to try and immediately hook my soul up to a weaker and more fragile god and risk the exact same thing happening again.

Edit: besides, it would either be a god-construct that could never function outside of very limited and specific themes, or it would be a natural god at risk of literally anyone in the galaxy (like Chaos) giving it negative themes or themes that overlap it with a Chaos God. Trying to make a god, especially one called Vaul, in our garage with our box of scraps is begging for terrible things to happen to it as things stand.

 

[A Slipspace Tree]

wasn't this a "Phoenix court"? wouldn't the reforging/restoration of our souls inherently mean that Vaul himself is eventually reborn a new?

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The funny things that having a Phoenix as your god king can do when all of your people count as pieces of your gods and he invests his power into them.

Man the Old Ones were cooking with the Eldar given the shenanigans this setup with the Eldar and their gods potentially allows them to do.

 

[Professor Vesca]

We've literally seen that the strongest Deva we have of Vaul, almost certainly an Exalted Deva- cannot bring himself to craft anything. The greater the nature of the Deva, the more catastrophic the damage to the person. Pointedly, almost all the really ancient Eldar died in the fall. The correlation there is not that the Devas are sheltering fragments of the god to be reforged, but that the Devas were torn apart by the sudden removal of that connection in the fall.


No. Our entire faction quest is altering ourselves to mitigate and remove the burden. It's explicitly not to make us whole and it's a huge part of why we ideologically can never coexist with Biel-Tan. Because the Vulkhari fundamentally accept that they can never be made whole and must be reforged anew. Trying to put together a false parody of the god our people knew so intimately and personally is just fucking insulting.

The whole takeaway people are just casually dismissing by insisting we can rebuild Vaul is that *we don't need to*, that the fraction of divinity intrinsic to a Deva or a Daemon can be unbound from a god. And I don't know about you, but if I saw trillions of people dragged into eternal damnation because their souls were bound to a god, I would be pretty damn reluctant to try and immediately hook my soul up to a weaker and more fragile god and risk the exact same thing happening again.

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I mean yeah? We were all wounded by the birth of Slaanesh. Such a thing has consequences.

A false parody? So we can be reforged but Vaul cannot? Why? That sounds incredibly arbitrary. Once we reforge our souls, will we no longer be Aeldari? Do we have to give up our craftworld? Do we have to give up our culture and history? Will we be ejected slimey and squirming upon the crust of some forsaken rock, when we complete the working?

No. Obviously not. No more then the Ishari are not still Aeldari despite changing themselves so dramatically. They are not a false parody of the Aeldari despite the changes they have undergone, and both we and the laughing god treat them as if they were all part of the same people. If we have decided that we must move forward, that we cannot return to what once was, that we must press on to what may be, then why can Vaul not join us?

Who cares what the high priests say, they are traumatized because they had their god ripped out from them in a birth scream that tore a hole in the galaxy. They dont own Vaul, if they dont want to be the priests of Vaul anymore, thats their choice. That doesnt mean that that is the only acceptable way of things. Any more then us permitting the flaw in our souls is the only acceptable way of things.

 

[frostgiant]

Our entire faction quest is fixing the flaw. Making ourselves whole again.

If Vaul is a part of us then that would include him too. Because his power, or whatever is left of his power, is invested into us. Slaanesh didnt get all of it, and part of breaking the curse Slaanesh placed upon us is challenging (or destroying) the connection Slaanesh is exploiting to claim all of our souls.

By this logic if we wanted Vaul back, we have the tools to do so. It wont be the same Vaul, he wont be anywhere close to what he once was. But we can have him back if we want it. And to be honest, considering who the Volkhari are and what they are trying to accomplish, I could very easily see them trying to do that to spite Slaanesh. To reclaim the visage and name of Vaul from the gullet of the Soulthirster because it is not worthy to hold on to that.

Like so what if they were driven insane? They dont own Vaul. They dont have sole claim to the gods of the Aeldari, we do too, and unlike them we are still alive. The gods arent for the dead, they are for the living, the people who are still here. Because it is the people who are still alive who will tell the stories that sustain and shape them.

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You keep acting like Vaul was a Shrine or something, He was a actual Diety that Some of the highest parts of our society had soul to soul contact with. This Idea of "Making a new Vaul" IS disrespectful.
Its like if your granfather Padro dies in a horrid Triple homicide, and your solution to this instead of greiving and moving on to to go get another younger, Vaguly similar person and start calling THEM granpa Padro. That is not grandpa padro, He actually died, and this talk of Making a new grandpa Padro is actually insulting to the God that we worshiped for millions of years who recently died.

Its not like Vaul was a Hammer, Or a building or something that can be reforged, He was a god, with a Actual personality and everything, SO this talk of "Making a new vaul" Is downright... Like i said, It like trying to Grab a New person to replace a recently dead loved one, calling them the same name, your not helping anythimng, all your doing is causing more pain, and a hell of a lot of offense in the long run for the people who knew Grandpa padro.


If we were just talking about Godforging, I would be up to try that, But no, Every thing you have talked about is the equivalent to trying to godforge a Baby replacement Vaul, which is not only Hubristic because you trying to match teh work of the old ones, Its just painful for everyone involved because your trying to replace Vaul, with a new god named Vaul who is basically nothing like the vaul that is 1000% dead.

At best we end up with a baby who everyone is calling Grandpa padro like that baby has anything to do with the dead guy, At worst we end up with a face on a stick who we wave around and Insist That This face on a stick is Grandpa Padro, Totally,

 

[Professor Vesca]

You keep acting like Vaul was a Shrine or something, He was a actual Diety that Some of the highest parts of our society had soul to soul contact with. This Idea of "Making a new Vaul" IS disrespectful.
Its like if your granfather Padro dies in a horrid Triple homicide, and your solution to this instead of greiving and moving on to to go get another younger, Vaguly similar person and start calling THEM granpa Padro. That is not grandpa padro, He actually died, and this talk of Making a new grandpa Padro is actually insulting to the God that we worshiped for millions of years who recently died.

Its not like Vaul was a Hammer, Or a building or something that can be reforged, He was a god, with a Actual personality and everything, SO this talk of "Making a new vaul" Is downright... Like i said, It like trying to Grab a New person to replace a recently dead loved one, calling them the same name, your not helping anythimng, all your doing is causing more pain, and a hell of a lot of offense in the long run for the people who knew Grandpa padro.


If we were just talking about Godforging, I would be up to try that, But no, Every thing you have talked about is the equivalent to trying to godforge a Baby replacement Vaul, which is not only Hubristic because you trying to match teh work of the old ones, Its just painful for everyone involved because your trying to replace Vaul, with a new god named Vaul who is basically nothing like the vaul that is 1000% dead.

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We just had gods explained to us and we just had the Aeldari gods specifically explained to us. A god is more then just my grandfather Padro, a god lives through the stories their followers tell about them, they wear the faces their followers craft for them. They are shaped by the adventures we tell, retell, and make new about them. A god can change over time, and an old god wears many faces and has many stories that can sustain it even through the most grievous of wounds.

What is Vaul but a very old god? Why does this not apply to Vaul? It applies to all the other gods we know of. Why is Vaul so different? Are the ruinous powers the final word? Can their curse not be undone? We just discovered how to undo it this turn so no, they are not the final word regardless of what they would like us to think. We were just explicitly told they have laid a curse upon us that is messing with our heads.

Like no shit the priests say the gods are dead.

Grandpa Padro isnt shaped by the stories I tell my children about him, and he doesnt change when my kids tell their children about Grandpa Padro. Gods do, explicitly so. Through those stories they live on, it is literally their bread and water. So too it is with Vaul because Vaul is no different.

Hell! Our very faction quest says we are trying to imitate the old ones by reforging the flaw in our souls away. Yeah we are copying the old ones! No shit! We explicitly chose to do that in character creation. Are you saying we should stop doing that? Give up? Because trying to imitate the old ones is the height of hubris? The alternative is Slaanesh, fuck that.

 

[random_npc]

We've literally seen that the strongest Deva we have of Vaul, almost certainly an Exalted Deva- cannot bring himself to craft anything. The greater the nature of the Deva, the more catastrophic the damage to the person. Pointedly, almost all the really ancient Eldar died in the Fall. The correlation there is not that the Devas are sheltering fragments of the god to be reforged, but that the Devas were torn apart by the sudden removal of that connection in the fall.

Click to shrink...

yeah, like I said, the equilvent of a few specks of blood of a being that can in the right circumstances, come back from a single still living cell. If the new being would be Vauls reincarnation or his heir taking up their fathers mantle is yet to be determined, and quite possible will depend on how its seen given how much perception shapes the warp. But from what was discussed on the god post, we have enough of Vaul's essence left to create something that in a meaningful way, is Vaul/their successor. If we pull it off that is, there is absolutely a chance something goes wrong and those last few specs of Vaul die.

 

[Karugus]

I mean yeah? We were all wounded by the birth of Slaanesh. Such a thing has consequences.

A false parody? So we can be reforged but Vaul cannot? Why? That sounds incredibly arbitrary. Once we reforge our souls, will we no longer be Aeldari? Do we have to give up our craftworld? Do we have to give up our culture and history? Will we be ejected slimey and squirming upon the crust of some forsaken rock, when we complete the working?

No. Obviously not. No more then the Ishari are not still Aeldari despite changing themselves so dramatically. They are not a false parody of the Aeldari despite the changes they have undergone, and both we and the laughing god treat them as if they were all part of the same people. If we have decided that we must move forward, that we cannot return to what once was, that we must press on to what may be, then why can Vaul not join us?

Who cares what the high priests say, they are traumatized because they had their god ripped out from them in a birth scream that tore a hole in the galaxy. They dont own Vaul, if they dont want to be the priests of Vaul anymore, thats their choice. That doesnt mean that that is the only acceptable way of things. Any more then us permitting the flaw in our souls is the only acceptable way of things.

Click to shrink...

When we reforge our souls, we will literally no longer be Asuryani. We will reject the Paths. We will be finding our own way to almost certainly mitigate the Curse long before we can feasibly excise it. And yes, Vaul fucking died. We happen to still be alive regardless of your goalpost shifting.

The Ishari worship Isha. One of two gods of the Pantheon fully intact even if she is bound and reduced. They're absolutely Eldar, but we're going to have to go even further and we cannot possibly take the same steps as they did because there is no Vaul left besides at most scraps from Slaanesh's table. To use Vaul, a god that has already been eaten, and already explicitly subordinated to Slaanesh through right of conquest is batshit insane. Slaanesh has already used that connection to exterminated a 5th of our Craftworld in the Fall. So long as Slaanesh has any claim to the Pheonix Court, trying to rebuild Vaul is just building another avenue for it to devour our souls. Unless we go so far as to somehow rebuild Vaul such that he rejects the authority of the Pheonix Court and in doing so completely reject ourselves.

This is not something minor, this is not just a different name, this is a fundamental cultural and religious divergence between us and the rest of the Craftworlds nearly as pronounced as the one they have with the Drukhari.

But yeah, freeing Isha would also allow her to metaphysically assert her primacy over Slaanesh as the Everqueen of the time before Asuryan's Phoenix Court, but she can hardly assert that claim with any kind of (metaphysical) weight while she's a prisoner whose power is 99% consumed by Not Dying/Being Assimilated By Nurgle.

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The Ishari have bound themselves to the Everqueen in a bid to avoid the pull of the Pheonix Court. Because Isha's authority in many ways precedes and coexists seperately with Asuryan's. Unless we have Vaul completely diverge from his mythic past, he cannot do the same. They're a fundamental refutation of how easy it us for us to do same because Isha is in a completely different situation than Vaul no matter the amount of hoops we jump through.

 

[Mechanis]

Notably relavent to this discussion, Ynnaed is very much not Asuryan. The conditions in which the Aeldari gods originally arose and 'today' are as different from eachother as Earth is from Jupiter, even if you attemped such a thing, it simply wouldn't work, because the Chaos Gods weren't a thing yet. Which means you probably end up getting Vashtorr in a funny hat and grocho marx glasses rather than Vaul 2.0 anyway, even if you were willing to try In Universe. Which you aren't, for the record.

 

[random_npc]

Notably relavent to this discussion, Ynnaed is very much not Asuryan. The conditions in which the Aeldari gods originally arose are as different from eachother as Earth is from Jupiter, even if you attemped such a thing, it simply wouldn't work, because the Chaos Gods weren't a thing yet. Which means you probably end up getting Vashtorr in a funny hat and grocho marx glasses rather than Vaul 2.0 anyway, even if you were willing to try In Universe.

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to be clear, does this mean if we tried to stoke the last embers of Vaul into a new god, the only option would be to create a god that is an heir to his mantle, or that the entire approach is fundamentally flawed?

 

[gale]

Which means you probably end up getting Vashtorr in a funny hat and grocho marx glasses rather than Vaul 2.0 anyway, even if you were willing to try In Universe.

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Is it possible to bring back aspects of Vaul? And make them into their own gods?