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A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)

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Alectai said:
I don't think we're ever getting rid of all three, the point will be mitigating them to a point where we're functionally on par with a faction that isn't crippled from the start. But yeah, I think every faction's gong to have their own path to get there, the only one that likely requires unified support is the Isha Heist.
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The name of the game is mitigate, workaround and rules lawyer. We already have examples of the various workaround that Canon Eldar use to avoid the slannesh soul eating.

Actually lifting the curses are going to be the work of legends, hundred, possibly thousand year epic struggles to lift the curses considering the criteria we are looking at, of which permanent killing the champions of one of the chaos gods is the simplest.

But the biggest upside of the knowledge of the curse, is that Eldar as a race now not only know HOW they are under attack, and they have more then just soul eating they will need to mitigate, the Eldar race has WIN conditions again. They now have goals besides "don't get eaten by the soul bad toucher"

They know they can clear their sight by killing kairos, so kairos is now a racial Target. They know Isha is alive, and rescuing her stops nurgles curse, so they now have a goal, a rescue mission, he'll they now know how much slanneshes curse is bound to the seat of the Phoenix court, who Isha also can upsurp.


Eldar have a GOAL, and a win condition, instead of just trying to find ways to survive that bit longer and not get soul eaten. A goal and a win condition can be a powerful thing to a person in depression.

Actually lifting the curses is a long way off, but one can't understate how important the knowledge that they CAN be lifted is, both in terms of mitigating the other two curses, but in terms of affecting the racial psyche of the eldar.
 
Completely getting rid of all three is basically a "thanks, was fun, goodbye" wincon, given how brutally high eldar base stats are and how good even diminished dominion techbase is.

40 billion of crippled Eldar/major craftworld is like a space marine legion led by a Primarch; stop slaanesh from suppressing majority of their psychic strength, stop Nurgle from crippling their population dynamics, and in a millenia or two eldar are back to being effectively strongest galactic faction. Hell, probably earlier, if they do the "double pop size every generation" thing humans did for a good part of their history.

Even shaving one point off Nurgle's curse is likely to result in pretty major changes by the point of 40k.
 
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Alratan said:
It is. If Isha is rescued and becomes the legitimate Queen of the Phoenix Court in Exile Slaneesh's hold over the souls of the Eldar may end, because Hir claim is a conceptual/legalistic one.

It may not work; but IC it's plausible that to would. That possibility massively undermines the legitimacy of the Ishari and other irrevocable Soul Forginf approaches.

All that matters to a that it's plausible that it works.
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I'm not sure what "legitimacy" got to do with it?

They're two means towards a similar goal. One is no more legitimate than the other.
(There's also the fact to remember that the Eldar are intimately tied to their gods. Slotting Isha into every slot of the Eldar soul that used to be filled with a large array of different gods is basically the same as major soul forging, and might involve a bunch of soul forging to make it work in the first place).

It'd also have some rather radical effects, and I do not expect an Isha-Eldar to resemble either an Asuryani or a pre-fall one.
Heck, they might end up closely resembling the Ishari, since they are after all based around the same Godess.
 
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Alratan said:
If the Curses are fixed the Ishari are an example of failure.

They've retained their biomancy and lost everything else.

The Path Eldar can then abandon the Paths and have all their powers.
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The Ishari are an example of an extreme immediate solution carried out in haste. this is why it's important to take our time with a solution for everything but The Eye of Tzeench, since that grows stronger the longer it's around.
10ebbor10 said:
The eldar soul was build upon their Gods. Those gods are now dead, and no matter how much cursebreaking we do, we're not getting them back.

So the pre-fall eldar are not returning, and even if you break the curses, what you have left is an eldar with a bunch of hooks/weaknesses into their souls where those blessings/curses used to attach. It's those things that allow us to attempt the reforging in the first place, but they're also still a weakness.
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indeed, we'll never be pre fall Eldar. however, their is indication that much of our psycher strength is being used to resist Slaanesh, and that our seer potential is being actively sabotaged. once the latter is overcome and the former at least mitigated if not relatively averted, we'll be vastly better off than we are currently.
Aliya said:
The Thirst is not solved by this. It probably can't be completely solved by any way other than not being Eldar anymore, like Ishari.
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we don't specifically know that. the whole reason we are able to resist Slaanesh at all is because they are a usurper, as it says in the curse update where it spells out the particulars of each curse.

soul reforging is going to be a lengthy and risky prospect, especially since the soul wounds of the Eldar from each of their dead gods mean that widely applicable reforge is even more complicated.

for now, we are targeting Eye of Tzeench, which doesn't require soul reforge.
 
Curse mitigation in general
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All that said, Vulkhari's Faction Quest is changing their souls - so their effective curse mitigation limit is prolly higher for them than for factions that are limited to either piling up wards, forcing yourself into rigid psychological routines, or fistfight nurgle and slaanesh.

By how much higher... We'll see.
 
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10ebbor10 said:
I'm not sure what "legitimacy" got to do with it?

They're two means towards a similar goal. One is no more legitimate than the other.
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Because it's a conceptual claim. If the Eldar who worship her as a whole consider her the legitimate queen that may well deny Slaneesh that authority.

Slaneesh's Thirst doesn't seem to be a piece of magic applied to every Eldar's soul. It's a piece of legalism that exploits the fact that the Warp runs on narrative. If we create a new species wide narrative that may well break the Curse.

Prospalz said:
All that said, Vulkhari's Faction Quest is changing their souls - so their effective curse mitigation limit is prolly higher for them than for factions that are limited to either piling up wards, forcing yourself into rigid psychological routines, or fistfight nurgle and slaanesh.

By how much higher... We'll see.
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The Vulkari faction quest could be a suboptimal solution/mistake*, just as the Paths are. However, while the Psths are only permanent for those who get lost on them, soul modification may be irrevocable.

* all the other Eldar strategies are mistakes, I don't see why we'd be an exception/ We're probably just utterly wrong n a different way. The way to win may be not to play, or at least not to commit to any strategy.
 
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Alratan said:
The Vulkari faction quest could be a suboptimal solution/mistake*, just as the Paths are. However, while the Psths are only permanent for those who get lost on them, soul modification may be irrevocable.

* all the other Eldar strategies are mistakes, I don't see why we'd be an exception. The way to win may be not to play, or at least not to commit to any strategy.
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It's funky that you think the soul reforge can't be changed at a later date, without some massive fatal flaws.

If you get the knowledge and skill to do the soul reforge in the first place nothing stops you from doing a second, third or fourth one as you learn from the mistakes of the previous ones and improve on the process and end result.
 
And TBH, this whole discussion is starting to feel like it's less about the Ishari, and whether to bring them to the Aeldmoot, and more about relitigating one of the first, quest defining votes.
 
I mean, ultimately, we spent 3 points on the soulforging, so we will be soul forging eventually purely because of that, and to argue against it is to do the rudest thing - relitigation of past votes.
 
There's also the bigger picture.

Sure. The Asuryani may "win" the argument and the bulk of their powers back should they just tank the curses while trying to undo them, and might eventually be able abandon the Paths when all is fine and dandy. But who says they'll ever be able to beat the curses in their diminished state?

Storming Nurgle's Garden is going to require the full might the Eldar can muster, they can't really afford to do so while spending the bulk of their strength denying Slaanesh. The Paths don't do anything to solve that. Meanwhile Vulkhari soul forging could potentially end up with enough rule-lawyering to either sidestep Slaanesh's hunger or at the very least reduce the attention and power needed to resist She-Who-Thirsts. In effect trading future power ceiling for immediate power floor so they can actually deal with the curses rather than sit around.
 
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Incidentally, and entirely unrelated, I do like the Ishari because of the sheer tonal whiplash they can bring to our craftworld.

On your left, a giant edifice of industry, a grand factory spitting out ancient power armor
On your right, a rainforest.
 
I am fairly sure that it wasn't really been about Ishari for like, a page and half, maybe more. Anyway, shit rolls or shit decisions still could go anywhere including pretty bad places.

But even if Slaanesh and Nurgle were to vanish tomorrow, we'd still have a shattered pantheon and damaged souls, greater than current diminishment, and still so much less than Pre-fall glory; given that, I rather doubt that soulforging is instantly going to get forgotten and laughed at as temporary silliness in the aftermath.

If anything, exact opposite is more likely to be true.
 
Skjadir said:
It's funky that you think the soul reforge can't be changed at a later date, without some massive fatal flaws.

If you get the knowledge and skill to do the soul reforge in the first place nothing stops you from doing a second, third or fourth one as you learn from the mistakes of the previous ones and improve on the process and end result.
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It may not: however it also may.

10ebbor10 said:
And TBH, this whole discussion is starting to feel like it's less about the Ishari, and whether to bring them to the Aeldmoot, and more about relitigating one of the first, quest defining votes.
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Not at all. Everyone has to find a stop gap, something to stop Slaneesh eating them. Those are potentially interim measures.

That doesn't mean that the choice of how we manage the apocalypse completely defines everything else.

If we kill Kairos, rescue Isha, make her the new Queen in the Webway, and then everyone on a Path just moves on and recovers their psyker powers, we'll look pretty foolish if we engaged in radical soul surgery that turned out not to be needed though.

The trade off of the Parhs is that although they're incredibly hard work to keep working, they're also mostly trivial to abandon. The Paths are a bet that the Curses can be substantially broken. They're what optimistic and hopefully Eldar adopt.

The trade off of Soul Forging is a saying everything is fucked, that we should accept defeat on that battlefield and change who we are to move to a different one. It's fundamentally a pessimistic one we're your give up on the hope of victory and decide that instead it's better to mitigate the consequences of defeat.

What we've learned about the Curses makes it possible that Biel Tan is right and we're wrong.
 
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Alratan said:
It may not: however it also may.



Not at all. Everyone has to find a stop gap, something to stop Slaneesh eating them. Those are potentially interim measures.

That doesn't mean that the choice of how we manage the apocalypse completely defines everything else.

If we kill Kairos, rescue Isha, make her the new Queen in the Webway, and then everyone on a Path just moves on and recovers their psyker powers, we'll look pretty foolish if we engaged in radical soul survey that turned out not to be needed though.

The trade off of the Parhs is that although they're incredibly hard work to keep working, they're also mostly trivial to abandon. The Paths are a bet that the Curses can be substantially broken. They're what optimistic and hopefully Eldar adopt.

The trade off of Soul Forging is a saying everything is fucked, that we should accept defeat on that battlefield and change who we are to move to a different one. It's fundamentally a pessimistic one we're your give up on the hope of victory and decide that instead it's better to mitigate the consequences of defeat.

What we've learned about the Curses makes it possible that Biel Tan is right and we're wrong.
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The paths rely on extensive social engineering. That kind of thing tends to be self sustaining, so your idea that they can be trivially abandonned is overly optimistic. An eldar society which has followed them for some time, will have forgotten how to be normal, will have lost that culture, lost that society. Even if there's no more need for the path, their entire society has been build around it.

The paths are not a bet that curses can be broken, they are a bet that nothing will change, so the entirety of society needs to be rebuild to operate in this new, altered reality, to forever live within the confines that now hold them.
It is, as the initial vote notes, a fundamentally defensive operation.

Soul forging is the admission that things have changed, and that they can be changed even more. It's not giving up hope of victory, not unless you define victory solely by how closely you can come to the ancient eldar empire of old. It is fundamentally a radical strategy that looks forward, not backwards.

Alratan said:
What we've learned about the Curses makes it possible that Biel Tan is right and we're wrong.
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Nah, Biel-Tan is still wrong, and we can see that by the fact that we bothered to look, and they didn't.

Biel-Tan worships the old Eldar Empire, longs to return to it, but that dogmatic worship of the old, makes them incapable of accepting that the galaxy has changed.
It's what prevented them from making this discovery themselves, because the empire of old wouldn't do this kind of investigation, so they didn't.

It's what makes them lash out so hard at those who spurn them, what makes them so dangerous, so volatile.
It's not an idiot ball, it's the very nature of a blind, reactionary longing for past glory.

They are not the rational reconstructionist you want them to be.
 
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Craftworlds of the North
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    • Vau-Vulkesh



    Arach-Qin



    Zahr-Tann

    Even the least of the Craftworlds are constructions of colossal scale, massing as much as small moons and comparable only to planetary bodies in size. The largest outmass many planets, containing billions of lives, vast industries, and cavernous vaults filled with millennia of relics, equipment and treasures. Were it not for the supreme mastery of the ancient Aeldari Empire over the forces of the universe, such vessels would be incapable of visiting a star system without visiting disaster on any world they pass---yet such mastery those ancient builders possessed, and vast gravity-compensators and mass-reduction engines hum ever within their depths, chaining their immense gravitation fields to barely more than a midsized voidship.
     
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    • 10ebbor10 said:
    The paths rely on extensive social engineering. That kind of thing tends to be self sustaining, so your idea that they can be trivially abandonned is overly optimistic. An eldar society which has followed them for some time, will have forgotten how to be normal, will have lost that culture, lost that society. Even if there's no more need for the path, their entire society has been build around it.

    The paths are not a bet that curses can be broken, they are a bet that nothing will change, so the entirety of society needs to be rebuild to operate in this new, altered reality, to forever live within the confines that now hold them.
    It is, as the initial vote notes, a fundamentally defensive operation.

    Soul forging is the admission that things have changed, and that they can be changed even more. It's not giving up hope of victory, not unless you define victory solely by how closely you can come to the ancient eldar empire of old. It is fundamentally a radical strategy that looks forward, not backwards.
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    Both are fundamentally radical strategies. The Paths are arguably much more radical on a day to day basis. They're just radical in different directions.

    However, based on what we now know, the Eldar may be able to break the three Curses without radical and possibly diminishing soul surgery.

    We are the pessimists insisting that we have to risk diminishment and mutilate our souls to survive.

    They're the ones saying, no, we can just win. We may not have the blessings of the gods anymore, but by force of arms and the will to power we can change our fate. Then we can abandon the Paths without a backwards glance.

    Also, it's not self-sustaining. One of the big issues that the Craftworld Eldar have is that basically everyone hates the Paths, and so they defect to other Eldar factions.
     
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    Alratan said:
    Both are fundamentally radical strategies. The Paths are arguably much more radical on a day to day basis. They're just radical in different directions.

    However, based on what we now know, the Eldar may be able to break the three Curses without radical and possibly diminishing soul surgery.

    We are the pessimists insisting that we have to risk diminishment and mutilate our souls to survive.

    They're the ones saying, no, we can just win. We may not have the blessings of the gods anymore, but by force of arms and the will to power we can change our fate. Then we can abandon the Paths without a backwards glance.
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    You complain about pessimism, yet you are the one who assume that any soul surgery must be diminishing and mutilation, that it is impossible for things to get better, unless the specific action taken is one that harkens back to the old eldar empire because better than what came before is not just impossible, it's unimaginable.

    The conservatives are inside this very thread.
     
    Prospalz said:
    All these craftworlds.

    We should ram someone with them. Use our beeg ships to assert dominance over these microscopic orcish boats.
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    That'd be a huge waste.

    Even Meros is basically an Escort to us, and I guess we're a Grand Cruiser to the Major's full sized Battleships, huh?

    Still, Vau-Vulkesh is A big fucking player, not the biggest, but far from someone who can be dismissed either. We're liable to be a major powerhouse down the line if we keep advancing this way.

    Hmm, I almost wonder if even sub-Minor Craftworlds are potentially constructable in the long run? Or if there's just Too Much Bullshit involved with even the least Craftworld for it to be in reach anymore?
     
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    Karnax626 said:
    Just existing hard enough in someone's general direction would be enough to fuck them up at that size.
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    Vau-Vulkesh would disrupt the tides on any planet it approached.

    Also, interesting variation. I like the Arach-Qin butterfly.

    Will Vau Vulkesh's appearance change when the Ishari are fully integrated, or are their biodomes too small to be visible at this scale?
     
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