A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)

[A Slipspace Tree]

We'd have to find the library first.

And we are probably going to be told "no, you cant go into the god forging section. That area needs the aeldmoot to approve of you entering it."

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To be fair given what happened to Ynnead in canon with the ritual getting interrupted and the backup plan involving the croneswords running into the problem of "the last ones hidden inside She Who Thirsts palace", it would be understandable why the Clown god would prefer that anyone trying to godforge has as much of the Diaspora backing them as possible.

Having a significant portion of the entire Eldar military protecting a moon is much easier then having to invade the domain of chaos god (especially since invading Nurgle's to free Isha is pretty much already on the docket).

 

[Alratan]

With how much Vau-Vulkesh and The Laughing God have been on the same wavelength, do you think he is gonna let us have a library card?

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In canon the Black Library was the one joint project between the Eldar of the Diaspora we know of, it was established and built by the Black Council, a group of leaders from the major craftworlds working together.

The Aeldmoot may well have butterflied the Black Library, as the major craftworlds have higher priorities.

 

[Profilozof]

I think that black library will probably be a topic of 2nd/3rd Aeldmoot

 

[K von Carstein]

In canon the Black Library was the one joint project between the Eldar of the Diaspora we know of, it was established and built by the Black Council, a group of leaders from the major craftworlds working together.

The Aeldmoot may well have butterflied the Black Library, as the major craftworlds have higher priorities.

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At least in the wiki, the BL was created by Cegorach not the Eldars themselves.

 

[blankmask]

(especially since invading Nurgle's to free Isha is pretty much already on the docket).

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That's kinda the thing: we've probably butterflied away most of the support for Yennead, just because the people who would throw in with the desperate last ditch plan to make a death god can now focus on the much less pyrrhic option of "try to free Isha". Yes Yennead is probably going to still be a thing but it won't be as big of a thing.

 

[Prospalz]

IIRC, Black Library was Cegorarch's effort?

 

[Professor Vesca]

As far as I am aware Cegorach and the Harlequins established the Black Library inside of an abandoned craftworld, and The Laughing God is the sole determinator of who is worthy to have admission.

 

[Valerian]

As far as I am aware Cegorach and the Harlequins established the Black Library inside of an abandoned craftworld, and The Laughing God is the sole determinator of who is worthy to have admission.

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This was my impression as well.

The Craftworlds had nothing to do with its creation.

 

[Prospalz]

There seems to be some conflicting info here and there. Probably retcons again.

 

[Randino Treviani]

As far as I am aware Cegorach and the Harlequins established the Black Library inside of an abandoned craftworld, and The Laughing God is the sole determinator of who is worthy to have admission.

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kind of have to wonder if they'll even have that abandoned craft world to establish it in this time.

so did a reread, and while this thing is engulfing a star with it's mass, it's also made of smaller, individual worm monstrosities that make up the greater whole, so we probably do have enough damage to free Nacretinei with concentrated fire.

 

[A Slipspace Tree]

That's kinda the thing: we've probably butterflied away most of the support for Yennead, just because the people who would throw in with the desperate last ditch plan to make a death god can now focus on the much less pyrrhic option of "try to free Isha". Yes Yennead is probably going to still be a thing but it won't be as big of a thing.

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I'm just using Ynnead to show how godforging can go wrong even without catastrophic negative failures like She Who Thirsts and why if the Eldar decide to forge any new god they should treat it as a all hands on deck situation. It's the kind of thing that has consequences that are very difficult to mitigate after the fact.

 

[Star]

Tall Dark and Slimey would eat it. Whatever it is, Slaanesh knows they have it, and so does The Laughing God, and its big enough that Slaanesh got Nacreteini stuck in a labyrinth with a monster, AND The Laughing God sent a troupe to go find it and lead it to safety.

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Honestly at this point my guess is that Old Ones experimented on C'Tan and had put it into a biological form to see how it would react.

Similar to what Necrontyr did by putting them into necrodermis.

 

[Cago]

Honestly It could be some Slaugth megaform since we know very little about them other then they are worms, masters of the biological and were the masters of the rangdan

 

[SaltyWaffles]

@Mechanis : I've asked this question twice before, and still not received an answer, probably because it's been missed/forgotten amidst all the other stuff going on.

I'm not sure exactly, but I may have at some point mentioned Draylin is technically capable of doing so, it's just that he's too old to raise that kind of power anymore without his body giving out on him. Because he does have the knowledge to do so.
(one of the possible Bad Roll results for the Meros Rescue was him having to do a sacrifice play at some point, leaving you with only scraps of his knowledge in the form of his various apprentices and existing manuscripts/notes, but that didn't happen because someone was sacrificing goats to the dice gods for that entire sequence.)

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I mentioned before about the obvious solution to "body is too old", which is that our master biokinetics/bioformer refugees should absolutely be able to de-age (rather, heal the damage from aging) of eldar that they can physically touch. Obviously not a perfect solution because traveling to Vau-Vulkesh for all of the elder eldar is not a very easy thing, but for those with unique and/or especially valuable capabilities/knowledge, a trip like that would have strategic value. I know that de-aging a body is a lot harder than just morphing it into something nonfunctional, but trading all of your natural psyker ability for pure biomancy (and morphing your very soul into biomancy) should make you more than just someone who can break things a lot less efficiently than a guy with a gun.

It would also be quite fitting with the themes of this quest and Vau-Vulkesh in general: coming up with new and creative solutions to problems that have arisen due to the Fall and the loss of divine capabilties the Eldar once had. Now, instead of easy resurrection, you have dedicated biomancers occasionally healing the damage from your aging. Not nearly as easy or elegant, but it works, and it's a practical step forward instead of just pining for the good old days.

 

[Mechanis]

@Mechanis : I've asked this question twice before, and still not received an answer, probably because it's been missed/forgotten amidst all the other stuff going on.


I mentioned before about the obvious solution to "body is too old", which is that our master biokinetics/bioformer refugees should absolutely be able to de-age (rather, heal the damage from aging) of eldar that they can physically touch. Obviously not a perfect solution because traveling to Vau-Vulkesh for all of the elder eldar is not a very easy thing, but for those with unique and/or especially valuable capabilities/knowledge, a trip like that would have strategic value. I know that de-aging a body is a lot harder than just morphing it into something nonfunctional, but trading all of your natural psyker ability for pure biomancy (and morphing your very soul into biomancy) should make you more than just someone who can break things a lot less efficiently than a guy with a gun.

It would also be quite fitting with the themes of this quest and Vau-Vulkesh in general: coming up with new and creative solutions to problems that have arisen due to the Fall and the loss of divine capabilties the Eldar once had. Now, instead of easy resurrection, you have dedicated biomancers occasionally healing the damage from your aging. Not nearly as easy or elegant, but it works, and it's a practical step forward instead of just pining for the good old days.

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The issue with this is that seneciance for the Eldar is a matter of Pykery, not biology; essentially, what's happening is his physical tissues are becoming so saturated by his own power they're starting to become more Warp Nonsense than biology and subsequently transmuting into Psykeic crystal rather than flesh- a process that is both incredibly painful and typically fatal, because it doesn't happen evenly so sooner or later something important is going to crystalize enough to stop working, or get cut up by having crystals literally forming inside it. It's never been a problem for the Eldar before, because they could just die and get a new body that doesn't have that problem, but there's literally nothing that a biomancer could do to help, other than easing some of the pain and helping keep what's left of his biology going; his own power, his own soul, is what's killing him and there's nothing anyone can do about that unless someone works out how to do soul transfers without getting eaten by Daemons fast enough.

And considering that it took Iyanden centuries to work out something as conceptually simple as "move from small rock to bigger rock" it's extremely unlikely to happen fast enough to help.

(I won't say impossible, because you already did something that was supposed to be essentially impossible, but Draylin is very much at the "I am dying, but if I am careful and pace myself, I can last long enough to write down a bunch of the important things I know and finish teaching my current crop of apprentices" stage of life. That said, he has a Soulstone on his person at all times--no sense taking risks with that, after all--so it's not like death is the end, just extremely inconvenient in terms of his strengths (scrying, general psykery, and the teaching thereof) due to the limitations of being technically dead-adjacent.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

The issue with this is that seneciance for the Eldar is a matter of Pykery, not biology; essentially, what's happening is his physical tissues are becoming so saturated by his own power they're starting to become more Warp Nonsense than biology and subsequently transmuting into Psykeic crystal rather than flesh- a process that is both incredibly painful and typically fatal, because it doesn't happen evenly so sooner or later something important is going to crystalize enough to stop working, or get cut up by having crystals literally forming inside it. It's never been a problem for the Eldar before, because they could just die and get a new body that doesn't have that problem, but there's literally nothing that a biomancer could do to help, other than easing some of the pain and helping keep what's left of his biology going; his own power, his own soul, is what's killing him and there's nothing anyone can do about that unless someone works out how to do soul transfers without getting eaten by Daemons fast enough.

And considering that it took Iyanden centuries to work out something as conceptually simple as "move from small rock to bigger rock" it's extremely unlikely to happen fast enough to help.

(I won't say impossible, because you already did something that was supposed to be essentially impossible, but Draylin is very much at the "I am dying, but if I am careful and pace myself, I can last long enough to write down a bunch of the important things I know and finish teaching my current crop of apprentices" stage of life. That said, he has a Soulstone on his person at all times--no sense taking risks with that, after all--so it's not like death is the end, just extremely inconvenient in terms of his strengths (scrying, general psykery, and the teaching thereof) due to the limitations of being technically dead-adjacent.

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But if the biomancers could make a new body for them, then the remaining hurdle to overcome would be figuring out how to move the soul from the old body to the new one? A challenge, to be sure, but hardly an overwhelming one (in the span of centuries/millennia and such), given that soul stones already involve moving the soul from one place to another.

 

[Copperscale]

But if the biomancers could make a new body for them, then the remaining hurdle to overcome would be figuring out how to move the soul from the old body to the new one? A challenge, to be sure, but hardly an overwhelming one (in the span of centuries and such), given that soul stones already involve moving the soul from one place to another.

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I have been shilling for using Cloning as part of mitigating Nurgle's curse.

Getting to the point where the eldar aren't losing people to old age or battle either (as long as they have a soulstone and it gets recovered).

It's a nice intermediate step.

 

[Alratan]

Given what the Dark Eldar can manage, and what the likes of Estrathain did by spreading his soul over multiple bodies (and a Webway realm) by inventing karmi*, old age is clearly a solvable problem, if not one we know how to solve yet.

* so even if one body dies he still has others he's simultaneously occupying.

 

[Mechanis]

But if the biomancers could make a new body for them, then the remaining hurdle to overcome would be figuring out how to move the soul from the old body to the new one? A challenge, to be sure, but hardly an overwhelming one (in the span of centuries and such), given that soul stones already involve moving the soul from one place to another.

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oh yes. it's absolutely possible to work out how to get a new living body that can accept a soul out of a Soulstone (or infinity circuit once those become a thing,) it's just extremely difficult and time consuming, because unlike the people who worked out how to do that in canon (namely the Haemonculi) you (and the craftworlders in general) have those pesky things like "ethics" and "morals" and "desire to not go through test subjects like Kleenex in hay fever season" even for the people who are radical enough to actually consider it. (in which you, read your faction of the Eldar, are absolutely counted, for the record.)

 

[blankmask]

due to the limitations of being technically dead-adjacent.

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The Aeldari as a whole seem to to make a habit of "only mostly dead".

oh yes. it's absolutely possible to work out how to get a new living body that can accept a soul out of a Soulstone (or infinity circuit once those become a thing,) it's just extremely difficult and time consuming, because unlike the people who worked out how to do that in canon (namely the Haemonculi) you (and the craftworlders in general) have those pesky things like "ethics" and "morals" and "desire to not go through test subjects like Kleenex in hay fever season" even for the people who are radical enough to actually consider it. (in which you, read your faction of the Eldar, are absolutely counted, for the record.)

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Well that's on the list then. Would it also be possible to make what's essentially a Aeldari scale Wraithgaurd for their soul to pilot? That seems marginally less likely to cause problems given that the Aeldari figured out wraith constructs in canon too.

 

[Copperscale]

Well that's on the list then. Would it also be possible to make what's essentially a Aeldari scale Wraithgaurd for their soul to pilot? That seems marginally less likely to cause problems given that the Aeldari figured out wraith constructs in canon too.

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Wraithguard ate what you get of you half ass the process imo.
The soul not being linked to the body correctly is probably what causes the perception issue.

Fortunately, our soul reforging will probably be an excellent starting point to figure out how to wire it back correctly.

 

[Alectai]

At the end of the day, the Dark Eldar cheat seems to only work because they've largely cut their souls off from the Warp. We can definitely improve our medicine I think, because Craftworld Space Elfs aren't known for being the best at it (You either get better or you die), but I don't think straight up reversing the aging process in the case of the giga old is in our power, because their body and souls are so tightly entwined that separating them will probably kill you in itself.

 

[Alratan]

Well that's on the list then. Would it also be possible to make what's essentially a Aeldari scale Wraithgaurd for their soul to pilot? That seems marginally less likely to cause problems given that the Aeldari figured out wraith constructs in canon too.

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The problem with wraith constructs is that the Eldar souls in them are only loosely coupled with reality.

What the Haemunculi managed, and people using Haemunculi derived knowledge, is how to reattach souls to bodies in a way that they could fully participate in reality.

This is something the Phoenix Lords also managed for themselves and the Exarchs, as their wraithbone constructs animated by gestalt soul collectives, in the case of the Phoenix Lords with a consistent dominant personality.

At the end of the day, the Dark Eldar cheat seems to only work because they've largely cut their souls off from the Warp. We can definitely improve our medicine I think, because Craftworld Space Elfs aren't known for being the best at it (You either get better or you die), but I don't think straight up reversing the aging process in the case of the giga old is in our power, because their body and souls are so tightly entwined that separating them will probably kill you in itself.

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I don't think there's any evidence for this.

There are examples of Dark Eldar psykers who appear to be fully capable of the full range of psychic vampirism and ways of using that energy as well as psyker powers. There's one who spent most of a novel as a living decapitated head.

The limitation on Dark Eldar using psyker powers is a legal one imposed by Vect because of the risk of Disjunctions leading to daemonic invasions, not anything connected to the metaphysics of the Dark Eldar condition.

Dark Eldar psykers are just not common or immediately oowerfulenough on a tactical scale to show up in the army books.

There's also the likes of Estrathain who used Haemunculi techniques to get his multi-body (including being a Webway realm as well as having hybrid biological-wraith bone Eldar-form bodies) setup running.

 

[Professor Vesca]

oh yes. it's absolutely possible to work out how to get a new living body that can accept a soul out of a Soulstone (or infinity circuit once those become a thing,) it's just extremely difficult and time consuming, because unlike the people who worked out how to do that in canon (namely the Haemonculi) you (and the craftworlders in general) have those pesky things like "ethics" and "morals" and "desire to not go through test subjects like Kleenex in hay fever season" even for the people who are radical enough to actually consider it. (in which you, read your faction of the Eldar, are absolutely counted, for the record.)

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Another thing for us to consider is that for someone like Deylin who is already powerful, the lifespan of a new body is likely to be drastically shortened because he will only continue to get more and more powerful as time goes on. His crystallization will happen faster and faster, until there is little point in rehousing him until we figure that part out.

The Aeldari as a whole seem to to make a habit of "only mostly dead".



Well that's on the list then. Would it also be possible to make what's essentially a Aeldari scale Wraithgaurd for their soul to pilot? That seems marginally less likely to cause problems given that the Aeldari figured out wraith constructs in canon too.

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Wraith constructs may be a viable option; the Isharii transferred their souls into a biosphere and became incredibly powerful seers and biomancers. So we could study what they did and try to replicate it with wraith constructs.

At the end of the day, the Dark Eldar cheat seems to only work because they've largely cut their souls off from the Warp. We can definitely improve our medicine I think, because Craftworld Space Elfs aren't known for being the best at it (You either get better or you die), but I don't think straight up reversing the aging process in the case of the giga old is in our power, because their body and souls are so tightly entwined that separating them will probably kill you in itself.

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Notably; the Dark Eldar reverse the aging process, not halt it, and its done through the consuming of souls. Not through the biosciences. So even if we stole a Haemonculus' notes on making grotesques or on soul transferrance they would not be of use to us for halting simple biological aging.

These are all problems we will probably resolve when we reforge our souls. Or at least we will be forced to address them.

Our biological bodies, immortality, aging, and the flaws in our souls.

 

[Mechanis]

The problem with wraith constructs is that the Eldar souls in them are only loosely coupled with reality.

What the Haemunculi managed, and people using Haemunculi derived knowledge, is how to reattach souls to bodies in a way that they could fully participate in reality.

This is something the Phoenix Lords also managed for themselves and the Exarchs, as they're wraithbone constructs animated by gestalt soul collectives, in the case of the Phoenix Lords with a consistent dominant personality.

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Phoenix Lords and Exarchs get around the problem the same way Wraithknights do, by including a living Eldar in the gestalt. Namely, whoever is wearing the armor at the time.

Another thing for us to consider is that for someone like Deylin who is already powerful, the lifespan of a new body is likely to be drastically shortened because he will only continue to get more and more powerful as time goes on. His crystallization will happen faster and faster, until there is little point in rehousing him until we figure that part out.




Wraith constructs may be a viable option; the Isharii transferred their souls into a biosphere and became incredibly powerful seers and biomancers. So we could study what they did and try to replicate it with wraith constructs.



Notably; the Dark Eldar reverse the aging process, not halt it, and its done through the consuming of souls. Not through the biosciences. So even if we stole a Haemonculus' notes on making grotesques or on soul transferrance they would not be of use to us for halting simple biological aging.

These are all problems we will probably resolve when we reforge our souls. Or at least we will be forced to address them.

Our biological bodies, immortality, aging, and the flaws in our souls.

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think of it like heavy metal poisoning: you can take X amount and not really be harmed, much, but over certain thresholds it gets worse and worse and worse until the symptom is "death". The exposure rate doesn't really change much, it's more like "every day you naturally produce XYZ moles of lead that can't leave your system"; it takes many, many, many centuries to reach even moderately dehiblititating levels even for guys like Eldrad who are Doing Stuff practically every second of every day.


The Eldar previously never really bothered to study the process in detail or work out alternative means of treatment besides "die and reincarnate" because why would they, even the C'tan weren't able to mess with that on a large scale even if some of them had options for killing specific individuals Deader Than Dead, what could possibly contest their gods if even the greatest enemy they'd ever faced couldn't (in spite of vigorous effort to find a way of doing so)?

(there are many people regretting that now, of course, and seeing it for the hubris it was, but eating the world's largest novelty humble pie doesn't magically make centuries of medical research on the connection between soul and body materialize out of the Aether.)