If we really want to be absolutely sure we can just have Draigo and the Cadian 8th assist her. With a Tier 2 Asset and 2 Tier 1 Assets, she's guaranteed to get things done, and she'll probably get things done with time to spare.
I'm fine with giving Celestine the Cadian 8th, but I'd rather put Draigo on some other anti-Chaos mission (fighting the Black Imperium or supporting Pandora at Ynnead).
I'm fine with giving Celestine the Cadian 8th, but I'd rather put Draigo on some other anti-Chaos mission (fighting the Black Imperium or supporting Pandora at Ynnead).
Would you be fine with having Draigo assist with Ynnead, then switching him to Celestine once Ynnead is born (assuming that there's still time after that)?
I think that we need to consider that Emperor is very likely to recall Celestine mid ritual which means that we probably should send her with our fleet as back up to finish the obligations before the Ritual in case the thing on the throne decides to take her away after the battle
Now you might be thinking I'm setting you guys up for a disappointing reveal like every other time, but I'm about to bamboozle you. Cain is a T1 Hero - but entirely on the weight of his reputation and his luck.
If Draigo is a good example of a T1 Hero geared for combat - with a major in daemonslaying - then Cain is a good example of a T1 Hero geared for social and politics. He's certainly very good at rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, as well as applying his reputation, even against those who know he's full of crap.
Also, as jobs go, reforming the Schola Progenium would be among the least dangerous jobs we could give him. He would be more likely to refuse because he worries it's some sort of poison pill than to refuse because he's worried it's a dangerous job. Not that he'd refuse at all because his image won't let him, no matter how strong his imposter syndrome writhes in agony.
Also, as jobs go, reforming the Schola Progenium would be among the least dangerous jobs we could give him. He would be more likely to refuse because he worries it's some sort of poison pill than to refuse because he's worried it's a dangerous job. Not that he'd refuse at all because his image won't let him, no matter how strong his imposter syndrome writhes in agony.
I think sort of okay? Blanks strong enough to be comparable to strong Psykers tend to get killed. Jurgen is just sort of unpleasant. Strong blanks are much worse than that.
Sibling bonding is neat and all.......but are we all forgetting that now that Sanguinias has a body, he can finally do the one absolutely vital thing that meeds to be done.........and give Dante a big Primarch hug and tell him he's proud of his son? Better yet, send him to the Lamenters and tell them he knows all they've done and are proud of them (while giving each a hug as well)?
And if the Minotaurs or the Marines Malevolent just so happen to be trying to eliminate the Lamenters, Sanguinius will go full Rage Angel on them, Khorne will feel cheated that he didn't get the XI Legion, and Angron will have uncomfortable flashbacks to Eternity Gate
And if the Minotaurs or the Marines Malevolent just so happen to be trying to eliminate the Lamenters, Sanguinius will go full Rage Angel on them,, Khorne will feel cheated that he didn't get the XI Legion, and Angron will have uncomfortable flashbacks to Eternity Gate
First, he didn't steal fragments from their Thrones. The metaphysics of the quest don't allow that. You either get all of the Thrones of the god in question by eating said god (or more than one god), or you get nothing. Or you topple all the Thrones, killing the god without eating any of the said Thrones. No partial claims to the Astral Thrones that have been already claimed. Instead, he stole raw power from the Realm of Chaos and purified it from its taint, though I have to admit here I'm not 100% sure about the details on how that works. Just about what it is not.
...Underwhelming. I had assumed he was somehow stealing bits of their thrones based on the fact that he's apparently able to suborn Chaos Daemons (as we saw in the fight aboard Gaia's Edge.)
I suppose that the first Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine game does provide a precedent for the Chaos Gods going to significant lengths to prevent significant amounts of warp-energy from escaping their grasp?
You mean when he heroically stopped the space nazis from genociding countless innocent people who were also his own allies? Because it is all a matter of perspective. If he was the protagonist of this quest, I will guarantee you that most people would be gleefully celebrating that. And Telepathy is just his main tool because it is something he is the best at, even if its icky to many people.
I was repulsed when OL did it in With This Ring, and I'm repulsed here. Reaching inside someone's head and rewriting who they are, and/or making them do things they would find repugnant, is simply a moral red line to me.
Besides, if all of these people all went insane like you are proposing, they wouldn't be much use to him as a fighting force outside of being constant puppets, now would they? Which clearly didn't happen, so your point doesn't stand. And he needed those people and ships to have something stopping Imperium just continuing its genocide.
Are you arguing that he did something more like inflaming existing ill will among the ranks, rather than outright mind control? That would still be rather grotesque - the equivalent of using someone's existing rivalry with a friend to make them attempt murder by amplifying the kernel of negative emotion within it.
Still, I suppose that could have worked. Manipulate a large number of people into killing their own allies, targeting already-present elements of their personalities to make them think it was their own choice, and then leverage that to make them swear to his banner because he'd turned them into traitors. Again, worthy of the Plotter, but more elegant than simply rewriting their psyches.
Well then. I want you to take and keep a hard stance of freeing or killing all the Servitors converted from living humans on this turn. And switching to just making ones from (hopefully) unthinking clones.
Sure? I'm not certain what makes this such an armor-piercing bullet to you?
To my knowledge, the sourcing of servitors can go anywhere from outright crimes against humanity (see the current arc of @sun tzu's 40k/GI Joe quest for some of that) to harvesting bodies from morgues and wiring them up before the process of decay progresses too far. The use of living humans when cloning technology is already available (and already in use, in some regions) is just another of the Imperium's many needless atrocities.
However, given that the execrable Arco-Flagellants seem to be treated as an exceptional violation in-universe, rather than just another sort of servitor, I'm inclined to believe that the vast majority of servitors are mindless automata; otherwise, the not-quite-dead, certainly-not-alive state of the Arco-Flagellants wouldn't be considered worthy of note.
I've certainly never seen anything that would imply that "freeing" a servitor is possible. Half the point of servitors is that they've had most of their original brains removed and the rest turned into a supplement for cogitator hardware. Part of what makes the use of actual human beings for servitors so repellent is that what's done is irreversible. There's nothing left in there to save.
But even worse, the politics of it. Mars and Antegymax, at this point, would almost certainly decide to rebel and trigger a civil war if we tried to shove something like this down their throats. Which, almost certainly, would mean a death spiral for us at our current level of preparation and Imperial subversion.
If we try to enforce it immediately? I don't doubt it.
However, consider that we managed to implement underhive reform without demanding that every Hive City in the galaxy be shuttered until they could institute the reforms? You're strawmanning your own argument.
Scaling up the already existing use of cloning facilities to produce servitors and winding down the Mechanicus' human trafficking is a feasible avenue to pursue (although we'd want the Administratum to keep an eye on the degree to which the Mechanicus tries to benefit by demanding that tithes previously paid in flesh now be paid in other materials.)
What Lucan did is nothing when compared to that violation present everywhere in the Imperium. Constantly. Which we should be looking for a solution btw, even in this very real AP hell. But at the same time, if you want to feel icky about Lucan puppetting someone temporarily, maybe remember that there are more important fights to be fought.
Don't play the "there's starving children in Africa" game, and don't downplay what Lucan did. You might as well try to characterize Jigsaw as an avant-garde motivational speaker.
I'm not unaware of the ontological issues of free will when we consider things like environment and material circumstances. However, Lucan decided to bypass any such nuanced argument by reaching into peoples' brains and, AT ABSOLUTE BEST, jamming a psychic crowbar into existing cracks to induce psychotic breaks which aided his own ends.
When I was in middle school, I flew into a rage and chased my sister through the house with a knife. I am incredibly thankful that she wasn't hurt by my violent episode, and if a wizard appeared behind me - either now or then - and psychically 'encouraged' me to pick up a knife and kill my sister by grabbing hold of my existing flaw and hypercharging it, I would spend the rest of my life hating that person and struggling with the guilt of what they made me do.
There is no power structure worth defending in which Lucan's conduct can be considered anything less than an existential threat to basic humanity. Trying to dice up the injustices of the world and play them against one another - saying things like, "Well, the treatment of women is horrid, but surely the plight of the disabled in modern society is more important!" - is the sort of thing we should be fighting, not using as a pretext to trivialize atrocities.
Hey, since Lucan is such a...divisive topic, I have an idea! We wait to discuss him until something he's directly involved with is on-screen for an update again. Because if we get too caught up in arguing about Lucan and his actions, then we're not going to be paying enough attention to what's currently happening elsewhere.
Basically, I don't like having to defend Lucan because people keep trying to paint him as a ticking time-bomb set up by Chaos. I want to shit on this stubborn idiot because isn't willing to let go of his "genius plan" that he has been preparing for about ten thousand years, even after Pandora's return and the Great Rift. Because the sunk cost -fallacy is a bitch.
Can you really call him stubborn? If he has been working on this plan for ten thousand years baring witness to countless horrors why would Lucan just drop his plan simply because Pandora appeared? Is it a surprise? Of course. Would her appearance make him reevaluate some things about his plan? Possibly. But Pandora shows up claiming she has a better path forward which includes...reforming the Imperium. To Lucan who lost one of his sisters to the Imperium (who was trying to get involved and help) and saw every possible horror the Imperium has inflicted onto the galaxy the very idea of trying to reform the Imperium would be absurd.
...Underwhelming. I had assumed he was somehow stealing bits of their thrones based on the fact that he's apparently able to suborn Chaos Daemons (as we saw in the fight aboard Gaia's Edge.)
I suppose that the first Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine game does provide a precedent for the Chaos Gods going to significant lengths to prevent significant amounts of warp-energy from escaping their grasp?
He's a sorcerer. He just did mass daemon binding, on the fly, in the warp, en masse.
As for the rest of your post, it should be noted that you don't know how Lucan subverted half of Battlefleet Solar. It probably did involve some amount of mind control, given the scale at which it happened, but it is unlikely to have lasted long-term because maintaining that would take a great deal of power.
Lucan does not have a lot of other options to stop the genocide of Nova Terra otherwise, either, as the landing of Imperial troops would have subsequently lead to a great deal of death and destruction, which meant that he would have to singlehandedly stop a battlefleet of tens of thousands of warships carrying billions of men from reaching low orbit, where even a single one slipping the net means millions die, on a planet that has no substantial garrison because those forces are elsewhere inciting rebellion elsewhere in Pacificus. Which means that Lucan has to make use of his power as efficiently as possible in order to make that work.
If Pandora were the one in that situation instead, the only way she could do it would be to ensure that the entirety of Battlefleet Solae goes missing in the Warp forever. An Alpha Plus Biomancer would have to spread some sort of plague through each individual ship, a warp disease that can jump from ship to ship at speed. A Pyromancer would cause their weapons to detonate when firing, or their reactors to overload, killing everyone on board. And a Telekinetic would have caused the fleet to be lost inside a tesseract of their own making in the Warp, or caused every single ship to exit the Warp while overlapping another ship, leading to mass death regardless.
There is no easy, moral, casualty-free answer to how an Alpha Plus stops the single largest Imperial Battlefleet and a complement of Imperial Guard to match from burning a planet. Lucan, born with a talent for Telepathy, could only make use of the skills he had at his disposal, which also turned out to let him take those forces for his own. It is ultimately a massive ethical violation, but at the same time were Pandora in that situation - hell, were Pandora a Telepath at chargen - she would have to commit similarly awful crimes to reach the same result.
Lucan is an asshole. But he is also one guy, trying to protect his own, against an evil space empire. I'm happy to be able to make a character people are so divisive on, but its also important to recognise that Lucan and Pandora are quite similar as well.
Make some interesting points. It is important to realise the motivations to some characters, and how mulit-faceted they can be, regardless of initial impressions.
...but he's kinda a dick though, so 0/10, worst character ever, Pandora needs to drop the People's Elbow on him.
Wait, did Dante still have that vision of Sanguinius during the devastation of Baal? If he did I honestly wonder how angry he is with his dad for not letting him die…or if he's just happy now that he's here and can share in his misery. Either way, arresting someone's heroic attempt to die gloriously is going to leave them grumpy, even if they might understand why you did it.
I can see him somehow getting embroiled with political power games in the upper echelons of the greater schola as he tries to balance Pandora's educational reforms against the dogma spewed by more traditional factions. Which would probably pit him against some subfactions of the ecclesiarchy and also the commissariat itself. Because as we saw in The Traitor's Hand, commissars are not above screwing each other over for personal gain.
Wait, did Dante still have that vision of Sanguinius during the devastation of Baal? If he did I honestly wonder how angry he is with his dad for not letting him die…or if he's just happy now that he's here and can share in his misery. Either way, arresting someone's heroic attempt to die gloriously is going to leave them grumpy, even if they might understand why you did it.
Sanguinius has been revealed to his sons since the reclamation and rebuilding of Baal. The general response has been "Praise Sanquinius!" Dante included.
Sanguinius has been revealed to his sons since the reclamation and rebuilding of Baal. The general response has been "Praise Sanquinius!" Dante included.
I mean... The Battle of Baal is an undisputed Imperial Triumph that cemented Pandora's Legend instead of being the pyrrhic victory it is in canon. The Blood Angels took damage and so too did the sector but it was nowhere near what canon suffered.
If that's the impression you have of Baal in ASOP canon I think you need to reread that entire string of updates.
Lucan is an asshole. But he is also one guy, trying to protect his own, against an evil space empire. I'm happy to be able to make a character people are so divisive on, but its also important to recognise that Lucan and Pandora are quite similar as well.
There is no easy, moral, casualty-free answer to how an Alpha Plus stops the single largest Imperial Battlefleet and a complement of Imperial Guard to match from burning a planet. Lucan, born with a talent for Telepathy, could only make use of the skills he had at his disposal, which also turned out to let him take those forces for his own. It is ultimately a massive ethical violation, but at the same time were Pandora in that situation - hell, were Pandora a Telepath at chargen - she would have to commit similarly awful crimes to reach the same result.
Arguably we've already descended to the level of Lucan. Nevermind the fact that we rely heavily on the Custodians who underwent a procedure that makes what Lucan did appear like child's play, we voted for another Space Marine founding. We pushed to expand a branch of the Imperium's military that exclusively recruits prepubescent and teenage boys and hypno-indoctrinates them into being loyal soldiers.
