Deus Pater (Exalted/40k)

[Wade Garrett]

kill the interex to own the libs

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Is it really the Imperium's fault.

Is that really Erebus murdering a culture, or is it a bunch of folks with an admittedly cool aesthetic (cybernetic centaurs with plasma bows) committing suicide via "I say, Mister Democratically Elected Space Prime Minister, we've encountered a war fleet of seven foot tall surgically altered child soldiers wielding chainsaw swords led by a man who calls himself The Warmaster, what do we do now?"

"Let's invite them to our homeworld, I am sure negotiations will be both fruitful and mutually beneficial!"

 

[lancelot]

I don't think anyone in canon sure as hell ever found that point.

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To be honest no one in canon with any kind of power has ever tried. Also for its size and purpose the Interex did it's job, and kept it's eye on the ball which was fucking over chaos. It could be said that the reason chaos moved when they did was because if the Imperium, and the Interex meged or simple worked well together chaos would be all sorts of fucked.

 

[Chehrazad]

But you touted the Interex as a positive example before the Imperium ruined everything in reply to someone saying the canon reforming Imperium was on the right track. When, in all actuality the Interex was a bit player that got eaten by the monstrous human faction rather than the monstrous fungus, or maggots, or whatever other horror.

Referencing the Interex as a positive sustainable example in any way seems head scratching.

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No, here's what happened with the Interex: The Imperium comes about them and they are utterly puzzled about these fellas using way more advanced technology such as actual AI and centaur-platforms that put them on par with Space Marines, then Erebus steals the Kinebrach Anathame and the Interex go fucking apeshit and they need to evacuate Horus off the planet like a little bitch because they're actually incapable of beating them. Then we lack all data for a while and we're told that they were destroyed in an Imperial campaign as precedent to the war against the Auretian Technocracy. Your nice claim about being stomped by a legion or two is validated nowhere, and you're free to go check False Gods to verify.

Furthermore, this argument is dumb. This is going "the Interex don't work as well as the Imperium because they're not hypermilitarized all the time at all times and have 18 Übermenschen-Primarchs, 1 God-Emperor and vast other advantages dispersed across the Imperium by either vagaries of fate or random chance." We can see that the Interex are more than capable of going toe to toe with Space Marines, we can see that they're more than capable of scaring even the battle-hardened Luna Wolves who completely fail to put up an effective fight against them and we can see that the Interex were more than willing to cooperate peacefully with aliens. What we can't see is any evidence for your quaint claim that a single Legion beat them. The Interex spent their effort on other things than being as space macho as possible, and were most likely hampered primarily by simply not posssessing the large, vast population of the Imperium that could be marshalled at a moment's notice, while the Imperium was midway through a period of heavy expansion.

Did the Interex work out? No, not the least. The Imperium did destroy them in the end, but I never said it was perfect. But here's a secret, a deal, a trick of the trade if you will: Just because it failed then, there is no reason it will fail again when applied to different circumstances and situations, and the Interex did certainly seem to work rather fine until then. As far as things go, I can't say I'm terribly convinced by the argument that the incredibly anti-chaos-specced polity got fucked up by a non-chaos-worshipping hypermilitarized polity was its own fault or a proof that it could not work out. That's just a proof that the Imperium was more militarized, which we all knew it was in the first place. Especially when we don't actually know that much about the war with the Interex in the first place beyond empty conjecture.

 

[Wade Garrett]

To be honest no one in canon with any kind of power has ever tried. Also for its size and purpose the Interex did it's job, and kept it's eye on the ball which was fucking over chaos. It could be said that the reason chaos moved when they did was because if the Imperium, and the Interex meged or simple worked well together chaos would be all sorts of fucked.

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Reminder that the Interex had a Primarch killing daemonsword just hanging on the wall of a public museum.

Just hanging on the wall.

They had their eye on the Chaos ball like Megaton City in Fallout 3 has its eye on the nuclear power ball.

 

[ctulhuslp]

I'm sorry, who got rolled over by a legion or two? When we have crazy ass shit like the Rangdan? Or Gorro. Or Ullanor. I have my doubts anything like a modern liberal democracy can cover such a vast and diverse scope as the IoM without an absolute shit ton of problems of its own.

Yeah, the Imperium is distinctly far worse than it has to be- and humanity has to do better... but if the Interex is your idea of optimal then shit is going to get apocalyptic fast. Humanity to some extent has to be militarized, it has to be prepared for the herculean effort of defending itself across the breadth of a galaxy.

The imperium needs to become better, humanity needs to become better, but if that boils down to simply thinking the Interex had the right idea we've missed the point. A huge part of this game should be trying to find that equilibrium between an oppressive militaristic regime with no regard for human life except in the abstract, to one that promotes liberty, happiness, and progress best suited for thriving in a hostile galaxy.

Edit: as an example, reconciling the surveillance needed to prevent Chaos cults or Slaught infiltrators or what have you from rampaging into disasters versus individual rights and liberties. Or memetic hazards versus harmful ignorance.

I don't think anyone in canon sure as hell ever found that point.

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Yes, and why do you think IoM is a good way of doing it?

Like, fascism is not only morally wrong. Problem is, it's inefficient pile of shit.

Survival of IoM is, by itself, a good argument modern liberal democracy would survive and prosper - because fascism is way less efficient at literally anything than it. And so, if even such a walking trashfire of inefficiencies as mix of worst parts of HRE and worst parts of fascism survived, then I see no reason for anything more efficient to keel over.

 

[Wade Garrett]

Reminder that the Interex had a Primarch killing daemonsword just hanging on the wall of a public museum.

Just hanging on the wall.

They had their eye on the Chaos ball like Megaton City in Fallout 3 has its eye on the nuclear power ball.

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But I will give them this, that is still more on the ball than how the Imperium handled daemonswords.

 

[bioticgrunt]

To be honest no one in canon with any kind of power has ever tried. Also for its size and purpose the Interex did it's job, and kept it's eye on the ball which was fucking over chaos. It could be said that the reason chaos moved when they did was because if the Imperium, and the Interex meged or simple worked well together chaos would be all sorts of fucked.

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That was always my thought process on that as well. I always assumed that if the interex joined (or at least allied) with the imperium, things may have turned out differently. Chaos may have become public knowledge, or at least the higher ups would be aware of it, and it could have made resisting chaos more efficient. Maybe the imperium would think "maybe we don't have to kill all the xenos" and so on and so forth.

 

[Karugus]

To be honest no one in canon with any kind of power has ever tried. Also for its size and purpose the Interex did it's job, and kept it's eye on the ball which was fucking over chaos. It could be said that the reason chaos moved when they did was because if the Imperium, and the Interex meged or simple worked well together chaos would be all sorts of fucked.

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And that's a fair point, that the Interex had some policies to be replicated but that's not the same thing as saying they're something we should out and out emulate.

I'm personally convinced that, yes on the scale it operated on the Interex was good, but that scale was far too small considering some of the threats in the setting and I'm skeptical it will scale up favorably.

No, here's what happened with the Interex: The Imperium comes about them and they are utterly puzzled about these fellas using way more advanced technology such as actual AI and centaur-platforms that put them on par with Space Marines, then Erebus steals the Kinebrach Anathame and the Interex go fucking apeshit and they need to evacuate Horus off the planet like a little bitch because they're actually incapable of beating them. Then we lack all data for a while and we're told that they were destroyed in an Imperial campaign as precedent to the war against the Auretian Technocracy. Your nice claim about being stomped by a legion or two is validated nowhere, and you're free to go check False Gods to verify.

Furthermore, this argument is dumb. This is going "the Interex don't work as well as the Imperium because they're not hypermilitarized all the time at all times and have 18 Übermenschen-Primarchs, 1 God-Emperor and vast other advantages dispersed across the Imperium by either vagaries of fate or random chance." We can see that the Interex are more than capable of going toe to toe with Space Marines, we can see that they're more than capable of scaring even the battle-hardened Luna Wolves who completely fail to put up an effective fight against them and we can see that the Interex were more than willing to cooperate peacefully with aliens. What we can't see is any evidence for your quaint claim that a single Legion beat them. The Interex spent their effort on other things than being as space macho as possible, and were most likely hampered primarily by simply not posssessing the large, vast population of the Imperium that could be marshalled at a moment's notice, while the Imperium was midway through a period of heavy expansion.

Did the Interex work out? No, not the least. The Imperium did destroy them in the end, but I never said it was perfect. But here's a secret, a deal, a trick of the trade if you will: Just because it failed then, there is no reason it will fail again when applied to different circumstances and situations, and the Interex did certainly seem to work rather fine until then. As far as things go, I can't say I'm terribly convinced by the argument that the incredibly anti-chaos-specced polity got fucked up by a non-chaos-worshipping hypermilitarized polity was its own fault or a proof that it could not work out. That's just a proof that the Imperium was more militarized, which we all knew it was in the first place. Especially when we don't actually know that much about the war with the Interex in the first place beyond empty conjecture.

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I'll be frank- all I know about the Interex is hearsay but you just admitted they had peers to Space Marines and the capacity to drive Horus off... and yet for a supposed specialist civilization in fuck chaos, they still lost the anathema.

It should have buried in a vault, protected by the best and most reliable soldiers they have and constant AI surveillance... when I've constantly heard they displayed it in a museum of all things. That if anything demonstrates a gross underestimation or Chaos for all that 30k Imperium was far worse about that.

And yeah... GEoM and Primarchs is a bullshit advantage but so are AI, advanced technology, and insanely good military cybernetic prosthesis- in a setting like 40k where one Waaaagh on the other side of the galaxy can snowball or a hive fleet can escalate out control on plenty of biomass a civilization has to be able to leverage its own advantages to seize some sort of hegemony lest something wander in from outside the neighborhood and ruin everything you know and love.

How exactly do you see the Interex's policies scaling up? Because keeping a coherent national identity across tens of thousands of light years seems daunting at best. How are you going to convince worlds on the other side of a segments that they need to raise their military tithes to confront a Waaaagh that will almost certainly never see the impact of if jack boots are completely off the table? That people have to be convinced in the tremendous expense of policing a galaxy when the consequences are largely out of mind and out of sight to the average world. The varied struggles human civilization faces here demands nuance- and even if an empowered and educated populace is a strong deterrent against Chaos, that potentially opens up other concerns like self-determination and political consciousness which while laudable can certainly be self-defeating here on such a scale.

 

[Imrix]

Did the Interex work out? No, not the least. The Imperium did destroy them in the end, but I never said it was perfect. But here's a secret, a deal, a trick of the trade if you will: Just because it failed then, there is no reason it will fail again when applied to different circumstances and situations, and the Interex did certainly seem to work rather fine until then. As far as things go, I can't say I'm terribly convinced by the argument that the incredibly anti-chaos-specced polity got fucked up by a non-chaos-worshipping hypermilitarized polity was its own fault or a proof that it could not work out. That's just a proof that the Imperium was more militarized, which we all knew it was in the first place. Especially when we don't actually know that much about the war with the Interex in the first place beyond empty conjecture.

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If anything, the defeat of the Interex is evidence against the necessity of the Imperium; the two were originally negotiating in good faith, and had those talks continued there was every chance a fruitful relationship might have resulted, to the betterment of humanity as a whole and the great detriment of Chaos. Instead an agent of Chaos, nestled in the bosom of the Imperium's ignorance of the threat, was able to sabotage negotiations and drive the two parties to war. Even at the height of its efficiency, ideals, and rationality, the Imperium was still used as a dupe to destroy potentially significant threats to the Ruinous Powers.

 

[ctulhuslp]

How exactly do you see the Interex's policies scaling up? Because keeping a coherent national identity across tens of thousands of light years seems daunting at best. How are you going to convince worlds on the other side of a segments that they need to raise their military tithes to confront a Waaaagh that will almost certainly never see the impact of if jack boots are completely off the table? That people have to be convinced in the tremendous expense of policing a galaxy when the consequences are largely out of mind and out of sight to the average world. The varied struggles human civilization faces here demands nuance- and even if an empowered and educated populace is a strong deterrent against Chaos, that potentially opens up other concerns like self-determination and political consciousness which while laudable can certainly be self-defeating here on such a scale.

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The same way IoM does, by being a polity which works together? Only, you know, without weird fascist bits.

For example, USA was arming up to attack Third Reich before Pearl Harbor, it was just a final straw/a decent casus belli. They had enough bodies to throw at the grinder despite it being fuck-off-where. (And despite USA at that time having a decent chunk of people who shared some idea of Nazis)

USA had issues with war exhaustion during Vietnam War, sure, but that probably had to do with that war indeed being a huge, pointless waste of lives.


Like, your post hinges on assumption that a weird mix of fascism, theocracy and decentralized feudalism of IoM is somehow more efficient than liberal democracy, and like....
Fascism was demonstrably not more efficient at raising troops or arming them or keeping a coherent polity. And that's before throwing "also add HRE-tier infighting, entitled nobility and decentralization" into the mix. You kinda need something more meaty than just assuming this, for lack of better work, system is capable of being more efficient than anything at all.


edit: A lot of justifications for IoM seem to implicitly rely on good old assumptions about fascist-esque regimes being better at militaristic stuff or mobilizing population than others. That's...not really how this works.

 

[Arcus]

It should have buried in a vault, protected by the best and most reliable soldiers they have and constant AI surveillance... when I've constantly heard they displayed it in a museum of all things. That if anything demonstrates a gross underestimation or Chaos for all that 30k Imperium was far worse about that.

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"We have thoroughly educated our population on the dangers of Chaos. Surely no one would be stupid and suicidally insane enough to take up a Chaos tainted daemonsword, and even if there were such people what are the chances that they'll be a superhuman warrior who can slip past our security completely unnoticed despite being a 7 foot tall humanoid?"

It does suggest some level of complacency, but that in itself suggests that they were doing well enough at fending off Chaos that complacency had begun to set in.

 

[Imrix]

"We have thoroughly educated our population on the dangers of Chaos. Surely no one would be stupid and suicidally insane enough to take up a Chaos tainted daemonsword, and even if there were such people what are the chances that they'll be a superhuman warrior who can slip past our security completely unnoticed despite being a 7 foot tall humanoid?"

It does suggest some level of complacency, but that in itself suggests that they were doing well enough at fending off Chaos that complacency had begun to set in.

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Point of order: the Anathame was not a daemonsword. It was a product of the technological expertise of the Interex (or at least, a subject race of that polity), a weapon capable, with proper preparation, of killing any one person. It was kept on display in a museum of such advanced curiosities, to which the Warmaster and his honour guard, as visiting, high-ranking dignitaries, were invited. It was no more an implement of Chaos than an Eldar witchblade is.

 

[Wade Garrett]

Point of order: the Anathame was not a daemonsword. It was a product of the technological expertise of the Interex (or at least, a subject race of that polity), a weapon capable, with proper preparation, of killing any one person. It was kept on display in a museum of such advanced curiosities, to which the Warmaster and his honour guard, as visiting, high-ranking dignitaries, were invited. It was no more an implement of Chaos than an Eldar witchblade is.

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Well, in the novel Angel Exterminatus we find out that Erebus ultimately gave Anathame to Fabius Bile to study (!!!!).

Fabius describes the weapon as having an intellect of its own, and a completely psychotic one at that. (And when Fabius Bile describes something as completely psychotic...)

With that said, this is Anathame after several years in the hands of the Word Bearers and having been used in perhaps the most significant act of desecration and black magic in 40K's history, the state of the blade in AE could very well be the result of Chaos Corruption and thus have no bearing on what it was like originally.

 

[lancelot]

I'm personally convinced that, yes on the scale it operated on the Interex was good, but that scale was far too small considering some of the threats in the setting and I'm skeptical it will scale up favorably.

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So does that mean you think it wouldn't scale up as well as say... the Administratum? Oh boy I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

The imperium isn't a government so much as it's a threat of complete destruction if you give the wrong people a funny look. And that is for its own people.

 

[Stewart9]

Can we all at least agree that we have assholes to kill and people to save. For example I think we can all agree that the only way to deal with Orks, Tryanids, and the followers Chaos is to kill them before they kill the people we are trying to save. The rest of it we can deal with as the QM throws it our way.

PS. I mean we could try to use some Orks as a kind of guided missile but that may be hard considering our character's views on weather or not they really exist at all. Also the Fungus only really respects killyness and our character is lacking in that area so even that would be hard.

 

[veekie]

You know, considering xeno races as something more like hostile weather phenomenon in ultra-humanist soliphism is a rather amazing way to conceptualize things like Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Necron, Daemons and Orks.

...after all the containment method is largely the same, AND it makes things a lot more efficient if you aren't preemptively hauling off to vengefully destroy each one the moment they vaguely look about to show up, but rather approach it with the same angle as terraforming a planet. Figure out why and how they are a problem, blow up those foundations, and continue applying a lot of physics to the problem.

 

[XenonPrime]

You know, considering xeno races as something more like hostile weather phenomenon in ultra-humanist soliphism is a rather amazing way to conceptualize things like Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Necron, Daemons and Orks.

...after all the containment method is largely the same, AND it makes things a lot more efficient if you aren't preemptively hauling off to vengefully destroy each one the moment they vaguely look about to show up, but rather approach it with the same angle as terraforming a planet. Figure out why and how they are a problem, blow up those foundations, and continue applying a lot of physics to the problem.

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It's certainly healthier for everyone involved and it allows for much more flexibility in how to deal with various problems.

It's fundamentally hilarious but simultaneously brilliant.

 

[Murderhobo of Nod]

Alright, I'll bite.

Is the IoM really that fascist? It's really seems to be a shitshow of hyper-feudalism. . .

 

[Imrix]

Alright, I'll bite.

Is the IoM really that fascist? It's really seems to be a shitshow of hyper-feudalism. . .

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YES.

Like, read this article. It goes down a list. The list, really.

The FBI has a questionnaire that it uses to analyse if you're a psychopath or not. It asks about thirty simple questions. The thing is, we can do a similar thing with nations, thanks to a political researcher called Dr. Lawrence Britt. He looked at the characteristics of fascist nations, their similarities and shared values, and created a useful diagnostic tool for analysing a society and identifying if it was fascist or not. What I'm going to do is go down the list and look at each quality, seeing how it applies to the Imperium of Man.

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[ctulhuslp]

Alright, I'll bite.

Is the IoM really that fascist? It's really seems to be a shitshow of hyper-feudalism. . .

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Its a quantum mix of both.

It fits overwhelming majority of Ur-Fascism's points to a T, but is also, due to partly unreliable communications and travel, partly due to delberate decisions by Big E and later Guilliman, decentralized mess often stabbing itself.

 

[Wade Garrett]

I mean, just because you're a barely functional mess of a nation barely capable of tying your metaphorical national shoelaces without imploding into civil war doesn't mean you aren't a fascist barely functional mess.

 

[Alectai]

Eh.

The thing on the "Imperium is Fascist and Evil" thing. I completely agree, with the caveat that so far, in the 40K galaxy, it seems to be the only thing that's allowed to work, and that there are very few alien races out there who aren't incredibly hostile towards other life in general.

It sort of makes sense if you look at the whole history of the galaxy. Goes millions of years with the Eldar as the top life form--and some of the more recent lore has it suggested that the Eldar at their height sort of made a point of culling other races that rose above a certain height and forcing them into a convienent little nature preserve so they could enslave or otherwise abuse for their own edification (The method they used against the humans being the Men of Iron Rebellion, as is all but admitted to during one of the War of the Beast novels), and the human race survived because they took too long to act on this on account of the Eldar having largely crawled up their own asshole and were about to explode.

Then the Fall happens, and all those little enclaves of races that were allowed to exist because they were 'Interesting' to thrill seeker space elves with wish engines suddenly have the freedom to expand without limit. Which leads to a thousand years or so later when the Great Crusade happens, and you have all kinds of horrific shit out there like the Rangdan (Who basically all but devoured a Legion or two), the K'nib (Who are currently mysterious). Plus small local threats like the fucking Carnoplasms--which land on planets and eat everything but scraps of brain and spinal fluid.

Just, you know, generally awful fucking shit.

And as the cherry on top of it all--the Emperor's chronic inability to admit to the existence of the Bad Shit in the Warp, and his need to hurry (Which makes sense when you consider how multiple hegemonizing monster swarms were brewing all at the same time after a lengthy period without the Eldar curating their preserves) meant that the Imperium split in half--with all the progressives and sane people being on the side of the crazy fucking lunatics who twisted those intentions into supervillainy.

No, the Imperium is wrong, but anyone who has the right idea tends to die young or get corrupted by darker forces. The Interex were a pretty good example of this as a race that basically did everything right--but then got run over because a bigger gorilla found them and was directed by some petty assholes to crush them without mercy.

The lesson is that you can't just be right, you have to be strong and right. And this is a galaxy that holds virtue and goodwill in the utmost contempt.

 

[Accelerator]

Also, there's the selective destruction of cultures to consider.

Consider psykers. They just appeared. Holy shit they are freaky and scary. People feel fucking nauseous. Brains explode. They are unstable.

Do you:

1. Treat them as ordinary citizens, making sure that despite all things, they are not mistreated nor oppressed

2. Try and put them under surveillance, keep all necessary caution and safeties

3. Lock them up in stasis fields for safety, or just drug them so that their powers don't go out of control.

4. Kill them all.

Problem. Psykers are pretty bad at using warp power, and can unleash warp storms, serve as gateways for enslavers, and summon daemons by accident.

As you can see, anyone who let a psyker live tends to.... not survive. All it takes is one. Just one. And shit happens. The cultures that simply killed all psykers before they could go out of control? They lived. They made up the population of the Imperium. And so when your population is the kind willing to kill people for a birth defect cause it might start causing apocalypses.... yeah, you tend to be not nice.

 

[XenonPrime]

Another problem is that Humanity as a species are psychically adolescent, they're fundamentally shit at being psykers still, hence the wild variations in talents vs the Eldar.

This wouldn't be so bad except the War in Heaven ruined the Warp, I'm not sure if it's possible for a psychic species to develop naturally like the Old Ones did.

 

[Maugan Ra]

Planetary Record

Name: Sanguis
Founding Date: Unknown (Est. M31)
Designation: Cardinal World
Location: Austra Sector, Ultima Segmentum
Population: Est. 8 Billion (note: Transient population of significant but undocumented size).

Sanguis is a world of martyrs. Internal records and planetary legend claim that the world was liberated from some vast alien threat by the Space Marines of the Blood Angels legion during the days of the Great Crusade, during which the Astartes suffered heavy casualties. Specific dates and the identity of this nameless foe have never been verified and the records of the Blood Angels themselves make no mention of the world.

In the wake of the Horus Heresy, the people of Sanguis learned of the death of the Primarch they held to have been their savior and plunged into a great frenzy of mourning and depression - a time noted in the historical record as the 'Time of Weeping'. Then, seemingly overnight, this grief transitioned into a collective reverence of the Lord of Angels, and through his example the very act of Martyrdom itself. Pilgrims from Sanguis travelled to other worlds, seeking out stories of local martyrs and their remains, and upon obtaining such would return to their home and build there a shrine or memorial to the 'victorious dead'.

Today the world is a museum and mausoleum of unmatched scope, where the stories and teachings of martyrs from across the Imperium are enshrined in reliquaries and temples that number in the millions. The priests of Sanguis are selective over who should be permitted to reside within their memorials, and disputes over whether a given soul is worthy enough have often escalated to the point of outright violence.

Tithe: Sanguis is administered directly by the Adeptus Ministorum, and pays no tax to the wider Imperium. The Ecclesiarchy receives and directs all funds from religious tithes.

Industry: The surface of Sanguis holds only sites of religious veneration. However, the constant influx of pilgrims and the need for appropriate infrastructure has given rise to a massive body of orbital stations and dockyards, which work together to feed, supply and administer the planet below.

Adeptus Presence:

• The Adeptus Administratum maintains a small liaison post in the orbiting dockyards, though contact between them and the ruling Ecclesiarchal officials is sporadic at best.
• The Imperial Navy keeps a careful watch over Sanguis from the moon of Solus, which is given over entirely to their dominion. They guard their independence with a fierce pride, and hold themselves beyond the authority of the priests below.
• The Adeptus Arbites occupy a small Watch-Fortress built into an asteroid above the planet.
• The Order of the Argent Shroud maintain a Convent upon Sanguis, and Battle Sisters of the order often serve as escorts and guardians of the priesthood and it's sanctums.