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Deus Pater (Exalted/40k)

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[X] Defiance. Established doctrine is wrong, and the words of the Ecclesiarchy a betrayal of the God they claim to revere. Such a clean break makes further changes a lot easier to introduce, but makes you much more vulnerable to accusations of heresy and invites direct opposition.

Let them say that the big glowing Living Saint with Sisters of Battle standing beside him is a heretic. The weakness of the Imperium is how slow it is to act, so let's blow everything up in their face quickly.
 
Just had an interesting thought:
Defiance basically takes us closer to the Street Preacher, while Philosophical brings us closer to the Theologian.
Adhoc vote count started by Arbit on Oct 3, 2018 at 3:21 PM, finished with 1779 posts and 115 votes.
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ManusDomini said:
i better be useful to this quest

[X] Revelation
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Okay no more seriously, changing my vote to:

[X] Defiance. Established doctrine is wrong, and the words of the Ecclesiarchy a betrayal of the God they claim to revere. Such a clean break makes further changes a lot easier to introduce, but makes you much more vulnerable to accusations of heresy and invites direct opposition.
 
Imrix said:
When that independent authority is unshackled from the self-sabotaging fascism of the Imperium? No, I don't think it is.
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Keep in mind that most of the really bad rot and outright gratuitous grotesqueries come from planetary level stuff.

Maugan Ra said:
Well I was thinking of calling the vote but apparently we're literally tied so I guess I'll go play video games for a bit...
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Can't we just be philosophically defiant?

Or perhaps defiantly philosophical?
 
[X] Philosophy. Construct a system of quotes, teachings and doctrine from across the ages that can be used to justify your new approach. Such a change of belief will be wide-reaching and thorough, but requires more time to convey and is easier for other priests to engage with and attack.
 
dunk1010 said:
Tyrannids, Orks, Black Crusade...

I have a few more, But I disagree with the "We don't need to mobilize" bit. There are a lot of threats.
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Orks are a fair point, but they don't require the gross level of mobilization that the Imperial Guard represents literally every minute of every day--and Chaos tends to get most of their hulls by just straight up stealing it from vulnerable Imperials who go rogue and take their ships with them.

And the Tyranids literally just showed up. They're exactly the kind of threat that you maintain a reserve for--so you can dial up to meet the new needs, rather than constantly running the engine on overdrive and just trying to outright replace parts of it in use.

The Imperial Guard is as poorly equipped and numerous as they are because their primary objective is the suppression of local rebellions. Because they're still better equipped than all but the most seasoned PDF forces, and that's the only reason they need such enormous mass too. A tighter, better equipped elite infantry cadre supporting strong PDF forces (Rather than ones that have their best cadre literally decimated as a matter of course about twice a generation if they're lucky) would mean that the Imperium would lose planets very rarely, and generally only against threats that are worthy of dispatching elite forces against.

But it also means the Imperium loses the ability to keep their individual planets weak and dependent on them. Which was the policy of the Crusade, because they needed literally everything they could pull out of every world in order to keep up with the absurd tempo, and nobody ever told them to stop despite the fact that working more like a federation where everyone contributes a modest--but reasonable portion of their economy to a central pool, while having enough to see to their own affairs without needing to be shackled to the central authorities--would be a superior survival strategy.

So they kept doing it, even when it stopped being a good idea, and for all the Imperium's disgusting amount of resources, they end up having to waste most of it putting out the fires that were created strictly because of the stresses brought on by nigh-permanent full mobilization.
 
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Imrix said:
I don't think this is a fair analogy. For one, it presupposes that annexing parts of the Imperium to rebuild them free from the oppressive interference of Imperial oversight is analogous to the entire boat disappearing. It also ignores how many of the threats in the galaxy both are and continue to be the Imperium's fault. I assert that Susano is fundamentally correct that the Imperium adds to rather than withstands the dystopian universe. How many times has an Inquisitor turned rogue and gone off the deep end with some nefarious scheme? How many times have planetary governers bowed to the selection pressures of their job and become a corrupt liability? How many times have people rebelled against the abuses the Imperium levies against them and turned to malicious forces out of ignorance and desparation?
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These are sad, and testament to the deeply dysfunctional nature of the Imperium, but you're ultimately not seeing the forest for the trees here. None of those change the broader fact, essential to the setting, basically inarguable, that without constant and immense military force to hold them back, there are multiple threats which would consume humanity. The Imperium is a deeply flawed way of delivering that militarily force, but something needs to do so, constantly, and the Imperium hence cannot implode without billions or trillions of people being overrun. Every rulebook, every bit of source material, whilst underlying the broken nature of the Imperium, also makes this plain. I get that you don't like it, and I get why you don't like it, but it remains the inconvenient truth. The Imperium has to be overthrown carefully if countless lives are not to be lost.

Given the nature of the setting I'm kind of surprised this is getting so much opposition. :V

And no, my analogy does not presuppose that. What it presupposes is that the already creaky edifice of the Imperium cannot sustain the losses it will take from a civil war as it tries to prevent us annexing large chunks of its territory by force, and that the vast bulk of the territory of the Imperium will be overrun before we have any practicable way of intervening. This is basically inarguable, just strategically speaking; there is no way we can conquer a galaxy quickly enough. Even the Great Crusade took centuries, with more strength than we would have, and arguably less concerted and varied opposition. This is pretty much the argument I outlined in my first post here, so I don't know why it's novel.

At this point I think we're either talking past each other, or repeating ourselves.

thamuzz said:
@Maugan Ra
Would this represent a fair compromise between Defiant and Philosophy?
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AND LO, THE EMPEROR INCARNATE DID WALK INTO THE VALE OF GETHSEMANE

AND DECLARE THAT THOSE ASSEMBLED THERE WERE A BUNCH OF BASIC BITCHES
 
Admiral Skippy said:
These are sad, and testament to the deeply functional nature of the Imperium, but you're ultimately not seeing the forest for the trees here. None of those change the broader fact, essential to the setting, basically inarguable, that without constant and immense military force to hold them back, there are multiple threats which would consume humanity.
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It is not inarguable. @Alectai argued against it like four posts up. You are making sweeping generalisations with a degree of absoluteness that I assert is not supported by the material. No, every rulebook and bit of source material does not make it plain that the Imperium cannot implode without billions or trillions being overrun. In fact, most of the source material is concerned with relatively small-scale conflicts concerned with at most a handful of worlds; the Ciaphas Cain series, Ben Counter's Grey Knights novels, the old William King Space Wolf books, the venerable Eisenhorn trilogy, Storm of Iron, Fifteen Hours, the Dawn of War games... For pity's sake, the Damocles Gulf Crusade, a major punitive campaign expected (wrongly, as it turned out) to crush an interstellar empire, is described as comprised of a dozen warships, five companies of Astartes and less than twenty regiments of Imperial Guard. Even some of the setting's most famous hot spots, like Armageddon, are played out on the scale of a single planet!

Vast, galaxy-threatening campaigns that require the mass mobilisation which you tout as so necessary, things like Sebastian Thor's overthrowal of Goge Vandire, the Beast War, Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade or Hive Fleet Leviathan are rare, exceptional, and not representative of the general state of affairs in 40k. That those last two are not seperated by hundreds or thousands of years is deeply anomalous by 40k's standards, and frankly owes more to GW compressing the timeline into the last years of M41 for fear of losing that catchy, "it is the forty-first millennium..." tagline. Most of the time, 40k's idea of a big war is something like the Sabbat Worlds Campaign, which raged across a hundred systems - a single Sector in one of the smallest Segmentums of the Imperium, and quite within our grasp to claim and defend with greater force than the bloated, creaking edifice that is the Imperium.
 
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[X] Defiance. Established doctrine is wrong, and the words of the Ecclesiarchy a betrayal of the God they claim to revere. Such a clean break makes further changes a lot easier to introduce, but makes you much more vulnerable to accusations of heresy and invites direct opposition.
 
[X] Philosophy. Construct a system of quotes, teachings and doctrine from across the ages that can be used to justify your new approach. Such a change of belief will be wide-reaching and thorough, but requires more time to convey and is easier for other priests to engage with and attack.
 
[X] Philosophy. Construct a system of quotes, teachings and doctrine from across the ages that can be used to justify your new approach. Such a change of belief will be wide-reaching and thorough, but requires more time to convey and is easier for other priests to engage with and attack.

Going any other route other than Philosophy seems doomed to me. Philosophy is Ignatus' bread and butter. His natural playing field. If we go insurrection there's not much we can do when a couple of inquisitors shanghai a sector fleet or two and stomp Sanguis' defense force. All the preaching in the world wont stop kinetic bombardment (... though there's probably a charm for that, now that I think about it.). Plus, the ambition of seeking to change the entire imperium and not just a fraction of it appeals to me.
 
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I'm...pretty sure this quest is not set in Skirmishhammer 40,000, setting tagline:

"In the grim darkness of the far future there are only small scale conflicts of limited scope that happen rarely."
 
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