Echoes of Creation (30k/Exalted)

[Ternasta]

In this case, might it be possible that a similar warp storm could arise to delay the Emperor from reaching Lorgar? Would it be feasible to actively create some such obstacle to delay the Emperor, and if so, how much time could be bought?

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I'm actually looking forward to the Emperor showing up, mainly due to wanting to see him commiserating with Lorgar about people trying to worship them as gods.

Wouldn't surprise me if the Emperor had True Faith due to his firm belief in maltheism actually, which is accurate in his universe since GW fits the definition of evil gods.

 

[DragonParadox]

So seeing as this has been such a point of interest of late lets look at what we can trade to the IoM on a strategic scale, things we can get concessions for:

• Hand of Djeheuty Astropathic Beacons that speak through the Noosphere: They are not perfect, the message can be as much as a year late if you only get one success, but depending on how powering the thing works you can just keep shooting it off until you get that 5 successes for 1 day. Regardless it is inherently better than the present state of Astropathic messaging which is, and I am not even kidding, communication by interpretive nightmare
• Lidless Demon Eye Navigators: They are better at looking for paths than the current guys and do not slowly go mad, that is a very narrow, but very useful perfect effect, even though it comes with all kinds of moral quandaries this is big
• Mars-Like High End Tech: Granted Mars also has it, but it is quite stingy with sharing the good stuff, by breaking the monopoly, or agreeing not to break it if we want a concession from Mars, we can make quite the impact

Things we might be able to trade, but we should probably be careful with:

• Exalted Sorcery: I'm not sure I trust Big E, even the most well intentioned version of him with the debug console for reality, but if anyone can use it it's him and it would be worth a lot.
• Safe-Non-Shamanic Warp Sorcery: Thanks to Dharok we have a source for every sorcery in the book, even just getting the three Fortune, Mana Manipulation and Alchemy could shift the balance of power significantly when talking about say the Thousand Sons. On the other hand... we would be encouraging people to think there is such a thing as safe sorcery. Getting a clean source out of the Chaos Gods was a reach even for us. I do not think anyone else is managing it, but they mght think they are

What do you guys think, are there any other wide ranging trade items we can grab? Anything I missed?

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

But there are three ways around it.

1. Use Scorcry Workings to make them.
2. Use Sorcery, 2nd Circle Working to grant Navigators the relevant charms, powered by Willpower.
3. Grant someone the Lidless Demon Eye, bind the charm to the lidless demon eye and then clone/implant it into Navigators bloodline. That would involve Thalassa, but IIRC, you were already planning to have her do gene splicing for Mutations anyway, so this covers that.

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4. Sorcerously make an Attendant with Awakened Dream Manufacture, Forging the Graces and several stacks of Worker's Gift to spam out Guides.
5. Make the aforementioned Attendant and just have it force Way Graces for Navigators.

With Sorcery, if you roll high enough, you can do anything, But doing so will be....problematic as Navigator will suffer from the Dragonblooded problem.

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Which one?

Maybe it will speedup Emperor's Navigator culling. Because when a Psyker can use eye to more and less do a Navigators work then is it nessccary to let Navigator exist just because they can use few useless eye beam power?

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Honestly, their eyeball powers are actually really useful for hunting daemons and witches. They can perceive them without going crazy, have a power that lets them shrug off corruption effects that do bypass their passive resistance and have several powers that do bonus damage against corrupted people or make it way easier to banish daemons.

 

[DragonParadox]

Honestly, their eyeball powers are actually really useful for hunting daemons and witches. They can perceive them without going crazy, have a power that lets them shrug off corruption effects that do bypass their passive resistance and have several powers that do bonus damage against corrupted people or make it way easier to banish daemons.

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That is not accurate, they can perceive the Warp without going crazy, they are at most resistant to daemons and psykers messing with them. We know this because they suffer rapid aging, mutation etc...

Navigators are at most an imperfect solution to the problem of charting a path through the warp and as for any other purposes you could put them to... there is the issue of most of the population hating their guts. You can't really be part of an enforcement arm when you are in serious danger of being attacked by angry mobs on the regular.

We could take them, Colchis does not have as much of a problem with mutants seeing as a large part of our population comes from before the collapse and has never seen a Chaos mutant, but the standing issue is that they won't take the deal.

This does remind me of something @Yzarc said yesterday about most Navigators not taking the deal of us making them human... Could make them human without asking first? I mean say we got the Paternova could we cast a sorcerous spell powerful enough to strip the power and the mutation off every single Navigator in one go? That would in the same act render them powerless and immune to the most virulent anti-mutant hate. I mean sure some of them would be killed by rivals or the like, but there is no way to avoid all bloodshed on a shift in power of this scale and just leaving the system in place would come with its own likely larger human cost. One hive world getting smashed by orcs because the navigator was too slow is tens of thousands of times the misery.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

That is not accurate, they can perceive the Warp without going crazy, they are at most resistant to daemons and psykers messing with them. We know this because they suffer rapid aging, mutation etc...

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Yes it is accurate. It's all in Rogue Trader. Their mutation is a result of growing their navigator powers, not warp exposure.

Spoiler: Citation

Rogue Trader page 179 describes Gaze Into the Abyss, which even at novice levels provides the (admittedly far from infallible) ability to identify Psykers and warp taint, along with being able to track where more powerful ones have been. Higher levels of mastery allow such feats as detecting warp rifts within several hundred kilometers or active use of psychic powers in a significantly shorter range.

Page 180 of the same book describes Held in My Gaze, an ability that can (at an adept range of 60+ meters) seriously hamper psyker's abilities to use their powers and exacerbate anything causing instability in daemonic presence, to the point that mastery renders minor disruption into complete banishment.

This has great synergy with Aether Doldrums (Navis Primer p88) an AoE effect that can also cripple Psykers and cause daemons to be both damaged and stunned, which happens to be an auto trigger for instability.

Navis Primer (p90) also has Pass Unscathed which lets the navigator reduce corruption dealt to themselves and/or their allies regardless of source, to a minimum of zero.

Into the Storm page 190 has Immolate the Soul, an ocular flame thrower that harms chaos corrupted significantly more than normal.

And that's not even getting into their more general combat or utility techniques that aren't specifically anti-daemon.

 

[Ternasta]

Honestly, their eyeball powers are actually really useful for hunting daemons and witches. They can perceive them without going crazy, have a power that lets them shrug off corruption effects that do bypass their passive resistance and have several powers that do bonus damage against corrupted people or make it way easier to banish daemons.

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Frankly, I suspect the Emperor was planning to repurpose them as anti-daemon forces rather than dispose of them once the Webway project was done, because Navigators have very useful skills besides the obvious.

@Yzarc, is the True Death of Fateweaver something that was noticed by Farseers and other seers, or did they just register a change in the potential futures?

 

[DragonParadox]

Yes it is accurate. It's all in Rogue Trader. Their mutation is a result of growing their navigator powers, not warp exposure.

Spoiler: Citation

Rogue Trader page 179 describes Gaze Into the Abyss, which even at novice levels provides the (admittedly far from infallible) ability to identify Psykers and warp taint, along with being able to track where more powerful ones have been. Higher levels of mastery allow such feats as detecting warp rifts within several hundred kilometers or active use of psychic powers in a significantly shorter range.

Page 180 of the same book describes Held in My Gaze, an ability that can (at an adept range of 60+ meters) seriously hamper psyker's abilities to use their powers and exacerbate anything causing instability in daemonic presence, to the point that mastery renders minor disruption into complete banishment.

This has great synergy with Aether Doldrums (Navis Primer p88) an AoE effect that can also cripple Psykers and cause daemons to be both damaged and stunned, which happens to be an auto trigger for instability.

Navis Primer (p90) also has Pass Unscathed which lets the navigator reduce corruption dealt to themselves and/or their allies regardless of source, to a minimum of zero.

Into the Storm page 190 has Immolate the Soul, an ocular flame thrower that harms chaos corrupted significantly more than normal.

And that's not even getting into their more general combat or utility techniques that aren't specifically anti-daemon.

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I'm not going to argue on the minutia of powers, I'll take your word for it, but one thing that strikes me as odd is the notion that the the thing causing them more mutations is 'the growth of Navigator powers'. Here we have a group of people with known genomic instability caused by constant inbreeding who are exposed to the warp more than any other group of people in the setting (other than self selected groups like Chaos Cultists) and they are mutating. Occam's Razor would indicate that it probably has something to do with the highly mutagenic space hell..

 

[Degorium]

I'm off work okay can someone point me to a source where it says the emperor wants to kill The Navigators. I get it everyone thinks it's all genocide all the time but Abhumans are a real category of humanity that enjoyable legal protections under that status. Mutants hold a very particular status both in 40K and Warhammer as a whole they aren't stable Abhuman mutations I.E The Navigators, the squats the felinid, the Ogryn those are all groups of people that are exactly treated as such under the law mutants are actively mutating non-stable maybe humanoids that arise from a variety of conditions mostly due to Chaos mostly because even in 40K there aren't really chemicals that could make you a four-legged weird horse monster thing from a human.

 

[DragonParadox]

I'm off work okay can someone point me to a source where it says the emperor wants to kill The Navigators. I get it everyone thinks it's all genocide all the time but Abhumans are a real category of humanity that enjoyable legal protections under that status. Mutants hold a very particular status both in 40K and Warhammer as a whole they aren't stable Abhuman mutations I.E The Navigators, the squats the felinid, the Ogryn those are all groups of people that are exactly treated as such under the law mutants are actively mutating non-stable maybe humanoids that arise from a variety of conditions mostly due to Chaos mostly because even in 40K there aren't really chemicals that could make you a four-legged weird horse monster thing from a human.

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Assuming you can trust a Reddit post (I do not have Master of Mankind to check but it looks legit) his position can best be described as confusing:

+The webway. Mankind is ascending, Ra. Humanity is taking a great developmental step, evolving into a psychic race. Uncontrolled psykers are lodestones for the warp's touch. A species comprising them would suffer as the eldar suffered. And for the eldar, this evolutionary juncture was their final step before destruction. I will not let humanity be destroyed by the same fate. The eldar had the answers within their grasp but were too naive and too proud to save themselves. They had the webway, which could have been their salvation. But they never fully severed their connection to the warp. Their soulfires drew damnation upon their entire species.+

With the webway, humanity would need no Navigators. They would never need to rely on the unreliable warp-whispers of astropaths. Vessels would never enter the warp to be lost or torn apart by the entities that dwelt within it. But the eldar had done the same, had they not?

+No. They eradicated their reliance on the warp but they never severed their species' connection to it. I will do that for humanity, once and for all.+

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[...]

+I have conquered humanity's cradle-world. I have conquered the galaxy, in order to shape mankind's development as it at last evolves into a psychic race. No isolated pockets of our species may remain free, lest in their ignorance they invite destruction upon us all. I have shattered the hold of faith and fear over the human mind. Superstition and religion must continue to be outlawed, for they are easy doors for the warp's denizens to enter the human heart. This is what we have already done. And soon I will offer humanity a way of interstellar travel without reliance upon Geller fields and Navigators. I will offer them means of communicating between worlds without reliance on the warp-dreams of astropaths. And when the Imperium shields the entire species within the laws of my Pax Imperialis, when humanity is freed from the warp and united beneath my vision, I can at last shepherd mankind's growth into a psychic race.

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How could one break humanity's reliance on the warp (and not he is not just talking about travel here with the Eldar comparison) and also make humanity a psychic race?

 

[Degorium]

How could one break humanity's reliance on the warp (and not he is not just talking about travel here with the Eldar comparison) and also make humanity a psychic race?

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Well the Eldar rely on the warp for more than just their ships they'll also use it for their bonesinging and their gods both new and old a lot of Technology relies on the warp there's just like a lot of warp intertwined shit with that.

Then there is the kind of working perspective of the Emperor he is someone who is outright capable of just killing demons in a universe where that isn't a thing he has a multiple objects wether your talking about the Fulgurite (Perpetuals) or his own sword he's capable of slaying demons out right so on some level if he can remove Humanities reliance on the warp even if it's just putting Humanity in a place where they cannot actively be drawn from for strength for a significant period of time (Webway) and then just kill everything in the warp he could just do that. Especially if moving Humanity out of way weakens the vast majority of demons but does not weaken him.

There's also the fact that psychers are paradoxically actively under the most threat from the ruinous Powers yet have the most choice in whether or not they are consumed by them. Maybe moving mankind or very least protecting the vast majority of mankind from the warp for a time allows him to create psychers that know and understand and can just deny the influence of the four heralding that ascendance into a psychic species that does not need to rely on the warp because none of Mankind's technology if he's done his job right needs the warp to function all the ships are made out of metal and not warp stuff like the Eldar the web way is a subdimensional pocket in between reality and the warp that is cut off significantly and expansively from both and having a faster than light communication method that doesn't need to travel through the realm of Souls would actively cut off the ability of demons to hijack Communications which is great.

That also doesn't really answer the initial question he doesn't want to kill The Navigators he doesn't want to rely on them which makes sense because there are limited number of Navigators that exist they're also semi-active risk to the security of the vessel they're on it's very low key but it is there but that doesn't really indicate that he wants to kill them he doesn't have to they're power revolves around being essential removing that status would just make them another branch of mankind which considering that would just make them join the other couple hundred billion humans that exist in the universe I'm not really seeing a problem with it. He also doesn't have to kill them they just give birth or generate Baseline humans if they aren't inbreeding because they're heavily engineered branch of mankind. In my mind there is no benefits or even reason to kill them once they're not essential they'll deal with themselves relatively quickly with the with the proliferation of non- warp travel and join the other massively wealthy groups that make up the Empire just as quickly because they are insanely wealthy they're just no longer essential.

 

[DragonParadox]

Well the Eldar rely on the warp for more than just their ships they'll also use it for their bonesinging and their gods both new and old a lot of Technology relies on the warp there's just like a lot of warp intertwined shit with that.

Then there is the kind of working perspective of the Emperor he is someone who is outright capable of just killing demons in a universe where that isn't a thing he has a multiple objects wether your talking about the Fulgurite (Perpetuals) or his own sword he's capable of slaying demons out right so on some level if he can remove Humanities reliance on the warp even if it's just putting Humanity in a place where they cannot actively be drawn from for strength for a significant period of time (Webway) and then just kill everything in the warp he could just do that. Especially if moving Humanity out of way weakens the vast majority of demons but does not weaken him.

There's also the fact that psychers are paradoxically actively under the most threat from the ruinous Powers yet have the most choice in whether or not they are consumed by them. Maybe moving mankind or very least protecting the vast majority of mankind from the warp for a time allows him to create psychers that know and understand and can just deny the influence of the four heralding that ascendance into a psychic species that does not need to rely on the warp because none of Mankind's technology if he's done his job right needs the warp to function all the ships are made out of metal and not warp stuff like the Eldar the web way is a subdimensional pocket in between reality and the warp that is cut off significantly and expansively from both and having a faster than light communication method that doesn't need to travel through the realm of Souls would actively cut off the ability of demons to hijack Communications which is great.

That also doesn't really answer the initial question he doesn't want to kill The Navigators he doesn't want to rely on them which makes sense because there are limited number of Navigators that exist they're also semi-active risk to the security of the vessel they're on it's very low key but it is there but that doesn't really indicate that he wants to kill them he doesn't have to they're power revolves around being essential removing that status would just make them another branch of mankind which considering that would just make them join the other couple hundred billion humans that exist in the universe I'm not really seeing a problem with it. He also doesn't have to kill them they just give birth or generate Baseline humans if they aren't inbreeding because they're heavily engineered branch of mankind. In my mind there is no benefits or even reason to kill them once they're not essential they'll deal with themselves relatively quickly with the with the proliferation of non- warp travel and join the other massively wealthy groups that make up the Empire just as quickly because they are insanely wealthy they're just no longer essential.

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The thing is the Webway also depends on the Warp at the most basic level, it runs though the warp, which means that on order to do any kind of repairs or heck to add new sections to it you need warp-smiths of some kind. There is a reason the Eldar have Bonesingers and it's not for fashion. That is what they make their stuff out of, including but not limited to what repairs they can still make to the Webway. So unless the Emperor can make the whole thing himself or only with the aid of Magnus it makes on sense for him to do the isolation first and then train psykers to not be Chaos bait. He should have started in the opposite order... and for that purpose the navigators would have been a potential resource. Here we have a sort of psyker who is highly resistant to the Warp (if they are even a psyker as @Alratan said there is a case to be made that they act on the warp without touching it). So why isn't he recruiting them, why isn't he recruiting anyone to make this super secret Webway project? I think the Emperor does not have all the pieces himself to get from humanity isolated from the Warp to all of them rejecting Chaos.

As for the reason why he might have to kill the Navigators though, I agree that it would not be any kind of dislike of them as abhumans, I do not think he even dislikes Abhumans really, but that does not really matter against the reality of the power and prestige he would be taking from them with his magnum opus, casting them to the tender mercies of their baseline human kin This finally is where we are at the moment, stuck between the implacability of the Golden Man who does not value the Navigators as more than a stopgap and the Navigators themselves who do not want to get killed, with or without the complicity of Imperial law.

I think what we need to do is... show him that it does not work, his half designed plan, we have Lorgar's memories of betraying the Ultramarines, Chaos Primarch Lorgar. It is risky at hell to show him that, but I think it is the one thing that can convince him that he does not know best and that he might have to redesign his plans. Otherwise weare trimming around the edges of a plan we do not understand and which we know is doomed to fail in canon, not so much because of circumstance as because the Emperor does not get the very humans he si trying to save. Heck I am not even sure he understands the Prmarchs and he made those.

 

[Earth-Destroyer]

Navigators enjoy a position of near unlimited power they will tolerate no threats to. Their a reason they enjoy having a positions as 1 of the high lords of Terra. We are talking power that makes it an automatic death sentence for any normal human to have relationships with a Navigator. While the Navigator could rape whomever they want and and the only consequence is their victims being killed.

And Navigators are very much not liked at all. Some of the legal abhumans make ratkin look downright normal. I wish I had saved the drawing of the known abhumans I found a few years ago. But one of the highlight is abhumans whose eyes extend out of their heads on mobile stalks.

Everybody, every faction, they all absolutely hate the Navigators for good reason. They have used and abused their power for thousands of years now. The only reason nobody as not already wiped the Navigators out is they cannot afford to kill them. The moment that changes every slight, every insult the Navigators have given to everybody over the last thousand years will come back at them.

 

[Ternasta]

It is risky at hell to show him that, but I think it is the one thing that can convince him that he does not know best and that he might have to redesign his plans

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You mean, besides the fact that he found out that the future is in flux and his plans are no longer viable? Which we saw already? I'm not trying to be rude here, but are you mixing up this quest with another one?

Also, still not seeing why we should care one way or another about Navigators keeping their monopoly on warp travel.

 

[Alratan]

Can I ask where you're getting the idea that the emperor wants to kill them because the most I can find is he doesn't want to rely on them and that might be killing them simply because they're not as sustainable phenomenon genetically. If they don't have their power they will cease to exist their children are sometimes born so mutated they have to kill them because it's crueler to let them live the third eye and a lot of their very obvious mutations are recessive this is before we get to the massive amounts of inbreeding they undertake as a practice because of said mutations and recessive genes. The Navigators just aren't a good solution they are very explicitly only capable of looking into the warp as they are due to their eye and over time they accumulate mutations of both the body and soul for doing so in improving Technologies you would want to not have people essentially drinking Soul radiation on a daily basis.

Before anyone says the emperor is a hypocrite or whatever he does want Humanity to arise as a psychically active species it is a thing that he wants we hear it right out of his mouth in master of mankind it's not a question on whether or not they were psychic or not or not they're mutants or not and making the web way he essentially condemns them to irrelevancy. Their own genetics both due to the fact that they're obviously manufactured and deeply unfortunate for both their physical and spiritual health means they won't last being shoved into a non pivotal role. He doesn't need to kill them a couple of generations without being massively rewarded for being inbred and super wealthy will do it for him. Because unlike other Abhumans Navigators do just give birth to regular humans if they don't also intermarry with Navigator houses because functionally speaking they are just normal humans with an eye directly into the warp that causes them both real and not insignificant pain wether they feel it in the moment or across their Service life.

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Khan confirms it in one of the books, that when the Webway project is done the Navigators will be killed along with other witches (Astropaths):

Article:

My Father hated the lie as much as I did. He knew the Imperium could not last as long as its foundations were knee-deep in the warp. It was necessary to use these mutants and witches, but they could not be allowed to endure. They would be passing tools, like the warriors of thunder that united Terra – blades that would grow blunt and be cast aside.
...
But consider this – the Navigators are the last of the old mutants, the final throwback to our distant horror. They are the clearest and most potent exemplars of the lie, and for as long as the Imperium needed them it could never rest secure. If my Father were truly set on making the Imperial Truth a reality, they could not have been suffered to remain.

Source: Path of Heaven

In Master of Mankind the Emperor says he wants to sever humanity's connection to the Warp and on the next page that he wants humans to become a psychic species. Those are necessarily incompatible, if psychic and psyker are different things. A psychic species may, for example, purely use energy generated by their own soul without directly srawing power from the warp.

Khan at least believed that the Emperor wanted to kill Navigators on principle.

The thing is the Webway also depends on the Warp at the most basic level, it runs though the warp, which means that on order to do any kind of repairs or heck to add new sections to it you need warp-smiths of some kind. There is a reason the Eldar have Bonesingers and it's not for fashion. That is what they make their stuff out of, including but not limited to what repairs they can still make to the Webway. So unless the Emperor can make the whole thing himself or only with the aid of Magnus it makes on sense for him to do the isolation first and then train psykers to not be Chaos bait. He should have started in the opposite order... and for that purpose the navigators would have been a potential resource.

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The Emperor's plan was to make his Webway tunnel out of mundane physical matter than a specialist variety of Tech Priest was building, and then use psychic shields projected and sustained by the psyker sitting on Golden Throne to project those tunnels. That's why he needed Magnus, as Magnus would forever more sit on the Golden Throne shielding his part of the Webway.

He wouldn't need a large section, as he planned to use his tunnel to burrow into the Eldar's Webway and take that from them.

 

[DragonParadox]

Navigators enjoy a position of near unlimited power they will tolerate no threats to. Their a reason they enjoy having a positions as 1 of the high lords of Terra. We are talking power that makes it an automatic death sentence for any normal human to have relationships with a Navigator. While the Navigator could rape whomever they want and and the only consequence is their victims being killed.

And Navigators are very much not liked at all. Some of the legal abhumans make ratkin look downright normal. I wish I had saved the drawing of the known abhumans I found a few years ago. But one of the highlight is abhumans whose eyes extend out of their heads on mobile stalks.

Everybody, every faction, they all absolutely hate the Navigators for good reason. They have used and abused their power for thousands of years now. The only reason nobody as not already wiped the Navigators out is they cannot afford to kill them. The moment that changes every slight, every insult the Navigators have given to everybody over the last thousand years will come back at them.

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I think that is called 'having power'. They do not all hate the Navigators because they are somehow uniquely evil IMO, but because they are in that sweet stop of being just weak enough that everyone fantasizes about killing them and yet untouchable in practice. They are a fanatic's nighatmare since they look inhuman and scary, but he thing they do does not directly impact the common man and yet they are protected by the powers that be. I would not be surprised if there is a conspiracy theory going around Tera very very quietly about how the Emperor is just a pawn of the 'Three-eyed-monsters' or whatever it is they are called.

You mean, besides the fact that he found out that the future is in flux and his plans are no longer viable? Which we saw already? I'm not trying to be rude here, but are you mixing up this quest with another one?

Also, still not seeing why we should care one way or another about Navigators keeping their monopoly on warp travel.

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I mean that is enough for him to no longer believe he knows precisely where all the pieces go. It is a long way from that to thinking that maybe the basics of his plan need a redesign. Note that his reaction to finding out the apple cart was overturned was not to cancel any of his plans, it was to accelerate one of them, finding Lorgar. Not to say that was even a bad plan, but it is pretty clear that someone does not get to where the 'Lord of Lightning' is now by being given to a lot of self doubt.

The Emperor's plan was to make his Webway tunnel out of mundane physical matter than a specialist variety of Tech Priest was building, and then use psychic shields projected and sustained by the psyker sitting on Golden Throne to project those tunnels. That's why he needed Magnus, as Magnus would forever more sit on the Golden Throne shielding his part of the Webway.

He wouldn't need a large section, as he planned to use his tunnel to burrow into the Eldar's Webway and take that from them.

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But that just brings up so many other questions... The Eldar Webway would not be made of mundane matter, the idea that you could retrofit that to work with mundane matter and just slap some psychic shields on it is kind of silly not to mention... why would Magnus do that? It would be hell on someone as interested in learning new things as he is and it's not like the Emperor can just mind control him into it, then he would be stuck controlling the controller for all eternity.

 

[Phoenix853456!]

[X] Plan: Don't be an asshole
-[X] Machine Spirits aren't homogenous beings, and like us biological beings, they have different needs depending on the level of their awareness and their personality. Some of them are more similar to pets who have simple and basic desires like regular maintenance and not being abused by it by word or by action; other more aware machine spirits have additional, more complex desires, the respect and appreciation for their work just like we do, companionship and many other which if not causing harm should be accommodated to the best of our ability.
-[X] Machine spirits, like we all, can commit mistakes and crimes, but just like we all deserve to have an accusation against us investigated and justly judged so the punishment fits action, so do they.
-[X] We can't forget that they are also individuals so we should have an open mind when listening to their council, especially when it involves their purpose.

 

[Alratan]

I think we should be looking to make L(idless) D(aemon) E(ye) Navigators.

But that's only a first step. I think we should try to organise for one of our LDE Navigators to become the Paternova, and then try to use Sorcery to make the Paternoval LDE Navigator into a proper demigod (assuming that it's not already), and then use the clearly pre-existing links that exists between the Paternova and the Navigators, and whatever quasi-entity that forms, to upgrade all the Navigators.

And ideally grant them a mutation that makes them immune to exposure to Warp Energy causing mutations as well.

But that just brings up so many other questions... The Eldar Webway would not be made of mundane matter, the idea that you could retrofit that to work with mundane matter and just slap some psychic shields on it is kind of silly not to mention... why would Magnus do that? It would be hell on someone as interested in learning new things as he is and it's not like the Emperor can just mind control him into it, then he would be stuck controlling the controller for all eternity.

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They wouldn't neccessarily need to retrofit it. The Eldar webway self-repair capability as Wraithbone regenerates on its own. As long as he was content just to use the existing tunnels, realms, and gates, he could just squat in what he'd stolen. All he needed was his initial tunnel to breach the Webway as a beachhead to conquer it. The Emperor may also not have known what the damaged Webway was like post-Fall and been operating based on mistaken assumptions about its stability. Also, the Dark Eldar can maintain and manipulate the Webway with pure technology, no active psyker powers required. Perhaps the Emperor planned to seize their technology when he conquered the place.

Why couldn't the Emperor just mind control him, or lobotomise him into a pysker-servitor similar to the ones the Mechanicum use to link their Forge Worlds' data networks together? They can still use their powers despite having their free will destroyed. Presumably he had some plan to ensure Magnus stayed there forever.

 

[Earth-Destroyer]

I think that is called 'having power'. They do not all hate the Navigators because they are somehow uniquely evil IMO, but because they are in that sweet stop of being just weak enough that everyone fantasizes about killing them and yet untouchable in practice. They are a fanatic's nightmare since they look inhuman and scary, but he thing they do does not directly impact the common man and yet they are protected by the powers that be. I would not be surprised if there is a conspiracy theory going around Tera very very quietly about how the Emperor is just a pawn of the 'Three-eyed-monsters' or whatever it is they are called.

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Navigators are protected by the fact they provide a logistical level resource that nobody else can. They are protected on institution level the Admech, the IOM as an organization itself, not the people within it. The moment the institutions no longer are providing the Navigators their protection, the people will tear the Navigators limb from limb.

 

[Degorium]

The thing is the Webway also depends on the Warp at the most basic level, it runs though the warp, which means that on order to do any kind of repairs or heck to add new sections to it you need warp-smiths of some kind. There is a reason the Eldar have Bonesingers and it's not for fashion. That is what they make their stuff out of, including but not limited to what repairs they can still make to the Webway. So unless the Emperor can make the whole thing himself or only with the aid of Magnus it makes on sense for him to do the isolation first and then train psykers to not be Chaos bait. He should have started in the opposite order... and for that purpose the navigators would have been a potential resource. Here we have a sort of psyker who is highly resistant to the Warp (if they are even a psyker as @Alratan said there is a case to be made that they act on the warp without touching it). So why isn't he recruiting them, why isn't he recruiting anyone to make this super secret Webway project? I think the Emperor does not have all the pieces himself to get from humanity isolated from the Warp to all of them rejecting Chaos.

As for the reason why he might have to kill the Navigators though, I agree that it would not be any kind of dislike of them as abhumans, I do not think he even dislikes Abhumans really, but that does not really matter against the reality of the power and prestige he would be taking from them with his magnum opus, casting them to the tender mercies of their baseline human kin This finally is where we are at the moment, stuck between the implacability of the Golden Man who does not value the Navigators as more than a stopgap and the Navigators themselves who do not want to get killed, with or without the complicity of Imperial law.

I think what we need to do is... show him that it does not work, his half designed plan, we have Lorgar's memories of betraying the Ultramarines, Chaos Primarch Lorgar. It is risky at hell to show him that, but I think it is the one thing that can convince him that he does not know best and that he might have to redesign his plans. Otherwise weare trimming around the edges of a plan we do not understand and which we know is doomed to fail in canon, not so much because of circumstance as because the Emperor does not get the very humans he si trying to save. Heck I am not even sure he understands the Prmarchs and he made those.

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The bone singers make a significant portion of the eldar's ships they rely on the warp to do almost everything the web way like the other weird sub dimensions in 40K has interactions with the warp but unless you bust open a hole in the web way kind of like reality itself there's no way to get from the web way into the warp and vice versa there's also the fact that you are partially protected from the warp in the weapon there's no random warp storms or incursions in the web way there are people who can sabotage the protections of the web way for some nefarious political end and they do occasionally but inherently the web way isn't vulnerable to the warp not even in the same way that reality itself is.

Well I have one question because of the webway's distance from the actual sea of Souls how would The Navigators be able to help because The Navigators don't actually have psychic powers by themselves not unless they are also psychers they have an eye that literally just lets the warp flow into reality it's not really the same thing. We know that he has assistance in the creation of the web way actual scientust test tech priest and himself either doing the psychic lifting or using The Golden Throne as a magnifier for the effect to create the web way link or the human web way I don't actually know if it's meant to pierce into to the eldar's web way or just make a human web way that starts under the Sol system and expands out from there.

I think we should be looking to make L(idless) D(aemon) E(ye) Navigators.

But that's only a first step. I think we should try to organise for one of our LDE Navigators to become the Paternova, and then try to use Sorcery to make the Paternoval LDE Navigator into a proper demigod (assuming that it's not already), and then use the clearly pre-existing links that exists between the Paternova and the Navigators, and whatever quasi-entity that forms, to upgrade all the Navigators.

And ideally grant them the mutatio that makes them immune to exposure Warp Energy causing mutations as well.



Khan confirms it in one of the books, that when the Webway project is done the Navigators will be killed along with other witches (Astropaths):

Article:

My Father hated the lie as much as I did. He knew the Imperium could not last as long as its foundations were knee-deep in the warp. It was necessary to use these mutants and witches, but they could not be allowed to endure. They would be passing tools, like the warriors of thunder that united Terra – blades that would grow blunt and be cast aside.
...
But consider this – the Navigators are the last of the old mutants, the final throwback to our distant horror. They are the clearest and most potent exemplars of the lie, and for as long as the Imperium needed them it could never rest secure. If my Father were truly set on making the Imperial Truth a reality, they could not have been suffered to remain.

Source: Path of Heaven

In Master of Mankind the Emperor says he wants to sever humanity's connection to the Warp and on the next page that he wants humans to become a psychic species. Those are necessarily incompatible, if psychic and psyker are different things. A psychic species may, for example, purely use energy generated by their own soul without directly srawing power from the warp.

Khan at least believed that the Emperor wanted to kill Navigators on principle.



The Emperor's plan was to make his Webway tunnel out of mundane physical matter than a specialist variety of Tech Priest was building, and then use psychic shields projected and sustained by the psyker sitting on Golden Throne to project those tunnels. That's why he needed Magnus, as Magnus would forever more sit on the Golden Throne shielding his part of the Webway.

He wouldn't need a large section, as he planned to use his tunnel to burrow into the Eldar's Webway and take that from them.

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Jagatai Khan is both a hypocrite and very explicitly dislikes witchcraft and Abhumans. He has his own storm shamans he very explicitly has his own magic users and he sponsors the Council of nikea so like Mortarian you have to take what he believes with a grain of salt because his Planet very explicitly has both mutants in the form of horses, himself, His astartes and his storm shamans and he himself is not a psycher but is capable of telling about psychic phenomenon from a distance so I have to take what he says with a massive grain of salt in the same way you had to take with Lorgar says about the Imperial truth with a massive grain of salt. This also goes for all the Primarchs because on some level all of them seem to believe it despite Magnus being a Magocracy/ Geniocracy advocate also believe in the Imperial truth it's not until the Council of nikea where his psycho shit is actually forced away from him. From this we kind of have to go in that the imperial truth is propaganda it's whatever anyone looks at it wants to green from it whether that be Divinity for Lorgar, psychic Destiny for Magnus or a return to the times before the dark ages for the Khan. This extends even Beyond them as well Sanguinius despite being a being who is completely humanoid has multiple psychic gifts and has wings flat out and believes in the Imperial truth now some level it could just be a hypocrisy and to be honest a lot of them are just hypocrites but you have to assume that the imperial truth does not actually say kill all actual Abhumans because that immediately disqualifies all of The Navigators all of the squats of the inner worlds all of the Ogryn as well as the Astartes. Which are literally called abhumans themselves.

Then there's the fact the warp as phenomena and warp as substance or place or strength. Inherently the emperor's goals as far as we can understand them was to break the warp as a phenomenon that happens to people which means minimizing contact with war entities and the warp as the sea of souls itself entirely. Becoming a psychic race would mean being completely on our terms or Humanity's terms interacting with the warp it's no longer we have to but now we can because we are strong or because the tides have turned in our favor rather than if you don't use the warp travel you're never going to get anywhere within a couple of hundred years. The idea there is that when you have a choice in the matter you do not rely on it or need it to exist which the Eldar very explicitly needed the warp both to make all of their ships their wraith bone and their reality engines. Humanity at this moment only needs the warp for travel and for communications if he can break both of those then he's broken Humanities Reliance on the warp.

 

[Alratan]

Jagatai Khan is both a hypocrite and very explicitly dislikes witchcraft and Abhumans. He has his own storm shamans he very explicitly has his own magic users and he sponsors the Council of nikea so like Mortarian you have to take what he believes with a grain of salt because his Planet very explicitly has both mutants in the form of horses, himself, His astartes and his storm shamans and he himself is not a psycher but is capable of telling about psychic phenomenon from a distance so I have to take what he says with a massive grain of salt in the same way you had to take with Lorgar says about the Imperial truth with a massive grain of salt. This also goes for all the Primarchs because on some level all of them seem to believe it despite Magnus being a Magocracy/ Geniocracy advocate also believe in the Imperial truth it's not until the Council of nikea where his psycho shit is actually forced away from him. From this we kind of have to go in that the imperial truth is propaganda it's whatever anyone looks at it wants to green from it whether that be Divinity for Lorgar, psychic Destiny for Magnus or a return to the times before the dark ages for the Khan. This extends even Beyond them as well Sanguinius despite being a being who is completely humanoid has multiple psychic gifts and has wings flat out and believes in the Imperial truth now some level it could just be a hypocrisy and to be honest a lot of them are just hypocrites but you have to assume that the imperial truth does not actually say kill all actual Abhumans because that immediately disqualifies all of The Navigators all of the squats of the inner worlds all of the Ogryn as well as the Astartes. Which are literally called abhumans themselves.

Then there's the fact the warp as phenomena and warp as substance or place or strength. Inherently the emperor's goals as far as we can understand them was to break the warp as a phenomenon that happens to people which means minimizing contact with war entities and the warp as the sea of souls itself entirely. Becoming a psychic race would mean being completely on our terms or Humanity's terms interacting with the warp it's no longer we have to but now we can because we are strong or because the tides have turned in our favor rather than if you don't use the warp travel you're never going to get anywhere within a couple of hundred years. The idea there is that when you have a choice in the matter you do not rely on it or need it to exist which the Eldar very explicitly needed the warp both to make all of their ships their wraith bone and their reality engines. Humanity at this moment only needs the warp for travel and for communications if he can break both of those then he's broken Humanities Reliance on the warp.

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Khan didn't hate psykers. He supported Magnus and the existence of Librarians, which is why he later suspects that Chaos arranged for him to miss Nikea so he couldn't be there to support Magnus.

The Emperor didn't want to remove humanity's logistical reliance on the warp. He wanted to sever humanity's connection to it. He explicitly talks about things like soulfire and their radiance within the warp in Masters of Mankind.

And as I say, being a psychic race doens't have to mean being psykers. Dark Eldar have psychic powers while supressing their psyker powers.

 

[Tzaphquiel]

As to other bargaining chips, hm, well, in addition to restoring the Ring of Iron, the other card to be played is to expand as much as possible.

Of course, if it is possible to actively delay the Emperor and extend the time limit from 10 years to the maximum of 15 years, then the option should be taken. Buying as much time as possible to expand and develop to the utmost can only be to the good.

As is typical with such negotiations, to the extent that the Emperor is capable of such a thing, he will probably be seeking to squeeze Colchis for all that it is worth while giving up as little in return as he can. Likewise, Lorgar and Fan Morgal must do the same, to squeeze the Emperor and Imperium for as many concessions as possible while only yielding the absolute minimum themselves.

 

[Alratan]

As to other bargaining chips, hm, well, in addition to restoring the Ring of Iron, the other card to be played is to expand as much as possible.

Of course, if it is possible to actively delay the Emperor and extend the time limit from 10 years to the maximum of 15 years, then the option should be taken. Buying as much time as possible to expand and develop to the utmost can only be to the good.

As is typical with such negotiations, to the extent that the Emperor is capable of such a thing, he will probably be seeking to squeeze Colchis for all that it is worth while giving up as little in return as he can. Likewise, Lorgar and Fan Morgal must do the same, to squeeze the Emperor and Imperium for as many concessions as possible while only yielding the absolute minimum themselves.

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There's also two levels to this game.

One is what he can offer on Day 1. The other is what we can extract from him and the rest of the Empire during the Great Crusade.

I personally think we're better off keeping our trump cards to ourselves so that Lorgar's rate of expansion is proportionately higher than other Expeditionary Fleets.

The higher proportion of Imperial Worlds we conquer and leave our people on to rule, the greater influence over the galaxy well have.

In two ways. The first is directly, that the people on those rules will be directly exposed to our philosophy and the institutions we create.

The second is that those people will in turn influence other parts of the Imperium.

This is connected to why I think we shouldn't offer LDE Navigators to the Emperor, and instead cut deals with the important Navigator Houses.

I think building influence and contacts across the Imperium in preparation for a succession crisis is importantly, and having influence over the Navigators makes it much easier to spread our influence, as they can allow us to spread our message and ideas and insert agents and cultivate sympathisers in the Imperial bureaucracy vastly more easily, as they can transport them as part of their personal staff.

I mentioned this above, but arranging for a loyal LDE Navigator to become the Paternova would also be potentially enormously useful.

On Navigators, I was doing some reading on them and was reminded that when actively Navigating they use cybernetics to directly interface with the ship they're directing, integrating with its Machine Spirit. That suggests another route for improvement, building psybernetics or Incarnated Machine Spirits for ships that can grant Navigators who have performed the bonding ritual to the ship a Gift that makes them better at it.

 

[DragonParadox]

I think we should be looking to make L(idless) D(aemon) E(ye) Navigators.

But that's only a first step. I think we should try to organise for one of our LDE Navigators to become the Paternova, and then try to use Sorcery to make the Paternoval LDE Navigator into a proper demigod (assuming that it's not already), and then use the clearly pre-existing links that exists between the Paternova and the Navigators, and whatever quasi-entity that forms, to upgrade all the Navigators.

And ideally grant them a mutation that makes them immune to exposure to Warp Energy causing mutations as well.



They wouldn't neccessarily need to retrofit it. The Eldar webway self-repair capability as Wraithbone regenerates on its own. As long as he was content just to use the existing tunnels, realms, and gates, he could just squat in what he'd stolen. All he needed was his initial tunnel to breach the Webway as a beachhead to conquer it. The Emperor may also not have known what the damaged Webway was like post-Fall and been operating based on mistaken assumptions about its stability. Also, the Dark Eldar can maintain and manipulate the Webway with pure technology, no active psyker powers required. Perhaps the Emperor planned to seize their technology when he conquered the place.

Why couldn't the Emperor just mind control him, or lobotomise him into a pysker-servitor similar to the ones the Mechanicum use to link their Forge Worlds' data networks together? They can still use their powers despite having their free will destroyed. Presumably he had some plan to ensure Magnus stayed there forever.

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I think the mutation that grants something like immunity to (more) mutation is Homogeneity, though how that plays with what is already a three eyed mutant is anyone's guess.

Given that in 40K the Webway is explicitly falling apart I do not think it is reasonable to count on it to just resist the literal tide of entropy that is the warp forever. Put it this way the Webway in canon has existed in something like it's present form since just after the War in Heaven sixty million years ago, it has been without maintenance for ten thousand years, that is 0.016% . It ain't doing so well in the present.

 

[Ternasta]

Given that in 40K the Webway is explicitly falling apart I do not think it is reasonable to count on it to just resist the literal tide of entropy that is the warp forever. Put it this way the Webway in canon has existed in something like it's present form since just after the War in Heaven sixty million years ago, it has been without maintenance for ten thousand years, that is 0.016% . It ain't doing so well in the present.

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Three Words: Pattern-Reassertion Touch. And the Gate of Khaine is less a problem if we have the Emperor backing us up, since he'd be happy to help us walk into the domain of Slaanesh and kill everything there. Of course, that's a ways into the future.
I wonder how much experience we'll get for killing one of the Four. Well, all of the Four are on our list, of course, but we'll start with the weakest and youngest for practical reasons.

 

[DragonParadox]

Three Words: Pattern-Reassertion Touch. And the Gate of Khaine is less a problem if we have the Emperor backing us up, since he'd be happy to help us walk into the domain of Slaanesh and kill everything there. Of course, that's a ways into the future.
I wonder how much experience we'll get for killing one of the Four. Well, all of the Four are on our list, of course, but we'll start with the weakest and youngest for practical reasons.

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I was talking about the Emperor's plan, I doubt we will be doing with that given the implicit Eldar genocide of taking over the Webway and running human ships through it.