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I kinda want to see a crossover between Warhammer and the Quantum thief trilogy. Basically a few hundreds of years after a mysterious collapse and singularity Humanity is divided between two factions locked in cold war over Sol. On one side is the Zoku. A clan of Quantum Entanglement gamers who see literally everything as a game and have insane resource optimization while prizing free will and choice and despising ideals. On the other is the Sobornost, a... Society ruled by seven God-Kings and composed of trillions of endlessly forking and multiplying mind copies being held inside planet sized diamond computers. The Sobornost have A Great Task of effectively eliminating Quantum uncertainty so they can make a perfect deterministic world with no suffering and revive every human ever.
There isn't much Biggatons in these books but that is componsated by absolutely insane information warfare. Ghost Guns that copy a targets mind and capture it while scrambling their original mind. Stories written in the sand of abandoned earth that literally take over your mind. The fucking All-Defector. Stuff like that.
Then there's the Big Bang Gun and Kaminari Jewel but that's a one time limited thing.
Any interaction between the two depends on whether the Mechanicus thinks brain emulation is Abominable intelligence. There are no aliens. Everything is human made and insanely advanced and there is no AI. The Mechanicus should love that but the thing is that everyone uses brain emulations called Gogols in place of AI so it depends on if the Mechanicus would think Gogols are Abominable intelligence.
On that topic. I want to see a crossover with Exordia by Seth J. Dickinson aka our very own
@General Battuta.
The basic premise of Exordia is that this Kurdish survivor of genocide living in New York, Anna, encounters this nine headed snake/Naga lady in Central Park. The Snake lady is a rebel from this alien empire called the Exordia that has essentially turned the entire galaxy into side characters in their story, literally.
It's like Warhammer in that Stories have literal power in this setting. The Gods placed specific coding in the laws of the universe to permit free will and keep the universe from being filled with soulless self replicating optimizers or total assholes. This coding essentially judges good and evil objectively, has seven encoded afterlives in the hidden/small dimensions of the universe that you can use for FTL, allows for things like weapons that literally eat a targets soul and torture them in hell and ensures that stories have real tangible power. This universes equivalent of Psykers literally just math so hard they can warp reality because the laws of physics are shittily programmed also.
And the Snake alien, Ssrin, along with her entire species are marked ontologically evil by the Universe. There is no chance of redemption for them. They all immediately go to hell when they die. So they just decide "Fuck it. May as well rule the galaxy if we are going to hell anyways." Kinda like the Dark Eldar. Their grand undertaking is pinioning all the species in the galaxy to their narrative, turning them into objects in the Exordia's subjects. Essentially making their hegemony a law of physics.
Seth J. Dickinson is the guy who did all of the best lore of Destiny like the Books of Sorrow, Unveiling and Marasenna and you can definitely tell from that "Fantasy with magic but Sci-fi and with overtly detailed science and philosophy babble" vibe. Also he wrote the Baru Cormorant series and you can also.... Definitely tell. Also this might just be me but I think he also has a fetish for snake girls based on this book.
The Exordia and Imperium will immediately hate each other considering how this book ends and they are also filthy Xenos. There also just a tone thing. The Exordia are modelled after US imperialism. Most of them are just doing their job and don't particularly think their superior or are just having the time fo their lives hamming it up knowing they are inherently evil. For most Exordia, nuking a world using Cobalt Salted bombs so that whoever survives suffers is just another day at the office. The Imperium has a seething passion and hateful fanaticism in its very being and consider their work holy.
Combat wise, The Exordia are another case of "No Biggatons but hax." They don't go for "UNGA Bunga big guns and thicker armor than god" like the Imperium. They pretty much act like a modern military except they have space magic and are better in every way. I asked Seth and he said "There are advanced particle weapons in the Exordia arsenal which give them an advantage in space battles, though they're not intrinsically hard to make or develop. Mostly the Exordia relies on being unafraid of damnation. There's a tenuous kind of truce in which species ruled by the Exordia accept their secular suffering in exchange for entry into paradise; some of them believe that enduring this suffering is actually what makes them morally good."
Probably their nastiest toy on the ground is the Atmanach. It looks like a centipede made of Alien Geometries. Its size, speed, and even physical presence are all indeterminate. It eats souls and transfers them to a personalized hell dimension designed to extract everything they know. It has no senses except the ability to detect free will — every time you make a choice, that brings it closer to you. And the thing is that having no soul guarantees that you will be utterly horrified by the fact that ensouled beings are breaking physics by existing and go into a murder frenzy with no back.
As for their space magic equivalents. IDK. I don't know the exact limits. I know it generates problematic amounts of heat and it can go very badly wrong; I know it usually (but not always) involves an intersection between morality and effect; I know it is conducted through a few 'methods' which consist of the best-understood techniques but which have only scratched the surface of possible pathology.
