Sterbelicht - One Sacrifice At A Time Against The Galaxy (40K)

What should your focus for the rest of the Quest be?

  • Mercy (Diplomacy and Expansion)

    Votes: 201 74.7%

  • Ruthlessness (Kick the Duchy in the Balls)

    Votes: 65 24.2%

  • Thule (Yeeni Handholding and Piscarian Cuddling)

    Votes: 102 37.9%
  • Total voters
    269
Voting is open
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Professor Vesca said:
@HeroCooky can we take actions to raise the quality and capability of the underhivers? Can we set up schools to educate them and disseminate revolutionary propaganda?
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The Laurent said:
Idea, by the way. Now that we know the major ships that deliver the Ag Food, if we have people in the shipbuilding on Voxx Primus, and we're taking an action to infiltrate Voxx Secondus, we could (and should) get people onto/into that ship and the docks from both ends.
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As far as I am aware, the plan for the next Turn is to finish the Propaganda Office to not bother with Voxx Primus beyond "Go Into That Direction" anymore. Which means that you will do both of those things automatically.
BigBadBob7070 said:
Sounds a lot like these fuckers:

warhammer40k.fandom.com

Enslavers

"Call them what you will—Krell, Psyrens or Enslavers. Just one witch, unsanctioned, caused the destruction of Hive Skorpios when one of those things used her brain as a gateway to this world. Within three days the entire hive’s population was reduced to drooling mindslaves. Within three weeks an...
warhammer40k.fandom.com warhammer40k.fandom.com
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They are OC Xenos. Not Enslavers.
 
The Laurent said:
I will note that we explicitly know this is not quite true. Is this what the Imperium believes? Yes.
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We have stable psykers through a friendly God. That's part of our Hax Abilities. Functionally Soul-Bonding, but with fewer of the downsides. The Chaos Gods just don't give a toss about their mortal or Astartes servants, a few trinkets and delays of execution aside.
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WillRobinson said:
It's also wrong about imperial practices, iirc? Soul-binding is specifically an astropath thing, not an every psyker thing.
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It's an every Psyker thing. Whether it's Astropaths or Battlepsykers, you all go through Psyker School, and they're the ones who decide who gets eaten and who can survive the bond.
 
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Always Late said:
We have stable psykers through a friendly God.
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No. You have stable psykers through them taking a century or two to learn how to control their powers first, anything else second. Their faith helps, but not more than them having a stable mind and community does.
The Laurent said:
Oh, I was under the impression that we'd still have to infiltrate Voxx Secondus/The Ag Worlds.
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You need to start the latter, but that Office is made to deal with that stuff once you get it rolling/pointed in that direction all on its own.
Please do make sure to indicate what you want it to do when you do, just to make sure.
 
Always Late said:
It's an every Psyker thing. Whether it's Astropaths or Battlepsykers, you all go through Psyker School, and they're the ones who decide who gets eaten and who can survive the bond.
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The rite of sanctioning and the ritual of soul-binding are two different things. Rogue Trader is pretty clear about the difference:

Article:
For this reason, the forces of the Imperium ensure that psykers are tracked down by whatever means are necessary. Once detected they must be protected. Those strong enough to stand alone will be recruited into the Adeptus Terra, the army or other Imperial service. Of the remainder the most able will receive the protection of the Emperor and join the ranks of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, the rest are doomed to serve their fellow man as members of the Adeptus Astronomica or as nourishment for the Emperor himself.

[Several pages later]

The remainder are recruited into the imperial organisation in some way, but only a tiny proportion of the very best are judged strong enough to survive without some form of psychic protection. So psykers can be found throughout the Adeptus Terra, the Inquisition, the Legiones Astartes, the army and the fleet. However, over 90% of psykers in imperial service are members of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, known commonly as Astropaths. Astropaths are created from those psykers who have considerable powers, but who are not mentally strong enough to withstand the attentions of psychically attuned warp creatures.

[...]

All Astropaths undergo a special process which moulds their powers. This is called the soul-binding ritual and only the Emperor has the power to perform it. [Details about the ritual follow]
Source: Rogue Trader
 
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HeroCooky said:
No. You have stable psykers through them taking a century or two to learn how to control their powers first, anything else second. Their faith helps, but not more than them having a stable mind and community does.
You need to start the latter, but that Office is made to deal with that stuff once you get it rolling/pointed in that direction all on its own.
Please do make sure to indicate what you want it to do when you do, just to make sure.
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It sounds like now that we have the propaganda office set up we don't need to spend as many actions on Vox primus anymore beyond giving it a direction to go in.

Also: Would it be okay if we as a free action asked for intelligence briefings on this or that if we needed them? Just so we could inform you of what we don't know and what we want to learn about?
 
HeroCooky said:
The Voxx Primus Planetary Trading Ring receives and ships, on average and per year, around 20-28.000.000.000 tons of cargo, the vast majority (>60%) of which consists of food imports from Voxx Secundus.
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This is very good news as if 60% of the needed food imports comes from a world in the same system then trying to keep the world supplied is going to be easer then i feared then when most came from more distant systems trough the warp
 
Professor Vesca said:
It sounds like now that we have the propaganda office set up we don't need to spend as many actions on Vox primus anymore beyond giving it a direction to go in.

Also: Would it be okay if we as a free action asked for intelligence briefings on this or that if we needed them? Just so we could inform you of what we don't know and what we want to learn about?
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You still need to put in the Actions.

And yes, you can. I encourage it.
 
... I wonder if this is just the Dogmatic 5/5 Super Power?

Like how we got "Chaos can't get you without actually putting genuine effort behind it", I wonder if Dogmatic 5/5 is "Threats to you just... Somehow get revealed before they're in a position to do real damage, through strange and coincidental movements." For a style that dumpstats everything else to focus on Hero Units at the expense of every one who isn't a Hero Unit, the ability to effectively target your Heroes makes it actually viable. Since your enemies just "Coincidentally" start running into troubles that raises red flags and reveals where your actual Heroes need to start digging to find a Threat, which effectively closes the "Easy to Subvert" hole.

It's just that most Imperial polities aren't actually 5/5 Dogmatic so they don't get that superpower.
 
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Alectai said:
... I wonder if this is just the Dogmatic 5/5 Super Power?

Like how we got "Chaos can't get you without actually putting genuine effort behind it", I wonder if Dogmatic 5/5 is "Threats to you just... Somehow get revealed before they're in a position to do real damage, through strange and coincidental movements." For a style that dumpstats everything else to focus on Hero Units at the expense of every one who isn't a Hero Unit, the ability to effectively target your Heroes makes it actually viable.
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Remember some inquisitors can shape change. I think. Not a huge expert on the inquisition but it depends on who was left behind when the original Imperium left.

I could absolutely see some null or blank facechanger sneaking into our cells to do stuff like this.
 
Professor Vesca said:
Remember some inquisitors can shape change. I think. Not a huge expert on the inquisition but it depends on who was left behind when the original Imperium left.

I could absolutely see some null or blank facechanger sneaking into our cells to do stuff like this.
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The scale's just too massive for it to be just one dude. Though going full Pariah might produce these effects too, and would also not leave much of a trail because you're just literally terrifying the Machine Spirits to death and axiomatically immune to Psyker nonsense so you can't be scryed. If you're also a terrifying killing machine, well, there you have it.

Still doesn't explain how we're getting penetrated to this degree, but it would explain how they're doing it, if we're getting Scryed by a Psyker Cabal and then Died by psuedo-Culexis saboteurs. If we can shut down their eyes, we'd have a shot at actually catching the saboteurs since they wouldn't be able to act with surgical precision any more. Combine that with Paladins and we'd actually be able to do something about this attack vector.
 
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Professor Vesca said:
Remember some inquisitors can shape change. I think. Not a huge expert on the inquisition but it depends on who was left behind when the original Imperium left.

I could absolutely see some null or blank facechanger sneaking into our cells to do stuff like this.
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The big mystery is not how they discovered us.

They have a multitude of ways to do that.

It's why they attacked us in the ways they did, through means that seem exceedingly complicated (stealth replumbing), for reasons unclear. Like, they go through all the effort to arrange an accident, but that accident does not appear to have killed anyone of importance.

They'd need deep infiltration to pull the kind of shit they did, but they did not discover critical elements of our plan, mainly the Chamleon's .
 
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10ebbor10 said:
The big mystery is not how they discovered us.

They have a multitude of ways to do that.

It's why they attacked us in the ways they did, through means that seem exceedingly complicated (stealth replumbing), for reasons unclear.
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There's a type of pseudo-Null called Discordants who can straight up murder Machine Spirits and cause even analog technology to break down, and do this in a fairly wide area if they're well trained. It's just they don't happen very often because the Mechanicus fucking hates them.

EDIT: Shit, Discordants would be able to do all of this shit. They're immune to technological surveiliance, pair them with a Blank and you get a wombo combo that can only be observed through the naked eye, and if you train and equip them well enough, any witnesses are going to be dead, especially since even fucking Lasguns can fail against a Discordant

Their population is certainly massive enough that they could produce a meaningful number of Discordants and Blanks if you're not going to just reflexively kill them on sight, and the two powers don't interfere with each other, combining them lets you create a saboteur team that's virtually infallible.
 
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The plan is over the next 1/2 turns, as the voters decide, to do so. Which would be before we'd be normally expected to take another action to keep things steady, so this was the last action invested specifically into Voxx Primus.
 
Professor Vesca said:
Remember some inquisitors can shape change. I think. Not a huge expert on the inquisition but it depends on who was left behind when the original Imperium left.

I could absolutely see some null or blank facechanger sneaking into our cells to do stuff like this.
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Polymorphine is another Assassinorum trick, but the Dark Heresy RPG did include Shape Flesh as a Biomancy power.
 
Yeah, that could do it, a Discordant and Blank saboteur team directed to key targets by a Psyker cabal, Van Zandt's main divergence from the Dogmatic norm is that they're willing to make full use of even otherwise ostracized clades like Psykers rather than just hating them because the Emperor had a temper tantrum and never rescinded his universal death sentence before he was on the Throne.

You can't observe them through cameras, you can't observe them through postcognition, and you can send them precisely where they can cause the most damage. It's fully within the Imperium's power to produce these, especially if your population is at the point that it's at, and even just making it a priority to catch, recruit, and train these as agents as a matter of policy will massively increase their life expectancy, rather than just "If you see them, give your priceless asset a T-Shirt and use them as a human shield, if they die, you still win"
 
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PurposefulZephyr said:
Less eager for other dossiers- they are far less important than this massive Action sink that is this hive, this Duchy.
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There is the Black Ash Clan and the Croaf Hegemony which is the place we might move towards next. Plus it sounds like the Black Ash Queen is making moves towards fighting the Croaf Hegemony, so let's get ready for that to happen and see if we can help the ladies out.

Always Late said:
Every Psyker that isn't fed into the Throne is Soul-bound under the guidance of the Scholastica Psykana,
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But they aren't l? That happens with every Astropath, but regular battle psykers don't need power from Big E to do that. Some of them can get sanctioned without setting foot on Holy Terra
 
Alectai said:
Yeah, that could do it, a Discordant and Blank saboteur team directed to key targets by a Psyker cabal, Van Zandt's main divergence from the Dogmatic norm is that they're willing to make full use of even otherwise ostracized clades like Psykers rather than just hating them because the Emperor had a temper tantrum and never rescinded his universal death sentence before he was on the Throne.
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Depending on what avenue of Inquisitorial involvement Van Zander had, we could be even closer to a Sins Of The Past situation: The real leadership is psychic, but they're so self-hating and convinced of their own unique purity that they're oppressing both the normal people and their own kind because it's just how their ancestors were.
 
Alectai said:
Yeah, that could do it, a Discordant and Blank saboteur team directed to key targets by a Psyker cabal, Van Zandt's main divergence from the Dogmatic norm is that they're willing to make full use of even otherwise ostracized clades like Psykers rather than just hating them because the Emperor had a temper tantrum and never rescinded his universal death sentence before he was on the Throne.

You can't observe them through cameras, you can't observe them through postcognition, and you can send them precisely where they can cause the most damage. It's fully within the Imperium's power to produce these, especially if your population is at the point that it's at, and even just making it a priority to catch, recruit, and train these as agents as a matter of policy will massively increase their life expectancy, rather than just "If you see them, give your priceless asset a T-Shirt and use them as a human shield, if they die, you still win"
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The big problem is, that they didn't go to the places where they did the most damage. We didn't get pinpoint attacks attacking our weakspots, we got lots of mysterious attacks that only stochastically correlate with hitting us.

And then there's this :

HeroCooky said:
And then a Hive went silent.
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That is a massive, coordinated attack, not something that can be done by a small number of teams.
 
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Alectai said:
Snip
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If that's the case, then it's a problem we might need to deal with up until we fully control Voxx Prim, as avoid as our rebels are I can't see any of them taking on Imperial assassins and winning given how durable and stealthy they are, so next best idea is mass firepower and pray enough shots land to kill the bastards, then behead and burn the bodies just to be sure.

And they'd be able to fucking no sell anything short or the naked eye, meaning night-vision cameras and anything to help find someone is going out the window. Actually depending on what level they are you could find them by following the source of any sudden homicidal rage that isn't Khorne induced (but that's mainly for Pariahs, you don't get much from normal Blanks).

Edit: Has HeroCocky told us these attacks all came from one group?
 
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