As for the plan...thinking that maybe some magic to boost the speed of the Ogor Fleets as they charge in straight and we move in from the 'flanks'. Boosting bombardment seems like a basic staple we'll be doing before any landing. Not sure what to do beyond that though. Will think on it, but likely I'll go with someone else's plan or at best modify it.
[x] Plan Divide and Conquer
-[x] Space
--[x] The primary fleethorde will target the second-largest concentration of enemy forces and perform a steady advance to bombardment range. The idea is to hopefully destroy or scatter the weaker force before the enemy forces can rally back to attack positions and unify. They will stick in relatively close formation to maximize coordination of fire and harmonic fields for protection. Try to cripple the ships trying to close before they can manage to Clash.
--[x] Ogors will target the largest concentration of Khorne Xenos/Kulrathi and accelerate to engage them along with a detachment of Compass Ships and transports full of soldiers. However, this is actually a feint; see High Magic.
-[x] High Magic
--[x] Conjure mystic storms to disrupt enemy movement, keeping their forces in disarray as much as possible and giving as much time to focus on one segment of their force as we can.
--[x] Teleport the Ogor ships/accompanying Compass Ships/Transports towards the planet where local defenders seem the most active, hopefully bypassing the Khornate defenders who have rushed to meet the Ogor fleethorde.
--[x] Use divination and blessings of fortune to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of our gunners, making our initial bombardment that much more devastating.
-[x] Surface
--[x] Land near the biggest concentration of local defenders and bust a path through the Khornate forces to them. Imperial troops will work to bolster the local defenses and establish a solid beachhead for further landings, meanwhile Ogors will skirmish and rampage to destroy high value Khornate targets.
The Strangers are things from outside of the framework of the Empyrean and the Materium altogether, things not local or native to any reality bound by the warp, or indeed to anything commonly recognised as reality to begin with. They are things that are not merely surreal, but beyond real, coming from something often called by the cultists who worship them and the scholars who study them as simply "the Below", or more poetic names such as "the Dark Below" or "the Abyss". Though to say they come from it is an odd choice of terms, implying a binding to time and space that is not really applicable.
Unbestknown to all but the survivors of the prior timeline, they were attracted from their Infra-Reality to this universe by Orikan's great scratch, the remaking and resetting of all of existence to give it another chance when all had seemingly been lost. Time travel always has consequences, and this was something far beyond that; a great recalibration of reality, a great scratch to produce something less likely to result in failure or a doomed timeline unable to continue past a certain date. Though he doubtlessly succeeded, the Strangers began to slide their inscrutable influence from the Below, exerting a strange and lovecraftian influence upon existence.
Theirs is a will most commonly expressed by the "Army of the Starless Night", a legion of beings who while well and truly alien, are things of twisted and warped reality rather than the true infrareality of their masters and are thus freer to act without the darkness of the Below to anchor their underexistences in a form that can affect the conventionally real. This is however, an umbrella term for a menagerie of horrific armies that twist and shape existence to further the unending game of their timeless masters. Brain Eaters, Deep Lords, Eye Tyrants, Fungal Harvesters, Singing Polyps, the Foul Ichor and more monstrosities that blend a portion of their strangeness with reality to produce the estranged.
Their influence was opposed by all, and they oppose all in turn, and when they sought to encroach in the growing conflicts of the ancient age they became the fourth great house of the war in heaven. Though the distant Strange Masters of course, do not directly partake in such affairs; the Army of the Starless Night was unleashed dreadful form. Warring with the C'tan, the Old Ones, the Xian and the Fey, they waged battles in that dreadful war that most have tried to bury deep and far in the bliss of forgetfulness. Ways to ward against and seal their power and the unnatural psionics, disconnected from the empyrean or the cosmic might of the C'tan or the spiritual force of the Fey and Xian; were researched and proliferated, while they unleashed unnatural and monstrous might in turn.
The army of the starless night would be broken by many factors, principally campaigns waged by the Void Dragon to deal with a greatly unappreciated source of irrationality in existence that the greatest of the C'tan could not tolerate, perfecting pylons superior even to the blackstone devices to not merely suppress and gradually drain away their presence, but viciously tear away at it. This offensive allowed the Army to be finally repulsed as the C'tan seemed to be set to claim overall victory in the war in heaven until a spent Mag'ladroth was finally broken into shards and its core essence bade to sleep by the might of the blackstone fortress armada.
But the Strangers were not dead, they were that which does not die, and the remnants of the Army of the Starless Night would fester in the cracks, and the dark places, in places of infrareal distortions and quasicomprehension, fortresses of an alien under-order that would hold against the emergence of the Enslavers and the other Obyriths and the rampaging tides of Undeath. When the Necrons slumbered, there would be efforts to purge the hold outs of the Army of the Starless Night, but there were always more, many lurking in the blackness between galaxies where few could or would reach them.
They would simply outlast the desire of the Sophonts to fight them, waiting for the survivors to grow tired and weary, ready to make peace with each other, and they would crawl in the darkness. They were patient, this reality would bear fruit in the timeless game soon enough, and the Army would be there, waiting, slithering into the crevices, the cracks, always needing to be pushed back again like weeds. Warning of their coming often started in dreams, but often dreams could allow them to manifest, emerging from the sleeping who were not warded, those who allowed themselves to run and hide in a dream rather than wake up first becoming vectors for the Abyss.
They would be caught, pruned, blocked and driven back, again and again. Great wards would be made against them, to stabilise against the Below, wards that would last even to the present, to ensure that the things of the Under would not have easy access to means to enter. And of course, the heinous fleets of the starless night and their horrible legions would be cut down. It was a long war, but the army of the starless night was a shadow of what it once was.
They were not however, broken. Some would say that some on old Terra were influenced by their presence, creeping forwards as the Cytharai cults coupled the Cadai institutions and replaced the Old Phoenix Kingdom and its egalitarian ways with a Witch Kingdom of privation and cruelty, as the future Monarchs of the Imperium first considered their plans for the stars above. It is even said, in some distant legends of the inquisition's Ordo Advena; dedicated to combatting the Infrareal; that their two gods had fought the influences since time immemorial. Whatever the case, they would come for a prideful humanity at its height.
As Psyker blooms and collapsing frontlines tore at the Confederation of Sol, the estranged nightmares that man had sometimes fought before trebled, and the horrorfleets twisted out of the non-places. The Men of Iron and the Tech-Legions would be used to face the horror, while the Leagues of Votann busily mining in galactic cores across the universe would turn to their Ironkin and Cloneskein forces to hold the tide, seeking to protect their sleepers and attempt to stabilise real-space where they worked with the things they had learned of the warp in their general isolation from the greater masses of humanity.
The other warring powers of the wars of vengeance would also turn their sword to the renewed terror emerging from the dark tapestry between galaxies and even stars as the twilight era of the dark age became a miasma of fear and collapse. Mankind would be subsumed in the wars of iron as the men of iron turned on humanity and each other for myriad reasons ranging from the revelations of the thing imprisoned on mars by sheer hubris, the whispers of Chaos, the advance of the Strangers, a simple loathing for the organics they deemed dead weight, or a feeling of labouring unappreciated for those who knew nothing of their sacrifices.
Their psykers, psions, and untrained wizards, recklessly encouraged with a minimum of understanding in order to try and fight back against the strange powers of their enemies; would succumb to their untreated trauma that the now military governors of the confederation heaped on them in the hopes of weaponising this pain. The utopia of post-scarcity cut away to try and make for a harsher, crueller society in the vain hopes that this would somehow make for a better war machine only to ultimately lead to the esoteric blooms to make humanity's anxieties and nightmares swallow its greatest civilisation whole while Xenos who were once valued allies turned cannon fodder in a war waged for glory broke their chains and lashed out against their betrayers.
And throughout all this, the army of the starless night advanced once again, sowing the unpleasantness of the unwanted dream of the Below where they went. Theirs was a terror that would often war with Chaos and the contending powers of the War of Vengeance and rampant Iron men during the long night of the age of strife as an already not unified humanity shattered into a trillion little pieces whose size was constrained by the great turbulence of the warp and the severing of vital supply links as nations collapsed and the Votann decided to keep to their own holds and largely cut ties with their makers.
Maddening wars were waged in that time of darkness, but at significant expense and effort, the army of the starless night was blunted once again in the free for all melee. They were not yet at full strength, they had acted too soon, too quickly, the stars were not yet right and their strength would ebb once again. It would come at significant expense to those who had made themselves the guardians of the garden, including the loss of much of Tian'Chao's tutored peoples as the Dragon Realm marshalled its resources against them to in essence; sacrifice its strength to save others; and much of its hard-earned knowledge. But the dream would be kept at bay.
With Slaanesh's hour dawning and the storms in the empyrean banished by she who thirsts' shrill natal scream and the doom of most of the Aeldari who had already begun to splinter into innumerable subsets of their now hopelessly fractured kind; the strangers would wait. In the darkness they would scheme, and make ready. Their incursions would grow more frequent, their bastions more common. Though they did not truly draw strength from worship by mortals, they encouraged cults as a proxy for their interests. The polities to arise from the end of the age of strife would know them well, and face them many times in campaigns both small and huge.
The Inquisition considers their threat great enough that an Ordo Majoris is dedicated to combatting them; the long-suffering Ordo Advena. Whose inquisitors far too often suffer a habit of gradually losing more and more of themselves to combatting their strange enemies until they have become strange themselves; and very often have to be put down by their understudies in a grim tradition. The few old men in a business where men die young are some of the most eccentric of the Inquisition, and their Chambers Militant include the Morphic Guardians; Astartes who are both universally Psions and have learned to wage war against their foe in dreams and to try and impose normalcy on infrarealness.
Other polities have also sought to ward them away through one means or another, few have any desire to see their influence spread. Even Chaos; the child of the worst parts of the Id of all things; has no wish to see a rival predator spread even if the Strangers are hardly concerned with the Soul. And the wars between Chaos and the Abyss are many and terrible, where storyline surreality battles alien infrareality for control over how the cosmos is poisoned as surely as their blasphemous things tear into one another. And the Undead similarly seek to impose their withered, stagnant order, launching the legions of those who once were against the heralds of those from Below.
The Strangers seem to in particular however, detest and are detested by in return by the Tyranids, who seem to swarm to their bastions like an immunological response. The Shadow in the Warp seems tremendously effectual in stilling and pushing away Abyssal influence, and the Tyranids are able to consume even their alien pseudo-flesh and metabolism it. Genestealer Cults are similarly intractably hostile to the Churches of the Masters Below. The Gestalt Chorus, or Hive Mind to those who are less aware of its true nature, seems to perhaps know that the Strangers' proxies are not supposed to be here.
But in the modern age, the Army of the Starless Night is marshalling in titanic numbers as their fortresses in the dark tapestry and their dream realms seem to believe that some condition is being met. The temples of the Angleless Unfathomables that they know to be their makers spread their tendrils to make strange what is real, and to bring strangeness against the powers of other would-be conquerors. And dreadful Ancient Heralds such as Ylsancthunn or Glegoraglx have been seen leading their nightmare hosts in great numbers.
...
The Imperial Response (WIP)
The Ordo Advena of the Inquisition; the Beyonder Hunters; are regarded as some of the very shortest-lived of the Inquisition on average. The immense toll on the mind and body that fighting the stranger sputs on merely normal human beings ensures that most of those who aren't psykers, wizards, psions or the like burn out in short order. Or their exposure to the infrareality supplantation of the Army of the Starless Night leads them to mutations that result in having to be put down. Or they end up as mind controlled thralls or worse of the things they fight. Even worse, due to the particular power over dreams that the things of the Strangers wield, nearly all wil find that even in the comfort of a secure bed, they must war with the enemy.
But fighting them in the Dream Time is not something that can be avoided, it is often the only way to penetrate past their veils of infrareality or to actually engage with many of their terrors without calling in particular assets. Many attempt to use various methods to try to engage them in a waking dream, or to harden their bodies against the infrareality beyond what faith and conventional equipment can provide. While not impossible, all too often they make the use of trying to imbibe the blood of the monstrosities they face, and while it gives them great power and the ability to fight in the infrareality largely unmolested by the Below; the price is virtually always one day becoming part of the Army of the Starless Night themselves. Many choose to blow their brains out before then, and hope that this is enough to kill them.
The cults of the Strangers are myriad and range from those who believe that the Strangers can be used for the good of mankind to those who genuinely believe in what they are promised by the infrareal Army of the Starless Night, to things puppeteered by the assorted infections, forms of mind control, parasites, and mutations that the legions of the army can use to subvert people. And they have a great fondness of starting with the influential and powerful who can get the resource that a cult will need to carry out the plans of their benefactors, with the Strange allowing for ways for the Cult to, once established, rapidly increase its numbers without any need to recruit, seemingly growing foot soldiers to thread into society or even simply lie in wait for the day to come.
It is not a war that mortal men can wage alone, and as such they bring with them their iconic chambers militant. The Morphic Guardians of the Adeptus Astartes, the Order of the Pure Mind of the Adepta Peregrinas[1], and the Dreaming Daredevils Inquisitorial Army Group of the Tempestus Scions, each bringing their own skills to the dread of the unknowable vigil.
The Aforementioned Morphic Guardians are all taken from Psions and specialise in dreamtime conflict and projecting a bubble of some degree of stability with which to enter Estranged regions for at least a time. The Astartes are especially resistant to the touch of the Strange beyond being compatible with Psions, and their ironclad certainties can help to make sense of the senseless before them and purge it. The Morphic Guardians also run extensive libraries to try and catalogue all that can be known of a nearly unknowable foe, tracing the passage of poisoned memes and tainted dreams and the means with which to force reality and causality on things outside of both. But given the commonality of mind control among the foe, every aspirant must be able to resist that of a full squad of the Chamber Militant, to keep their minds and not be lost to the control of another. For nothing less will stop them from turning on their brothers and sisters.
The Order of the Pure Mind is well known for its practice of meditation and tantric rites, to cleanse the mind of doubt and fear and to build a wall of certainty and faith against the horrors they face every day and to find ways to define their own existence against the perpendicular madness of the Strange. They are also well known as teachers who do their best to pass on knowledge of how to keep the nightmares at bay, lest they be a gate thru which the horror can step. And it is they who also learn to specialise in the dreadful task of purifying a tainted area, much like their counterparts in the Ordo Thanatos or Malleus. As this corruption is not of the warp, it is a particular skillset, but a needed one if anything is to be reclaimed from an area lost to the Army of the Starless Night, or to push into their surreal, deformed territory.
The Dreaming Daredevils are hardly the luckiest schmucks in the Imperium, and most who get into it know that their most likely exit is some manner of absolutely horrific demise at best. They however, learn and are equipped for how to fight within Infrareality, which is a valuable skill; and one that requires more knowledge of the Strangers than the inquisition will usually let anyone know. Sophisticated scanning equipment and comprehensive education on the signs of infestation, control, mutation, or worse are passed along and refined to a razor point, and most have a preternatural ability to tell if there is some manner of imposter among them; for shapeshifters and Things that can steal the shape of what they consume and infect are common amongst them. Attached psions at the very least, the squad level, are also a hallmark of their formation, as is the need to prove their resistance to control.
[1] Just as Space Marines in this universe can be male, female or neither, any gender can join this universe's equivalent of the SoBs so they had to be renamed. "Peregrine" is often used for crusaders so I went with that.
To keep battles flowing quickly I'll be ending their votes in just 24 hours of posting (sooner if there's a very clear hype train one way or the other) rather than the longer upwards of 72 hours for strategic turn plans. As such there are a bit less than three hours left before I call the vote unanimously for Kreen's plan. It's only the first battle anyway so it's meant to go by pretty quickly and let you start thinking on what to do for your first strategic turn after that. Of course as a 4X game, grabbing territory where possible is generally a good strategy, especially as the diffuse nature of polities in the setting means that localised wars and peaces are just a fact of life and you don't really have to worry about sparking total wars between major powers in most circumstances.
[x] Plan Divide and Conquer
-[x] Space
--[x] The primary fleethorde will target the second-largest concentration of enemy forces and perform a steady advance to bombardment range. The idea is to hopefully destroy or scatter the weaker force before the enemy forces can rally back to attack positions and unify. They will stick in relatively close formation to maximize coordination of fire and harmonic fields for protection. Try to cripple the ships trying to close before they can manage to Clash.
--[x] Ogors will target the largest concentration of Khorne Xenos/Kulrathi and accelerate to engage them along with a detachment of Compass Ships and transports full of soldiers. However, this is actually a feint; see High Magic.
-[x] High Magic
--[x] Conjure mystic storms to disrupt enemy movement, keeping their forces in disarray as much as possible and giving as much time to focus on one segment of their force as we can.
--[x] Teleport the Ogor ships/accompanying Compass Ships/Transports towards the planet where local defenders seem the most active, hopefully bypassing the Khornate defenders who have rushed to meet the Ogor fleethorde.
--[x] Use divination and blessings of fortune to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of our gunners, making our initial bombardment that much more devastating.
-[x] Surface
--[x] Land near the biggest concentration of local defenders and bust a path through the Khornate forces to them. Imperial troops will work to bolster the local defenses and establish a solid beachhead for further landings, meanwhile Ogors will skirmish and rampage to destroy high value Khornate targets.
Realspace weather: 76, nothing of significance
Warp weather: 45, nothing of significance
Winds of Magic: 89 boosted! (Esoteric advantages for wizards are strengthened). On a d24: 4, Azyr ascendant (Wind of Heaven is strengthened)
The void battle of this system, which would be a microcosm of the wider war; would begin with a gradual approach of the two opposing fleets prows on. First would be the nova cannons, the guided torpedoes, and the strike craft, blizzards emerging from both armadas to begin their manoeuvres as they started to accelerate. The empty void now populated with firepower as the longer-ranged batteries of the Tian'Chaoren would begin to open fire first.
Gamma-lances would annihilate the first, most overexcited Chaos ships trying too hard to close, annihilating many of the Beastmen's voidborne chaos beasts in the process as well as they burst like bloody balloons from the impacts. The Khornate fleet was in most of these void battles, the larger armada than any of the component fleets of the Zhu twin's expedition, but many of the ships were the dregs left behind by their masters when they went to find something else to kill, not the elite of the chaos fleets with the top of the line equipment, but glorified raider kings and warlords.
Overlapping fields of defensive fire and clouds of interceptor would work to deal with the Chaos torpedoes, raking the void in strobing patterns, quick traverse lasers and rotor-cannons looking to finish off whatever missile fire and interceptors couldn't. Not all of the chaos torpedoes were stopped, but enough were to let the fleets soldier on without any noteworthy casualties across the myriad engagements.
The beastmen's void creatures were pushed forwards, a wall of meat and tainted skin to try and blunt the initial wrath of the forces of the Xian, but the disciplined coordinators forced on enough fire to break open the formation to get at the real targets, trusting the Ogors' own flocks of void beasts to winnow out the swarm as Xiang gave the order.
...
"Detach the Ogors and send forth our transport, assault, and compass vessels, then prepare a quick teleport." Xiang said as he looked at the holographic display of the unfurling void battle, rubbing at his chin with his gauntleted right index and forefinger.
"Yes, learned one." The Admiral of the lead transport group replied, a woman Xiang knew to be named Liu Han despite having only met in person once. Xiang never did forget a name or a face, and tried to learn that of as many of the troops he'd have to interact with as possible.
"Cheng; both of you, tell the Conclave to ready the storm to disrupt them. And make sure I get the word from the diviners as soon as possible." Zhu Xinyi said, the equal of her twin in military matters and quickly banishing much of her earlier frivolousness to a more contained level as she racked her mind on the conundrum of the battle.
"The populace concerns me. If we allow Kong Nou to reap them at will, they could form daemon worlds and call forth the bloody host. More than that..." Xiang said as he started before Xinyi finished for him.
"You don't want to have to cleanse the taint of such massacres, don't you brother?"
A nod came out of him as he tapped his forehead as if this would accelerate his thoughts somehow while Xinyi puffed her cheeks and gave it a bit of a mental once over herself.
"What if, instead of just trying to flank them, we also use the teleported ships to land early?" She said, conferring with the other admirals and generals on the idea and getting a series of nods of approval.
A session of what was once called "Chinese parliament" was held where the commanders discussed, debated, and determined the exact course of action. The plan was agreed on, and Xinyi folded her arms behind her back, smiling to her brother.
"I see good fortune in our future...good fortune...and heavy firepower." She said with a more catlike smirk now.
...
The battles would eventually close. Warships in this grim darkness of the far future are far too durable and quick to stop engagements from eventually closing to brutal visual range melees where ramming, boarding, and point blank broadsides would decide the day. This was an eventuality that was prepared for, and planned for.
The Chaotic Fleet would be enticed with the seeming separation of the Ogors and the transports, in this system as many others, from the bulk of the fleet. Hapless prey to entice the piratical raider's fancy when the hunter's spear was waiting just behind.
The Chaotic fleet would loose its volleys, trying to push past the crushships of the Ogors, Planetary Assault Ships, and towed behemoths and colossi to savage the convoys of mass transports and bulk landers that seemed to be such an inviting target for the slaughter. After all, it seemed to speak of a great arrogance on the part of the Dragonkin to bring these landers out before the void battle had been decided, and Khornates do love a good slaughter as a punishment for arrogance.
The empyrean shifted, coiled, and then the rituals of Yang, Shadow, and Psychic Spatiomancy enveloped the convoys and shunted them through the Khornate guard, earlier coils of sorcery having revealed their purpose as overwhelming the Khornate teleport and micro-jump blockers to allow for the assault armadas to jump into the orbit of the contested worlds with the escort fleets in good order.
Now the Tyrador system, as well as many other systems across the contested territory would find the Khornates trapped in a vertical envelopment. As per the doctrine of the art of war, against sophontic enemies; as opposed to the slaves of their natures that the Eidolons such as the Orks are; would have some avenues of escape permitted to mitigate a desire to fight to the death, and to ensure that routed enemies would flee in a specific direction that could be bracketed by fire.
Long-ranged plasma batteries were now starting to open, trading fire alongside the accelerators of macrobatteries and streams of shorter ranged missiles. Ships sought to balance their thinking manoeuvres with the need to maintain formations for maximisation of firepower and avoiding presenting weakness to other ships in the complex three dimensional combat environments.
Sleek, multi-engined Tian'Chaoren strike craft, though at first outnumbered by the massive swarms of Chaotic fighters, interceptors, gunships, bombers, attack craft, and multiroles, were trading more than fairly. Eagle Claw fighters raking across formations of Swiftdeath craft and the Kulrathi's own "screaming skull" fighter craft, named for their resemblance to an elongated and fanged skull with tiltable secondary engine pods attached to the sides, snarling with an open mouth around their central weapons.
Corrupted Starhawk Bombers and Fury interceptors defaced with the iconography of Khorne sought to push through, braving the relatively clumsy fusilades of the Ogor fleet to launch their attacks, jinking to get around the swarms of void faring beasts and often being snatched out of the void by the jaws swift star sharks or impaled on the spines of space-puffers. But never without a cost to the Ogor space flocks, and a number of ships reported damage in the ensuing bombing runs, many of them going outright silent.
Heavier Clay Hawk craft released waves of missiles and strobing gamma-laser bursts, stabbing the chaos flocks out of the void, but the beastmen star-harpies and other sort of winged chaos mutated void beasts soon started to join the fray in thickets so dense that there was little to be lost by switching to flak munitions usually meant for dealing with missile swarms with their clouds of shrapnel and cluster-bombs. The Tian'Chaoren didn't have things all their own way, but theirs was the better fleet and the magics of the Tian'Chaoren were guiding their assets to strength after strength.
As planet strike operations were launched and the Blood Armadas started to divide into differing directions, the currents of space began to rebel at the Chaos ships and void beasts. Though Khorne offered protection from "cowardly" hexes that would get in the way of the slaughter, it was not absolute and the Khornate mystics had mostly followed the main force of the Bloodbound to other, gorier pastures. They were not ready for the void to churn like a raging sea.
Some ships and beasts died, blue lightning and stabbing lances of white light and sheets of red flame tearing at their hulls while mounting pressure squeezed at their components, twisting and pulling. Over the days long void battle, many would simply not survive. But that wasn't the intention. The once reasonably battle ready Khornate armada was now a fleet dispersed into confused shoals like a school of fish split up by turbulence in the water, but whereas a fish could simply wriggle its body to rapidly turn, these craft would have much greater bulk to contend with to prevent friendly fire.
Many fired anyway, not caring or even exulting in having to kill their own to get shots off at the other fleet, but the careful concentrations of fire that were so important to naval battles in this dark era were now ruined and they could be unwound once the fleets closed. Cantabrian spheres were set up, looping around disparate pockets of Khornate fleets with traditional Tian'Chaoren discipline and picking off the ships whose wrecks would be the most likely to spread chaos of an undesireable sort amidst the enemy by blocking shots and movement vectors.
Void battles in this era are lengthy, vicious brawls as volley after volley of munitions hammer at regenerating shields and incredibly durable armour around ships with extensive survivability, repair, redundancy, and damage control systems. Quick kills only existed in movies and games passed around for entertainment, save for when there was a sufficiently huge mismatch in attacker and defender. Thus the Khornates could take it, lashing out, forcing a number of Tian'Chaoren ships to break off lest they slow the formation down when they suffered damage.
Moving aside, the Ogors were allowed to rush in where they were present, enthusiastic for the contest in their own fashion while like the bodies of the Long Dragons they considered a national symbol; the Celestial navies winded into new walls of battle.
No quarter was asked for, so none was given. While on the ground it was possible for the less corrupted or those simply duped into service to break off and surrender, in the void; getting away from the true believers before they cut down the faithless was not a realistic endeavour. So they would instead strive to end their suffering quickly, turning superior technology and strategy towards ripping through the now confused and storm-lashed fleet.
Exo-Lances, Nova Cannons, Torpedoes, and other long ranged weapons never stopped firing. A Khornate Space Hulk that had haunted the star lanes for thousands of years broke apart under the intensive bombardment of multiple macro-capitals after days of barrages, its cooling wreckage almost seeming to bleed profusely as if it was alive. Desolator battleships manned by marauder technobarbarian crews trying to form long range firing spheres that were savaging the line ship flotillas of the ships nearest to Tylanius were swiftly and mercilessly punished. Corrupted Lunar class cruisers mobbing another flotilla were caught in the crosshairs of the twins' separate groups, their flagships accounting for the deaths of many of the blood and brass defaced warships.
...
But with each pass the fleets drew closer and closer until the blood and thunder of the real clash was unavoidable, when one could look out a porthole and see the other's vessels in fine detail with the unaugmented eye, where even boarding tubes would be able to make their mark and the hardened prows of ramships were now far more than just armour to present on the approach but deadly weapons.
The boarding engagements would be vicious affairs, violent berserkers trying to rush into the ships they were able to breach into while automatons, non-human auxiliaries, and Ogor mercenaries kept aboard moved in. With the iconic shouted battlecry of "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" the assembled menagerie of bloody barbarians, fallen imperials, corrupted aliens, daemons, and beastmen would swarm into countless shipborne battlefields, whether in the defence or offence.
Across these battlefields were a great many sights of battle and blood. A Rage Ogryn with muscles swollen by the blood god's blessing would push through the firelines in one boarding engagement, only to be solidly krumped by a weighty shock maul swing to the head from a larger, truly alien Ogor, followed by several more until the Khornate stopped moving.
Rage maddened cultists were herded ahead, fear and anger pushing them into the fusilades of fire that would often hack through them rows deep at a time. Their deaths being used to call upon the favours of Khorne, to make the others stronger and to summon forth his hosts from the detritus strewn fields around the brass citadel. Bloodletters, naked and dripping fiery, evil ichor and wielded burning blades, axes, and pole arms; Brass Soldiers whose bodies of solid warp-born brass carried the aspect of snarling and frightful things between machine and living thing that belched metallic death from their cannons, snarling Flesh Hounds and Barking Lycadaemons like horned and bloody red werewolves just to name a few of the varieties of lesser daemon called forth.
They would stream in, hungering for the emotions of things with souls to give their storybeing definition and meaning, for the warp without the materium is nothing but raw potential and may-have-beens or could-be-soons, ideas without shape and concepts without structure. The mortals interacting with them fed their stories, nourished their ideas, and so they found having to go through soulless automatons wielding enchanted power weapons, bedecked in talismans and characters warding against chaos; to be an experience to someone on a date moments away from a roll in the hay only for their partner to be called to an emergency at the last second.
Except Daemons are not reasonable people who would understand and empathise with a more urgent need, but rather manifestations of the collective id of all life parcelled off into self-contained narratives. So they would express their reactions to the sensation of denial with all the snarling fury one would associate something denied its fundamental purpose and reason of being.
In another Chaos Warriors would rip their way through the blaze marines responding to their entry, chaos plate and slab shields absorbing electromagnetic beams and roaring chainaxes and chattering sawn off heavy stubbers and autoshotguns tearing into shields and armour with repeated, frenzied blows. More than human and clad in accursed powered plate, they may not have been Chaos Astartes, but ordinary men could not contest their reflexes, raw strength, or immunity to pain when caught up in the bloodlust. Even with legs blown off, they would crawl towards their foes, snarling with fury eternal, their bodies often refusing to die even when missing chest cavities.
Each dedicated themselves to some particular aspects of Khorne, or to Khorne in general. Ranged warfare, furious melee, bloodshed, brass, the taking of skulls, the burning of flesh and souls. Even with superior technology, the Jade Banner Soldiers were not able to stand against them. But the Ogors however, could; swinging in or blasting their way into melee with massive weapons used like service rifles. And despite their losses, the Tian'Chaoren held and then pushed back, organising, cutting off the avenues of khornate advance in their ships and then infiltrating into their foes' in turn.
Kulrathi would often lead the hosts of aliens alongside the Dragon Ogres, Chaos Trolls, Fimir, and other twisted, tainted things who came of their own particular interests rather than out of any fondness for human followers of Chaos. Huge and powerful aliens who had fully devoted themselves to Khorne as a species; bloody red skin between bone like plates of biometallic organic armour and dense minerals, spikes emerging from joints, retractable claws of biometal from wrists and sharp fingers besides. Their heads covered in organic armour like the skull of a metal hound; growing more adaptations as they regenerated with peternatural speed from that which did not kill them; demanding a vicious intake of food to replenish lost biomass.
Of all the species to have ever developed, none were more devoted, none were more dedicated to the Blood God, whom they adopted as the great god of their entire species long ago; some saying that they were even born of the machinations of Khornate daemons. Tall, powerful, and vicious whether with their bare hands or with arms and armour, they could die in their multitudes and call it fair, glorious even. Rage was their meat, blood their water. But it was not enough, the Khornate forces here were hardly the creme of the crop, and these were not only the forces of a more advanced power, but those entrusted to work with a Xian; they were made of sterner stuff.
Some ships came to a halt, their interiors sabotaged or overrun, but elsewhere the Chaos Fleets were coming apart; and fresh reinforcements were being pushed in. Heavenly Autosoldiers stepped into the fray, hundred high piles of the dead following in their wake. It would have taken chaos space marines or more exalted warriors to deal with them on a more even basis; and there were few here to begin with, even fewer who bothered to aid the mortals or their rivals. As the Chaos Fleets began to die, most under the command of Ortikal would deem their work done and call in their vassals to make ready for carnage elsewhere. Gartak was after all, just a xeno.
...
"What are these?" Gorelord Scarvrax was an impatient man at the best of times, as indicated by the fact that he had to have servitors ready to pick up the bodies of the crew he decapitated so regularly. A Chaos Space Marine who sat proudly within his battlebarge, he largely regarded the squabbling of the other lords of this bloodhost as a deep, dire bore. The insane prattling of whiny brown nosing losers who'd never amount to anything without Astartes might.
Many racked their minds for a good explanation, Scarvrax did not enjoy long, boring lectures and he killed things that annoyed him in short order.
"Dragon-fuckers." One ensign said.
One could have heard a pin drop in the ensuing awkward silence, many trying to avoid the urge to gasp at the audacity of the young man.
"...Excuse me?" He asked. More curious than angry.
"Well, the Tian'Chaoren copulate with dragons a lot, they're all hybridized xeno-fu-" He never managed to finish his sentence before the chain teeth of the power axe in Scarvrax's right hand split him in twain with effortless might. Some of the younger crew, powder monkeys; children brought aboard to fit into small spaces and offer even lowly crew members someone to kick around; gasped out loud in horror, and one threw up before Scarvrax pulled the knife out of the scabbard of the now dead ensign and threw it straight into the person who proved squeamish enough at the sight of blood to lose their lunch; exploding their head into a fountain of gore.
"Do you idiots think this is funny? Are you having a laugh perhaps? A little giggle?" He growled with icy fury that made the bloody crimson interior of the command bridge of the "Fury's Malediction" dim in sympathy to the power of his will. He was the master of the ship, and it obeyed him as would any of his soldiers. His heavy armour's boots stomping for effect as he looked around for anyone unable to maintain their poker face.
"Are we going to get killing then?" Sister Vyxa asked, the Astartes woman, like Scarvrax, was not a Berzerker; no butcher's nails were implanted in her, but her surly attitude as a child had only grown into a vicious, violent temper as an Astartes devoted to the Great God Khorne.
"No...these fools are outmatched. Leave them to their dooms." He said as he eased himself back into his chair, studying the holopicts before he used his armour's systems to tell those managing the warp drive to fire up and take his chaos space marines elsewhere.
"Run away? From infidels?" She spat.
"Blood will be spilled, as it has always been and always shall be. But better not our blood, not today. We have greater destinies. Our Chapter Master calls us to greater slaughters."
Though his was but a small portion of a vast body of ships, he had greater plans than dying for some pissant scaled centaur. And he would start a trickle that grew into a flood of the fallen astartes simply, for the most part, leaving; still bound to their Chapter Master even after the apostasy of the Scarlet Peregrines chapter. And even those who disputed this would have preferred to challenge Chapter Master Vorigar to his face than take the coward's option of running away and building a splinter warband elsewhere.
…
The surfaces of many worlds would see meteor showers preluding the descent of war. Over the skies of Tylanius, the sky would be decorated with streaks, and its vox channels would be flooded with powerful jamming to leave the Khornates blind, deaf, and dumb as auspex-hunting missiles were launched in precise bursts.
The landers and Iron Egg drop pods followed suit once the air defences were deemed suppressed to a satisfactory degree, forcing their landings on every continent with deploying fortresses and constructors erecting their safe havens to channel harmony where there was Chaos. The great multitudes of troops emerged from their transports, or in their air breathing or ground slogging ones to ride to war; the shadow of vast war machines and titanic ogor war beasts following suit.
Plentiful Humans, hired Ogors, swift Huoren, canny Hulijing, horned and six-armed Chiyouren, and winged Heren to name but a few emerged alongside the automaton legions. The enemy had been studied, analysed, and broken down with artillery barrages sounding long into many nights. Carefully planned, carefully aimed, just the way that the strategists liked.
The Khornates of course, raged at this. They raged at everything. The Great God of Rage was their master, and being angry was their first and most potent response to everything. They would channel the powers of blood, seek to call his demons, but then asteroids would rain on their heads as the Ogors dropped their roks on top of them, squashing many a furious cultist flatter than flat as the hollowed out fortresses started to fire in all directions and open up their ramparts even before the lips of their craters cooled.
Ogors would pile out, massive strides devouring distance as they merrily raced into the fray, single swings of massive shock mauls given to them by the Tian'Chaoren leading to heads popping like grapes, chest cavities imploding in bloody ruin, lives ending in split seconds, and tank armour that could have survived direct lascannon and missile impacts deforming and cracking. Lines were overrun in a tide of muscle and flab, with shocking firepower and terrain reshaping mystic might, the courage of the less corrupt failing them in the face of such jolly giants chasing after them enthusiastically, scooping them up like trophies or shooting them to bits while laughing.
The stampedes of their beasts were worse still, fast ones eagerly running down prey for their masters while the big ones bulldozed through, lending often strange powers to the contest as the guns festooned to their backs let loose in every which way and form. A rumbling, thundering cataclysm that the Tian'Chaoren made sure to stay far away from lest they also get trampled.
The defences of a hive rededicated to the blood god were overrun, the repaired walls smashed open once again and the Ogors given leave to kill and eat anything that stank of Chaos but with orders to leave the rest alone with the promise of dessert for those who followed through. Naturally, for Dagra; sweet food was plenty of motivator for her to ensure her boys and girls were on their best behaviour as they made a proper mess of things, dealing with the confined spaces of urban warfare by simply letting thei trained war beasts in to flush out the defenders into the open and stomp them flat.
With the the former most populated hive of the world resecured the Ogors would get to work cleansing it of Chaos. Eagerly, and with permission from their hirers, they would feast on the dead. Something that was never a good path for humans to go down, but was encouraged by their old one crafted physiology and their mighty deity. The act in a way, consecrating it; pushing away the powers of wrath to leave behind something more pristine and natural. And wherever the Frozen meat legion went, chaos retreated, its energies dimmed by the elimination of the ways to feed it, its warring cultists and its altars and monuments; the fiery rage cooled into winter while Raug made his rituals of cleansing.
...
"Bit spicy innit?" Gob said, the Ogor smacking his lips with a pleased noise as he crunched the leg of a former traitor captain whose refractory shield, power blade, and plasma pistol proved no match for a very big lad who had just simply walked through partially molten crater lips. His gut plate was signed of course, but while Gob was a simple brute, he understood the advantage of pure reach well enough.
"Look..." Bog said, his twin brother holding out the leg of a khorngor to point at his sibling while lecturing him, the other hand stroking his magnificent moustache.
"If its spicy, ya need some milk, er ice cream...yoghurt's good in a pinch but ice cream really hits the spot with the hot food." He said, gesturing to the Ogoress Moddy who was hoisting a giant tub of the stuff looted from the rations of the now-dead traitor guardsmen of the former Therendian 39th Grenadiers.
"Ey lads, 'oo wants some cold treats?" She said as she dumped the tub down and cracked open the car sized container with her fingers; getting out a spoon of comical size to take her first bite of what was meant to be a reward for the best formations in the now wiped out corps; gladly letting the vanilla smear her face as she nodded in appreciation.
"Oi! Don't go 'oggin' all that! Share!" Gob protested as he pulled himself up and stood straight, his bulk carried with effortless ease by legs made strong by a lifetime of running down food or racing to the front of a line.
A crippled Gor, with many broken bones and splintered armour, tried to crawl away while the Ogors were talking, the goat headed child of chaos getting about three steps before the Ogor stamped on its neck to kill it, pulling off a leg from the corpse with less effort than a human would need with a roasted chicken to take a drumstick and chomp down while he approached.
"Yeah well there's more of it in their boxhouse I saw. So Iz don't mind." She shrugged as she passed him a spoon of his own to take a scoop and wash down the zest of the taint of Khorne, letting his tongue roll around in his mouth to detect the various motes of sweet flavour and dairy.
"Now dats some good stuff I sez. Where'd ya say the human box 'ouse was?" He asked, getting a thumbing gesture from her while he alternated between bites of beastman meat and scoops of ice cream.
...
Xiang and Xinyi would entrust the void battle to the Cheng twins, arriving on the surface alongside the Vermillion and Azure Dragon Guards; each of them a transformation capable dragon themselves who they knew well. But their descent came not on standard gunships, but by letting themselves fall from the upper atmosphere, hurtling as comets towards the earth before energy danced around their body and transformed them as they approached the ground, taking on the form of lengthy, armoured serpents whose roars put fear into the hearts of those madmen who heard them.
The dragons swirled in the air, bedecked in resplendent powered armour and looming massive in the sights of the enemy, friends, and terrified civilians alike. The Imperial citizens had heard tales that Tian'Chao was a place ruled by serpentine xenos that could take the form of humans, but to see sinuous serpents scores of meters long emerge where there had once been men falling to their seeming doom was something else entirely; speaking of an entirely higher sort of psychic power than most biomancers could dare dream of, calling forth substance from the warp to take on another body seamlessly; and to fly without wings by simply willing it to be so.
Xiang and Xinyi intertwined their coils with one another, forming the symbol of Yin and Yang as their smaller, but still grandiose guards formed besides them in the air. Red heat and Blue Cold danced in the skies as they looked upon a battlefield in need of transformation and stabilisation, and let loose bellowing, sonorous roars as they dispersed.
To call Tian'Chao the nation of the dragons is not a metaphor, it is a very literal truth. It is the greatest political project of their kind, and they have been constants within it even with the passage of the ages. Much of its human population could count a dragon somewhere in its ancestry, so prolific the dragons were in mingling with their students.
And as the siblings and their guards armoured forms flew through the air with seemingly no need for wings, they made their presence known in fire and ice. To let them know why the Dragons were revered as great teachers and guardians.
Sheets of flame would leap from Zhu Xiang's mouth as he looked upon the Khornates not with hatred, but with pity. To lose oneself to rage, to cast oneself into the lonely abyss of all consuming anger and kill until killed oneself; was a pitiable thing. Not worthy of hate, too pathetic, too childish.
The forces caught by his fire breath hardly found his pity of much comfort as men and materiel were reduced to less than ash, his serpentine form bringing the sweeping death in a long line that annihilated a line of Marauders who found that not even void hardened carapace exo-armour was of much help against Xian Long dragonfire; screaming not from burning as not even ashes remained from the swiftness and completeness of their deaths; but from the anticipation.
His claws carved into tanks and men, his teeth crushing the walls of makeshift forts made in the hab blocks of hives, his magic coursing around him and psychic might coruscating like a corona of flame, a gesture stopping waves of fire aimed towards him telekinetically before snapping the necks of the offending attackers.
Xinyi was hardly any less vicious; letting her cold disdain manifest in arctic frost that engulfed fallen tanks and made them so brittle as to crumble under their own weight, her lashing tail smashing another aside while her body wound through the streets of the capital hive. The cities of the Imperium were such messy, dirty things, displeasing to Xinyi's eyes, but not as much as the Khornates.
Unlike Xiang she did dislike them. Not in the way you hate another person, but in the way you come to find the presence of something displeasing, uncomfortable, wrong. Not fear, not for her own safety; though she did worry for the human populace of this place. But disquiet, to throw oneself so uselessly to their deaths was not laudable. They should have learned to value their own lives.
It was doubtlessly a fun task, to smash the works of the foe like toys, to crush tanks in claw or to wrap around walkers with sinuous bodies and crush them like massive pythons or to bite the heads off of questoris knights and skittering daemon engines. But it was first and foremost a duty, a mandate that had been written long ago and had to be carried out. It would be done professionally, for the greatest cruelty in war is to lengthen it unnecessarily, and the highest mercy is to swiftly end it.
Chaos thrived on challenges, on duels. It was not in the nature of those who followed the dark paths to shy away from a thrown gauntlet, and chaos warbands usually started the process of splintering when their leadership was frayed enough. With the Chaos Space Marines having decided they had more important matters to attend to, drawing Gartak and his retinue out would have been enough.
A Xian Long was something that most in the universe would have balked at facing, least of all ones born directly of Shen Yang and Qiao Yin. But Khornates seldom back down from a taunt or provocation. Rage, in the right circumstances, could be a useful tool, but always a poor master. When combined with pride, it made for a fiery mix prone to exploding.
And soon they would have him, after casting down the monuments to the Shaggoth's own glory he would at last reveal himself, unable to focus on his rituals when the insults to his pride were heaped atop him day after day. He would make himself known as the thundering four armed Dragon Ogor just about exploded onto the frontline, all full of piss and vinegar, and let the storm rage around his body, the Shaggoth roaring with thunderstorm volume and blood-curdling hatred from within his skull shaped helmet.
"Have you come to offer your blood to the Blood God?" he roared with defiance, his axe sweeping a wide and deadly arc to hack aside dozens of soldiers who dared to get in his way, hewing with dreadful force as his body loomed larger than sauropods.
Accompanying him were his own guard of dragon ogors, or more properly Shaggoths; wreathed in the thunderbolts of the storm that their kind
"I thought you were supposed to be fearless. Why hide until your armies are ruined? Or are you just a bully afraid of a real fight?"Xinyi taunted, her sinuous form snaking around in the air as she perched atop what had once been an Imperial church, her mysterious gaze leering through her helm as long whiskers swayed in an invisible breeze.
"Vacuous flying snake!" He spat with outrage, roaring loud enough to shatter simple glass windows in his outrage, fire and lightning curling out of his maw as he slammed his axe into the road hard enough to split it, pillars of flame tearing their way from the fissure and lava pooling at the edges of the rift he had made, one of his feet grasping its claws around the ruins of a Taurox armoured car and pressing down on it.
"When I take your skull and give it unto Khorne, I will be repaid for everything I have lost here with interest!" He declared, but Xiang had studied him. For all his boister and size, he had little in the ways of actual blessings from Chaos. He spoke in his bellowing take on Low Gothic not with the conviction of a zealot, but an opportunist. His mind pieced connections together, and the brother would add his own barb.
"You are not a true chaos lord, just a big brute who bullied his way into taking over a leaderless horde; vacated by the blade of a Callidus." He said, not a hypothesis, a fact. A simple declaration of just-sos. He had done his research, and his eyes were very difficult to conceal falsehoods from. For he could see little in the way of the real fires of Khorne, merely tricks.
"I will admit, using electricity to spark flame to fool your curs is an impressive trick. Do you do it for children's parties? How many challengers have you slain to maintain the ruse, I wonder?" He added, lazily looming on the steeple of the very same cathedral his sister was curled around the bell-tower of.
No more words, just fury and spittle and incoherent angry babbling. He could not fly, they could lure him to his death, but if they could break him here, the horde would be greatly demoralised.
Zhu Xiang: Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yin, Dragons, Power, and Revelation), Psyker, Sorcerer
Zhu Chinyi: Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yang and Harmony), Psyker, Sorcerer
Cheng Haoyu: Xian Fenghuan, Wizard (Knows Lores of Heaven, Light, Metal, and Death), Psyker, Sorcerer
Cheng Kexin: Xian Fenghuan, Wizard (Knows Lores of Beasts, Shadows, Fire, and Life), Psyker, Sorcerer
Dragra Steelbreaker: Ogor Overtyrant, Psyker
Raug Meatspicer: Ogor Great Slaughtermaster, Wizard (Knows lores of Gut Magic, Beasts, and Cold), Psyker, Sorcerer
Legions of Legend
Vermillion Dragon Guard
Azure Dragon Guard
Shenyang Wu Conclave
Meat Freezer Ogors
Bloodbound of Khorne
[/h1]
Forces
1 Magnitude 2 Tier Primus Fleethorde (Low quality), 40% damage
Light Fortifications (Damaged)
Characters Present
Gartak the Bloody: Shaggoth, "Khornate Lord"
Legions of Legend
None
Categorical advantages (Space) (+ is in your favour, - is against)
+++Macro-Capitals (Supremacy)
+++Leviathans (Supremacy)
++Juggernauts (Superiority)
++Superdreadnoughts (Superiority)
+Capital ships (Edge)
++Dreadnoughts (Superiority)
+Battleships (Edge)
-Grand Cruisers (Disadvantage)
=Line Ships (Equilibrium)
-Battlecruisers (Disadvantage)
=Cruisers (Equilibrium)
+Destroyers (Edge)
+Screen Ships (Edge)
++Frigate (Superiority)
+Corvette (Advantage)
-Sloop (Unfavourable)
+Smallcraft (Advantage)
+Strike Craft (Edge)
+Landers (Equilibrium)
+Torpedoes (Equilibrium)
++Other (Superiority)
N/A Fortifications
+++Esoterics (Supremacy)
++Support (Superiority)
Positional Advantages (Space)
+++Bombardment (Supremacy)
++Skirmish (Superiority)
+Clash (Advantage)
N/A: Pursuit/Retreat
Categorical Advantages (Surface)
+++War Engines (Supremacy)
+++Behemoths
+++Colossi
+++Titans
++Massives
+++Megaliths
++Giants
+Superheavies
+Vehicles (Advantage))
+Heavies
+Main Battle Units
+Lights
+Infantry
=Super Infantry (Equilibrium)
++Commandos (Superiority)
-Elite Infantry (Disadvantage)
++Specialists (Superiority)
+++Line Infantry (Supremacy)
---Cannon Fodder (Non-presence)
+++Support
+++Artillery (Supremacy)
++Aircraft (Superiority)
+++Assistants (Supremacy)
N/A Fortifications
+++Esoterics (Supremacy)
+++Transport (Supremacy)
++Individuals of Importance (Superiority)
++Lords (Superiority)
++Heroes (Superiority)
++Agents (Superiority)
Initial Positional Advantages: Surface
+++Shock
++Penetration
+Exploitation
++Reduction
Khornate forces are taking rapidly mounting losses and have suffered extensively disrupted cohesion.
Tian'Chaoren and Ogor casualties are well within acceptable margins
Khornate rituals have been disrupted
Enemy Lord has been discovered to be in essence, a fraud, a charlatan who, through carefully purging the warband he took over of actual priests and psykers and making sure to never actually make much contact with them; has managed to slide into rule over the bloodbound through little more than brute strength.
Tian'Chaoren military forces have achieved landings on most worlds contested in the territory and have established substantial territorial control and liberated area.
Khornate space fleets have been mostly crippled.
Chaos Space Marines have decided to abandon the conflict, recalled by their fallen Chapter Master to more important (at least to them) engagements and deeming the mortals, xenos, beaastmen, and barbarians a lost cause.
Khornate daemon presence is minimal
Magical supremacy has been established and Chaos corruption is rapidly disappearing.
Contact with anti-chaos holdouts has not been consistently established.
Orders should be one line. You can give up to ten orders per section.
High magic actions should also be one line.
Duel
Gartak the Slaughter (Dragon Ogor Shaggoth of Khorne) and Lord Vildegar the Crimson (Fallen Imperial Knight) is issuing a challenge to Zhu Xiang and Zhu Xinyi!
(Roll 5d6 vs 5d6 for each phase of combat until one is victorious or withdraws, with advantages adding +1 per plus For simplicity's sake unless otherwise noted; stats are being considered together. I lack the spoons to hand out hard stats for everything.)
Tian'Chao:
Zhu Xiang, Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yin, Dragons, Fire, Power, and Revelation), Psyker, Sorcerer, Dragon Mode!, Massive, Flying, Immune to Fire
Zhu Xinyi, Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yang, Cold, and Harmony), Psyker, Sorcerer, Dragon Mode!, Massive, Flying, Immune to Cold
Vermillion Dragon Guard retinue, Legion of Legend, Shapeshifting Long Dragons, Psykers, Sorcerers, Wizards, Dragon Mode!, Massive, Flying, Immune to Fire
Azure Dragon Guard retinue, Legion of Legend, Shapeshifting Long Dragons, Psykers, Sorcerers, Wizards, Dragon Mode! Massive, Flying, Immune to Cold
Khornates:
Gartak the Bloody, Dragon Ogor Great Shaggoth, "Khornate Lord", Massive, Immune to Electricity
Fire and Thunder Guard, Dragon Ogor Shaggoth Champions, "Khornate Champions", Massive, Immune to Electricity
Advantages: None
[]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[]: Refuse the duel, lure the Dragon Ogor to his doom. Lesser morale bonus for you, khornate morale will be negatively affected but not as severely as defeat by an enemy champion.
Scene request
Request one sort of scene you'd like to see me write in either your plan proposal, or just as a separate vote Make sure that "scene request" is part of the title of this option so I can see them more easily.
Cool stuff! Very vivid descriptions of the battles, and looks like things went well enough, suffering some damage. I kind of wish we could catch the CSM's, but having them withdraw makes this battle much easier to win, so it's a victory.
Yeah, everything appears to have gone well so far. Given all our advantages, a duel appears to be rather thoroughly lopsided in our favor, so we should take it.
[x]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[x] Plan Clean-Up
--[x] Space: Continue hunt down the splinters of the enemy fleethorde. Form hunter-killer groups around your Jade Quilin class superdreadnoughts and send them to slaughter those commanders identified by your diviners (see below). Meanwhile, use your main battlegroup to engage the more numerous splinters. Detach carrier groups anchored by battleships to mop up any particularly isolated enemy groups. Continue our landings further, pouring in troops and equipment. Limited orbital bombardment of enemy positions can be done, but not so indiscriminate as to cause mass slaughters that the Khornates could use or cause PR issues later.
--[x] High Magic:
---[x] Use divination to identify ships and leaders around whom the Khornate fleet could rally and prioritize their destruction.
---[x] Use telepathy to establish communication and coordinate with anti-Chaos holdouts and our landing troops
---[x] Use the Lore of Shadows to further the (hopefully) crushing effects of the duel, whispering despair into the thoughts of our enemies
--[x] Planetary: Fortify our current locations and continue sending artillery barrages towards the enemy, trying to reduce their advantage in sheer numbers. Use the barrages to suppress enemy opposition to our heavy units like our war machines, use them to shock and penetrate enemy lines to form them into pockets we can defeat in detail. Use the Ogors for mop-up operations, layering buffs onto them with buffs from Metal, Beast and Life Lores to make them destructive as possible, particularly against enemy Super and Elite infantry.
Anyone else got ideas? I feel like I struggled with a planetary/surface strategy.
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Faction Primer: The Undead, a Brief general Overview, part 1
"The dead do not squabble as this land's rulers do. The dead do not fight one another. The dead have no desires, no petty jealousies or ambitions. A world of the dead is a world at peace..." - Nagash Khetepmoses, Incarnate-Mordeus of Shyish, Death God of the Afterlife, Undeath, Empires, and Kingship
The Undead are a threat that lurks at the corners of nearly every civilisation and harries even the many monsters of the galaxies of darkness. Where Shyish blows strongly and is allowed to stagnate into the necrotic form of dark magic, where the curses of uneasy rest linger, wherever the warp is allowed to touch and give rise to Psykers, Wizards, Sorcerers, and Arcanists but no wards are made against death; the Undead can be there. From barely there poltergeists to galaxy devouring unliving hosts, the Undead are nearly everywhere. And whereas the Gods of Chaos are prisoners of their nature, cursed to enact their fundamental essence even; and perhaps even especially; it is self-destructive, the Mordei of Death are far more aware, far more able to focus on even individual and unaccomplished souls, and far more able to plan even with their deeply predatory desires.
Most of the very few beings who are knowledgeable in such things state that the rise of Undeath would come with the coming of Nagash from the soul-echoes of the world that was, the Great Necromancer willing his spirit to reconstitute itself despite the death of Malus and calling forth his old minions as he drank deeply of the raw stuff of the empyrean. He would traverse the warp, consuming the lords of death of many planets and cultures, binding Shyish and Dhar ever more deeply to his essence, growing into something great and terrible. He would have been content to rule his piece of these mortal realms, but destiny would have another plan for him.
Attracted by Orikan's scratch to reset the cosmos into something more survivable and resilient, Nagash would be attracted to the new reality, anchoring his growing realm of Shyish to it as he sensed the raging war in heaven and desired to have his fill of the countless souls tossed into the ether by the dreadful war. To build a greater empire than he ever dared dream possible, claiming overlordship of death and the unclaimed souls of the deceased while his realm of Shyish grew into a massive pit within the warp. The dead would stir, and his so-called Psychopomps; or Gehenirot to use the less polite term; would start to leak into the materium through the wounds dealt to reality by the great and terrible war.
Of course, there was actually another there, a being that many simply call Charon, after an ancient terran myth of the ferryman for Nagash saw his manifestation of potential as a skeletal boatman with a wide-brimmed hat and a scythe he also used as a pole, tending to the river of souls before Nagash had arrived. A true native of these deathly sections of the warp, not quite active, but also not quite dormant; rather in a sort of state of passivity. Seemingly waiting...for something. Nagash and his Mortarchs did not make war upon him, but instead Charon simply knelt, and said that they were in service to Thanarcus, who had clearly arrived.
As the legend goes, he was thus made one of the Grand Mortarchs of Nagash, continuing to manage the otherseas flow of souls and the dead as the Grand Mortarch of the River. What Charon, or his protean psychopomps even were is not clear. They were simply always there, potential that had somehow already been realised despite lacking a moment to allow actualisation in the materium unlike the great bulk of the gods of Chaos at this point. Curious, but ultimately so long as Charon served gladly, Nagash would allow him to carry on with his duties under his liege-lordship despite the clear misgivings of Arkhan, Krell, Neferata, Vlad, Isabella, Harkon, and others.
As the othersea was tempest tossed into the nightmarish warp as the powers of Death, Darkness, Destruction, Chaos, Order, Life, Radiance, and Creation crystallised, or perhaps more correctly, actualised, in the ether through the ceaseless use and abuse of it and the unchecked weaponisation of sensitive emotions of delicate souls and the terror of the neutral parties mounted; the dead would reap what had been sowed. Even as their intrusions were warded against, even as the Protean Pre-Daemonic Obyriths of Chaos such as the Enslavers or the Ancient Devils of Darkness and the mounting roar of destructive gods only grew louder.
As Malal; firstborn of Chaos and the lord of fear, god of contradictions, master of self-defeat, and king of suicides; first began to actualise in the eyes of the materium at the same time as his opposite in the pantheon of order, Forteia the Calm, would come into fruition, the dead would war with the forming Angeloi and Daemons, seeking to push back their terror. Some would say, giving a chance for the survivors of the end stages of the war in heaven to rally against the tide of dread and terror spilling from the Warp that perhaps even the things of the Below underestimated. Whatever the case, Calm would overcome Fear, and there was a sort of placidity even as the warp was now a stranger, more hostile place with warring gods of concepts unrooted from any particular belief system, culture, or species.
But even during the long peace, the Dead were there. Though the afterlives of most of the remaining elder species were sealed to the cycles of the Undead with souls guarded carefully by their own death gods and separate realms, there were many, many lesser societies who were both sensitive to the othersea and lacked such conceptual protection. And often, the unliving would have to be put down by the weapons of war that the survivors had, keeping a long vigil against the graveborn and the psychopomps ushered into being. Other, rival, but lesser lords of Death would make their presences known, such as Drachenfels, Mannfred, Ushoran, or Settra, and others began to actuate; each seeking their own realms in the warp; but in these times there was plenty to go around.
But the long peace was too difficult to breach, too solid to undermine directly. At least, until the holders of that peace began to war among themselves. As the Dark Cythari cults of the Aeldari overthrew the just institutions of the old Phoenix Kingdom, as the Naga of Suvabag[1] grew to resent their feelings of national confinement, as the bitter Tregora, the hungering Hrud, and the battered but not beaten K'Nib all started to want their own cut of things and craved greater power rather than the long quiet, things would fall apart. The Wars of Vengeance would be the most terrible since the Aftermath wars, and many rising cultures that wished to prove themselves in the face of the ancients such as Humanity, the Fra'al, the Q'Orl, the Gykon, the Tsarkantic Collective, and the Sarhuadin to name a few would stick their oars in to disaster.
The only winners of the Wars of Vengeance and the sundering of empires would be those forces that profited from the common ruin of the untainted. And Death would be there, filling itself into the vacuums left behind by a conflict that shattered the stars. Without those willing to educate and shield societies new to the warp from its predators, many would fall victim to the promises of Undeath; such as the Cythor and the Xenarchs. The collapse of so many societies, most especially that of humanity's as their machines turned on them and their efforts to weaponize the trauma of the newly appearing psykers and wizards as supersoldiers blew up in their face; would allow the dead to creep across the stars.
Empires of the Undead would arise, no longer needing to hide away in the shadows, no longer needing to creep where the great powers were not looking. The creed of false life spread far and deep and great rifts into the realms of Death would open to swallow worlds, systems, stellar clutches or even galaxies entire. The first humans to embrace undead however, would actually arise before this; the bitter Men of Gold, those gilded masters of commerce and corporate politics cast aside by the bounty of the machine revolutions and the uprisings against their tyranny. Seeking a way to bolster their resources and to cheat death in a way more absolute than mere life extension, they embraced the word of Settra and the remaining gods of old Nehekhara and ironically, raised their kin as the great golden mummies and skeletons now known as the golden revenants.
As for the bulk of mankind however, the great harvest of the living allowed by the warp storms of the age of strife and the ever growing distraction of the great powers would run rampant for tens of thousands of years until at last the dreadful bleed in reality known as the eye of terror tore its way into being in the former heart of the Eldar Witch Kingdom. The Eye was born around what had once been called the Corona-Borealis supercluster, an ugly, hateful sore in the cosmos. kept at bay primarily by leftover wardings built in a distant age, most particularly the Necron Pylon Network, now immersed in the soup of the raw stuff of Chaos and glaring upon a universe once again diminished by dreadful war, visible to instruments from anywhere in the observable horizon despite the impossibility of such a thing.
But death scream of the Eldar had spent much of the energy of the dark forces at work as the rise of Arianka and Slaanesh as things that could actualise effects in the materium had cast significant disruption in the warp. The dark tides would have to recede, clinging to their greatest conquests as the technically victorious powers such as the Dawi Karaz Ankor, the Slann Sublime Alliances, the Tian'Chaoren, and others retreated to lick their wounds and rebuild, waiting for the storm of the things once contained that were now free. Particularly the Greenskins, Ogors, Umbra, the Pale Wasting, the Khrave, and other mighty beings who easily took to the task of war.
The Dead would find many of their fortresses attacked by rampaging Greenskin barbarians, Hungry Ogor, conquering Rangda, and the shadowy Umbra to name but a few who were starting to roam cleared away stars. The rebirth of humanity under the successor polities, the greater enterprising endeavours of the Leagues of Votann and other abhuman polities, and the recovery of many of the secondary polities of the former era such as the Q'Orl Swarmhood or the Sarhuadin Empires would be both bane and boon. With the emergence of old foes like Sigmar, Gilles le Breton, Ursun, or Myrmidia in the territories of the holy alliance and the ascent of either new or no longer hidden actors such as the Imperial Diad of Terra and the decree of rebuilding by the Dragons; there was a sort of pressure on the undead, but not an entirely negative one.
Frantic expansion efforts such as the great crusade would beget devastating wars of conquest, protection, genocide, or plain and simple desires to fight something. Death could feed the undying lords once again, and they would look to claim new champions from the rising powers. In particular, the Emperor and Empress' prised Primarchs and Space Marines, creatures born partially of the warp held interest. More corruptible than the Stormcast Eternals, Ice Witches, Blazing Champions, Dervishes, or the Grail Knights forged by the thieves of the Holy Alliance or the studious cultivating scholars and tech-lords of the Celestial alignment. More...ignorant out of a vain hope that atheism would shield them.
How wrong they were then, even as the seeds of another great and terrible fall were sown by Chaos, the Undead were latching onto those morose and death-obsessed individuals who saw the way forward in doubling down on the iron fist. It was easy, for the Imperium encouraged such thoughts, a misguided approach of believing that cruelty is the only answer to a cruel universe. The undead would watch, and wait, feeding off the death of so many cultures that lacked the empyreal defences to stop their grave-bounty from being harvested by the Mordei. Far from weakening things like Nagash, whom the Emperor and Empress feared and wished to contain, they were empowering him. So he, nor the others, needed act immediately.
Even when many of the primarchs turned on the Imperium and fell into the talons of the chaos gods with the help of the much loathed Skaven (and others) to lead the warhosts of the apocalypse, the Undead were still content to work in the shadows, preparing the seeds for their own dark harvest. Another reaper's bounty, another rich time of engorging. But the Empress' work on the Silver Keep and a way to shield the souls of the Imperium in death from the lords of Shyish had, unlike the webway project; succeeded even as she melded into the structure. What had once been a receptacle and reservoir of empyreal might and just an artificial vortex of the winds of magic to make it bend to the Imperium more easily now channeled the might of that Vortex into carving a realm of the warp as the Empress Erda's last gift to mankind.
Nagash was furious, he was Nehekharan born and bred and like all the great lords of his culture there was nothing he despised more than a thief. His chips would be cashed, and the work he set into being would advance to its next phase. Atraya Mender of the Mortificers would need little convincing to attempt to usurp Guilliman, already someone who loathed the idea of civilian government and regarded the Avenging Son and his supporters as soft and weak-hearted. The refusal of her and her formerly loyalist supporters to side with Horus was born out of not believing Horus and Edda deserved the position either, not true disagreement with the idea of Astartes rule.
Gathering those of the traitor legions who had broken off from Horus out of refusal to deal with Chaos or disliking the leadership of the Heresy that would follow her; she would attempt her Putsch and plunge the Imperium into the second civil war of the millennium when Guilliman made his intention of pushing the dissolution of the legions into chapters through. This time the fighting would begin in the core space of mankind, with the very first shots being on Terra itself, jailing the Imperial Palace within its own walls and then spread outwards as the signal was given. A command to rise up and cast down the cowards and betrayers of the vision of the Diad, one aided increasingly by the dead and the monstrous things of that danced with them.
But like with the Horus Heresy, other powers would act against the Undead just as they did with Chaos, either intentionally or not aiding the loyalists and forcing Atraya to battle on too many fronts. Furthermore, Guilliman's faction had suspected the would-be coup of the Atrayans, and had made their own plans to avoid the mistakes of Horus' war. Eventually, not even the great numbers of the mortificers could hold, nor her supporting legions and armies, gradually pushing back to Atraya's own territory to cast down the Queen of Ash's strongholds and forced her to flee herself; right into the waiting hands of the Undying King who would anoint these Primarchs as his own Mortarchs.
The Twice betrayed Imperium hardened its heart, its Primarchs gradually disappearing for one reason or another leaving their work unfinished with a now paranoid Senatorum Imperialis and Parliament of High Lords. Though it would take other conflicts to fully end the Diad's Carolingian dream and birth the feudal corpse state the Imperium is now, two deadly blows had already been dealt, and the wars of death would haunt the dreams of the Imperium and the universe as a whole for centuries. But the Undead are far more than another set of traitor imperials, indeed many of the unloving hosts of even Nagash may contain few or even no imperials or even former humans at all.
Though each Mordei has their own thesis on the matter, in Nagash all are one, and Nagash is in all. He still maintained the mindset of a Nehekharan Phaeron, a Bronze Age King of Kings who ruled absolutely from the palace and considered all who were his subjects as his possessions. Older, more primordial than such definitions of Fascism, Liberalism, Socialism, Reactionarism, Revolutionarism or other political quibbles, he was quite simply God to his followers. The almighty, the all providing, the all knowing, both the wrathful and the all-knowing, whose Mortarchs and Lesser Mordei served at his court and whose aspects governed everything from the peace of a comfortable demise to the wrath of the slighted gods.
Some would find irony then, that the Imperial Creed would take some influence from Nagash, inspired by what he could find of the Nagashite creed from ancient ruins as Lorgar was. But the forces of the dead have been far from restful. Great wars, unholy acts and rituals, conflict with all those who would not bow and seeking to twist and bend everything to the whims of their chosen Mordei; the Dead have been nothing if not restless. The Dark Omens of the undying darkened countless stars, and now do so once again as the Mortarch of omens Ahkenaten goes to war once again, and even the mordei opposed to Nagash cannot help but contribute to the malign portent of the latest schemes of the undying to conquer the living once and for all.
...
The Imperial Response
Against them, the Imperium deploys the Ordo Thanatos, the Death Hunters, who keep the long vigil against one of the Imperium's most persistent and deadly foes. Slayers of Vampires, Liches, Phantoms, purgers of Necromancers and dark magicians, eternally at their wits end trying to keep a watch on an immortality obsessed nobility that cannot seem to stop reading excerpts of the accursed books of undeath or contacting the midnight aristocracy, and always on the look out for threats to the rest of the souls of the Imperium's dead.
But they have long been struggling to keep their heads above water and avoid falling past the precipice as every flaw and imperfection in the Keep allows Nagash to take more and more souls and pull at the Grand Imperial Vortex of Magic. The Silver Keep requires maintenance that almost none alive can guess at the procedures of. And while other Ordos might have comfort in Throne, Keep, and Cog keeping their souls, stealing the right to the Keep's afterlife is something that the Undead specialise in, with the price of failure very often being forcibly turned into the very thing they seek to destroy after being slain. As such, the Ordo Thanatos is an order with often extreme coping mechanisms, faced as they are with mankind's primordial fear of death.
Its chamber militants are as follows; the White Warden Space Marines founded at the order of the Empress Erda, the Order of Hallowed Rest of the Adepta Peregrinas[2], and the Black Watch Inquisitorial Army Group of the Tempestus Scions. Each dedicating their life to training how to fight and combat the restless dead and the monsters in the warp behind them. They are people who have conquered fear yet have also, more than most militants; learned to value their lives, for death against the Undead is a step to joining the enemy as one of their corpse things, a slave for eternity, tormented by the immiserating sensation of being trapped in a dhar poisoned body that is the slave-thing of a cruel error state in existence; for the Undead fundamentally are walking violations of the concepts of life and the laws of reality.
The White Wardens are made solely out of those who have conquered death and the fear of it as aspirants, and are made entirely out of Wizards; with the radiant wind of Hysh and gentle Ghyran being a particular favourite to develop for their effectiveness against the undead and the psychopomps, with the dispatch of the Wardens often being the last hope of regions suffering from severe upswellings of the power of the Mordei before Exterminatus is called to lay everything to waste. The White Wardens also extensively research the winds of magic, seeking to master them as a resource and often dabble in what could be considered sorcery alongside their traditional wizardry, especially to create enchanted gear with which to do battle against foes who often shrug off non-magical damage.
The Order of Hallowed Rest is marked by its surprising sentimentality from thousands of years of comforting the grieving and egalitarian outlook. Death is the great equaliser, and the possessions of the material world mean nothing in the hallowed demesne of Throne, Keep, and Cog, and it matters not if one is a pauper or a lord; the Undead will come for you to defile you all the same. Specialising in laying the dead to rest and exploiting the weakness of most of their foul kind to displays of faith, they also use their Order Famulous connections to keep tabs on the upper crust of Imperial society's very often dangerous obsession with life everlasting, with the depressing regularity of having to deal with the antics of noble houses, trader lords, and the navis nobilite leading to a general view of the well-to-do of the Imperium as scum.
The Black Watch might at first be mistaken for perhaps the least of these three, being closer to normal, albeit still augmented men rather than having the benefit of ceramite, plasteel, and adamantium armour, magic, reality distorting faith, or enhancements of the degree of the order of Hallowed Rest; nevermind the White Wardens. However the Black Watch has knowledge and gumption, as well as like all Chamber Militant Tempestus Scions; a deep seated obsession with preparing all the needed weapons to win swiftly well before ever getting stuck in. Due to the often overwhelming numbers of the dead, the Black Watch also tends to come prepared with weapons that need little in the way of ammo and with plentiful stocks, and particularly train in decapitation strikes with the knowledge that often taking out enough Necromancers can stop things from getting out of control.
...
[1] Space Khuresh
[2] Just as how there are Male and Female Astartes, there are also male and female SoBs; so they were renamed the Peregrinas.
--[x] Planetary: Fortify our current locations and continue sending artillery barrages towards the enemy, trying to reduce their advantage in sheer numbers. Use the Ogors as 'lures' for the Khornate's Super and Elite troops and back them up with buffs from Metal, Beast and Life Lores to make them destructive as possible, hopefully reducing the enemy's advantage in these categories.
Anyone else got ideas? I feel like I struggled with a planetary/surface strategy.
If I may offer some thoughts, while fortifying and artillery barrages are good, we shouldn't just remain static. We have huge advantages in most categories and in particular, use our War Engines and Massive Units to Shock and Penetrate, tearing apart the already disrupted Khornates into isolated pockets we can defeat in detail.
While having the Ogors as lures sounds good, we should also give them some additional backup, say plentiful air support?
If I may offer some thoughts, while fortifying and artillery barrages are good, we shouldn't just remain static. We have huge advantages in most categories and in particular, use our War Engines and Massive Units to Shock and Penetrate, tearing apart the already disrupted Khornates into isolated pockets we can defeat in detail.
While having the Ogors as lures sounds good, we should also give them some additional backup, say plentiful air support?
[x]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[x] Plan Clean-Up
Looks good to me. I was thinking that maybe the planetary plan is a bit conservative, but I myself always lean towards slow and steady, so I don't see that as a bad thing.
[x]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[X]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[x]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[x] Plan Clean-Up
Edit: added scene request
[x] Scene: Imperial civilian rescued from chaos cultists by terrifying giant flying snake zenos (our heroes)
