As I understand it the golden throne is exist as a compass when a ship goes in the immaterium. But during the time when the Emperor and the Primarch's where still around the golden throne was not yet operational and if I remember correctly it was still a secret project by the emperor.

So how did humanity travel through the warp without getting lost?

The Astronomican was build after the Horus Heresy, because the first project of the emperor, to build up an own Version of the Eldar Webway failed. In times past, the human starships makes only little jumps, then comes the first Navigators, so they can make longer jumps. In the Age of Strife, the warp fall into trouble and warpstorms make warptravel was nearly impossibly.

Prioer to the Great Crusade:

- Warp travel used Navigators and 'unvaigated' jumps as today.

With the 'revealing of the Emperor':

- He at some point started generating the Astronomicon. The 'Choir of the Astronomican' as carved out on Terra seems to be distinct from the sustained psychic technique used by the Emperor himself; you might imagine how powerful he is when a player asks "Can I try to broadcast an astronomican signal?"
- The Emperor is said to generate it through the Great Crusade (the 200yr prior to the Heresy), quite how this works isn't known, but I assume that its actual physical 'point of origin' isn't as important as the effect it has for psykers in the warp. The 'compass and beacon' analogy doesn't work very well when the warp is a roiling see of pure emotion with no rhyme, reason, metric or dimension. One simply sails past a desire for cheese and turns left at despair for sociology.

Since the Golden Throne:

- Interestingly, no-one's precisely sure about the nature of the Golden Throne. 'Back in the day' (i.e. a few years back) folks thought it was simply a psychic-life support machine. A few years back they published the 'Beyond the Golden Throne' bit of the Heresy Card Game which revealed that it's actually a seat used by the Emperor to fabricate a tunnel in the warp, an 'Imperial Webway' connecting to the Eldar Webway (which Magnus the Red's sorcerous message warning of Horus' attack destroyed the protection of, causing daemons to flood into the Imperial Webway and thus explains why the Emperor was completely locked up on Terra during the Heresy...if he wasn't, daemons would flood across Terra.
- 'The Golden Throne' isn't actually the only throne. Mechanicum unveils a similar psychichdevice (though it's used to 'reveal knowledge', but it is described as an actual golden throne). Faith and Fire involves a psychic device in the form of a 'silver throne', a relic-laboratory of the Emperor's from during the Great Crusade which seems to be used for 'massively expanding/gifting psychic ability'. The short story Headhunted also features an Ork (!) throne which is used to massively amplify the ability of an Ork Warboss who sits upon it
- One (i.e. me) imagines that the Thrones (in contrast to the Halo devices) are relics of the Old Ones and therefore related to bestowing/wielding/whatever massive (god-like) psychic power (just like the Old Ones...). Given that Cegorach (the Laughing God, rumoured 'last Old One') supposedly lives in the Webway and that the Emperor (who is purported/widely suspected of being a bit dodgy in his motives, accused of trying to become a god) was caught red-handed trying and succeeding to get into the Webway using the Golden Throne ...well, I just find it interesting, 'tis all. Appeals to the conspiracy theorist in me.

Having said all that, we simply don't know quite the extent of the Golden Throne(s). Was it just a webway building device? Was it multipurpose? Maybe it itself 'created' the Emperor (i.e. he used it to really ramp up his powers?). Is the Golden Throne necessary for creating Astropaths, or is it the Emperor himself who's the necessary bit? (How were Astropaths created during the Great Crusade: Brought to Terra & the Sisters of Silence, or brought to the Emperor out and about?)

One imagines that prior to the Great Crusade (and the Fall of the Eldar), Warp Travel was slower (but safer, 'cause Slaanesh didn't exist yet). With the coming of the Emperor it got faster and more reliable thanks to Navigators and the Astronomicon. But who really knows, eh?

newo said:

Wasn't the Emperor always the beacon, regardless of where he was. After all, as long as you can triangulate your position, it's all good right?

I like the idea that they messed it up, and he's acting like a thumb in the **** of damnation.

Thought the Golden Throne was where the great "brain-in-a-jar" that is the emporer now sits, but anyway. Without looking into novels, I thought there was some sacrifice of psychics to keep the "beacon" burning, even before Horus' glorious weakening of the Emporor.

Currently, the big E sits on his Gilded Commode and has a thousand psykers killed daily to shore up his mortally wounded lifeforce; that mortal wound was received in the clash with Horus where Sanguinius famously died. The Emperor was always the beacon and his physical location wasn't and isn't, I think, relevant to that function, at least not directly, so long as you know that this precise signal is the Emperor and when it feels like that you're near Severus Secundus - this would be the Navigator talent.

Well Navis have been around somewhere between the M20 and M21 era where warp drive was invented and the navigators genetically engineered, it wasnt until about M23-24 that the first warp storms where encountered. I'm guessing that happy period of expansion in the dark age of tech was fairly heavily assisted with computers used in conjunction with the navis up until around the end of M24 where things kind of went to pot... aka 'The age of isolation'

In that era between M24 and M27 there was all kinds of chaos which effectively was something of a dark age of travel, it was still there but seems to have retarded the spread of humans quite considerably, when they where not killing xeno's they seem to have been fairly happy killing each other with the Emperors help up to M27. So expansion really wasn't that big an objective due to secularisation it would seem.

As for raw navigation during that bit up until the emperor gets stuck in the throne, I'm guessing they triangulated positions based on other warp formations (and probably still do to some extent) that where present they could get a point of reference from in certain areas of space, course when new ones opened up it would have made things a little trial and error for a bit! With the astronomicon it is basically a stable point of reference like magnetic north which makes navigation faster and avoids having to do mapping off other sources of reference... which with the way warp travel is, could be almost redundant by the time the information is made available

Now bear in mind the novels aren't officially canon, and most/all of this is from Lexicarnum, but here's what seems to be accepted:

The throne was originally intended to break into the webway and let the imperium use it too. The Emperor designed it himself, being the immortal genius living god that he is.

It needed a psycher to sit in the chair and power/control it. Originally this was to be one of the primarchs (Forget who), who used it for a short time while the emperor went off to fight Horus. The emperor's last words were instructions on how to convert the throne into a life-support device.

It keeps a few of the Emperor's cells alive, and anchors his soul to the mortal realm. Enough of The Emperor remains that the astronomicon burns from the sacrifices, and He influences some attempts to communicate with him (such as the tarot or psychic divination), but is capable of nothing else.

When the last of his cells die, anything may happen. Popular theories are:
The creation of a true deity, with the strength to seal away chaos and calm the warp
The creation of a fifth, benevolent, chaos god
The rebirth of The Emperor as a somewhat mortal man
The final victory for the forces of chaos
The sacrifice of the Emperor's possible children may or may not be involved.

Approaching the end of the 41st millennium (A while after the RPGs are set, but in time with the latest tabletop campaigns) the Terran Throne Maintenence Team realised that the throne is breaking in ways they don't know how to fix. All they can do now is delay the inevitable while preparing for whatever comes next.

"the throne is breaking in ways they don't know how to fix. All they can do now is delay the inevitable while preparing for whatever comes next." He forgot to tell them to flush regularly, they will need some buckets and Holy Mops +7. ;¬)

Gaidheal said:

I thought they used His Most Holy Leavings in anti-psyker bolt rounds.

In the old days of 40k canon, the Astronomicon and then Golden Throne were very clearly two different things.

The Astronomicon is a choir of powerful psykers pouring all of their energy (literally hundreds die daily) into essentially a psychic shout of "we are here." Located in the hollowed out top of Mt Everest, they broadcast there signal like a lighthouse to guide all passing ships. The Emperor created the Astronomicon.

The Golden Throne is a giant life support mechanism, keeping the God-Emperor in a state of perpetual living death. It too is fueled by psykers who die daily by the hundreds, giving up their life force so the God-Emperor can live.

The psykers who fuel the Astronomicon are among the most powerful the Imperium has, despite the fact that they are doomed to death the moment they step into the chamber. The psykers who feed the Emperor, by contrast, are the weakest of the Black Ships harvest.

More recent canon has blurred the lines between the two, with the notion that the Emperor focuses the signal of the Astronomicon. Personally, I like the old way better. The notion that the Emperor protects and guides mankind in a very visible way is a wonderful bit of propoganda, but I favor the notion that that's all it is.

Trouble Entendre said:

They do.

Aye, Lucius, that's definitely how it was and I prefer it too; if I were running a game in the setting the popular idea that the Emperor on his Throne and the Astronomicon are the same thing would be propaganda / myth not the actual fact. I'm pretty sure that it's explicity a thousand psykers a day to sustain him, though, rather than hundreds.

I believe Lucius T has it correct. It takes thousands of psykers to support him but only a few hundred may die out at any given time. Think of it like a big matrix where they plug in all the psykers and drain them like batteries. Some give out sooner than others and have to be replaced on rotating schedules.

My personal favorite, although admittedly NOT cannon, version of the story is that the astronomicon beacon is actually the horrific psychic scream of all those thousands of psykers that are being painfully drained by the Emperor's golden throne. To me that is the most awesomely horrible resolution of the two items. It also means that the entire Imperium requires the daily sacrifice of thousands of people to die in horrible agony just so it can survive. Epic Brutal! I believe I read this at some time over my 20 years of 40k history, and it has always been my preferred interpretation.

It also gives some credibility to the Chaos Marines and the enemies of the Imperium for wanting to destroy the Empire because its actually an evil institution. Calling him the false Emperor and all the other things they come up with is actually telling the truth although nobody will ever believe them because all the propaganda says Chaos is bad.

It adds so much to the distopia when the good side you are fighting for is actually evil at its core and everything you think is evil comes from a spark of truth.

The choir loses hundreds a day but a full thousand are consumed by the Emperor to sustain him personally. As for the rest, aye that's my understanding of how it was but I've not seen it spelt out that way in a LONG time. Chaos Marines are now Eeevil and the Emperor is super-heroic and manly, personally responsible for cute babies and fluffy kittens.

P.S. Dystopia.

LEGION3000 said:

If you dig back deep enough in warhammer lore, the big 4 also have their positive representations and aspects they embody, Khorne was about honour, Slaanesh was about love, Tzeench was about avoiding stagnation and Nurgle about perseverance... which in essence they still do, but I guess at some point it was decided that if it wasn't all about the headbanging, hardcore and extreme end of the spectrum of the 4 chaos gods, it wasn't worth knowing about. Personally I still use it when I run WH40K, because as noisy and rah-rah-we're-so hardcaw as chaos is for the teenage ADD audience... it can also be as subtle as dying from a broken heart, a hero's last stand for whats right, that lucky fistful of dollars that make a fortune and just **** well surviving all they can throw at you.

I just like to slip that in quietly, if the PC's notice its subtle presence and do their best to conditions themselves as good, faithful, idiot members of the Imperium I might cut them a break later on when they real big 100lb bag of chaos **** is handed out...

I want to play in your game! :¬)

Seriously, though, I'm lucky enough to have a GM who knows all this too, in fact there are three of us who own(ed) the original WH40K: RT and played the tabletop game that it evolved into from at least 2nd Edition, so we're able to craft quite interesting plots and characters. Just to make it even better, all but one of the other players is a current fan of some form of 40K, even if it's just the Dawn of War computer games.

I seem to recall the 3rd edition book pegged the number of Throne sacrifices at 1000, but I don't remember how many died in the Astronomicon. I also remember being acutely embarrassed that I had to be told that the Imperium were also the bad guys. I'd spent so long trying to figure out a way to justify the priests in the KKK hoods and the little couplets about intolerance being part of the “good guys” culture. In my defense, I was like 12 at the time.

I have noticed the distinct ramping down of the dystopian elements in the more recent versions of canon. I suspect it has something to do with marketability. When you're publishing an obscure little game that is played from a ruleset that (as far as I can tell) is cobbled together out of magazines , you can afford to present fluff that will appeal to a nice market because let's face it, that's all you're ever going to be. Once the 17th videogame spinoff gets published and your big worry is getting all the army books published before the next edition's scheduled roll-out obsoletes them all, the marketing boys have probably been making some persuasive arguments in favor of “simplifying and streamlining” the setting so it's easier to digest by a casual mass audience. So now Space Marines aren't genetically enhanced technoNazis who sometimes do something genuinely heroic by accident, they're grim Knights Templar who can be forgiven for shooting before asking because of how often that approach is perfectly justified.

I came relatively late to the 40k scene (late 3rd edition era, I think. Catachan jungle fighters were the big IG mini set of the time) so a lot of the more interesting “forbidden” lore that the GW shop employees aren't allowed to talk about is a hazy mystery to me. Does anybody know any good places to read up on that?

(PS yes, there have been 17 video game adaptations so far if you count the Dawn of War expansions as standalone games)

Hmm, could do worse than sit down with my mates and cobble together the things that quietly slipped out of the canon, I suspect. A lot of the sources have been pulped by now, I rather suspect and I'm not sure what's out there online. For instance, female Astartes, Astartes originally being nothing but ordinary humans with powerful tech, heavy indoctrination and combat drugs, The Emperor essentially being the 'AntiChrist' of US Christianity, the Astartes routinely killing Ecclesiarchy members for heresy (the Emperor is NOT a god and specifically forbade religion).

Gaidheal said:

At least this aspect of the old canon has been upheld. In the Horus Heresy novels there are several instances where it is made clear that the Emperor is strictly against worship of any kind. He strictly forbids worship concerning himself.

There is a wonderfull litte story in the book "Tales of Heresy" concerning religion, the Emperor and worship in general. The story is set apparently after the Terran unification but before the start of the Great Crusade.

(SPOILER) The Emperor ( in disguise ) meets an old priest that supervises the last remaining temple on Terra. They engage in a philosophical debate about the nature and need for religion.

Shame Dorn didn't make a user guide. When the emp told him how to make it.

miss dee said:

Retconned. Nowadays the Golden Throne was in use long before the Heresy. Indeed, its existence and the Emperor's work with/on it could be seen to be part of the reason for the Heresy! Also, there are two noteable Golden Thrones during the Heresy-era, and three noteable Thrones (if you include the Silver Throne from Faith & Fire).

But enough of that. Need to be more Heresy books dealing with the Throne, the Astronomicon and so forth.

The Last Church is an intriguing story, but the philosophy on both sides of the argument is very basic. Interesting and well-executed as a story, but makes Revelation sound like a disillusioned teenager (who'd just single-handedly [of sorts] conquered the world) at their final meeting of Youth Group. And the priest's argument wasn't terribly much better than "It feels nice and even some non-stupid people like it". Quality story nonetheless!

Xisor said:

That's sort of the best you can hope for from 40K when they stop talking about violence and/or despair. It's always a bit adorable to watch the Black Library authors try to be Artistically Legitimate or to create some kind of Thematic Depth .

I think I'm fairly in the camp that 'artistically legitimate' is silly. Not merit, but legitimacy. I don't think the distinction between, say, Brothers of the Snake and Lolita is that one is literature and the other is dross. One's good and one's awful, to some folks.

But that's all beside the point. Thematic elements aren't terribly important, as the books are almost entirely plot-driven. Still, books like Relentless and Blind have very interesting aspects to them. The Last Church was a good story, but it's like bad stories in general. People don't just float off into space, of course, and no-one'd treat a story seriously like that. A tyrant and an elderly priest probably wouldn't use the precise same arguments as teenagers. But then poorly versed teenagers wouldn't make tremendous quips like "At last, a spirit I can believe in" or "Blasphemy is a victimless crime".

Not to worry. I've faith someone'll do a good job of the Emperor vs Magnus or the Emperor vs Lorgar.