So we have the Tyrant Star section of the Disciples of the Dark Gods. I read it last night.

And you know what. I still dont know what the theories are. That it apparently dates back to before Humanity is clear, and it has some cult called the Servants of Twilight. And it seems to have some psychic influence over both individuals and planets.

But what did you get as to the theories behind the Tyrant Star?

SJE

I have no idea what the creators idea is but in my own opinion it is the outsider trapped in the warp trying to get out into the material plane. Read it somwhere on the original forum quite cool hypothesis. And im not sure when dark heresy is played out (since the book Scourge the heretic seems to be played out at 998) but the timeline ive seen is before the necrons start to rise in real force.

The creators of Dark Heresy seem to leave the Tyrant Star a vague mystery for Game Masters to use as they please. Almost any interpretation looks good, but I prefer the Tyrant Star as a herald for potential daemonic incursions. Given several occurences during appearances of the Tyrant Star, I don't see how the Tyranids could be responsible for the phenomenon. A large Necron force slumbering in the outer reaches of the Calixis Sector holds a certain morbid appeal though.

Personally, I like the Tyrant Star as a 'when the stars are right- ftagn' device, especially when you link the Servants of the Twilight with the dead worlds of the Hazerothian Abyss, and in particular the ruins of a chthonic race found on some of them. Very much a mythos moment when I first read that (about an hor ago). Actually, most of the stuff I've read in Disciples so far can be interlinked in some grand, vaguely cthulhoid conspiracy- even the oncoming Slaugth...

So, overall, while I'm not sure yet how I will use the Tyrant Star motif (or even if), I'm leaning towards it being a (un?)natural phenomenon which occurs on worlds that pass through one of a number of conjunction points with a particular place, 'stable' warp vortice or artefact. The Calixis Sector simply happens to be in the right place for this weirdness to start happening, and it'll all blow over in a century or so... Of course, that presupposes that the worlds which pass through the conjunction points don't simply implode into irretrievable chaos in the meantime.

One of the interesting things I noted about the rising of the Tyrant Star was that the events that occurred under it's influence seem to have never happened- perhaps we have a short-term alternate-reality split off, with some artefacts, information and events bleeding through. Actually, that sounds like the sort of probability wake one might expect by something really big moving through the warp nearby. I'm reminded of the Matthew Farrer story in Planetkill: "Seven Views of Uhlguth's Passing". Perhaps we have something like the Fray (see T. Pratchett's "The Carpet People") moving deep through the warp, and all the bad juju is simply the surface ripples of something much bigger passing by. That would make the Servants of Twilight, and the Herald sort of like the Moules: they are not able to call it (as they may claim, and do, in one sidebar- the former Governor's confession, iirc), but can tell where it will appear next, and are prepared to profit from it's passing. That would also fit with the letter to Lord Militant Angevin from his senior astropath, which likens the time slips being experienced by his crusade fleet to a pulse...

I'd hate to see it emerge into realspace...

Well I toyed with some more "new-school" ideas, like C'Tan or a new Cthuloid race but ultimately one of the biggest strengths of the 40K setting is the Chaos based background.

Having run the first mini-campaign and now writing the second broader one I'm thinking that the Tyrant Star is actually a Blackstone Fortress that was actually an Eldar weapon millions of years ago. The Eldar used it to trap a really ridiculously powerful Daemon and hold it until they could work out how to destroy it. The Daemon trapped inside realised it was screwed so flung itself forward in time (to the 41st millenium) to try and escape in the future.

So now its time for it to reappear and in doing so it kind of staggers into 40K time and space causing all kinds of evil shenanigans with the psychic backlash. A small group of Eldar have been waiting for this thing to appear, having passed the task on from generation to generation, now they have come to the Calixis sector to wipe this thing out. Various Inquisitor factions want this thing as if they can kill the Daemon but leave the Blackstone Fortress intact it'll be worth keeping. And of course there are a bunch of chaos worshippers who have been waiting for their master to appear as they have predicted his coming and believe he will rule the Calixis sector and drag it into the warp for chaos based fun for a million years.

My thoughts were it was either of two 'things' trying to escape the warp.

1. The reincarnation of the Emperor

2. The Chaos god that was 'killed' by the others

Perhaps they are the same thing.

I like the idea that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hellebore

It's a baby Eye of Terror.

For my campaign, the concept works extremely well:

The main antagonist has been a slumbering Daemon Prince of Tzeentch sealed away eons ago by an extinct Xenos race. The campaign has centered on many conspiracies and rituals being performed across the sector in an attempt to break down the prison sealing this being away.

Now that I've read about the Tyrant Star, I'm basically going to use it as an Azathoth type being of atomic chaos, and this Daemon Prince is the Herald, of sorts (any Arkham Horror players out there? ).

Super excited.

As a side note, are the Tyrantine Shadow Agents )from the IH) somehow involved? Or is the name just a coincidence?

Given that the whole purpose of the Tyrantine Cabal is to study and attempt to combat the threat of the Tyrant Star covertly, I think it's probably safe to say it isn't a coincidence- I haven't checked, mind you, but I'm fairly sure the Tyrantine Shadow Agents are linked to it.

I think it would royally screw up a lot of peoples campaigns if FFG came out with an official story for the Tyrant Star. Some interesting ideas in this thread. I still haven't come up with the story behind the TS in my campaign, nothing I have coem up with thus far has been 'epic' enough for my liking. My players are scared of it for sure though, they dread it like its the eye of sauron. Should be a lot of fun.

Its a Jokaero spawning pod.

And its about to burst.

Be prepared for the spontaneous blinking into existence of 30 trillion Jokaero across the worlds of Calixis...

I'd order in some extra bananas if i were you...

Alasseo said:

Yeah, see that was what I was thinking. I could look it up once I got home, but it is more fun to ask while here at work. Ha ha .

I don't have any working theories as to what it is or isn't or any of that as of yet, though I do like some of the ideas that have cropped up.

I will be introducing it soonish as one of the plaints the PC's are on will be visited and portents (everything of importance having "black", "sun", or "star" in it's name, etc) as a bit of ongoing background over their missions as well as being in one of their backgrounds and reasons for their current Inquisitor to be a touch MIA. I'm just not quite sure what it is yet ;-)

On a related note, did the idea of the tyrant Star briefly send you back to the

Bear with me for a moment and I know that this sounds silly but...

I was re-reading Necron codex last night, wondering why they just simply couldn't have gone for less drastic background for C'Tan and Necrons (like Man of Iron, unbound Abominable Intelligences and whatever...), and suddenly I thought:

Four surviving C'Tan - four major Chaos gods. What if they are the same? What if it isn't material space that spawns the warp but the other way around? What if the warp is like the realm of Platonic forms and everything here is just the shadow of that? What if (and here we forget Plato) at the end of the time Emperor battles Chaos gods in the Warp and is victorious and they are slain and dumped into material plane. Since there is no time in the warp they are dumped at the beginning of the time as C'Tan.

Tyrant star is just the wake of their fall through time.

Silly I know

I dont think its silly at all. In fact, I always thought the star gods were renegade chaos gods. Or Lesser chaos gods that have the power to appear in the material world as incarnations of themselves. The less powerful they are the more likly that the material would wouldnt rip apart with their comming. Granted a well made daemon prince or greater daemon could kill a star god (40k wise, not fluff wise) It would make complete sense. They have to be warp entities. In a few 40k apocolypse games I'v allowed necrons to ally with any 'chaos based' force on the notion that the star gods would ally with other dark gods in order to survive and cause more distruction to the imperium, as long as a C'tan was apart of the necron force it was alright in my book. How long this alliance would last is pretty self explanitory, but for the sake of a major scale battle its a fun consept. I always saw Tzeentch and the Deciever as rivals, as neither can trust the other.

This is all 40k tabletop, not dark heresy. But then again I'v been playing 40k for almost eight years, and dark heresy for a year. So I know a bit more about the fluff of large scale battles then of the secret investigation work of the inquisition. I'm no expert on the subject matter (as I know very little about eldar fluff, or ork fluff for that matter.) Most of my fluff knowlege lies with Chaos, the inquistion, the Astartus, and a bit about the necrons. (as iv got a force for each army.)

Going back to what I was saying, I think its perfectly logical to assume a connection with the star gods and the four chaos major gods. But remember, those are the major gods, there are still lesser gods.

Alasseo said:

Did you catch the Silver Key in the adventure?

And I remember reading a Lovecraft (or one of his follow on writers?) story about a thing that walked like a man but was really made out of worms. I think in Kingsport, but maybe Arkham. Anyways, the Slaugth reminded me of that.

Plus, the game plays very much like Call of Cthulhu.

Ira said:

C'tan and Chaos don't really get along:

The major weakness of the C'tan is their inability to comprehend the warp. It is speculated that they find it impossible to survive in it and are particularly susceptible to warp spawned magics and psykers . They had a plan to block off the warp forever in an attempt to remove their single greatest threat ¹ . It is also speculated that they have set up a series of 'pylons' on Cadia , possibly for this purpose. Whether these pylons have anything to do with the Eye of Terror is unknown, but it is unlikely as the Eye wasn't opened until the C'tan were in their stasis tombs. There is also a Necron object on Armageddon in the central region of the planet ²

The Old Ones, desperate to survive, eventually discovered that the C'tan feared the uncontrollable energy of the immaterium, and so cultured life forms with ever closer links to the warp. The Eldar were their proudest and most powerful creations during this period, and the first to create beings of power to fight the C'tan. This period came to be known as the "War in Heaven". C'tan, being solely of the material realm, were extremely vulnerable to psychic based weaponry and feared psychic weapons so much that they banded together to split the warp from real space. It was never completed due to the growing cataclysm in the warp.

Malal

Personally, I don't like connecting the C'tan to the Tyrant star. For starters, after recently reading "Mechanicum", the books place the Outsider on Mars at least up until the time of the Horus heresy. Not to mention the fact that the C'tan utterly despise the warp and all things related to it, as previously established in several other books and sources regarding the gods of the necrons.

That said, if you want an ancient connection for this particular great and evil unknown force, there's always the one force that has always been overlooked in 40k canon.....the ancient enemies of the C'tan - the ones known to us only by the vague title of 'the Old Ones'. they were the ones who created the ork, the jokaero, the eldar and maybe even humanity. they were supposedly wiped out by the Enslaver plague in the final days of the C'tan/Old one war (as instigated by the Necrons) but that isn't to say that the Old Ones didn't create some sort of 'warp weapon' to use against the ancient C'tan.

Ok, let me put my thoughts in order:

1. the Halo stars are ancient. I mean really ancient.

2. Halo stars hosted some sort of well established and apparently wide spread race.

3. There was never any mention made of where the Old Ones used to hang their hat(s) back in the day.

4. The Eldar fear the Calixis sector (and presumably the Halo stars) for some reason, stating only that they're cursed.

5. the Halo devices (and here be ye spoilers so beware!) imply some incredibly fantastic understanding of biological science. They work on apparenlty ANY corporeal biological species and instinctively know if someone is affected by a dark pact or currently possessed and won't link to them.

WHAT IF:

1. the halo stars were near or even part of the home systems of the Old Ones?

2. we know that the war between the C'tan and the Old Ones was desperate and both sides did questionable things to win.

3. it was certainly well within the abilities of the Old Ones to create powerful 'warp entities', and it's implied that the ancient Eldar Gods were such constructs.

4. could the Tyrant Star be some sort of half finished ancient star god that sort of 'went feral' at the end of the great and ancient war? not as powerful as the chaos gods, but certainly too big to destroy...so they sort of harness it for their own use.

Ok I grant you that there are more than a few Lovecraftian overtones to the story I've partially laid down. but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've found that some Call of Cthulthu elements work well with Ordo Malleus and hereticus stories. less so with Xenos but then I tend to shy away from those kinds of adventures. Anyways, my completely random and discordant contribution is that the Tyrant Star is in some way connected to the ancient enemies of the C'tan. make of that what you will.

I didn't get any implication that the Tyrant Star predates humanity. The Imperium, certinaly, but not humanity. The ultimate truth in my Dark Heresy game is that the Tyrant Star is connected to the strange, apparently xenos ruins scattered all over the sector. These ruins are, in fact, the work of human hands. A pre-Imperial civilization that gained near total mastery of the warp. They foresaw the coming devastation as the age of Strife reached its apex and sought to escape the coming darkness by building a "soul ark" that would allow them to weather the warp storms and emerge after they had ended as beings of pure energy. Unfortunately, they were tricked by Tzeentch and their creation became their prison. The Tyrant Star is the fusion of these imprisoned souls and their creation that beleives it is one being and longs to share its torment with others.

I like this idea because it would be considered the foulest heresy immaginable and I want my players to learn this horrible truth and have to cover it up.

Personally, I really don't like the way the Tyrant Star is handled in DotDG. Presenting dire hints in an in character perspective feels a bit too much like a cop-out as though the writers didn't have any real strong ideas of their own. It wouldn't be so bad, if the Tyrant Star wasn't effectively portrayed as THE biggest bad in the Calixius sector and didn't have an entire cabel of inquisitors dedicated to stopping it.

However, we as GMs need to work with the paltry information we have.

There are several important things we need to remember

1) The phenomenon is local to the Calixius sector and no other

2) It is fickle in its effects. Sometimes it destroys the population of entire worlds, sometimes it leaves survivors.

3) For it to be useful as a plot device to the GM, it or its servants must have motivations and be able to be stopped, albeit at extreme difficulty and cost.

4) The hints in DotDG suggest that it has a pulse in the immaterium, explains the lack of Eldar (not Dark Eldar) activity in the sector and is dire enough for the Eldar to take the time and trouble to warn vistors to our galaxy not to enter.

I really like your idea, Torque. Personally, I like the idea of it being the result of one of the Adranti's desperate attempts to cheat death, by essentially becoming a minor Chaos God. Hence the Black Sun sightings are effectively a means of gathering psychic energy from sacrifices and the extreme emotions triggered in its wake. The kicker is that somehow a group has become aware of the precise nature of the ritual the Adranti used, possibly thanks to the explorations of a Rogue Trader, such as the house of Haarlok. As there is only enough metaphysical room for one gestating Chaos God in the sector, the ritual cannot be performed again until it wakes. Hence, the Servants of Twilight are frantically working to hasten the God's birth by summoning it, providing it with sacrifices, worship etc, as they each aspire to be the next to perform the ritual or at the very least be rewarded by the mother of all Dark Pacts once their God wakes. This set-up could make for an extremely high-powered but interesting game of double-cross as the GM could run a game in which the birth is imminant, and the Servants are using the Inquisition to destroy each other, a la Highlander, but without the ridiculous 80's special effects. You could also make it that the Servants are working in ignorance of the consequences of a successful birth. These could range from the Black Sun dawning on every world in the Sector, to the formation of a mini-Eye of Terror. Either way, there could well be not enough left of civilisation to fuel another birth, in which case, the remaining Servants would probably travel to another sector and start the process all over again. Towards the end, you could have psychically aware PCs being tempted by the Black Sun in their dreams, which could add an extra dollop of tension and drama to the mix....

Lucifer216 said:

But at the same time, if a definite answer had been given, the mystery gets robbed of its... well, mystery. More crucually, give a straight answer, and you annoy the chunks of the community that would have preferred it to be something different from what was revealed.

This way, the Tyrant Star can be tailored to the individual campaign as required, and takes thought and consideration before it makes an appearance (it is, afterall, a big deal to have the Tyrant Star appear), while also preventing players from figuring out what it is simply by reading the sourcebooks (very few things can derail a mystery faster than players reading what they shouldn't).

Also remember that the Cabal of Inquisitors dedicated to stopping it... don't know what it is either...

Well the classic solution is to give 3 different answers and let the GM pick the one they like,

But yes, I dont think the GM should still be puzzled as to what the Tyrant Star might be after they've spent money on a sourcebook about it. Hence this thread.

SJE

SJE said:

To be honest, I'd be disappointed if a sourcebook did give me all the answers. I want to have things left unexplained to fill in myself as and when required. That is, at least for me (and every GM I know... that's easily a dozen or so GMs, half of which are in my Dark Heresy group), part of the fun. I don't want conspiracies ready-made... that's actually one of the reasons I like Disciples of the Dark Gods so much - every heresy and threat it presents has ample room for customisation, with elements left only hinted at or left open for me to weave into my campaign as required. It's written for the purpose of using it in a campaign, and filled with plot hooks and ideas to that end, rather than being a book of ultimate truths....

Also remember that Disciples of the Dark Gods is not a 'sourcebook about' the Tyrant Star. It's a Sourcebook that contains some additional information about the Tyrant Star, but that information is only a small section of the book's contents. If the book was called "The Hereticus Tenebrae for dummies: All you ever wanted to know about the Tyrant Star and were afraid to ask", or similar, then perhaps it might have included great lumps of certainties and facts about the Tyrant Star... but it isn't, and doesn't, nor was it meant to as far as I'm aware.