Jack of Tears said:

Feeble human. You have not grasped the concept of order completely. There can be no order amongst the living. Your small and feeble minds and emotions are forever mirrored in the realm you refer to as "the warp". As long as you exist, Chaos will exist. It is only fitting that we, the C'Tan culls your cancerous numbers and bring TRUE order to the galaxy! You are merely cattle in our eyes, embrace your role as our food and cease with this nonsense bickering amongst one another. We crushed the Old Ones before your kind were even a flight of fancy, and we could crush you too just as easily. SUbmit yourselves, and lay down your hubris.

The Nightbringer has spoken! >

While it has yet to arise in my campaign, I'd be tempted to run the Tyrant Star as a mix of 'when the stars are right ftagn'-style sub/super/para/un-natural occurence that happens when a particular conjunction is made; the realspace probability wake/bow wave of something massive moving through the warp; and a summoned icon/avatar/beacon of primordial anarchy.

Think shai-hulud, setting off a nuke when it gets too close, and you can only place thumpers at particular times and places...

This, of course, provides scope to have my acolytes chase down a cult/cabal who, for reasons potentially completely unrelated, are summoning Komus. I'll give them just enough leeway to stop them in time... only to find that is sufficient to cause the Tyrant Star to appear. Of course, if they fail, I'm going to have to pull out the whole 'Screaming God Child' bit from Darkblade .

So yeah- insane and unsane warp entity, worrying enough the Chaos Gods have done their best to imprison it, trapped in the heart of a star in the deepest depths of the warp. And some people want to release it...

Oooh, all this has my intrigued now I'm gonna go read up on it!

i so want to say what my theory is but my players have not got that far yet and will not for a cupple of months. this is like seeing a film before your mats and wanting to discus the plot... but you can't and it ripping your insides out.

What i can say is the group have encountered a marine from the Sons of Malice and put him down. you can draw your own conlutions from that.

Note to FFG: Allow us to Edit messages!

Now, as I was reading the page on the Tyrant Star, I came up with an idea.

Basically, every creature (except untouchables) have a reflection in the warp right? A small glowing light amidst the trillions of others, all dotting the immaterium. So it's fair to say, those lights are the people, the citizens, the Eldar, the Orks etc etc. Then I thought, the warp is messed up. All wrong and evil and nasty, so maybe, those reflections are the depths of the peoples psyches? Their evil side, the side that secretly wants to join a Slaanesh cult just "to see what all the fuss is about".

So I was thinking then. The Tyrant Star appears and dissapears randomly, where does it go? Logical answer is the warp, where all the evil reflections lurk.

So, to me:

The Tyrant star is whatever planet it appears at. It is the version of the planet, as it appears in the warp. The riots and unrest? That's the unholy depths the people sink to, as is the sudden increase of cults and Psyker births. The geographical alterations, well technically, the planet serves the people. If it's needed to supply vast amounts of molten metal for the forges of the Mechanicum, the mechanicus can terraform the planet, create more ore in the planets make up. The Tyrant star would show the administratium clerks best dream. A metal rich planet, pretty much spilling over with metal ore. Ooops, that's a volcano

The approaching doom is the Tyrant star increasing in size, instead of just one planet, it'll do whole Solar Systems, then the Calixis Sector.... >:-)

So really, the only way to "beat it" is a pure and 100% taint free mind

Oh and here are the stats for a shadow walker, a human turned to the will of the Tyrant Star.

WS: 41
BS: 41
Str: 34 (6)
T: 41 (8)
Agi: 40
Int: 34
Per: 37
Wp: 32
Fel: 37 (6)

Movement: 4/8/12/24
Wounds: 21
Fate Points: 2

Insanity Points: 100
Corruption Points: 30
Skills
Dodge

Awarness

Charm

Talents

Basic weapon training (sp)

Melee Weapon training (Primitive)

Unnatural (St, T, Fel)

Step aside

from beyond

Dark sight

Fear 1

Unnatural armour (head 6 Points, the darkness mask)

Regeneration.

Armour

Storm trooper carapace 6 all locations

Weapon

Long las or armagedon pattern Autogun, mono sword. Clawed Cyber arm (left) 1D10+Sb r pen 2

The person affected still look human with pale skin but they wear the Darkness Mask. the darness mask lets them warp the mind of who ever they are talking to if they fail a will test. if a character has more than 30 insanity points then a Shadow walker is attacted to them. before that happens they will be marked with the talen on their left arm. when the shaddow warker comes for them and if they fail a will power test they will gto willingly ad be made into a shadow warker.

If a Shadow Walker is damaged to the point of critical 6 not in the head then the Darkness Mask will leave them. on this happening they are totally insane and a jibbering reck. a -30 Scholastic lore (occalt or legends) will help you gleem some knowledge of the Tyrant Star.

These are a good hard bad guy and they live in packs.

Further back in this thread, I stated that I would shut up about the King in Rags and Tatters in this thread -I lied. Not only did I lie, but in order to make that a lie, I had to resurrect this thread.

The recent mentioning of the King in Rags and Tatters in regards to Tattered Fates had rekindled my interest and deep love of the King in Yellow. After digging up the King in Yellow on the internet and going back over a couple of the stories, I felt the need to pull out Delta Green: Countdown again just for its treatment of Hestar and the KiY. For those of you unfamiliar with DG: Countdown, it dose away with a lot of the Derlethian treatment that CoC had given both Hestar and the King in Yellow in favor of a version more in line with Chambers' rendition of his creation. Hestar once again becomes more of a place (or at least an idea, mood, and force of nature) as opposed to a large pool of pseudopodia from another planet. The King in Yellow is less a shocking physical horror and more a brooding ever present shadow, a true avatar of ruination of mind, place, and being. In this, I finally found my Kumos and with that begins my version of the Tyrant Star.

It has been reported that Kumos manifests in many ways, sometimes blotting out a planet's sun, sometimes as a baleful black star. Sometimes only a few see it, sometimes the whole planet. Sometimes the entire population will be slain by it or vanish, other times, riots, madness, and plague are it's only gifts. Sometimes the portents of a visitation are all there, but it never shows its self at all. Very few know why it's manifestations vary so wildly and why, in all the thousands of years of it haunting the Calixus Sector, it's effects have never been witnessed or studied from afar. A telescope or other similar device on another world ten light years away should, by all rights, be able to see and study the arrival and departure of the Tyrant Star ten years after it's visitation -plenty of time for the Tyrantine Cabal to prepare such research. Even a layman who watches the stars for invaders or as a hobby has never witnessed the manifestation of Kumos unless they were present on the world of the visitation (and even then, not always). There is, as normal, a very simple reason for all of this: the Tyrant Star has never manifested in the Calixus sector or even in our reality. What was witnessed by those who saw the Tyrant Star was not it pushing forth into their star system and reality, but, instead, it was the whiteness partially falling into it's world and it's reality.

The Tyrant Star is not one star or sun, but many. It is the black stars that hang above the long lost but not completely forgotten world of Yhtill, forever illuminating the eternally nighted skies above the haunted city of Carcosa. When the Tyrant Star appears in the skies of a planet, the viewers are not seeing their own sky, but are starting to see the skies of Yhtill. The other sights and things that they must bear whiteness to are but a partial view of Yhtill, usually the boundless city of Carcosa. Madness, of course, fallows as their minds are stretched between the two worlds, some falling completely through to Yhtill, never to be seen again.

These transitions to Yhtill occur when an individual's perceptions are primed to see it and their minds directed towards certain vectors of thought. This harmonizing of the subject with Yhtill is what enables the barrier between to falter. The greater the harmony, the thinner the barrier. If an individual's perceptions and thought's were to be perfectly harmonized with the reality of Yhtill, then they would fall into Yhtill never to return. It is because of this harmonizing factor that any and all who ever see Kumos let alone the haunted city are doomed.

Once you see something, you can never unsee it and once Yhtill has you, it will never let go. It will forever lurk just beyond sight, dogging your every step until your mind, thought patterns, and emotions are just right for it to suck you in forever. One day, all who have ever laid eyes upon the black light or the dreaming city of Corsica will find the road they walk on suddenly leads them into that city, the door they passed through opens into an unfamiliar and ever shifting street. All who see Yhtill are doomed to eventually find their way back and forever exist there until the end of days.

The Tyrant Star is a great threat to all the universe for it is harmonized to regret, loss, despair, vice, and social entropy. Where these emotions and urges thrive, the potential for the Tyrant Star to appear is great, but it needs more (or else it would have eaten the entire galaxy by now). The subject's mind must be turned to very specific thought patterns that travel along very precise entropic vectors. An oppressive hopeless atmosphere filled with loss and despair simply help to promote such thought patterns and the perspective needed to see Yhtill but these thought patterns can be encouraged though many means.

Thoughts and ideas are highly contagious and almost impossible to completely stamp out. So it is with the destructive thought vectors that will align a victims mind with Yhtill and eventually send tom to the dreaming city of Carcosa for all time. These thought patters can be brought about through an infected confessing the visions they have been suffering from, demagogues preaching about the coming end based upon their visions (which could have been caused after hearing the confessions of another who's mind was already tuned into the right frequencies), or in many different works of literature and art -anything that can challenge a persona's thoughts and perspectives. Many paintings exist that were created during or after a visitation of the Tyrant Star by those who had survived. They tend to be very subtle things which are hard to pick out as dangerous. While subtle, there is always something about their subject matter, something in the way light is shown reflecting from a woman's tear or the colors used in the reflection off a vase that boars into the viewers mind, causes them to think certain thoughts, feel strange pangs of loss or regret, and, otherwise, prime them for a visitation of Kumos. One of the most powerful of such viral carriers of the entropic thoughts is a haunting unfinished two act play that tells the tail of the fall of Yhtill. All who read it will eventually find Yhtill never to return again. A strange glyph that resembles a birds talon is another such artifact that, in it's simple design calls forth all forms of destructive entropic thought patters that will surly call the black sun down upon the individual.

The Tyrant Star has claimed far more victims then the Tyrantine Cabal could ever know. From whole planets, to cities, to lone individuals, it has come calling, subsuming countless souls into the whole of Yhtill. Many times, when the translation to Yhtill is especially rapid and complete (such as occurs with those who read the play), the individual, city, or even planet will be completely ripped from all spaces and times, consumed by Yhtill effectively erasing it from reality. How many times this has happened is impossible to know as every time it happens, by necessity, it never would have happened -something that never existed can not be lost and something that was never known can ever be forgotten.

Lord Zerbe knows the most about the true nature of the Tyrant Star but even he doesn't know the full truth. He has seen Yhtill, walked the streets of Corsica, and returned to tell the tail (though he won't). He also knows it is only a matter of time before it comes to claim him for good and, sometimes, with a chilling realization he catches himself looking forwards to that day. He knows that it's certain thoughts linked to the Tyrant Star that will send individuals or whole planets to visit Yhtill and is trying to simultaneously find out more in an attempt to save himself and others from it's grasp as well as stamping out any and all knowledge of it and any form of artifact that can generate the dangerous thought vectors. He plays a delicate balancing act with knowledge that should be kept and knowledge that needs to be destroyed as well as with how much the others in the Cabal should know for their and everyone else's own good. So far, the others haven't learned enough of the truth to endanger themselves, but several are growing suspicious.

So, where is Yhtill and what, exactly is it?

Where ever Yhtill used to be, it is no longer there. It was once a wondrous planet in the Calyx Expanse before a terrible event took it from our reality forever. Amidst turmoil, despair, and a strange kind of broken soled escapism that gripped the populace, an emissary came. A king dressed as a beggar in a pallid mask that is not a mask came to Yhtill and pronounced a judgement upon it and all it's inhabitants, taking their world for his own. It now dwells in the warp in a small pocket that barely holds it together, staving off it's complete dissolution. It's eternally trapped in the moment it all went wrong and presided over by the King in Rags and Tatters who dwells in the palace surrounded by the eternally ending masquerade ball on the shores of lake Hali overlooking the eternally changing city of Corsica beneath the black stars.

Yhtill (or Corsica as they are pretty much one in the same now) is forever twisting and twisted by the warp, but in more subtle ways then usual. It is like a haunted city in a dream -ever changing and shifting based on the expectations of those trapped within, sometimes in contradictory and paradoxical ways not following traditional laws or time. The only time that seems to exist is the time in which the planet was doomed and the masquerade ball in the place had come to an abrupt end. It is at once completely deserted yet inhabited by shades, specters, and ghosts of the countless other's the planet/city has subsumed and consumed in the unknown and uncountable time it has existed in such a state. The city of Corsica is all there seems to be to the world except for lake Hali and the palace, yet the city goes on forever.
Carcosa is at once utterly alien to behold yet hauntingly familiar. It has consumed xenos empires far out in the halo stars as well as recent cities completely torn from Imperial memory not but a year ago. Over head, furies and other predators who call the warp home swoop and spin in an odd dance looking for any soul which may have wandered into the open. They never venture to the streets themselves, though why would be anyone's guess though none think to long on such topics as there are plenty of other far more insidious things to worry about in those ever shifting and changing twilight streets.

Eventually, all who come to Yhtill and the haunted city of Carcosa find their way to the palace where they find themselves standing before the King in Rags and Tatters as his newest subject, a ghost of who they once were condemned to the city for all eternity.

Thread necromancy in action!

This is based on the Serrated Query hand out in Purge the Unclean, so it is not completely up to date, but I have implemented some of the active conspiracies from DotDG.

In my game, Komus is a mistranslation of Horus- the Birds Claw rune being the symbol of his rank of Warmaster.

Eloeholth the Star Forger came to the Adranti with the remains of the defeated Horus, and tricked the Adranti into believing that they were the chosen people, who were given the task of ressurecting the true Emperor of the Universe. They learnt to master the warp, and under the guidance of Eloeholth, they constructed "the Star Womb", which should ressurect the now long dead Horus. By sending the remains of Horus into the Warp, he could be reborn, with the help of the construct called the Star Womb, which both acted as an incubator for the Spirit of Horus, and energy source, that would receive its power from the Warp. The problem is, that the essence of Horus needs to be "reborn", or inserted into a vessel strong enough, both physically and mentally to contain his soul. Preferably someone akin to an Astartes.

After many millenia, the Imperium of Man, under the leadership of Angevin, arrived at the Adranti Empire, and destroyed them. Thats how the story goes, but in reality, as does happen with all conquered peoples, the Adranti were assimilated into the Imperium of Man. The Adranti nobility and royals intermarried with what would one day become the Great Houses of the Calixis Sector.

The Adranti pretended to worship the God-Emperor, while they still had the dream that one day, the true Emperor of the Universe would return. When Sebastian Thor curtailed the power of the Ecclesiarchy, which had become the former Adranti noblility's powerbase. The former Adranti noble families, which was now known secretly as the Agema (lit. "Those Who Lead"), therefore decided to join forces with the Sectors newly born Temple Tendency. Thereby regaining some of their lost political power.

During the Millenia, the dogma and stories of the Tendency's God-Emperor, and the Agemas Emperor of the Universe, where intertwined, and the Agema lost it's purpose and it's legends. The Tendency and the Agema were as one. Untill a Scion of the former royal family of the Agema discovered how to decipher some ancient Adranti scripts, that told the story of Eloeholth and the Emperor of the Universe. Now the Scion is on the hunt for a suitable vessel, so Horus, the Star Emperor, can return and lead his people (read: Adranti) to a new destiny. To aid him, the Scion has turned to the Agemas righthand organisation, the Serrated Query- Purveyor of All Things Evil, in order fo find a being powerfull enough to contain the essence of a reborn god.

Any attempt of inserting the essence of Horus into an unprepared vessel or simply an inferior body will result in a temporary Daemon Host effect, which will burn the vessel to cinders in a matter of hours of days. The Tyrant Star is in fact the Star Womb seeking for a way to deliver the reborn Horus. The problem is, that the Agema has to present on the planet with a suitable vessel, in order for the Star Womb "to give birth" to the reborn god. The Tyrant Star incidents of riots and increase in numbers of birthed psykers is the result of the mass trauma of being present at the birth of a god, and the result of an increase in the psychic energy. The Star Womb has been ready to deliver for hundreds of years, but since the Agema has forgotten about the Star Womb and their former legacy, they stopped looking for the Tyrant Star, and they also stopped trying to find a proper vessel. Until now.

That's my take on the Tyrant Star. I have tried to incorporate some of the written fluff from the books.

What say you?

I had an appearance of the tyrant star in my campaign.

Its my take that the tyrant star is not one single big nasty phenomena, but something that a lot of different people experience all over the sector and then apply the title hereticus tenebrae to make it easily recongnizable. Kind of like when you get a horoscope you say "Yeah I am trustworth, and honest, they really nailed it" but you discard the parts that don't fit just because you consider yourself a virgo. So maybe the star over this planet turned green for a day before a massive earthquake, or maybe a star over another planet had a giant solar flare before they were invaded by orcs. But the overall theme is that weird stuff happens to a local star and then bad stuff happens on a planet. It might not be the same from planet to planet but the overall theme is there. That way if they later come out with an adventure, I can say they saw "A" tyrant star but maybe not "THE" tyrant star.

I've got it! Inquisitor Varnias Tybalt of the Ordo Xenos has solved the mystery! The answer lies within the pages of the Black Library tome called "Xenology". The Tyrant star is basically a gigantic black sphere, hence it must be an UMBRA! Sure Komus is not a "normal" Umbra-creature but probably the mother of all Umbras.

Most of you who haven't read Xenology will probably not know what im blabbering about, but those of you who have the book, start rifling through its pages and tell me im wrong!

You're wrong

The Umbra would sort-of match the description, except for the fact that some of the descriptions say that Komus has appeared in the same star system, in close proximity to the star. Given that the Umbra are weakened, or even killed by bright light, it doesn't sound likely that Komus could be an uber-Umbra.

Aw, crap! Guess its back to the conspiracy drawing-board again. And I must remember to punish my Sanctioned Psyker (I swear it was his stupid idea to begin with, I just didnt have the time to bother with checking it up. Im just waaay tp busy fighting of the threat of Necrons and Tyranids right now)

I have to say that I really like some of the answers on this thread, sadly, I’ve already decided on the tyrant star and what it represents in my game. Officially, from what I can gather in regards to the info contained within DODG and tattered fates, the tyrant star is the soul of a murdered sun. The Haarlocks killed the world (Tanis) and inflicted the monstrosity on the imperium at large. Why they did this remains unclear, but as the very first rogue traders that came into the sector they had pretty much free reign with the peoples and planets there. Perhaps the people of Tanis offered insult to the notoriously proud Haarlock Line? I could be completely wrong, but that seems to be the most referred to explanation (murals on Haarlock’s tomb, info in DODG).

What we know for certain is that the tyrant star can be controlled, summoned if you like, through certain mechanisms. This ties in with the prophecies revealed in the House of Dust and Ashes, courtesy of the Gilded Widow. This raises all sorts of scary possibilities, which I’m sure will be revealed in later Haarlock's legacy books.

I haven't read much about the Tyrant Star yet, so I won't comment on that. But I must say that just like Graver wrote, the King in Rags and Tatters immediately reminded me of the King in Yellow, a frequent visitor in my CoC campaign. The passing reference to the King aka Tatterdemalion is so much like the King in Yellow it can't be a coincidence? And of course the KiY is closely tied to Carcosa, Lake Hali, Hastur the Unspeakable and all that. What this has to do with the Tyrant Star I don't know yet, but there are undeniable similarities between Komus and the 'dark star' somewhere near Aldebaran which imprisons or holds Hastur, and the effects which both of these stars have on the mankind: madness, despair. suicide, cataclysms and death.

Tell me, have you seen the Yellow Sign?

Make the Tyrant Star your own personal mothman. Have every event somehow connected to the Tyrant Star in some way, (think of it like the game, 7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon), ie: the heretek was connected to the chaos cult which was connected to the nurgle zombies, which was connected to the Great Rat of Sumatra which was connected to the Spiro Agnew clone network which was connected to Kevin Bac... I mean the Tyrant Star. Another thing you can do is have conflicting stories, You can have some evidence suggesting it's a glitchy craftworld like the previous poster suggested, you can say it's a necron doomsday weapon, you can say it's a Chaos Mania Machine (we can call it the Pathos Generator and it drives whole worlds mad), it can be a reflection of an approaching tyranid hive fleet, it could be some sort of warp storm singularity that builds up whenever multiple sensei are in the same subsector together, it can be Hydra, the Star Child, a C'tan, the developing Eldar god, it can be Santa Claus' Volcano Fortress. It can be everything and everything so long as all the evidence conflicts with eachother and the unraveling of one mystery simply creates several more in it's place.

Me, I say it's the sleeping city where dread cthulhu lies and the time for his awakening is nigh. (I have this great imagine in my head of a mass of tenticles pushing through the fabric of the star into real space - enormous and hungry.)

"Officially" in my game (I put official in quotes because the players don't know it), the Tyrant star is... Nothing. There's no vast conspiracy around it, or rather if there is, it's because it's there and it's mysterious, not because of any prophecy or greater purpose.

I personally don't intend to throw the Tyrant Star up around my PCs, though it might happen if it fits the story. As far as I'm concerned, the Tyrant Star behaves similarly to a Space Hulk, so in my setting the Tyrant Star is the remains of one or more stars that have either died inside the immaterium (sucked in through the eye of terror or whatnot), or have collided with other stars and have been drifting through the warp to appear here and there seemingly at random. If I *must* come up with a reason for the psychic phenominon take place, I *could* say that it's either the taint of the warp being so strong (and the warp never having had a sun supernova in the immaterium), or the star was originally an inhabited system millennia ago, and the psychic shockwaves of crossing over into the materium create ripples.

Or I could just say it's the tail-end of a black hole, which dumps into the warp, and is now so big that it kicks out into realspace occasionally. Both work. But for whatever reason the idea that one of the deepest mysteries of the Calixis sector is a "naturalistic" event just tickles the hell out of me.

Other ideas:

The Tyrant Star is either a 5th c'tan (perhaps an infant trapped in a star that was sucked into the warp and corrupted), or is the Deceiver itself. Who could even begin to fathom it's motivations and purposes.

It is the manifestation and concentration of Eldar souls that have been lost when their soulstone was destroyed. For unknown reasons, these souls collect in the Calixis sector, and the Tyrant Star roams webways with an almost sentient agenda. This explains why most Eldar consider Calixis cursed or emphasize to avoid the sector.

Nature abhores imbalance and a vacuum, and somehow (GM's discretion, these things should never be revealed to PCs anyway) something the opposite of "chaos" has coalesced in the immaterium. Much like yin-yang, it is so much the opposite of Chaos, that it contains a seed of chaos within it, and Chaos contains a bit of whatever the Tyrant Star represents. Armageddon and disaster prophecies are literal in this case.

It's a manifestation of the pure, potent, undiluted emperor's spirit as he slowly dies due to the malfunctioning Golden Throne. Long shot on this one, and I dunno where you'd take it.

Of all the alternative ideas, I kind of like the c'tan one best. It fits easiest into canon, and would explain why the Eldar avoid the sector if possible.

There is a fantastic piece of fluff in DOTDG which states that 'victims' of the Tyrant Star have a bird claw mark on their faces ... would this not point to Tzeentch, whose daemons are the vulture-like Lords of Change? Or is the bird claw mark the personal sign of Warmaster Horus, as I've read somewhere?

The Laughing God said:

17th Primarch, Warmaster, favoured son of the Emperor etc. Horus' personal sign, mark or symbol is an eye on top of the 8 pointed star of chaos known as the eye of Horus.

The bird claw is the sign of the Emperor's children legion as they bore a part of the Emperor's personal sign: the anquila.

The Laughing God said:

As having been state previously, Horus sign is the eye of Horus.

Then agan a bird claw mard might hint to the Crowfather described in Illumination. Would sort of make sense now wouldn't it?

The way I handle the Tyrant Star is to allow the phenomina to evolve over the course of the campain.

the first (and only as of yet) time I have exposed my acolytes to the Herticus Tanebrae I used the classical approach of scaling the events

Before the rising itself (several days)

People seeing reflections of a black sun in liquids, the bird claw mark appearing on peoples skin, people getting restless and can't sleep without nightmares, madmen screaming out prophecies of doom and death, etc.

Under the Rising out the Tyrant Star (one "day")

electronics going haywire, mass hysteria and civil unrest on planetray scale, people acting as if possessed, eathquakes, lava erupting from the planet's crust, fires igniting without reason, the acolytes having to take willpower test or act without selfcontrol from time to time, tottaly blocking of all communication pscychic or electronic, the Psyker in the groupe has his psy-rating boosted at one moment and stripped away as if being close to an untouchable the next, daemons manifesting and being sustained as the warp bleed into the real world or being dragged screaming back to the warp as the area shift to untouchable effect after a second, etc.

After the passing of the Star

everything is in chaos but relativly back to normal. the acolytes have not experienced the long term effects.

what theTyrant Star actually is, is as of yet unknown but the main antagonists of the story (their nemisis: an ex-acolyte with a Halo Device, a Slaught Overseer, a Shroud Master and a False Prophet who have allied to form a alliance called the Tetragon Tanebrae or Square of Darkness) have the Tyrant Star as their Primary Goal (their secondary being the Haarlock Legacy which they believe is linked to the star somehow) and during the course of the game the Tetragon gradually find clues, fragments of which are being transfered to to acolytes through visions that the groupe's psyker gets from time to time, though he does not know why at the current moment it is because that he experienced the Rising of the Star once before and was somehow bound to the Tetragon either through destiny, the warp or some other reason.

the reason I do this is because it allows me to find out what it is gradually instead of in one go, I get inspred during the game and gets idears as the game progress and sometimes (ironically) from the strange theories of the players themselves.

but I might end up with the best, in my mind, (and most frustrating for the players) solution of all: don't solve the mystery, this means that no one is disappointed over getting a "less than expected" ending while still having a great tme trying to solve it and even being able to use again later if necessary.

Hope you do not find it to boring

Maybe the Tyrant Star is the Emperor being reborn, and the mass panic will change to mass euphoria....

Anyways, the few facts that I think can be gleaned with any authenticity from the excellent DOTG is that:

- the Tyrant Star is a threat from mankind's own forgotten antiquity (it is listed too explicitly to be a red herring in that book)

- it has something to do with the secret of the Haarlock dynasty of Rogue Traders -> Erasmus Haarlock is possibly the Herald or the Wanderer spoken of and tied to the reappearance of the black sun

- it has something to do with revelrie, a madman's feast, the over throw of all order and sanity

I do not think it has anything to do with Necrons. It's way too illogical and well, chaotic, to be a Necron thing.

Having just read the novel Emperor's Mercy , I have another possible theory as to the nature of the Tyrant Star- it may be another of the Old Kings (or something similar), that is being roused by the unknowing or the unsane. A caged star, worshipped as a god, which can't quite break free because the alignments are not yet right. If this is the case it makes an incredible weapon, even if they cannot deploy it properly (although if they could I doubt the sector would survive). I will not go into further details as it'd be spoilerriffic and I'm too tired to figure out how to avoid that.