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So the necrons have the pariah nexus which pretty much eliminates chaos influence in an area with the side effect of indirectly killing humans by cutting off their connection to the warp utterly.

It's been said that those with extremely strong faith are able to resist the stilling effect of the nexus, but my question is what about pariahs themselves, i.e. blanks, nulls, etc?
If the imperium had to invade the nexus could they use an army of super zealous faithful marines and SoBs plus the sisters of silence, maybe with some culexus assassins throw in for fun.

Just bombard the planets from space, unless they have shielding that can only be taken out with a planetary assault a space campaign against psychic nulls is no more expensive than one against regular humans.

Well, we don’t know.

It strikes me that in order to influence the warp, Pariahs/Blanks must interact with it in some way.

Cut off the warp, and who knows what might happen to them?

In one of the Cain books, Cain acquires piece of Necron tech that functions similarly to Nexus (a blackstone tablet that can supercharge or kill psychic powers). He is only able to convince his enemies it's safe to touch it because Jurgen (a blank) next to him shields him from effects of the device - probably closest to 'official' answer we'll get for a while.

 vict0988 wrote:
Just bombard the planets from space, unless they have shielding that can only be taken out with a planetary assault a space campaign against psychic nulls is no more expensive than one against regular humans.

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

There isn't that many blanks roaming around, I think it'd be very difficult to muster enough to have any sort of impact in fighting the necrons.

More efficient to just send in waves of guardsmen, and just accept many will perish due to the effects of the nexus. Still will end up with more fighting bodies.

Pariahs, as in the old Necron unit, don't seem to have been mentioned recently so they may have been retconned out of existence.

The current Pariah Nexus as such gets its effect from giant blackstone structures.

There has been already some BL fiction about them though the actual "success" is some Marines make it out to warn the Imperium. The structures are not easy to take out and the characters succeed due to Necron infighting/politics. They don't actually achieve a lasting success in destroying the Necron structure as another one gets moved in shortly afterwards. Warp travel is difficult because the warp is becalmed so imagine an old age of sail ship becalmed on perfectly flat seas.

I see the Pariah Nexus now as a Real Space equivalent to the Eye of Terror. A sort of fortress area for the Necrons to gather their disparate strength and get organised.

Just as one could send fleets and armies into the Eye, it’s not particularly advisable as it’s mere existence is deleterious to life.

That means I don’t see it being dismantled any time soon. And I am super interested in any background where Tyranids find their way into it....

Part of the reason why the Nexus is noticed is because the Necrons, Szeras specifically, accelerated construction. The original plan was for it to be built slowly enough that the spirit dampening effect would be less noticeable until too late, and the populations and planets dropping out of contact might go unnoticed or attributed to other more mundane causes.

jaredb wrote:
There isn't that many blanks roaming around, I think it'd be very difficult to muster enough to have any sort of impact in fighting the necrons.

More efficient to just send in waves of guardsmen, and just accept many will perish due to the effects of the nexus. Still will end up with more fighting bodies.

Whilst arguably the rarest form of mutation, let alone functional mutation across humans... When you have trillions of people in the imperium, then there is a good chance you could, if needed and with the correct resources to do it, raise an army of solely blanks.

Now, the issue comes from the grading of the blanks, Alpha plus equivalent (I think they are Omega minus classification), is that what is needed as they are very rare and basically, the Culuxus Temple has dibs on all of them.... With blanks being Omega class in themselves, so second grade of the anti-psyker tier (with a few classifications below that, though importantly they aren't blanks - they have a presence in the warp, they're just highly resistant to the warp and in some cases immune to psychic powers).

Additionally, it has been shown in the fluff before that a relatively large force of blanks has been mustered by just one inquisitor (The Distaff) which numbered 40 members. So it is possible a whole army can be mustered. Lastly, and why this may be unique to the grey knights, there is a way to create blanks...

There are tens of thousands of Sisters of Silence all over the Imperium.

While one in a trillion, blanks apparently aren't all that uncommon anymore.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:

jaredb wrote:
There isn't that many blanks roaming around, I think it'd be very difficult to muster enough to have any sort of impact in fighting the necrons.

More efficient to just send in waves of guardsmen, and just accept many will perish due to the effects of the nexus. Still will end up with more fighting bodies.

Whilst arguably the rarest form of mutation, let alone functional mutation across humans... When you have trillions of people in the imperium, then there is a good chance you could, if needed and with the correct resources to do it, raise an army of solely blanks.

Now, the issue comes from the grading of the blanks, Alpha plus equivalent (I think they are Omega minus classification), is that what is needed as they are very rare and basically, the Culuxus Temple has dibs on all of them.... With blanks being Omega class in themselves, so second grade of the anti-psyker tier (with a few classifications below that, though importantly they aren't blanks - they have a presence in the warp, they're just highly resistant to the warp and in some cases immune to psychic powers).

Additionally, it has been shown in the fluff before that a relatively large force of blanks has been mustered by just one inquisitor (The Distaff) which numbered 40 members. So it is possible a whole army can be mustered. Lastly, and why this may be unique to the grey knights, there is a way to create blanks...

Eisenhorn was a respected (at the time) Inquisitor and assembling a force of a few dozen was the work of decades. There are many untouchables out there but finding them is really, really hard - for starters, by definition any sort of psychic search won't work and their nature means they tend to be loners who exist on the fringes if whatever society they're part of.

Mass-producing 'protiphage' pariah clones is a better plan, if the Imperium still has that ability

They’re also prone to being all murdered to death because of their unsettling nature.

Their killers likely won’t even know they’re Blanks anymore that they’ll know what a Blank is. They’re just victims. And in a society as oppressive as The Imperium, there’s a lot of pent up anger/frustration for them to inadvertently attack.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
They’re also prone to being all murdered to death because of their unsettling nature.

Their killers likely won’t even know they’re Blanks anymore that they’ll know what a Blank is. They’re just victims. And in a society as oppressive as The Imperium, there’s a lot of pent up anger/frustration for them to inadvertently attack.

This.

Only a relatively tiny portion of people know what they are. All most people would know is they get a creepy feeling from them, and there could be plenty of reasons for that in the 40K universe besides being an actual Blank. It can range from sinister reasons like they are actually secretly Chaos tainted, knowingly or not, to something innocuous like they are introverted loners, who act or think differently from their peers but otherwise have nothing psychically abnormal about them. Trying to pick out the genuine Blank from all the ostracized outcasts out there can be difficult.

locarno24 wrote:

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:

jaredb wrote:
There isn't that many blanks roaming around, I think it'd be very difficult to muster enough to have any sort of impact in fighting the necrons.

More efficient to just send in waves of guardsmen, and just accept many will perish due to the effects of the nexus. Still will end up with more fighting bodies.

Whilst arguably the rarest form of mutation, let alone functional mutation across humans... When you have trillions of people in the imperium, then there is a good chance you could, if needed and with the correct resources to do it, raise an army of solely blanks.

Now, the issue comes from the grading of the blanks, Alpha plus equivalent (I think they are Omega minus classification), is that what is needed as they are very rare and basically, the Culuxus Temple has dibs on all of them.... With blanks being Omega class in themselves, so second grade of the anti-psyker tier (with a few classifications below that, though importantly they aren't blanks - they have a presence in the warp, they're just highly resistant to the warp and in some cases immune to psychic powers).

Additionally, it has been shown in the fluff before that a relatively large force of blanks has been mustered by just one inquisitor (The Distaff) which numbered 40 members. So it is possible a whole army can be mustered. Lastly, and why this may be unique to the grey knights, there is a way to create blanks...

Eisenhorn was a respected (at the time) Inquisitor and assembling a force of a few dozen was the work of decades. There are many untouchables out there but finding them is really, really hard - for starters, by definition any sort of psychic search won't work and their nature means they tend to be loners who exist on the fringes if whatever society they're part of.

Mass-producing 'protiphage' pariah clones is a better plan, if the Imperium still has that ability

Yet he still was just one inquisitor, with limited scope, power and resources. It may have taken him decades, but we know decades isn't that long a time frame for the imperium. It can take a decade to muster a regular crusade force to re-conquer taken territory.

I was just stating that if one inquisitor, and one of those that is probably mid tier realistically in terms of what he can demand and muster, can get 40 together, imagine what a lord inquisitor, or a grand master, or even the inquisitorial representative could do if they wanted too. That's even without bringing the Administratum on board to help facilitate...

It's possible, and it may just be a complete one off try at it, but it is possible.

On a note, I am actually surprised we haven't heard of a marine chapter comprised solely of those with the pariah gene, though I suppose it would be stepping on the sisters of silence role then.

As for the Sisters of Silence....

Yes they do seem to exist in relatively hefty numbers given how rare Blanks are.

But...they’re also solely comprised of The Dreaded Wimmins.

Given their important duties, there’s the immediate question of “why all women?”. Because so far as I’m aware (those more steeped in Heresy Lore step in!) the only real qualifier is the recruits be young, indoctrinated, and a Blank. Within that, there’s no good reason why said recruitment should be discriminatory over what’s in one y-fronts.

So....that big old why is something we need to consider. They could be clones. They could be forcibly created through something similar to gene seed. Certainly I understand they existed as an order pre-unification, on Luna if memory services?

If they are artificially created, by whatever means, we can safely assume its exceptionally esoteric, and may only be capable of maintaining enough for the ranks of the order.

If not? How are they found, let alone recruited?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As for the Sisters of Silence....

Yes they do seem to exist in relatively hefty numbers given how rare Blanks are.

But...they’re also solely comprised of The Dreaded Wimmins.

Given their important duties, there’s the immediate question of “why all women?”. Because so far as I’m aware (those more steeped in Heresy Lore step in!) the only real qualifier is the recruits be young, indoctrinated, and a Blank. Within that, there’s no good reason why said recruitment should be discriminatory over what’s in one y-fronts.

So....that big old why is something we need to consider. They could be clones. They could be forcibly created through something similar to gene seed. Certainly I understand they existed as an order pre-unification, on Luna if memory services?

If they are artificially created, by whatever means, we can safely assume its exceptionally esoteric, and may only be capable of maintaining enough for the ranks of the order.

If not? How are they found, let alone recruited?

The Black Ships pick up blanks too, and are staffed by SoS. SoS have cultural reasons why they are a sisterhood and do not allow males in.

Really it should have been the Sisters of Silence, not the Sororitas, who destroyed the Pariah Nexus. Faith being inextricably tied to the warp, religiously-minded beings who spent time in there should have been going through an existential crisis, and the *most* vulnerable to the Nexus's influence.

I have been musing over faith and pariah nexus and wonder if a watsonian explanation could be to do with directionality.

So the warp is shaped and fed by emotion from the materium and then warp energy can be drawn back out as psychic powers.

I wonder if faith (being essentially a feeling) is as much of a ‘push’ factor rather than purely a ‘pull’ factor like psychic powers. So people with lots of faith generate a bit more psychic energy on the materium side which partially bleeds back to the warp but partially can also be used in the materium. This is after all loosely how the orks psychic gestalt works.

This would explain why chaos faith makes daemons more stable, as there is more aligned psychic energy in the materium to sustain them without having to draw more from the warp. This would also sort of explain why non-psykers can use acts of faith - they’re using the materium side energy rather than pulling it through the barrier.

If the pylons strengthen the barriers between materium and warp, it might reduce the rate at which ‘push’ energy bleeds off as much as it does the ability to ‘pull’ energy out.

If the highly faithful are generating more local psychic energy, they may also be using this for whatever ‘psychic sustenance’ (for want of a better phrase) people normally get from their connection to the warp, which could explain why they’re less affected by the negative effects of the nexus - they’re generating their own energy to make up for it.

Lord Zarkov wrote:
I have been musing over faith and pariah nexus and wonder if a watsonian explanation could be to do with directionality.

So the warp is shaped and fed by emotion from the materium and then warp energy can be drawn back out as psychic powers.

I wonder if faith (being essentially a feeling) is as much of a ‘push’ factor rather than purely a ‘pull’ factor like psychic powers. So people with lots of faith generate a bit more psychic energy on the materium side which partially bleeds back to the warp but partially can also be used in the materium. This is after all loosely how the orks psychic gestalt works.

This would explain why chaos faith makes daemons more stable, as there is more aligned psychic energy in the materium to sustain them without having to draw more from the warp. This would also sort of explain why non-psykers can use acts of faith - they’re using the materium side energy rather than pulling it through the barrier.

If the pylons strengthen the barriers between materium and warp, it might reduce the rate at which ‘push’ energy bleeds off as much as it does the ability to ‘pull’ energy out.

If the highly faithful are generating more local psychic energy, they may also be using this for whatever ‘psychic sustenance’ (for want of a better phrase) people normally get from their connection to the warp, which could explain why they’re less affected by the negative effects of the nexus - they’re generating their own energy to make up for it.

this is an intresting idea, and might explain the commonly quoted plot hole of the sisters miracles happening in locations that were psychically supressed.

as to why only sisters of silence, it might be that the combat arm is just the sisters (for historical/traditional/whatever reasons), but their are male blanks working on the Black ships in non combat roles, like general jailer duties or helping to fill up the massive manpower required to operate any imperial ship.

We also know (whilst not exclusively male) that the Ordo Sinister (I assume it is still around in some capacity, unless the forthcoming Siege of Terra books state their ultimate fate) also uses blanks, and whilst it's only stated the princeps are blanks, I imagine due to the secretive nature of the Ordo, and well, their specific ammo/source of the titans power (psykers) they must maintain a security force of blanks in some capacity, that is not going to be the sisters of silence or other known blank operatives, to again maintain ultimate secrecy. Even if it will be just escorting them from psionic nulled cells to the titans to be inserted, they're going to need to have some form of blank on escort duty to keep them from going wild and trying to escape.

I have this creepy image some some real whackos in the imperium deciding the pariah nexus was a good thing as it would weed out the unfaithful and leave only the truly faithful alive.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
There are tens of thousands of Sisters of Silence all over the Imperium.

While one in a trillion, blanks apparently aren't all that uncommon anymore.

Can a blank be cloned? is it a genetic thing or some mystical thing that can't be cloned?

 Matt Swain wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
There are tens of thousands of Sisters of Silence all over the Imperium.

While one in a trillion, blanks apparently aren't all that uncommon anymore.

Can a blank be cloned? is it a genetic thing or some mystical thing that can't be cloned?

Yes. Spoilers for Pariah by Dan Abnett

Lord Zarkov wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
There are tens of thousands of Sisters of Silence all over the Imperium.

While one in a trillion, blanks apparently aren't all that uncommon anymore.

Can a blank be cloned? is it a genetic thing or some mystical thing that can't be cloned?

Yes. Spoilers for Pariah by Dan Abnett

Spoiler:

Alizabeth Bequin being cloned is a major driver behind the events of the Bequin series. As you might guess from the title, ‘Beta’, her clone, is absolutely still a pariah/blank.

BIG SPOILER FOR PENITENT