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What would 40k look like...much different!?

Yes and no. 1) Horus doesn't betray the Emperor and all but the Orkz and the Bids are wiped out by the Imperium or 20) not Horus but someone eventually betrays the Emperor and things fall in line similar to 40k

Look up the Dornian Heresy for an alternate take on it

Horus remains loyal.
Erebus attempts to introduce the brotherhoods into the legions but is met with mixed results. Chaos cults form within the legions but without the support of the Warmaster they fail to get the support of the higher officers in most of them and remain confined to the lower ranks.
Magnus senses something is wrong with the legions and approaches Horus who launches an investigation. The chaos cults, while not entirely understood, are still deemed heretical and against the enlightenment. They are wiped out across several legions.
Concerns are raised about the Emperor's Children and Fulgrim in particular.
Erebus has already approached Fulgrim about their newfound reality and is listening to approaches from the Alpha legion who seem to be aware of dark gods. It's hoped that one of the larger legions like the Blood Angels or the World Eaters can be brought into the fold as well.
Horus though has not been idle. Having determined the root of the heresy, he brings the Night Lords on side before Lorgar can get to them. He explains that the Word Bearers have gone back to spreading heresy again, that they are traitors. Curze is more than happy to loose his legion against the uptight bookworms of the Word Bearers.
Meanwhile Horus and his mournival have accompanied Russ and his legion to Prospero to oversee the accusations against Magnus and his legion and to resolve the matter peacefully.

The heresy is quashed by Horus. Lorgar and his Word Bearers are wiped from Imperial memory, Fulgrim is captured and brought before the Emperor who is able to extract the demon within. The Emperor's Children legion is purged, a third of the legion is lost but a restored Fulgrim is able to put his legion back in order and with the new knowledge of the warp safeguards are put in place.
A handful of survivors from the Word Bearers are used to set up an organisation that monitors the warp beings. As the legion colour is grey they call themselves the grey knights. They use a modified version of their old legion symbol of an open book with flame where they replace the flame with a sword. In penance for their primarch they pledge themselves to the Emperor and become his secret police for dealing with all warp power related events.

With the Imperial Fists confined to Sol System to help take back the webway under the Imperial palace, the Iron Warriors are tasked with securing the weak point in the warp known as the Eye of Terror.
The largest fortified region in the Imperium outside of Sol is created using a planet called Cadia as the centrepoint.
The Iron Warriors create a mini-empire of heavily fortified bastion worlds where every human is pressed into service.
Operating closely with the Mechanicum who are interested in the ancient pylons and other structures found on Cadia and elsewhere.
Having learnt of the danger of the dark gods, The Lion realises that Caliban is a weak point between the warp and the physical worlds. He returns with a contingent of Grey Kinghts who narrowly avoid an uprising by his trusted mentor Luther.
Great seals are placed on the warp breaches to keep the planet safe. Large areas of Caliban are given to the Grey Kinghts as a training ground.
The Alpha Legion, having early on seen that the rebellion against the Emperor would not succeed quickly abandoned Lorgar and instead informed the Emperor of the Cabal.
A new crusade was launched to wipe out the species that made up the Cabal, a crusade that continues to 40k.
Having never been weakened by a true civil war, the IOM is the supreme force in the galaxy.
Orks are a constant irritation, but nothing like the huge waaaghs that were defeated during the great crusade which finally ended 100 years after Lorgar's treachery.
Tau? They appeared on the Eastern Fringe in a turbulent part of Ultramar. Reports suggested they were the same species living in primitive conditions mere centuries earlier.
Three entire cohorts of Ultramarines (approx. 40,000 marines) were sent to wipe them out - they succeeded, bringing back many strange items for the mechanicum to study.
Around the same time a huge inteli-virus was detected moving towards the galaxy. Seemingly made of countless lifeforms it devoured planets as it went.
The Ultramarines Legion led the crusade against this new threat. 600,000 Ultramarines, 1.5 million marines from other legions and countless ships of the Imperial Army smashed the tips of this intelli-virus causing it to stall.
The crusade is ongoing.

WELL DAMN Computron, that was pretty awesome.
A few things, I find it unlikely that the Lion would be so open to such actions on Caliban,especially against a semi secretive organization like those Grey Knights would have to be.
Are we to assume Angron just stayed a loyal dog this whole time? I find it likely that if his legion didn't lash out during the heresy, it would eventually.
What about necrons? Surely they have just started waking up, has the IoM noticed?

Surely they have noticed. But with the power and leadership of the emperor they would quickly be quashed

Would the Emperor's Webway project thing then succeed? I imagine the Eldar would be a bit pissed (once they had a bit more time to recover from the birth of Slaanesh) and lead to some kind of conflict.

ryuken87 wrote:
Would the Emperor's Webway project thing then succeed? I imagine the Eldar would be a bit pissed (once they had a bit more time to recover from the birth of Slaanesh) and lead to some kind of conflict.

that conflict would be brutally one sided given that the IoM would be WAAAAAY stronger,

 Great White wrote:
Surely they have noticed. But with the power and leadership of the emperor they would quickly be quashed

Necrons have technology so advanced that Mechanicum Archemagi aren't able to even comprehend the basic ideas behind it. Necrons would rape in space, though shear numbers might be enough to drive them away. Necrons would probably unite instead of remaining fragmented and every Tomb World that awoke would be a complete surprise attack that the local Imperials would be unprepared for.

BrianDavion wrote:

ryuken87 wrote:
Would the Emperor's Webway project thing then succeed? I imagine the Eldar would be a bit pissed (once they had a bit more time to recover from the birth of Slaanesh) and lead to some kind of conflict.

that conflict would be brutally one sided given that the IoM would be WAAAAAY stronger,

I wouldn't expect the Eldar to openly fight the Imperium, they would probably try and collapse the Webway or something (or at least sections of it).

 dusara217 wrote:

 Great White wrote:
Surely they have noticed. But with the power and leadership of the emperor they would quickly be quashed

Necrons have technology so advanced that Mechanicum Archemagi aren't able to even comprehend the basic ideas behind it. Necrons would rape in space, though shear numbers might be enough to drive them away. Necrons would probably unite instead of remaining fragmented and every Tomb World that awoke would be a complete surprise attack that the local Imperials would be unprepared for.

With Empy and the Primarches around the IOM would likely understand more about it.

Flame-Rage wrote:
WELL DAMN Computron, that was pretty awesome.
A few things, I find it unlikely that the Lion would be so open to such actions on Caliban,especially against a semi secretive organization like those Grey Knights would have to be.
Are we to assume Angron just stayed a loyal dog this whole time? I find it likely that if his legion didn't lash out during the heresy, it would eventually.
What about necrons? Surely they have just started waking up, has the IoM noticed?

Angron would still have continued with the nails and his legion would have suffered like it did. Without Horus guiding him and his legion towards chaos though they might have been redeemed in the end. While some of the traitor legions were heading in the wrong direction already, it was Horus as Warmaster that allowed them to truly turn. Some of the legions were going chaos on their own anyway and the Thousand Sons are another one who could still have caused problems. How did the Death Guard turn? Caught in the warp? Isn't that what gellar fields are designed to prevent? If it were that easy then any of the chaos gods could turn anyone that used the warp at anytime - if you can turn an entire legion then anything else is child's play. I have to assume that Mortarion did something to allow it to happen, without Horus and the others whispering in his ear he may never have come across chaos.

Would Magnus still have crashed through the webway if Horus hadn't turned? He may not have, but maybe if led to believe that the traitors were stronger than they were he could have been fooled into doing so. Obviously if the webway were intact then the IOM would be even more powerful and less likely to encounter chaos afterwards.

The Lion accepted the council of Nicea like most of the others, I don't see why he wouldn't accept a group that looked after the hotspots on his own planet if it were in the interests of the IOM. I'm assuming that after the threat of chaos was revealed that the ban on librarians would be lifted officially so perhaps The Lion would demand that his own librarium guarded the warp points on Caliban.

On numbers, if the crusades had finished with the IOM joining all human worlds together along with wiping out much of the xeno species in the galaxy and no civil war, then after 10,000 years of direct guidance by the Emperor the IOM would be a force to reckon with. The nids would still be a major threat but more akin to what the orks are in the current timeline, the necrons depending on their numbers would be a bigger threat but it may still tip in favour of the IOM.

It depends I think on whether the IOM continued its military strength as it grew or whether it downsized its military. Perhaps the Space Marines were disbanded, the legions broken up and the last marines used as trainers and officers for the Imperial Army. I took the opposite approach which was that the legions not only continued, but grew in size to match the increasing population of the IOM. If there were around two million marines at the time of the heresy, then it seems you could at the very least double that number after 10,000 years of growth.
But would there be growth? A galaxy not at war? Why would you need so many marines when the Imperial Army would be vast? Who would they fight to ensure their skills were kept to the level that marines are famous for? No chaos marine armies, the traitors would have been wiped out before making it to the Eye of Terror, no major xenos threat.
After 10,000 years of mostly peace, the legions could be weak.
The legions may also have been purged from the IOM, sent on ever further missions into the universe until the average person had forgotten they ever existed.

10,000 years is a lot of time for stuff to happen.
Without the orks in large numbers or the forces of chaos, it may be that another threat was diverted from the galaxy - say a technologically superior race that didn't have the ability to deal with chaos.

 dusara217 wrote:
Necrons would rape in space

Please, this isn't 4chan.

 dusara217 wrote:
Necrons would probably unite instead of remaining fragmented...

In order for the Necrons to unite, there would have to be multiple tomb worlds awake at the same time. However, remember that all the tomb worlds aren't waking up at the same time - some woke up millennia before the others. A more densely populated Imperium, with more frequent patrols, better monitoring systems, large rapid response forces, etc, can wipe out many tomb worlds shortly after they wake. Not only are tomb worlds most vulnerable the faster you get to them, but it would also prevent there from being large numbers of activated tomb worlds at the same time, thus hindering any Necron attempt at unification.

Plus, the Emperor and has children would have the intelligence and authority to stop those idiot tech-priests from running around Necron tombs pushing all the buttons they can find. Seriously, the mechanicus has a worse track record than Wayland-Yutari when it comes to letting sleeping aliens lie.

 dusara217 wrote:
...and every Tomb World that awoke would be a complete surprise attack that the local Imperials would be unprepared for.

Agreed. Yes, the local PDF might be larger and better funded in this alternate universe, but it's still going to be utterly wiped out by the awakening Necrons. The main difference would be that a powerful Imperium can afford to have a larger rapid response force on standby in nearby sectors, ready to arrive two weeks later and bomb the world to bits, then besiege the remainder.

How do you wipe out tomb worlds? Never really paid much attention to necron fluff (or should that be filings?).

Computron wrote:
How do you wipe out tomb worlds? Never really paid much attention to necron fluff (or should that be filings?).

First, you get a very large hammer. Then, you tie cyclonic torpedoes to it. Then, drop it from space attached to 600 nukes.

Cyclonic torpedoes modified to work better on dead worlds.
2 stage melts ones designed to penetrate its core then blow it to astaroids from the inside.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Legions still may have use, keeping orks down, they always attack again, beating down rebellions, still might have odd xeno problems, genestealers, the warp will still exist, still potential for chaos in a lesser form.

Cyclonic Torpedos automatically work on dead worlds since they're planet-crackers. Don't confuse them with virus bombing, which is a form of exterminatus that leaves the planet's shell in tact.

Angron Dies of the nails eventually, his legion no longer feel the need to put the nails into new recruits under his orders and thus the Nails lost world eaters die out in short order, the world eaters regain there place as the uniter of the legions, using the inheritance of there gene seed, brotherhood.

I don't think the 40K univers would be that different. The Great Crusade was a failure from the start. The Emperor is a calous and frequently incompetent warlord. He is much like the christian God. Saying he is perfect and all powerful doesn't make it so. He is crippled by his monstruous hubris just like the Eldar leaders. More than half the Primarchs are petty, arrogant, greedy and disloyal. Their god-like powers in combat doesn't save them at all from the downfall of all leaders: arrogance and lust for power. Horus was set to rebel against the Emperor for many other reason than for the support and gifts of arcane beeing like the Chaos Gods. Angron, Curze, Fulgrim, Lorgar, Lion, Russ and Magnus were all very weak in characters and prone to their violent hubris. The Iron Hand Legion and Blood Angels were also becoming very unstable (unlike their leader who weren't so bad). The Imperial Army was becoming more and more powerful. The Imperial Truth was based on lie and deceptions that's not a very solid foundation for an empire. Malchador loyalty can also be questionable. No the Imperium was doomed from the start it just needed a little nudge to fall.

2 stage designed for worlds with minimal or no atmosphere and biological life. Even if its a dead rock with barren surface only a necron could live on its getting blown up.
Mainly tomb worlds.
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Exterminatus

I started to ask this question when I was reading the HH books. Horus made his mind up after surviving from a chaotic blade, he was persuaded 'I think' by the vision that history would forget him and many of his brothers, a well planned trick as it hadn't happened yet. As I remember the thousand sons tried to warn him. If he hadn't turned some legions would have, no doubt about it. However the level of destruction would have been much less.

Thousand sons turned because they had no choice, They tried to warn the emperor and he set the wolves on him. They were doing naughty stuff in the warp.

Alpha legion only turned due to the cabel.

Alternate history: Horus stays loyal, he masterminds the fight back. No doubt World Eaters would have turned, Word Bearers as well. Without Horus they would have just turned on each other and not fought as a unified force. Most of the rest could have been purged. Give the Thousand Sons a slapped wrist, use them to fight chaos and demons in the warp. This releases the Space Wolves from smashing their homeworld. The Space Wolves would have been at full strength (scary thought). Alpha legion stays loyal, could infiltrate the traitors, destroy them from within. This means White Scars wouldn't have engaged them and been delayed, again another full strength Chapter instead of a depleted one.

Imperium would have come out much stronger, but chaos is fickle and patient. Somebody else would have turned eventually and we'd be in much the same place. Without the breakup of the Legions eventually somebody would have gone over to chaos and taken a legion with them.

The way I find to still have fun though is to play Luna Wolves as a 40k Army. I'd love to do a loyal 40k Alpha Legion Army, however time and funds never permit?

 Baldysteve wrote:

The way I find to still have fun though is to play Luna Wolves as a 40k Army. I'd love to do a loyal 40k Alpha Legion Army, however time and funds never permit?

Over 60% of the marines in existence are Ultramarines in origin. What nobody knows is that the Alpha Legion infiltrated the gene banks during the heresy. In 40k the only example of Guilliman's genetic legacy sits inside a stasis chamber on Macragge.....

ohhh, I forgot, dun dun dun.....

Maybe he didn't, but I don't think the Emperor would see it that way.

Part of this question depends upon what events did and did not happen as well. If we assume that Horus chose to side with the emperor while he was dieing on Davin, then the interex are still dead, but the Technocracy is alive meaning the Ad mech will have access to a fully working STC machine.

The next question is wether or not Horus survived his wound. If he survived and remained loyal the Crusade would have continued, but if he died the trechery by Erebus might not have been as easy to prove as the only person who was aware of it at the time was Loken. The Crusade would have stalled for a while with Horus's death and the Word Bearers would have had more time to infiltrate and corrupt other legions while Loken tried to prove his case against Logar. This would have led to the loss IMO of the World Eaters as Angron was always on the edge of betrayl anyway.

From there I don't know how 40k would have looked, but I believe the biggest thing is that the Legions would still be intact as there wouldn't have been a mass betrayl like there was with Horus turning several Primarchs at once.

Noc

If Horus hadn't turned, we wouldn't have the heaps of Grimdark to warm our beds at night.

Everything would be Noblebright and Sanguinius would be declared King Fabulous.

In the happy bright future...


...there are only cuddles.

Well 1d4chan takes a stab at it here;
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Warhammer_High&sa=U&ei=DF7lVJexL87SoATb6IKADA&ved=0CBUQFjAA&sig2=X9ABYrjGvayugsyXLiCYmw&usg=AFQjCNEDMEea_-C58uwSgoVXf_Nz3O8Rvg

Well, given that Horus 'falling' happens on Davin after being stabbed by the Anatheme, if he doesn't betray the Emperor.....then he's useless to the Chaos Gods, and they let him die.

In some ways, it doesn't change that much.

Abbadon, Little Horus, Loken and the rest would probably kill Erebus and most of Davin at this point, and they'd be left with the same 'shattered legion' emotions to deal with that the Iron Hands have in current HH books. The Lodges might or might not survive. Arguably it'd be the only thing holding the legion together.

Magnus is already aware of the threat of the Chaos Gods, so would probably want to do something about it, but Lorgar's minons have already set up numerous lodges throughout the legions. More importantly, no-one is going to take Magnus seriously because of the whole sorcery thing, so you might well see the Thousand Sons attack the Word Bearers. Which might well result in the wolves getting involved trying to seperate the two, and - since Lorgar is nothing if not a manipulator - might well result in those two legions smashing each other even harder than they actually did at Prospero.

The Emperor's Children are still going to fall, because Fulgrim taking up the Laeren blade happened independently of Horus' corruption and because Fulgrim is an arrogant, easily manipulated tool.

Angron still has the nails in his head and still hates the emperor.

Mortarion is supposed to have been very close to Horus. We've not really seen why Mortarion fell in detail, but there'd be a good chance of him not falling if Horus wasn't there to push.

Alpharius Omegon would still encounter the Cabal and presumably still see (more or less) the same futures so would still probably react the same.

The big difference is that the traitors are down at least one legion, possibly more than one, and they don't have the advantage of the Warmaster's authority to order people out of position, so the betrayal would take longer to set up and might involve different legions.

A big question would be who was chosen as Warmaster to replace Horus, and whether Malcador and the Emperor came in person to find out what happened to their son (and hence go "Haaaaang on! This is a Daemon Weapon!"). Which is an issue, because there isn't an easy choice for Warmaster other than Horus Lupercal - that was always the point.

Computron wrote:
Horus remains loyal.
Erebus attempts to introduce the brotherhoods into the legions but is met with mixed results. Chaos cults form within the legions but without the support of the Warmaster they fail to get the support of the higher officers in most of them and remain confined to the lower ranks.
Magnus senses something is wrong with the legions and approaches Horus who launches an investigation. The chaos cults, while not entirely understood, are still deemed heretical and against the enlightenment. They are wiped out across several legions.
Concerns are raised about the Emperor's Children and Fulgrim in particular.
Erebus has already approached Fulgrim about their newfound reality and is listening to approaches from the Alpha legion who seem to be aware of dark gods. It's hoped that one of the larger legions like the Blood Angels or the World Eaters can be brought into the fold as well.
Horus though has not been idle. Having determined the root of the heresy, he brings the Night Lords on side before Lorgar can get to them. He explains that the Word Bearers have gone back to spreading heresy again, that they are traitors. Curze is more than happy to loose his legion against the uptight bookworms of the Word Bearers.
Meanwhile Horus and his mournival have accompanied Russ and his legion to Prospero to oversee the accusations against Magnus and his legion and to resolve the matter peacefully.

The heresy is quashed by Horus. Lorgar and his Word Bearers are wiped from Imperial memory, Fulgrim is captured and brought before the Emperor who is able to extract the demon within. The Emperor's Children legion is purged, a third of the legion is lost but a restored Fulgrim is able to put his legion back in order and with the new knowledge of the warp safeguards are put in place.
A handful of survivors from the Word Bearers are used to set up an organisation that monitors the warp beings. As the legion colour is grey they call themselves the grey knights. They use a modified version of their old legion symbol of an open book with flame where they replace the flame with a sword. In penance for their primarch they pledge themselves to the Emperor and become his secret police for dealing with all warp power related events.

With the Imperial Fists confined to Sol System to help take back the webway under the Imperial palace, the Iron Warriors are tasked with securing the weak point in the warp known as the Eye of Terror.
The largest fortified region in the Imperium outside of Sol is created using a planet called Cadia as the centrepoint.
The Iron Warriors create a mini-empire of heavily fortified bastion worlds where every human is pressed into service.
Operating closely with the Mechanicum who are interested in the ancient pylons and other structures found on Cadia and elsewhere.
Having learnt of the danger of the dark gods, The Lion realises that Caliban is a weak point between the warp and the physical worlds. He returns with a contingent of Grey Kinghts who narrowly avoid an uprising by his trusted mentor Luther.
Great seals are placed on the warp breaches to keep the planet safe. Large areas of Caliban are given to the Grey Kinghts as a training ground.
The Alpha Legion, having early on seen that the rebellion against the Emperor would not succeed quickly abandoned Lorgar and instead informed the Emperor of the Cabal.
A new crusade was launched to wipe out the species that made up the Cabal, a crusade that continues to 40k.
Having never been weakened by a true civil war, the IOM is the supreme force in the galaxy.
Orks are a constant irritation, but nothing like the huge waaaghs that were defeated during the great crusade which finally ended 100 years after Lorgar's treachery.
Tau? They appeared on the Eastern Fringe in a turbulent part of Ultramar. Reports suggested they were the same species living in primitive conditions mere centuries earlier.
Three entire cohorts of Ultramarines (approx. 40,000 marines) were sent to wipe them out - they succeeded, bringing back many strange items for the mechanicum to study.
Around the same time a huge inteli-virus was detected moving towards the galaxy. Seemingly made of countless lifeforms it devoured planets as it went.
The Ultramarines Legion led the crusade against this new threat. 600,000 Ultramarines, 1.5 million marines from other legions and countless ships of the Imperial Army smashed the tips of this intelli-virus causing it to stall.
The crusade is ongoing.

Hey can we all agree that this would happen or at least close to what would happen. Amazing work by the way.

locarno24 wrote:
Well, given that Horus 'falling' happens on Davin after being stabbed by the Anatheme, if he doesn't betray the Emperor.....then he's useless to the Chaos Gods, and they let him die.

In some ways, it doesn't change that much.

It's possible that Horus doesn't die, it's also possible that Erebus is ignored and he's not taken to Davin but the Emperor. Stick him in a stasis pod and take him to the person who created the primarchs is a definite option.

Angron is not slated to fall simply because he has the nails, he could still be a psychotic killer for the IOM, plenty of those around.
Angron hates the Emperor? Angron hates everyone