The Leagues of Votann are on their way, and everyone’s excited to find out how these doughty space-farers fit into the vast setting of Warhammer 40,000. The Leagues have a long, storied history of independent strongholds, bound together by the Votann – but just what is a Votann, anyway?
A secretive people in a galaxy full of mortal threats, the Kin do not discuss the nature of the Votann with outsiders – by sacred custom and sensible caution. The word is used freely enough, but no-one beyond the Leagues has any clue what it refers to.
There’s good reason for this reticence – if the secrets of the Votann were ever revealed to the galaxy at large, the uneasy peace between the Leagues and the Imperium of Man would quickly crumble.
Why? The Votann are Ancestor Cores – super-cogitators, gestalt repositories of inherited wisdom and knowledge. Each League has its own Votann, central to its way of life, and no Kin would hesitate to lay down their lives to protect it – these venerable cogitators are as sacred to the Kin as gods are to the more spiritual races. That’s the sort of thing the Adeptus Mechanicus has strong opinions on.
Within these self-organising datastacks and quantum infocores is held all the information a people might need to survive among the stars – weapon specifications, military theory, genealogical data, science, philosophy, and even Standard Template Constructs. There is an unimaginable wealth of lore buried in each Votann, which cannot be allowed to fall into the more superstitious hands of outsiders.
Of course, the 41st Millennium being what it is, not all is well among the Votann – it turns out that even machines of near-limitless power can eventually run out of memory. Whoever first created these marvels did not design them for tens of thousands of years of constant operation, and the sheer weight of data they are forced to compute has begun to slow them down.
Some have developed idiosyncrasies – what might even be termed “personalities”. When once the Kin would have received an answer to a tough question in a matter of moments, as the 41st Millennium comes to a close, some Votann can take decades – or even centuries – to deliver the same solution. Day by day, year by year, the Ancestor Cores become more eccentric and mercurial.
There are plenty more secrets where that came from, held in Warhammer Community’s very own Ancestor Core – we’ll have more to say about the Leagues of Votann once we work out how to get it to answer another question. In the meantime, keep checking back – and sign up for the newsletter to get all the latest ancestral insights delivered right to your inbox.