If the emepror came back....

[Pestigor]

considering the entire chain of events that got the Emperor onto the throne started by the Emperor turning his back on Lorgar for treating him as god...... Yeh, the Emperor would pretty much freak

[Do da burny dance]

i reckon the first thing hed do would take a pee.

[The_Giant_Mantis]

There's no evidence whatsoever that the Emperor didn't want to be worshipped. He had a specific theological beef with Lorgar, but that says absolutely nothing about his desire for worship. He built the entire Empire around himself.. People still went to shrines and gave thanks to him. Whether they did so because he was the savior of mankind or because he was the God of mankind is a relatively minor thing.

The fact is.. It's all very well just being the beloved leader and savior of mankind until you die. Noone could have carried on believing he was the savior of mankind because, let's face it, he made a giant prat of himself and wound up dying for it. The Ecclesiarchy was born, not because everyone turned around and decided to ignore what the Emperor said, but because across the galaxy billions of people had to make sense of the fact that the being they'd worshipped and followed, who had been the centre holding their empire together, had failed them by dying. The doctrine that the Emperor saccrificed himself and became a God is far more palatable than 'oh, he just made a bit of a mess.. now he's dead.'

Can you hold an Empire together around a dead dictator? History says no. Can you hold an Empire together around a God? History says yes. Without the God-Emperor, the Empire would have fragmented and everyone would have lost faith and just sold their souls to Chaos already.

If the Emperor woke up my guess is, he'd probably congratulate the high lords on doing an impossible job extremely well. He didn't care about numbers of deaths, he saccrificed billions of lives to carve out his empire in the first place. He didn't seem to mind being worshipped, and the Ecclesiarchy could easily adapt to his resurrection since the saccrifice doctrine was just there to explain the unforseen circumstance of his death. He didn't even care about bureaucracy.. For an Empire of such impossible size living without its beloved dictator, the Imperium is incredibly efficient and uncorrupt. The one time serious corruption seeped in, the Ecclesiarchy and the nascent Inquisition (those terribly corrupt and nasty power-mongers that they are) sorted it out.

This whole 'OMG! The Emperor wanted everyone to be liberal and nice!' thing doesn't have any support at all. Things worked better when the Emperor was around, sure, but the idiot went and got himself killed.. and considering that, mankind has pretty much been doing the best it can. The fact it still exists despite the millions of threats arrayed against it is testament to how well they've been doing.

[insideprawn]

He would go time to get dressed. My armor. Wheres my armor? Who took my armor!?!

[CaptainSarathai]

Originally Posted by insideprawn

He would go time to get dressed. My armor. Wheres my armor? Who took my armor!?!

"Woman!! Where's my Soopa-Suit?!"
--frozone, disney's "The Incredibles"

Mantis:
what you say is true, however, I never said that the emperor was liberal, or nice. The man slaughtered billions and billions of fellow HUMANS to create his empire, and made a deal with the chaos god's to sell their souls in return for the ability to make the marines. It was ultimately this that did him in.
He made a deal with the proverbial devil, and then tried to kill him. Chaos wasn't having any of that, and the fallen primarchs were their vouchsafe.
"If you turn on us, we've secretly implanted our will into half your creations- they'll turn on you"

I don't think the emperor would disband the current governing/ecclesiarchal system because he doesn't LIKE it. I think he'd get rid of it because he wouldn't want it ANYMORE. If he returned, whether people see him as a god or not, he is the supreme emperor of mankind. His word is law. He has no need for a council, or for a law-making, word-interpretting body. He might keep the ecclesiarchy around just to keep people loyal, but they'd lose alot of their power.
If he returned, he'd probably sweep aside anything that would stand between him, and a total, autocratic reunion of the Human Worlds and reestablishing humanity's might across the stars. There was no ecclesiarchy or government when he started, and there wouldn't be one if he came back either. Just him, a million marines, and alot of bullets.

[harlequin2262]

Originally Posted by CaptainSarathai

Also, the WWCs tend to avoid game-changing things now. EoT and SoC were the two campaigns that SHOULD have brought an end to the gaming universes of both games. The chaos players in each campaign took full advantage of everything that they had and utterly ravaged the gameverse so much so that GW had to write unbelievable stories to validate a Chaos loss.

But... back on topic of whole God-Emperor thing:

Emperor > Jesus
or was the beatles?

Chaos won fairly decisively in EoT, but there was actually pretty big problems in the SoC. The Order players seemed to be a lot more organised. IIRC, GW had to pull together some nonsense of Nurgle blasting Brass Keep with contagions to clear out the defenders, because at the rate things were going, there was no way that Chaos would get NEAR Middleheim.

But I see your point. Neither of them have really changed the game universe in the slightest. "Yes, the forces of chaos have spilled forth, causing despair and destruc...yeah. Just read any of the stuff we've published about Chaos over the last 2 decades, and change the dates and character names".

[CaptainSarathai]

Somebody just told me that the card game, Legend of the Five Rings, uses tournaments to determine some of the fate of the game. Players align with different factions, that make use of different cards (think Red, White, Green, Blue, from Magic) and then the winning side in the tournament gets to choose an effect against one opponent that will be changed in the next update of the game. Granted, that wouldn't work as well with GW, because the rule-sets only change once every 2 or more years, and the models cost more than 10cents, but really, it'd be kinda cool to see SOMETHING happen!

I mean: if EoT had resulted in a solid Chaos victory, they shoulda gotten something for it. If they killed some uber character during an EoT scenario, that character shouldn't appear in the next codex. Or something! Hell- even if they just start adding the fact that Cadia got a snot-kicking into the fluff, that'd be nice, instead of churning out the same stupid crap day in and day out.

[Visitor Q]

It depends how seriously you take the idea that the Emperor has actually ascended to godhood in the warp.

It might be that he says "ok before I wasn't a god...but now? Yeah I pretty much am."

[Khisanth Magus]

About the whole thing whether the emperor wanted to be worshiped...if you consider the Horus Heresy books canon(which I honestly don't know if they are), it was actively prohibited from worshiping the emperor as a god, by his own orders(although of course there was a small cult that worshiped him, but being discovered could get you killed). He felt that religion was just holding mankind back, and one of the things conquered worlds in the great crusade had to do was renounce all religion.

Of course, this is all presuming the Emperor were ever to wake up. I thought I read in the fluff in one of the codexes(no clue which one, I've read so many) that at one point it WAS possible to heal the Emperor and wake him up, but the people in charge didn't want him to wake up, not wanting to lose their own power and their perfect figurehead. I doubt anything would have changed in that regards, so it would be rather difficult to imagine him being healed enough to wake up.

[Montyhaul]

Originally Posted by CaptainSarathai

...The man slaughtered billions and billions of fellow HUMANS to create his empire, and made a deal with the chaos god's to sell their souls in return for the ability to make the marines. It was ultimately this that did him in.
He made a deal with the proverbial devil, and then tried to kill him. Chaos wasn't having any of that, and the fallen primarchs were their vouchsafe.
"If you turn on us, we've secretly implanted our will into half your creations- they'll turn on you"
...

*spits coffee all over self*

Wait, what?! Where can I get my hands on the source for this? Is it in one of the novels? I had no idea.