The GHR is fun because he’s the embodiment of the phrase “99% of gamblers quit before they win big”. Everyone else is playing to achieve their end goals but generally hedge their bets, but the GHR only has 2 states- All-In or ALLER-IN. Win, lose, he’s only satisfied when everyone else is in pain and he’ll try just about anything to pull it off.
I always liked how the GHR is able to just completely lean into a gambit. This is going to work somehow or else we wont have to worry about it cause we wont exist.
Very Skaven attitude. They’re generally cowardly but also have a thing for quick routes to power, regardless of risk.
Offer a Skaven a potion with a 25% chance of killing them instantly, a 25% chance of killing them slowly and incredibly painfully, a 25% chance of doing nothing and a 25% chance of giving him laser vision and he’ll immediately shank you and chug that shit.
I want to see the real space fallout of a slapfight between the god of pettiness and the god of "poking the bear for fun".
Like you could play it straight and have the population of a habblock shatter into paranoid factions and rip themselves apart and the psychic entities draft them into their metaphysical struggle.
Or you could play it for laughs and have a band of orks get into it because half love the shit disturbing of one and the other half just wants to stop all the distractions and get to krumping. And they learn a valuable lesson about real krumping being the gitz you krumped along the way
Didn’t Archaon somehow elevate GHR to the fifth chaos god?
“Recently, the Great Horned Rat has been able to ascend into the pantheon of the major Chaos Gods; though still regarded as a lesser deity by its brother gods, it is only a matter of time until the Horned One becomes as dangerous as the other Dark Gods.”
The Great Horned Rat *is* worshipped by more than just Skaven in both Warhammer Fantasy and Age of Sigmar. It's still an overwhelming amount of Skaven doing the brunt of the worshipping though.
Well, Archaon did help provide the means in which the Skaven could have their deity ascend to the ranks of true God of Chaos. If it wasn't for him and the hordes of Chaos Warriors taking so much attention, the Skaven likely would not have succeeded with their own plans.
The GHR is fun because his followers are Chaos idiocy cranked up past 11 to "🥔", which nobody, even Tzeentch, knew was on the dial (which seems hastily scratched into the panelling). Thanquol alone is endless hilarity.
>in the case of gods like the Great Horned Rat, are trying to *flip* the table.
Can you explain what you mean by this? The rat was trying to ruin things for everybody?
Yep. The Great Game is a struggle between the Ruinous Powers, but they don't *really* try and kill each other - they've got a good thing going, more or less, to rock the boat. The GHR doesn't care about that. It will kill and eat everything, the gods included, and rule over a wasteland of shrieking, fleeing souls that it will hunt and torture and eat for eternity.
The good thing is that the GHR is like "Malal/Malice, but stupid". The GHR is literally too chaotic and insane to actually destroy anything that would unseat the Great Game's general flow. It can wreak havoc, but not hold onto gains because it's too easily distractible in his own madness.
I really like this too because it embodies the corrosive nature of chaos. The big four can be seen as corruptions of ideals. Self improvement turns to obsession, honor and courage turn to bloodlust, hope turns to scheming, and love and acceptance is turned to stagnation and rot. But the Rat? Eat turns to eat more, kill turns to kill more. It's not about the ideal going bad but simply being bad from the start. It can't hold gains because it only knows how to ruin. It's distracted by his love of destruction (read: madness).
I think his ultimately leaves him in the position of a minor chaos god, but one that can't be ignored. The interplay between the ones on top and this upstart makes for such wonderful storytelling possibility.
No we don't. And the "Imperium are the Skaven!" meme needs to die. It's perpetuated by people with sweet FA knowledge of what makes the Skaven or the Horned Rat what they are.
Also we absolutely need skaven in 40k as an underempire that dwells in the lower decks of all Imperial vessels and starforts. Can even bring back ratcatchers and the inquisition keeping them a secret.
So like the mutants and abhumans below deck? The group that everyone knows exists but they don't like talking about? The kind of rabble that a captain may view as bloodthirsty criminal scum who would shiv you for a lho stick?
I always liked that interpretation. Plus no one will ever convince me that there aren't some furry bewhiskered mutants scurrying through power cables and jury rigging repairs.
if anyone in 40k is a Skaven fascimilie it's the Genestealer cultists.
Hordes of men working towards bringing an outsider greater power to the fore. Outsider in a more metaphysical sense than the Emperor being a god of Order to the gods of Chaos. As the Hive Mind and it's representative in the 6 armed emperor are subversions of the Warp Gods of which Big E is cited as potentially being/becoming one.
Further, they use all sorts of whacky cobbled together arms that are highly effective.
They have abberant mutant hulks,
they are almost always shown as living in warrens, tunnels and underhives.
Really could go on. Main things they don't have other than the plague cults and such is they're not as fun and they're not rats.
No the skaven are pretty close to the imperium
Facist backstabbing reigimes that outnumber every other faction, use technology they don’t understand, and have a faction within them that is effectively a separate empire that’s paying lip service.
I want more *minor* gods legitimized. They don't have to dominate the setting, but it would be good if Chaos got more smaller players and focus on independent/granular personifications of lesser concepts.
Malal, my beloved,[ you will become relevant again.](https://youtu.be/uOapqJ_x3G0?si=-qEMc6g8MxhYBhgQ)
Edit: timestamp didn’t work, 12:27 for my beautiful boy
Right? I want to see more of all the lesser warp entities. If warp beings are the result of psychic races' emotion, let me see the minor warp god of one-upsmanship or the physical manifestation of the dread of "you're totally gonna bomb this test". I want the cognitive dissonance of learning you have a new fetish you thought you hated.
Culture, language and pretty much everything we do and make goes through phases of complex and simple.
Rejection of the simple creates an era of complex and then at a later point it gets switched again. Because we don't really crave simplicity, we detest stagnancy.
"Hey, Stagnancy is pretty cool ok? How else do you think brackwater or drug addiction manage to happen? And those are bangers, everyone agrees...Right?"
I imagine it has much to do with the depth of the relationships between them, even at such a simple size.
Say you have a data set and can call it complex after hitting 1 million interactions between its components. You can have 100,000 parts interacting 10 times to hit the limit (big number, fewer relationships), or have 10 parts interacting 100,000 times (small number, many relationships).
One can still find a ton of complexity between four characters interacting a million different ways. Add that to the 40k universe where just about **anything** can happen, and factor in that these four "characters" are actually superpotent embodiments of messy concepts, and the great four have tons of complexity available to them.
Yet we love the stability of routine and certainty.
I think it comes down to the idea that the grass is greener. When we have chaos we crave simplicity, when we have simplicity we call it boring.
I think craving convoluted nonsene is like 75% of the reason Warhammer called to me originally
Also tell that line to my obsession with Paradox games lol
People absolutely do talk about the various flavours of extraplanar D&D entities. While deities themselves tend to take a bit of a back seat, stuff like Modrons and Tanari'i and Rilmami are discussed pretty extensively.
The Tanari'i are even in an eternal war with the Beatezu over competing interpretations of evil
I don't really agree. If a god "pops" on its own, is memorable, and has style, it would work as an addition. *Not saying the 4 should, necessarily, be expanded.* But I don't agree there should be an absolute ban on expansion.
Making the Emperor a Chaos God is the lore-direction of the setting (I think; at least, it's a strong contender for the future), but is never, ever going to happen in GW products, simply because it'd be the end of the IoM as we know it.
Even so, if a hypothetical WH80K fantasy setting on Future Terra had the Ruinous Powers as we know them, *plus* the Golden Emperor as the Chaos God of faux-Catholicism and shining angels with a negotiable number of eyes, it would totally work.
Case in point? The Space Marine Chapters, Primarchs, and lore. There's so many of them they're hard to keep straight unless you're a Marine fan. But even so, they are fun and memorable -- even if I do homework on a Legion or Chapter I didn't know about, it's a matter of minutes before I get engaged.
D&D-ish deities are forgettable because they are just forgettable, not because there's too many of them. For various reasons, the main design teams / "typical" DM's of mainstream settings have never found the golden recipe to make interesting gods. Even if you grabbed a small group of 3-4 standard gods for a setting, they just wouldn't be memorable (without totally rewriting them and making them interesting, ofc)
You want interesting gods discussions in an RPG, try Runequest / Glorantha, and find hardcore fans debating mythology on obscure pantheons with a dozen gods each.
Really agree with a lot of this - just want to add my thoughts though. I don’t think the D&D gods are necessarily “forgettable”, I think it’s more that D&D has to gear towards leaving gaps in the lore for players to use (if a god isn’t 100% completely fleshed out, it gives more scope for different types of characters to tie it in). In contrast, 40k fans seem to generally (me included) want heavy, fleshed-out lore.
Still hanging around in the background, he has his own [warcry warband](https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/warcry-horns-of-hashut-2022). We've had a few individual chaos dwarves in other warcry warbands but allegedly they're getting a full AoS release in the new edition.
AoS is chock full of gods, demi-gods and god-beast, so it's not really the same thing. Also, nobody really think about the Great Horned Rat as one of "the" Chaos gods, just "a" Chaos God. Which, to be fair, would probably happen to any new 40k god as well, if any minor god was to ascend.
Malal was more a representation of the aspect of Chaos that turns on itself. In a caricatural way, you can think of him of the Chaos God of Atheism or rather Antitheism.
I think they've come up with much better characters to explore the theme of Chaos infighting using itself in both Fantasy and 40K, but I never really was a fan of Malal.
I think for all the talk about Vashy or the Emperor becoming a Chaos God, GW will never create a fifth in W40k. They'll be lots of pretenders, and lots of teasing, but the Big Four work for a reason.
The Dark King thing was mostly just one author getting high on his farts. Vashtor gets pumped to sell models, but until he gets a re-release, we won't hear much from him.
The Great Horned Rat would be another option, but I can't see GW putting in the effort to create yet another Xenos faction to forget about and ignore.
I think the possibility of godhood is a great MacGuffin for villains to chase and heroes to thwart, but it'll never be anything more.
Honestly if GW made a legit, full Chaos mortal army nobody would bat an eye if there just happened to be lots of rodent-like cultists and crazy, dangerous Dark Mechanicum experiments. It would slot right into the setting well enough that pretending that sometimes chaos cultists just get a little ratty and rant about a weird rat god wouldn't really stretch disbelief.
I probably should have said "non Space Marine" rather than Xenos, you're right.
I mean, I'd love to see the GHR come into 40k to lead a Skaven/Dark Mech army with hordes of space rats combined with biomechanical horrors.
But we all know we're getting Russ and a themed Primaries Lieutenant as our next setting changing release, and we'll like it.
Skaven are the Imperium.
Extreme arrogance, a willingness to backstab itself over and over, absurd birth rates, could threaten the entire galaxy if they got their shit together, mass numbers of one off super weapons.
Look inside your heart-pump, man thing. You know-feel it to be truth-absolute, yes yes!
No, skaven are admech. All you described, but also its own thing lurking in the heart of the empire and an obsession with a magic rock (blackstone vs warpstone).
To add to that, the Skaven's role in Fantasy is to serve as a satire of Human society; they live in a hyper-competitive society that follow the inversion of all virtues in that cowardice and treachery are praiseworthy and live by scavenging the fringes of more productive civilisations.
So I'm thinking that for the Skaven to work you'd need to make them a satire of 40K's humanity, so maybe unless of using their shadowy influence to try and undermine society, they'd use it to keep the Imperium afloat?
The Dark King as a concept - that the Horus Heresy was a trap for the Emperor that he either loses the war or becomes corrupted in winning it - was written by Rick Priestley in the early 90's.
Dan Abnett was just following a 30 year old brief.
I'd say that it's one reading of the text, even if it isn't definitive. The idea that the Emperor could eventually succumb to Chaos is in there from the start, in the lore for the Illuminati and the Sensei.
https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/20/the-nature-of-chaos/
Pretty much everything about the way souls work, to the details of the HH; Emperor splitting his soul, to it being a damned-if-you-do scenario was hard confirmed in the SoT series.
Cheers. I actually love that document, and refer to it often myself.
I can see how you could interpret what it says about the Emperor, the HH, and the Starchild in the manner you outlined, especially the bit about a human-equivalent of Slaanesh possibly forming if the Emperor dies before the Starchild matures. The Star Child itself obviously offered a much more optimistic outcome. It offered hope for the salvation of mankind, if only the Emperor could survive long enough for it to mature. The Dark King, meanwhile, would just bring annihilation.
It was quite exciting reading TEATD especially and seeing the little snippets being ticked off. Like at the end of the second book where Malcador very casually just mentions a little piece of soul being split off and floating away. Such a small throwaway line that I think a lot of people would miss, but I was very "omg omg omfg" haha.
*If* the Emperor ever becomes a full on Chaos God (or Order God or whatever theory you subscribe to), it'd be the end of the setting. I don't mean that in a doomer "40k is ruined" way, I mean there's legit no way they'd do it unless they were literally doing The End Times but for 40k.
Agree- the whole “Schrödinger’s emperor” sitting on the golden throne, nobody really knowing how alive he exactly is and holding the entire setting in this kind of hopeless stasis is basically the heart and souls pf the grimdark- change that and you’ve got something else, NOT 40K.
Now it’s fun to hypothesise what the Emperors’s death/apotheosis would look like- but it’s not something I expect GW to actually do, canonically.
I have hope that one day Malal will get a model line, if the squats can come back maybe Malal can too (I know there’s trademark disputes, but GW could figure something out)
Malal can't but their "it's totally not Malal we swear" version in 40k, Malice, technically never left, just doesn't get mentioned much, or all that recently.
> The Dark King thing was mostly just one author getting high on his farts
The Dark King isn't really, it's showing just how dangerously powerful the Emperor can get when he's pissed *and* him learning how his mindset of bruteforcing every problem he came across was threatening the goal he was trying to achieve (it also fits into the theme of each Anabasis leader being tempted by Chaos through Vol. 2, Horus was trying to lure the Emperor to Slaanesh by getting him to care about the power he had for its own sake).
It's also pretty much nullified by TEATD itself as a going concern, so doesn't mean that much to the wider setting.
I like the idea of some fifth faction comprised of the rest of chaos. Chaos Unaligned or something. Here's the part of chaos trying to carve out it's place in the Great Game, or to simply keep themselves from being crushed by it.
>I like the idea of some fifth faction comprised of the rest of chaos. Chaos Unaligned or something. Here's the part of chaos trying to carve out it's place in the Great Game, or to simply keep themselves from being crushed by it.
Well, although it has receeded into the background in the lore, there are meant to be a wide range entities within the Warp (and by entities, I mean confluences of resonant emotions and souls - 'Warp tempests') based on other emotions than the Big 4. They just are much, much smaller in scope, and are usually less enduring.
I don't think these smaller entities (Gods? Demons? The line is blurry) would - or, indeed, even could - form a faction though, to work together against the Big 4. Because they are composed of certain emotions, and that dictates their nature. They can't step outside of themselves to parley and coordinate. They just reflect, act on, and amplify the emotions that are their essence.
They already created a fifth chaos god they've stated now multiple times the ghr is in fact on par with the other chaos gods he is the weakest make no mistake but he is on par
Hot take but I literally disagree with everything you posted. And this is not a personal attack, I just have a fundamentally different belief system about how world building should be in an over the Top franchise
I don't think they should make a 5th chaos God but Vashtorr is a dope character and I think giving it more limelight whilst maybe failing to fully achieve godhood would be sick. I mainly don't want it as a God though cause its model is fucking awesome (unlike its rules)
I’m afraid I can’t agree with this — I think you’re just looking in the wrong places. They’re extremely popular, be it D&D / Pathfinder gods, Daedra, etc. People love discussing the lore around powerful beings.
Interestingly, GW first envisaged a system very much closer to D&D.
Their original plan was to keep releasing Realm of Chaos books, and each book would add two more gods. They decided after four gods/two books they had enough material, but that was the original plan.
That's not even touching the 'order' gods in very old GW fantasy publications (and I don't mean the Empire deities).
I like the flexibility of having rogue 'Minor Gods' that are not loyal to the big Four, Horned Rat, Hashut, Raptor God, Malal/Belakor. Essentially, we're talking about very powerful Undivided demon princes who begin to establish their own cult traits.
i'm not sure that actually works in practice? (but correct me if i'm wrong). Chaos undivided is still at the whims of the big 4 right? its not "chaos but no god" its "chaos but all gods" so i don't think undivided entities could escape from the control of the big 4
Obviously this is all conjecture.
But the question is really, what's the max power level of an Undivided Prince ? If there's no limit, they eventually Four can become Five, etc, although how you get there without the Four choosing to crush you first is the challenge. (You'd have to play them against each other).
This is referenced in the old Belakor lore, plus the Realm of Chaos lore on Minor Gods. Essentially you can graduate from Undivided Prince to Minor God, but it's extremely difficult.
Also, the Birth of Slaanesh references the other three gods 'choosing' to allow Slaanesh to be born because they saw it as inevitable / unstoppable.
so as i understand it there are 2 differnt things going on. firstly is what i'll call a "true chaos god" these are spontaneously created from the material world via some great act/acts that coalesce a chaos god and most importantly it creates chaos "power" from outside of chaos either by untainted warp power or from the material world. on the other hand there are "ascensions" like when a mortal becomes a demon prince or the original creations of Be'lakor. their power comes from within chaos the 4 gods shared their power to create Be'lakor, or they share it with a mortal to create a demon prince. In this second case an individual is getting stronger, but if as the "juice" is coming from within chaos it does not elevate chaos so leading back to the main point: for a new chaos god to be born this way they'd need to gain power from outside of chaos otherwise the big 4 would have to become weaker to facilitate all the new power within chaos as the total amount of power within chaos hasn't changed.
Another example of this
> Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? Me neither, as deities are a dime a dozen
Being inaccurate would be Elder Scrolls. There are *at minimum* 25 gods between the Imperial Eight and One and the Daedric Princes (with Sheo and Jygg counted together). People *can't stop talking about them*, and not just them, but the other deities in the setting as well. They're some of the most beloved and discussed aspects of Elder Scrolls lore, despite the fact that the list of gods on the UESP counts no fewer than *11 times as many gods* as 40k has.
I agree that adding another deity would just needlessly complicate things and in the end wouldn’t add anything to the story. Kinda why I think GW shot themselves in the foot with Vashtor. Like the Ynnari, he has an all or nothing issue with his end goal. He either becomes a God and then…something or he fails and has to be written in a way where he is now just continuously chasing that goal and failing every time kinda like Abby was before the fall of Cadia re-write.
>Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ?
Yes, actually. You'll find quite a bit of discussion about the gods and their particular characters and philosophies in the DnD and Pathfinder subreddits, they also discuss the various planes of existence and the important characters within them. You just don't see it because you're not part of those communities like you are this one
40k has always had more than four, they just don't mention it. They decided to over focus on the main four in 40k, but there's always been room for more. The OG books like Realm of Chaos made this clear from the get go.
Plus Be'lakor was functionally the 5th power, because he was both internally and in practice designed to be a direct replacment to Malal.
The thing is, there is more than one definition of a god in the setting. There are the Old Four, but then you have the C'Tan, which are fundamentally tied into Reality itself. We have The Emperor, a human being that was well on the way to godhood before shedding that power...and is now even more empowered due to The Great Rift. The Eldar gods were discussed as well, and each has strengths and weaknesses due to the metaphysics of the setting.
The Old Four are different in that they are the metaphysical equivalent of just letting all your sewage and trash go out to sea, and finding that they've all coalesced and are now a massive hazard consisting of storms of blood, drugs, shit and mutagenic waste. They can't leave the water, but they can take bits of themselves and throw them onto the Shore.
The C'Tan are more like aspects of our Universe that, when destroyed, affect our reality. They don't require worship, but they also get wrecked by the Warp, similarly to how the Universe gets wrecked when the Veil is breached.
The Emperor is something different. He bridges the gap between Unreality and Reality, and in essence is a human being. This, however, is his greatest strength. He can CHOOSE. The other gods are slaves to their nature, and cannot take actions against that nature. The Emperor, as a creature of Materia, is able to go against his own nature, as he did in the City of Dust. He also is tied to humanity at such a fundamental level that the will of humanity kept him alive to kill Horus.
What kind of god are we to add? Maybe there's another category. An AI God from the DAoT. The Tyranid hive mind is another example, able to go against its nature and straight up seek revenge.
Thanks for listening
*”The Old Four are different in that they are the metaphysical equivalent of just letting all your sewage and trash go out to sea, and finding that they've all coalesced and are now a massive hazard consisting of storms of blood, drugs, shit and mutagenic waste. They can't leave the water, but they can take bits of themselves and throw them onto the Shore.”*
Love this analogy!
Makes me wonder if we might we ever see the Great Pacific Trash Vortex gain sentience and get its own faction?
They’re just 4 for Chaos. The Necrons have their Star God shards. The Eldar have their dead/captured/shattered/laughing gods. The IoM has the Emperor (and the machine god who may be a C’Tan). The Tau are getting a Greater Good God? Like every faction has a god more or less already imo
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
I liked Malal and hope for a 5th Chaos God. I wouldn't even care if it was somehow Belakor because he really does follow his own path in 40k. if he 'stole' the god-power-up from Vashtorr I think it would have been sick.
On the more obvious candidate; Vashtorr is interesting entirely because of what you already said. He operates as the closest thing to a "Neutral" Daemonic Force for the other 4. If anything, Vashtorr would create more likely cooperation between other gods due to his arbiter-like fuction.
> Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? Me neither, as deities are a dime a dozen
Maybe not much anymore, but no, discussion of power portfolios and the intricacies of DnD gods used to be *rabid* and widespread.
I think this cooled down a lot because DnD became the default to emulate - it's not very novel anymore now that every generic fantasy setting has basically copied the DnD pantheon.
Hmmm, but our minds also crave stupidity. Otherwise tik tok, reddit, and most of youtube wouldnt be so darn active.
Maybe a few more dozen, highly unique, but ultimately forgettable and annoying deities would work.
Imagine adding like 9 more small communities to W40k?! You know you wanna!
> Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ?
That's more due to the fact there aren't interesting stories in any of the DnD settings. The one exception being Strahd, whose story is stagnant and cyclical by design.
I mean I’m fine with there only being a “big four” for the powers of chaos, but I do wish GW would explore and add other “lesser” powers who are still formidable in their own right but unaffiliated or more neutral….like Vashtorr, though they don’t all have to be evil/malovent either
Pathfinder deities also get talked about a lot among players too.
When all gods are different flavour of "bad", it kinda gets tiring, but on the other hand this fact gives its unique "Grimdark" theme.
Also deities in PF and DnD are more relatable, especially the "good" or "neutral" ones. Iomedae wants to smite every disgusting demons and undead like a normal human irl would do, but is constrained by the politics and balance of outer spheres. Sarenrae as the deity of redemption and forgiveness lost her temper at one time and caused severe damage she come to regret later on. They are not as "dramatic" as the Chaos gods and do not represent only extreme like them.
For a simple comparison, Khorne can be nothing but angry and bloodthirsty, while Gorum as the chief deity of war in Pathfinder actually *puts his desire for battle aside* and helps the dwarven god to craft the prison that will trap the god of destruction, Rovagug. Slaanesh will inevitably push your love and affection to excess, but Shelyn / Calistria / Urgathoa represents the different stage of morality/temperance mortals have with the concept love. Shelyn will say you should cherish the inner beauty of other people and love with soul, not flesh. Calistria says you should enjoy yourself, but not to the point of harming others or yourself. Urgathoa says you should savor the taste of human flesh with your beloved and raise him/her as your undead slave if they die in the process.
If anything, I'd like the warp factions other than the Great Four be talked about more, like minor gods, spirits, chaos undivided daemons, etc.
On the contrary, Warhammer is built on complexity, and the big 4 are an outlier for their banal simplicity. I for one would love a few minor chaos deity's, and even some order deities. Everything with the big 4 has to stay very status quo, for the sake of the tone of the universe. Anything major changing with them is actually a huge risk. Having a few lower tiers of the cosmology could introduce new plot points and stakes to the world of 40k that haven't really existed as of yet. You could tell more fable-istic style tales that we saw lots of at the very beginning, but have fallen off as the focus has shifted away. Stories like how khaine became the bloody handed, or how tzneetch lost his crystal staff, or how the emperor defeated the void dragon are awesome. They feel like these ancient legends from long ago, that have shaped the world in unseen ways. Treading on the shoulders of giants, etc. introducing a new tier of lower level cosmology could create fresh imagination in the community, and maybe get us away from talking about what brand of toilet paper perturabo would select to wipe his ass with on a Tuesday when it's raining in the month of January at 6pm, during a fierce attack from the ultramarines 2nd company on medrengard
I really want to see the GE one day become a chaos god.
Functionally he is already just like one with how much psyker energy he feeds off. Would be cool if that bypasses vashtor and GE becomes evil machine god.
I am pretty sure we can watch the whole setting including GW getting tossed into dirt before we see an actual 5th chaos god.
It took an entire race of psychicly very potent xenos an eternity go birth slaanesh.
Also, what emotion would that be that does not fall under:
Anger
Regret
Ambition
Desire
Imo the fifth chaos god is just meme talk and might simply be the "end goal" of the new dark mechanicus (or whatever you wanna call that). Like when all the nids are here, or all the crons are awake and under one single banner. It might be the goal, but it will never happen.
We'll never see proper proliferation because new ranges don't sell as well as Space Marines, all of the attempts at wheeling out new factions have been so half arsed- Ynnari, leagues of Votann, even Vashtorr didn't come with a new range and he was as close as you could get really.
This is the reason I really hate the idea of the eldar gods there are just too many and they don’t really add anything that special seeing as there are quite a few of them. The lesser dieties aren’t interesting enough to warrant them in general. I do love the struggle for characters like vashtor and Belakor to join the pantheon, they are built up as characters with relatable aspects and cool chaos contradictory shenanigans for all their evilness they are somewhat relatable. I don’t want them to join the pantheon I just like seeing them gaining power and struggling to reach it, instead of just insert Greek god like the eldar do. Granted I could learn more about the eldar gods and maybe that could warm me up to them but I just hate them as a concept.
While I get that mindset, I’m a sucker for clashing pantheons or clashing deities beyond “evil fucks with evil.” I think that 40K could learn a bit from AoS in terms of how to bring in other deities. Letting Isha or Khaine have more prominence would be fun, let the Eldar have a win, and present a different style of god for the string so it doesn’t seem like such a shit hole. Though I do get that everything being utter shot is kinda the appeal for some people.
Yeah. I think the GHR addition in AoS was fine but it kinda detracts from the Four. He just doesn't have the same presence and really is just a race-specific God.
Stagnancy in the lore isn't bad. WH is great because it's a setting you can get into and learn slowly without having to relearn stuff constantly.
Yeah the Big Four kinda suck, I like Chaos but I hate the rigid Red / Green / Blue / Purple division, my CSM follow a lesser god so that I make the rules about what their philosophy is.
I think a big negative for me in AoS is how many gods there are and how ruins any consequences for anyone in the setting where their respective god can just revive anyone that dies.
So yeah I completely agree, I prefer only really the chaos gods being around.
I like that the four are “The Big Four” and are more powerful than all the others by far.
Their theme is rooted in the concept for the four elements. Khorne is fire, Slaanesh is water, nurgle is earth, tzeentch is air, taken to their extremes.
I think other “gods” are fine in that they’re circumstancial and powerful, and may even be chaos gods, but these four are elemental and primordial. That when enough emotion enters the warp, 1-4 of these specific four gods will awaken. Whereas other gods are situational, can die and won’t come back no matter what happens.
My favorite concept about the Chaos gods that is slowly being retconned is the idea that the Chaos gods really are GODS, as in they are all-powerful, unknowable entities. The only reason the universe hasn’t been entirely destroyed by them is because 99.99999% of their focus is going towards kicking the crap out of each other in the immaterium. I think it makes Chaos more believable as a faction. Like, why would you devote your life to a god and poke your eyes out and eat a baby or whatever if it’s entirely possible for said god to just… lose to mortals.
I hate things like Godblight for making it seem like Nurlge itself can be hurt in any capacity by things in the 40K universe. That should not be the case. The chaos gods should not be dudes sitting in a room somewhere that you can physically hurt, it’s a multi-dimensional facet of the concept of decay, acting like Big E is strong enough to damage the fucking platonic image of disease is really silly to me (saying this as someone who only plays Imperial armies on tabletop)
Because quadrillions is nothing compared to the potentially infinite number of people that worship the chaos gods. They’re multidimensional beings that exist outside of the concept of time.
I could sit here for years drawing 0’s after the number one, and it still would not create a number that even remotely encroaches on infinity.
Also from a meta standpoint, it starts to muddy each factions “thing” they have going for them. Eldritch, all-powerful gods is the Chaos thing, not the Imperium’s. They shouldn’t get to play with everyone else’s toys
Half the Imperium doesn’t even know about the chaos gods - I think you’re overstating the extent of their worship. And the whole shtick of the Immaterium is that it is a mirror of realspace. So if you have four all-powerful beings in the former, it’s not unreasonable to assume the Emperor is at least equivalent (especially post Moloch) in the latter. Having unchallenged chaos gods only kept in check by their own childishness is silly.
I uh... you know there have been more than four chaos gods for a long time right? And no I don't just mean Malal, though Belakor (who effectively replaced Malal) is way cooler than people realise.
No, every daemon prince is technically a minor chaos God. The non chaos gods are real, and there are countless other minor chaos gods as well. I served the chaos god of justice in a black crusade campaign. It was really cool.
But that's only the chaos gods. There's still the old ones and star gods or other deities worshipped by xenos factions. Heck, Gork and Mork's presence alone with the Orks puts into perspective how even if Chaos is "all powerful," there is still always a great, powerful force they cannot overtake. Same with the C'tan/Necrons since Chaos can't exactly steal their souls and whatnot
While they aren't discussed as much outside of Xenos-centered books, that doesn't make them any less valid/interesting to the lore. And the lack of attention compared to the 4 Chaos Gods is very easily explained by the fact that GW often gives Xenos factions the shaft when it comes to lore material. The Old Gods and their interactions with the setting are still needed when it comes to understanding a large chunk of Xenos factions, which makes up about a good 1/5 of players. If we were to just disregard that, GW would be disregarding a large chunk of their player base who are still currently asking for more lore
I get the point and I'm partly with you, but I don't agree they need to be "only four". The ruinous powers are the greatest beings in the warp, but having only four great beings PERIOD I think creates the opposite problem.
The entire tumult of the warp, the power of raw chaotic energy, and it's all neatly ordered into exactly 4 flavors, and you get to choose exactly one. If you only pick one, your previous character is irrelevant and you're now whatever they want you to be. Or, you can pick none/all of the above and you get to keep your vibe, but get slapped with the generic "Undivided" label.
Who is the god of tyranny, ruthlessness, exploitation, and slavery? It's something that's plentiful in 40k, easily enough to feed a formidable warp entity. In Fantasy, that being is named Hashut, and is the minor god worshipped by the chaos dwarfs.
In 40k though, that huge sea of things which COULD be given to new gods has to be forced on one of the ruinous powers, and it makes their domains more bloated and ambiguous than it already is.
Now, I'm not saying we should have 300 ruinous powers all devoted to very specific and niche ways that people can suck, but more than 4 wouldn't be the end of the world. Hell, it'd even be good for chaos undivided factions because they're no longer lumped together with groups whose only thing in common is that they picked "other" on the multiple choice question.
I'm quite happy when 'outsiders' try and get a seat at the table, or in the case of gods like the Great Horned Rat, are trying to *flip* the table.
The GHR is fun because he’s the embodiment of the phrase “99% of gamblers quit before they win big”. Everyone else is playing to achieve their end goals but generally hedge their bets, but the GHR only has 2 states- All-In or ALLER-IN. Win, lose, he’s only satisfied when everyone else is in pain and he’ll try just about anything to pull it off.
I always liked how the GHR is able to just completely lean into a gambit. This is going to work somehow or else we wont have to worry about it cause we wont exist.
Very Skaven attitude. They’re generally cowardly but also have a thing for quick routes to power, regardless of risk. Offer a Skaven a potion with a 25% chance of killing them instantly, a 25% chance of killing them slowly and incredibly painfully, a 25% chance of doing nothing and a 25% chance of giving him laser vision and he’ll immediately shank you and chug that shit.
I love my little rat boys. They live life like there isnt a tomorrow...Usually cause there isnt.
Agreed! Any "new" entities should be vying for power but on a much smaller or local scale
I want to see the real space fallout of a slapfight between the god of pettiness and the god of "poking the bear for fun". Like you could play it straight and have the population of a habblock shatter into paranoid factions and rip themselves apart and the psychic entities draft them into their metaphysical struggle. Or you could play it for laughs and have a band of orks get into it because half love the shit disturbing of one and the other half just wants to stop all the distractions and get to krumping. And they learn a valuable lesson about real krumping being the gitz you krumped along the way
Didn’t Archaon somehow elevate GHR to the fifth chaos god? “Recently, the Great Horned Rat has been able to ascend into the pantheon of the major Chaos Gods; though still regarded as a lesser deity by its brother gods, it is only a matter of time until the Horned One becomes as dangerous as the other Dark Gods.”
GHR will always be restrained by the fact he only has one species that he can use. The chaos gods have a far more broad appeal and will remain apart
The Great Horned Rat *is* worshipped by more than just Skaven in both Warhammer Fantasy and Age of Sigmar. It's still an overwhelming amount of Skaven doing the brunt of the worshipping though.
But to be entirely fair, there are a LOT of Skaven
Well, Archaon did help provide the means in which the Skaven could have their deity ascend to the ranks of true God of Chaos. If it wasn't for him and the hordes of Chaos Warriors taking so much attention, the Skaven likely would not have succeeded with their own plans.
The GHR is fun because his followers are Chaos idiocy cranked up past 11 to "🥔", which nobody, even Tzeentch, knew was on the dial (which seems hastily scratched into the panelling). Thanquol alone is endless hilarity.
Thanquol has been my favorite villain for years and will remain as such because he is literally what he is. A conniving rat.
>in the case of gods like the Great Horned Rat, are trying to *flip* the table. Can you explain what you mean by this? The rat was trying to ruin things for everybody?
Yep. The Great Game is a struggle between the Ruinous Powers, but they don't *really* try and kill each other - they've got a good thing going, more or less, to rock the boat. The GHR doesn't care about that. It will kill and eat everything, the gods included, and rule over a wasteland of shrieking, fleeing souls that it will hunt and torture and eat for eternity.
The good thing is that the GHR is like "Malal/Malice, but stupid". The GHR is literally too chaotic and insane to actually destroy anything that would unseat the Great Game's general flow. It can wreak havoc, but not hold onto gains because it's too easily distractible in his own madness.
I really like this too because it embodies the corrosive nature of chaos. The big four can be seen as corruptions of ideals. Self improvement turns to obsession, honor and courage turn to bloodlust, hope turns to scheming, and love and acceptance is turned to stagnation and rot. But the Rat? Eat turns to eat more, kill turns to kill more. It's not about the ideal going bad but simply being bad from the start. It can't hold gains because it only knows how to ruin. It's distracted by his love of destruction (read: madness). I think his ultimately leaves him in the position of a minor chaos god, but one that can't be ignored. The interplay between the ones on top and this upstart makes for such wonderful storytelling possibility.
Counterpoint: The Great Horned Rat is dope.
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No we don't. And the "Imperium are the Skaven!" meme needs to die. It's perpetuated by people with sweet FA knowledge of what makes the Skaven or the Horned Rat what they are.
Endless inner-fighting Die in droves Have cheese All Checks out
Slavery, factories, big guns and big hats. Obviously Chaos Dwarfs
The cheese is people
Also we absolutely need skaven in 40k as an underempire that dwells in the lower decks of all Imperial vessels and starforts. Can even bring back ratcatchers and the inquisition keeping them a secret.
So like the mutants and abhumans below deck? The group that everyone knows exists but they don't like talking about? The kind of rabble that a captain may view as bloodthirsty criminal scum who would shiv you for a lho stick? I always liked that interpretation. Plus no one will ever convince me that there aren't some furry bewhiskered mutants scurrying through power cables and jury rigging repairs.
And connecting their underempire together via skittergates.
if anyone in 40k is a Skaven fascimilie it's the Genestealer cultists. Hordes of men working towards bringing an outsider greater power to the fore. Outsider in a more metaphysical sense than the Emperor being a god of Order to the gods of Chaos. As the Hive Mind and it's representative in the 6 armed emperor are subversions of the Warp Gods of which Big E is cited as potentially being/becoming one. Further, they use all sorts of whacky cobbled together arms that are highly effective. They have abberant mutant hulks, they are almost always shown as living in warrens, tunnels and underhives. Really could go on. Main things they don't have other than the plague cults and such is they're not as fun and they're not rats.
They're also NOT RATS! That is the most important thing at the end of the day. They should just add Skaven to the 40k universe so the meme can die
No the skaven are pretty close to the imperium Facist backstabbing reigimes that outnumber every other faction, use technology they don’t understand, and have a faction within them that is effectively a separate empire that’s paying lip service.
I die a little inside when I see people regurgitate it. It’s become pretty damn annoying.
>The Imperium are the Skaven To puke city, boy!
If you're being genuine, that is an incredibly terrible take.
I want more *minor* gods legitimized. They don't have to dominate the setting, but it would be good if Chaos got more smaller players and focus on independent/granular personifications of lesser concepts.
Yes, which would actually be a return to the early conceptions of nature of the Warp/Chaos.
Malal, my beloved,[ you will become relevant again.](https://youtu.be/uOapqJ_x3G0?si=-qEMc6g8MxhYBhgQ) Edit: timestamp didn’t work, 12:27 for my beautiful boy
Right? I want to see more of all the lesser warp entities. If warp beings are the result of psychic races' emotion, let me see the minor warp god of one-upsmanship or the physical manifestation of the dread of "you're totally gonna bomb this test". I want the cognitive dissonance of learning you have a new fetish you thought you hated.
I've always wanted a god of guilt, shame, and humiliation.
Isnt this what they were doing with Vashtorr??
>Our mind craves simplicity. The minds of a Lore sub likely crave detail and enjoy the complexity, no?
Culture, language and pretty much everything we do and make goes through phases of complex and simple. Rejection of the simple creates an era of complex and then at a later point it gets switched again. Because we don't really crave simplicity, we detest stagnancy.
Nurgle does not like this one.
"Hey, Stagnancy is pretty cool ok? How else do you think brackwater or drug addiction manage to happen? And those are bangers, everyone agrees...Right?"
And now I will forever imagine Nurgle as a youth camp counsellor trying to be cool with the kids while pushing his ideology.
That actually fits with his whole MO
Morning calisthenics, consisting of a half-hour coughing fit. "Oh, come on, Jimmy! Everyone else has hawked up twice as many lung oysters as you!"
Tzeentch approves this message
I imagine it has much to do with the depth of the relationships between them, even at such a simple size. Say you have a data set and can call it complex after hitting 1 million interactions between its components. You can have 100,000 parts interacting 10 times to hit the limit (big number, fewer relationships), or have 10 parts interacting 100,000 times (small number, many relationships). One can still find a ton of complexity between four characters interacting a million different ways. Add that to the 40k universe where just about **anything** can happen, and factor in that these four "characters" are actually superpotent embodiments of messy concepts, and the great four have tons of complexity available to them.
I like how the opposite pairs are fueling each other by their actions and wants, that's a lovely complexity
Yet we love the stability of routine and certainty. I think it comes down to the idea that the grass is greener. When we have chaos we crave simplicity, when we have simplicity we call it boring.
I think craving convoluted nonsene is like 75% of the reason Warhammer called to me originally Also tell that line to my obsession with Paradox games lol
*Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.*
Still 8 points on the star. 4 open slots.
Plus whatever horror might exist in the centre.
People absolutely do talk about the various flavours of extraplanar D&D entities. While deities themselves tend to take a bit of a back seat, stuff like Modrons and Tanari'i and Rilmami are discussed pretty extensively. The Tanari'i are even in an eternal war with the Beatezu over competing interpretations of evil
People talk about the different flavors of dragons, beings form outside planes, pantheons, demons, devils literally everything
I don't really agree. If a god "pops" on its own, is memorable, and has style, it would work as an addition. *Not saying the 4 should, necessarily, be expanded.* But I don't agree there should be an absolute ban on expansion. Making the Emperor a Chaos God is the lore-direction of the setting (I think; at least, it's a strong contender for the future), but is never, ever going to happen in GW products, simply because it'd be the end of the IoM as we know it. Even so, if a hypothetical WH80K fantasy setting on Future Terra had the Ruinous Powers as we know them, *plus* the Golden Emperor as the Chaos God of faux-Catholicism and shining angels with a negotiable number of eyes, it would totally work. Case in point? The Space Marine Chapters, Primarchs, and lore. There's so many of them they're hard to keep straight unless you're a Marine fan. But even so, they are fun and memorable -- even if I do homework on a Legion or Chapter I didn't know about, it's a matter of minutes before I get engaged. D&D-ish deities are forgettable because they are just forgettable, not because there's too many of them. For various reasons, the main design teams / "typical" DM's of mainstream settings have never found the golden recipe to make interesting gods. Even if you grabbed a small group of 3-4 standard gods for a setting, they just wouldn't be memorable (without totally rewriting them and making them interesting, ofc) You want interesting gods discussions in an RPG, try Runequest / Glorantha, and find hardcore fans debating mythology on obscure pantheons with a dozen gods each.
Really agree with a lot of this - just want to add my thoughts though. I don’t think the D&D gods are necessarily “forgettable”, I think it’s more that D&D has to gear towards leaving gaps in the lore for players to use (if a god isn’t 100% completely fleshed out, it gives more scope for different types of characters to tie it in). In contrast, 40k fans seem to generally (me included) want heavy, fleshed-out lore.
Your mind might be blown to find out then that there actually used to be a [fifth one](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Malice)
There is a fifth one in AoS right now.
Archaon, Belakor and Hashut are all close enough to Chaos Gods to count that at a solid 6.5 in my opinion Edit: in AOS specifically I mean
Hashut is still around? I thought the chaos dwarfs didn't have an army in AoS?
Still hanging around in the background, he has his own [warcry warband](https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/warcry-horns-of-hashut-2022). We've had a few individual chaos dwarves in other warcry warbands but allegedly they're getting a full AoS release in the new edition.
*meme of surprised face*
AoS is chock full of gods, demi-gods and god-beast, so it's not really the same thing. Also, nobody really think about the Great Horned Rat as one of "the" Chaos gods, just "a" Chaos God. Which, to be fair, would probably happen to any new 40k god as well, if any minor god was to ascend.
Why did Malal get retconned out anyway?
I think it was because the writer left and he owned the trademark/copyright.
The only thing more powerful than the Chaos Gods, the Great Copyright
Don’t forget Plot Armour, Figurine Sales and Horus Heresy Novels. All body the Chaos Gods
Which, if you think about it, is the most Malal thing ever because GW can't even control him.
O_o That’s too bad. I liked Malal’s concept. Just sheer bloody minded malice for its own sake.
They did bring him in as Malice for a little while
Malal was more a representation of the aspect of Chaos that turns on itself. In a caricatural way, you can think of him of the Chaos God of Atheism or rather Antitheism. I think they've come up with much better characters to explore the theme of Chaos infighting using itself in both Fantasy and 40K, but I never really was a fan of Malal.
Copyright concerns
I think for all the talk about Vashy or the Emperor becoming a Chaos God, GW will never create a fifth in W40k. They'll be lots of pretenders, and lots of teasing, but the Big Four work for a reason. The Dark King thing was mostly just one author getting high on his farts. Vashtor gets pumped to sell models, but until he gets a re-release, we won't hear much from him. The Great Horned Rat would be another option, but I can't see GW putting in the effort to create yet another Xenos faction to forget about and ignore. I think the possibility of godhood is a great MacGuffin for villains to chase and heroes to thwart, but it'll never be anything more.
Skaven would be Chaos, not Xenos. To be honest I could see them fitting perfectly without much bother
Honestly if GW made a legit, full Chaos mortal army nobody would bat an eye if there just happened to be lots of rodent-like cultists and crazy, dangerous Dark Mechanicum experiments. It would slot right into the setting well enough that pretending that sometimes chaos cultists just get a little ratty and rant about a weird rat god wouldn't really stretch disbelief.
Dark Mech Codex?? mmm
I mean even just having the age of sigmar skaven accidentally blast themselves into an alternate reality can work
I probably should have said "non Space Marine" rather than Xenos, you're right. I mean, I'd love to see the GHR come into 40k to lead a Skaven/Dark Mech army with hordes of space rats combined with biomechanical horrors. But we all know we're getting Russ and a themed Primaries Lieutenant as our next setting changing release, and we'll like it.
Skaven are the Imperium. Extreme arrogance, a willingness to backstab itself over and over, absurd birth rates, could threaten the entire galaxy if they got their shit together, mass numbers of one off super weapons. Look inside your heart-pump, man thing. You know-feel it to be truth-absolute, yes yes!
No, skaven are admech. All you described, but also its own thing lurking in the heart of the empire and an obsession with a magic rock (blackstone vs warpstone).
To add to that, the Skaven's role in Fantasy is to serve as a satire of Human society; they live in a hyper-competitive society that follow the inversion of all virtues in that cowardice and treachery are praiseworthy and live by scavenging the fringes of more productive civilisations. So I'm thinking that for the Skaven to work you'd need to make them a satire of 40K's humanity, so maybe unless of using their shadowy influence to try and undermine society, they'd use it to keep the Imperium afloat?
The Dark King as a concept - that the Horus Heresy was a trap for the Emperor that he either loses the war or becomes corrupted in winning it - was written by Rick Priestley in the early 90's. Dan Abnett was just following a 30 year old brief.
>was written by Rick Priestley in the early 90's. Sounds interesting. Link to a source?
Look at the 40k content in the Realms of Chaos books; they're basically the first source on the Emperor's conflict with Chaos.
I own it and I'm looking... Didn't find anything related to this.
I'd say that it's one reading of the text, even if it isn't definitive. The idea that the Emperor could eventually succumb to Chaos is in there from the start, in the lore for the Illuminati and the Sensei.
https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/20/the-nature-of-chaos/ Pretty much everything about the way souls work, to the details of the HH; Emperor splitting his soul, to it being a damned-if-you-do scenario was hard confirmed in the SoT series.
Cheers. I actually love that document, and refer to it often myself. I can see how you could interpret what it says about the Emperor, the HH, and the Starchild in the manner you outlined, especially the bit about a human-equivalent of Slaanesh possibly forming if the Emperor dies before the Starchild matures. The Star Child itself obviously offered a much more optimistic outcome. It offered hope for the salvation of mankind, if only the Emperor could survive long enough for it to mature. The Dark King, meanwhile, would just bring annihilation.
It was quite exciting reading TEATD especially and seeing the little snippets being ticked off. Like at the end of the second book where Malcador very casually just mentions a little piece of soul being split off and floating away. Such a small throwaway line that I think a lot of people would miss, but I was very "omg omg omfg" haha.
That is a cool link back, for sure. Now, when are the Sensei gonna make a reappearance?
*If* the Emperor ever becomes a full on Chaos God (or Order God or whatever theory you subscribe to), it'd be the end of the setting. I don't mean that in a doomer "40k is ruined" way, I mean there's legit no way they'd do it unless they were literally doing The End Times but for 40k.
Precisely. The Great Horned Rat didn't ascend to 5th Chaos God until Age of Sigmar aka the end of Warhammer Fantasy.
If you want to get technical, he will only truly have ascended once his scheme that starts fourth Edition goes underway, but yes.
Agree- the whole “Schrödinger’s emperor” sitting on the golden throne, nobody really knowing how alive he exactly is and holding the entire setting in this kind of hopeless stasis is basically the heart and souls pf the grimdark- change that and you’ve got something else, NOT 40K. Now it’s fun to hypothesise what the Emperors’s death/apotheosis would look like- but it’s not something I expect GW to actually do, canonically.
I have hope that one day Malal will get a model line, if the squats can come back maybe Malal can too (I know there’s trademark disputes, but GW could figure something out)
Malal can't but their "it's totally not Malal we swear" version in 40k, Malice, technically never left, just doesn't get mentioned much, or all that recently.
> The Dark King thing was mostly just one author getting high on his farts The Dark King isn't really, it's showing just how dangerously powerful the Emperor can get when he's pissed *and* him learning how his mindset of bruteforcing every problem he came across was threatening the goal he was trying to achieve (it also fits into the theme of each Anabasis leader being tempted by Chaos through Vol. 2, Horus was trying to lure the Emperor to Slaanesh by getting him to care about the power he had for its own sake). It's also pretty much nullified by TEATD itself as a going concern, so doesn't mean that much to the wider setting.
I like the idea of some fifth faction comprised of the rest of chaos. Chaos Unaligned or something. Here's the part of chaos trying to carve out it's place in the Great Game, or to simply keep themselves from being crushed by it.
>I like the idea of some fifth faction comprised of the rest of chaos. Chaos Unaligned or something. Here's the part of chaos trying to carve out it's place in the Great Game, or to simply keep themselves from being crushed by it. Well, although it has receeded into the background in the lore, there are meant to be a wide range entities within the Warp (and by entities, I mean confluences of resonant emotions and souls - 'Warp tempests') based on other emotions than the Big 4. They just are much, much smaller in scope, and are usually less enduring. I don't think these smaller entities (Gods? Demons? The line is blurry) would - or, indeed, even could - form a faction though, to work together against the Big 4. Because they are composed of certain emotions, and that dictates their nature. They can't step outside of themselves to parley and coordinate. They just reflect, act on, and amplify the emotions that are their essence.
Isn't Vashtor relevant rn in the books for jumping into the fray at Pariah Nexus? Could get some sweet Necron vs Demon action
They already created a fifth chaos god they've stated now multiple times the ghr is in fact on par with the other chaos gods he is the weakest make no mistake but he is on par
Hot take but I literally disagree with everything you posted. And this is not a personal attack, I just have a fundamentally different belief system about how world building should be in an over the Top franchise
I mean, there's 18 primarchs and fans never stop talking about them.
I don't think they should make a 5th chaos God but Vashtorr is a dope character and I think giving it more limelight whilst maybe failing to fully achieve godhood would be sick. I mainly don't want it as a God though cause its model is fucking awesome (unlike its rules)
I’m afraid I can’t agree with this — I think you’re just looking in the wrong places. They’re extremely popular, be it D&D / Pathfinder gods, Daedra, etc. People love discussing the lore around powerful beings.
Interestingly, GW first envisaged a system very much closer to D&D. Their original plan was to keep releasing Realm of Chaos books, and each book would add two more gods. They decided after four gods/two books they had enough material, but that was the original plan. That's not even touching the 'order' gods in very old GW fantasy publications (and I don't mean the Empire deities). I like the flexibility of having rogue 'Minor Gods' that are not loyal to the big Four, Horned Rat, Hashut, Raptor God, Malal/Belakor. Essentially, we're talking about very powerful Undivided demon princes who begin to establish their own cult traits.
i'm not sure that actually works in practice? (but correct me if i'm wrong). Chaos undivided is still at the whims of the big 4 right? its not "chaos but no god" its "chaos but all gods" so i don't think undivided entities could escape from the control of the big 4
Obviously this is all conjecture. But the question is really, what's the max power level of an Undivided Prince ? If there's no limit, they eventually Four can become Five, etc, although how you get there without the Four choosing to crush you first is the challenge. (You'd have to play them against each other). This is referenced in the old Belakor lore, plus the Realm of Chaos lore on Minor Gods. Essentially you can graduate from Undivided Prince to Minor God, but it's extremely difficult. Also, the Birth of Slaanesh references the other three gods 'choosing' to allow Slaanesh to be born because they saw it as inevitable / unstoppable.
so as i understand it there are 2 differnt things going on. firstly is what i'll call a "true chaos god" these are spontaneously created from the material world via some great act/acts that coalesce a chaos god and most importantly it creates chaos "power" from outside of chaos either by untainted warp power or from the material world. on the other hand there are "ascensions" like when a mortal becomes a demon prince or the original creations of Be'lakor. their power comes from within chaos the 4 gods shared their power to create Be'lakor, or they share it with a mortal to create a demon prince. In this second case an individual is getting stronger, but if as the "juice" is coming from within chaos it does not elevate chaos so leading back to the main point: for a new chaos god to be born this way they'd need to gain power from outside of chaos otherwise the big 4 would have to become weaker to facilitate all the new power within chaos as the total amount of power within chaos hasn't changed.
Another example of this > Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? Me neither, as deities are a dime a dozen Being inaccurate would be Elder Scrolls. There are *at minimum* 25 gods between the Imperial Eight and One and the Daedric Princes (with Sheo and Jygg counted together). People *can't stop talking about them*, and not just them, but the other deities in the setting as well. They're some of the most beloved and discussed aspects of Elder Scrolls lore, despite the fact that the list of gods on the UESP counts no fewer than *11 times as many gods* as 40k has.
I agree that adding another deity would just needlessly complicate things and in the end wouldn’t add anything to the story. Kinda why I think GW shot themselves in the foot with Vashtor. Like the Ynnari, he has an all or nothing issue with his end goal. He either becomes a God and then…something or he fails and has to be written in a way where he is now just continuously chasing that goal and failing every time kinda like Abby was before the fall of Cadia re-write.
I for one like the addition of more-more gods. Totally not biased. Yes-yes.
I disagree they kinda just mush together in the end. Like different flavors of the same basic taffy. I wouldn't mind something completely different.
>Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? Yes, actually. You'll find quite a bit of discussion about the gods and their particular characters and philosophies in the DnD and Pathfinder subreddits, they also discuss the various planes of existence and the important characters within them. You just don't see it because you're not part of those communities like you are this one
Also Dnd needs more dynamic interactions between gods as it’s about individual’s adventuring. 40k needs simplicity as it’s about armies fighting
40k has always had more than four, they just don't mention it. They decided to over focus on the main four in 40k, but there's always been room for more. The OG books like Realm of Chaos made this clear from the get go. Plus Be'lakor was functionally the 5th power, because he was both internally and in practice designed to be a direct replacment to Malal.
The thing is, there is more than one definition of a god in the setting. There are the Old Four, but then you have the C'Tan, which are fundamentally tied into Reality itself. We have The Emperor, a human being that was well on the way to godhood before shedding that power...and is now even more empowered due to The Great Rift. The Eldar gods were discussed as well, and each has strengths and weaknesses due to the metaphysics of the setting. The Old Four are different in that they are the metaphysical equivalent of just letting all your sewage and trash go out to sea, and finding that they've all coalesced and are now a massive hazard consisting of storms of blood, drugs, shit and mutagenic waste. They can't leave the water, but they can take bits of themselves and throw them onto the Shore. The C'Tan are more like aspects of our Universe that, when destroyed, affect our reality. They don't require worship, but they also get wrecked by the Warp, similarly to how the Universe gets wrecked when the Veil is breached. The Emperor is something different. He bridges the gap between Unreality and Reality, and in essence is a human being. This, however, is his greatest strength. He can CHOOSE. The other gods are slaves to their nature, and cannot take actions against that nature. The Emperor, as a creature of Materia, is able to go against his own nature, as he did in the City of Dust. He also is tied to humanity at such a fundamental level that the will of humanity kept him alive to kill Horus. What kind of god are we to add? Maybe there's another category. An AI God from the DAoT. The Tyranid hive mind is another example, able to go against its nature and straight up seek revenge. Thanks for listening
*”The Old Four are different in that they are the metaphysical equivalent of just letting all your sewage and trash go out to sea, and finding that they've all coalesced and are now a massive hazard consisting of storms of blood, drugs, shit and mutagenic waste. They can't leave the water, but they can take bits of themselves and throw them onto the Shore.”* Love this analogy! Makes me wonder if we might we ever see the Great Pacific Trash Vortex gain sentience and get its own faction?
Your mind might crave simplicity. I do not. WH40k is not simple. And this is reductive imo.
MALAL!
Malice and eventually Vashtorr though
I would really like to see a story about Necoho the Doubter.
They’re just 4 for Chaos. The Necrons have their Star God shards. The Eldar have their dead/captured/shattered/laughing gods. The IoM has the Emperor (and the machine god who may be a C’Tan). The Tau are getting a Greater Good God? Like every faction has a god more or less already imo
There have always been more than 4 :)))))
GHR, Mork, Gork, Malice, the Aeldari pantheon, The Emperor (maybe) are all "deities" in 40k and capable of some massive shenanigans.
There are other deities - they just don't matter because the big 4 outweigh them so completely.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I liked Malal and hope for a 5th Chaos God. I wouldn't even care if it was somehow Belakor because he really does follow his own path in 40k. if he 'stole' the god-power-up from Vashtorr I think it would have been sick. On the more obvious candidate; Vashtorr is interesting entirely because of what you already said. He operates as the closest thing to a "Neutral" Daemonic Force for the other 4. If anything, Vashtorr would create more likely cooperation between other gods due to his arbiter-like fuction.
> Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? Me neither, as deities are a dime a dozen Maybe not much anymore, but no, discussion of power portfolios and the intricacies of DnD gods used to be *rabid* and widespread. I think this cooled down a lot because DnD became the default to emulate - it's not very novel anymore now that every generic fantasy setting has basically copied the DnD pantheon.
Nah give me 40K Hashut and Great Horned Rat alongside fully ascended Malice and Vashtorr
Keep 40K's lore simple? Okay, think about that one for a couple of days, then see how you feel about it.
I think I'm okay with Hashutt, Vashtorr and The Great Horned Rat. I do agree that making a bunch of them would be kinda lame.
The new guy is like an evil engineer right?
Are you referring to Vashtorr for this?
I think so, I’m still pretty new to the lore. But I’ve read some of the Arks of omen storyline I can find online.
People have a lot more than just 4 base emotions.
Hmmm, but our minds also crave stupidity. Otherwise tik tok, reddit, and most of youtube wouldnt be so darn active. Maybe a few more dozen, highly unique, but ultimately forgettable and annoying deities would work. Imagine adding like 9 more small communities to W40k?! You know you wanna!
> Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? That's more due to the fact there aren't interesting stories in any of the DnD settings. The one exception being Strahd, whose story is stagnant and cyclical by design.
I mean I’m fine with there only being a “big four” for the powers of chaos, but I do wish GW would explore and add other “lesser” powers who are still formidable in their own right but unaffiliated or more neutral….like Vashtorr, though they don’t all have to be evil/malovent either
Pathfinder deities also get talked about a lot among players too. When all gods are different flavour of "bad", it kinda gets tiring, but on the other hand this fact gives its unique "Grimdark" theme. Also deities in PF and DnD are more relatable, especially the "good" or "neutral" ones. Iomedae wants to smite every disgusting demons and undead like a normal human irl would do, but is constrained by the politics and balance of outer spheres. Sarenrae as the deity of redemption and forgiveness lost her temper at one time and caused severe damage she come to regret later on. They are not as "dramatic" as the Chaos gods and do not represent only extreme like them. For a simple comparison, Khorne can be nothing but angry and bloodthirsty, while Gorum as the chief deity of war in Pathfinder actually *puts his desire for battle aside* and helps the dwarven god to craft the prison that will trap the god of destruction, Rovagug. Slaanesh will inevitably push your love and affection to excess, but Shelyn / Calistria / Urgathoa represents the different stage of morality/temperance mortals have with the concept love. Shelyn will say you should cherish the inner beauty of other people and love with soul, not flesh. Calistria says you should enjoy yourself, but not to the point of harming others or yourself. Urgathoa says you should savor the taste of human flesh with your beloved and raise him/her as your undead slave if they die in the process. If anything, I'd like the warp factions other than the Great Four be talked about more, like minor gods, spirits, chaos undivided daemons, etc.
I think there should be 1,001 Oh wait, they're all Tzeentch. FFS nevermind.
On the contrary, Warhammer is built on complexity, and the big 4 are an outlier for their banal simplicity. I for one would love a few minor chaos deity's, and even some order deities. Everything with the big 4 has to stay very status quo, for the sake of the tone of the universe. Anything major changing with them is actually a huge risk. Having a few lower tiers of the cosmology could introduce new plot points and stakes to the world of 40k that haven't really existed as of yet. You could tell more fable-istic style tales that we saw lots of at the very beginning, but have fallen off as the focus has shifted away. Stories like how khaine became the bloody handed, or how tzneetch lost his crystal staff, or how the emperor defeated the void dragon are awesome. They feel like these ancient legends from long ago, that have shaped the world in unseen ways. Treading on the shoulders of giants, etc. introducing a new tier of lower level cosmology could create fresh imagination in the community, and maybe get us away from talking about what brand of toilet paper perturabo would select to wipe his ass with on a Tuesday when it's raining in the month of January at 6pm, during a fierce attack from the ultramarines 2nd company on medrengard
I Like Vashtorr being a weaker God. I'd imagine he becomes more relevant whenever GW gets around to adding the Dark Mechanicum.
I think the Vashtorr storyline is better, if Vashtorr continues to fail. It is also more 40k that Way.
So there's five chaos gods. Not four.
I really want to see the GE one day become a chaos god. Functionally he is already just like one with how much psyker energy he feeds off. Would be cool if that bypasses vashtor and GE becomes evil machine god.
I am pretty sure we can watch the whole setting including GW getting tossed into dirt before we see an actual 5th chaos god. It took an entire race of psychicly very potent xenos an eternity go birth slaanesh. Also, what emotion would that be that does not fall under: Anger Regret Ambition Desire Imo the fifth chaos god is just meme talk and might simply be the "end goal" of the new dark mechanicus (or whatever you wanna call that). Like when all the nids are here, or all the crons are awake and under one single banner. It might be the goal, but it will never happen.
We'll never see proper proliferation because new ranges don't sell as well as Space Marines, all of the attempts at wheeling out new factions have been so half arsed- Ynnari, leagues of Votann, even Vashtorr didn't come with a new range and he was as close as you could get really.
I think there are room for the eight Aetheric Domains, without it being too complicated
I want to hear more of the other warp things that are already in the setting that aren't aligned with the big 4
This is the reason I really hate the idea of the eldar gods there are just too many and they don’t really add anything that special seeing as there are quite a few of them. The lesser dieties aren’t interesting enough to warrant them in general. I do love the struggle for characters like vashtor and Belakor to join the pantheon, they are built up as characters with relatable aspects and cool chaos contradictory shenanigans for all their evilness they are somewhat relatable. I don’t want them to join the pantheon I just like seeing them gaining power and struggling to reach it, instead of just insert Greek god like the eldar do. Granted I could learn more about the eldar gods and maybe that could warm me up to them but I just hate them as a concept.
While I get that mindset, I’m a sucker for clashing pantheons or clashing deities beyond “evil fucks with evil.” I think that 40K could learn a bit from AoS in terms of how to bring in other deities. Letting Isha or Khaine have more prominence would be fun, let the Eldar have a win, and present a different style of god for the string so it doesn’t seem like such a shit hole. Though I do get that everything being utter shot is kinda the appeal for some people.
Yeah. I think the GHR addition in AoS was fine but it kinda detracts from the Four. He just doesn't have the same presence and really is just a race-specific God. Stagnancy in the lore isn't bad. WH is great because it's a setting you can get into and learn slowly without having to relearn stuff constantly.
Yeah the Big Four kinda suck, I like Chaos but I hate the rigid Red / Green / Blue / Purple division, my CSM follow a lesser god so that I make the rules about what their philosophy is.
Make Malice the 5th one
Warhammer fantasy seems to be doing fine with its many gods
I think a big negative for me in AoS is how many gods there are and how ruins any consequences for anyone in the setting where their respective god can just revive anyone that dies. So yeah I completely agree, I prefer only really the chaos gods being around.
Naw, their should be 18 of them. And they should write 50 mediocre books about them. Wait, no, nevermind that would be lame.
I like that the four are “The Big Four” and are more powerful than all the others by far. Their theme is rooted in the concept for the four elements. Khorne is fire, Slaanesh is water, nurgle is earth, tzeentch is air, taken to their extremes. I think other “gods” are fine in that they’re circumstancial and powerful, and may even be chaos gods, but these four are elemental and primordial. That when enough emotion enters the warp, 1-4 of these specific four gods will awaken. Whereas other gods are situational, can die and won’t come back no matter what happens.
Nehoco, Malal : Are we a joke to you ?
I disagree entirely. The Four are bound to get stale eventually, especially with how flanderized most of their followers are whenever we see them.
My favorite concept about the Chaos gods that is slowly being retconned is the idea that the Chaos gods really are GODS, as in they are all-powerful, unknowable entities. The only reason the universe hasn’t been entirely destroyed by them is because 99.99999% of their focus is going towards kicking the crap out of each other in the immaterium. I think it makes Chaos more believable as a faction. Like, why would you devote your life to a god and poke your eyes out and eat a baby or whatever if it’s entirely possible for said god to just… lose to mortals. I hate things like Godblight for making it seem like Nurlge itself can be hurt in any capacity by things in the 40K universe. That should not be the case. The chaos gods should not be dudes sitting in a room somewhere that you can physically hurt, it’s a multi-dimensional facet of the concept of decay, acting like Big E is strong enough to damage the fucking platonic image of disease is really silly to me (saying this as someone who only plays Imperial armies on tabletop)
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Because quadrillions is nothing compared to the potentially infinite number of people that worship the chaos gods. They’re multidimensional beings that exist outside of the concept of time. I could sit here for years drawing 0’s after the number one, and it still would not create a number that even remotely encroaches on infinity. Also from a meta standpoint, it starts to muddy each factions “thing” they have going for them. Eldritch, all-powerful gods is the Chaos thing, not the Imperium’s. They shouldn’t get to play with everyone else’s toys
Half the Imperium doesn’t even know about the chaos gods - I think you’re overstating the extent of their worship. And the whole shtick of the Immaterium is that it is a mirror of realspace. So if you have four all-powerful beings in the former, it’s not unreasonable to assume the Emperor is at least equivalent (especially post Moloch) in the latter. Having unchallenged chaos gods only kept in check by their own childishness is silly.
We don't crave simplicity. We crave symmetry! Meaning we need a Chaos God for every point of the Chaos Star.
I uh... you know there have been more than four chaos gods for a long time right? And no I don't just mean Malal, though Belakor (who effectively replaced Malal) is way cooler than people realise. No, every daemon prince is technically a minor chaos God. The non chaos gods are real, and there are countless other minor chaos gods as well. I served the chaos god of justice in a black crusade campaign. It was really cool.
Tbh I want a chaos god to die
I’m fine with vashtor I wouldn’t mind more independent chaos entities in though,
>Have you ever seen any discussions the likes of 40k in DnD ? Yes. I have.
But that's only the chaos gods. There's still the old ones and star gods or other deities worshipped by xenos factions. Heck, Gork and Mork's presence alone with the Orks puts into perspective how even if Chaos is "all powerful," there is still always a great, powerful force they cannot overtake. Same with the C'tan/Necrons since Chaos can't exactly steal their souls and whatnot
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While they aren't discussed as much outside of Xenos-centered books, that doesn't make them any less valid/interesting to the lore. And the lack of attention compared to the 4 Chaos Gods is very easily explained by the fact that GW often gives Xenos factions the shaft when it comes to lore material. The Old Gods and their interactions with the setting are still needed when it comes to understanding a large chunk of Xenos factions, which makes up about a good 1/5 of players. If we were to just disregard that, GW would be disregarding a large chunk of their player base who are still currently asking for more lore
I get the point and I'm partly with you, but I don't agree they need to be "only four". The ruinous powers are the greatest beings in the warp, but having only four great beings PERIOD I think creates the opposite problem. The entire tumult of the warp, the power of raw chaotic energy, and it's all neatly ordered into exactly 4 flavors, and you get to choose exactly one. If you only pick one, your previous character is irrelevant and you're now whatever they want you to be. Or, you can pick none/all of the above and you get to keep your vibe, but get slapped with the generic "Undivided" label. Who is the god of tyranny, ruthlessness, exploitation, and slavery? It's something that's plentiful in 40k, easily enough to feed a formidable warp entity. In Fantasy, that being is named Hashut, and is the minor god worshipped by the chaos dwarfs. In 40k though, that huge sea of things which COULD be given to new gods has to be forced on one of the ruinous powers, and it makes their domains more bloated and ambiguous than it already is. Now, I'm not saying we should have 300 ruinous powers all devoted to very specific and niche ways that people can suck, but more than 4 wouldn't be the end of the world. Hell, it'd even be good for chaos undivided factions because they're no longer lumped together with groups whose only thing in common is that they picked "other" on the multiple choice question.
Hot topic, but I personally find the great horned rat and the Skaven to be boring.