40k question on gods

[dragon]

Ok we have the four evil gods, Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch. I was wondering what if anything happened to the good gods for aspects such as honor, loyalty, love, valor, hope and others

[White Haven]

The four Chaos gods aren't so much 'evil' gods as they are their emotional aspect taken to its absolute extremes. Nurgle? He loves you. And the viruses in your bloodstream. In equal measure, unconditionally. Khorne? Khorne would be thrilled at the sheer levels of valor and determination involved in a tiny Imerial Guard squad in a fortified position standing off hundreds of Khornate berserkers, walling their position in the bodies of the (from their perspective) heretical dead. Tzeentch embodies the hope for change in the face of oppression. Slaanesh takes joy in the excesses of stimulation, from the most depraved violations committed by <arcane pronoun> cultists to the rush of pride and awe in the first person to scale a world's highest mountain and stare down across an entire continent from a peak so high that he actually had to wear a void suit to reach it.

There are, certainly, other Chaos entities out there, but it's a mistake to pigeonhole the four major powers of Chaos in narrow slots; they're much more nuanced than that.

[Cykeisme]

Ok we have the four evil gods, Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch. I was wondering what if anything happened to the good gods for aspects such as honor, loyalty, love, valor, hope and others

Well, White Haven has already given you the details, thus preventing me from giving you the cryptic answer, "you just named them".

[madd0ct0r]

Not entirely:

Nurgle feeds on despair, Tzeentech, Hope, Khorne is fuelled by Rage and Slaanesh, Lust (lust for more of any specific sensation, not just sexxx)

Honor, Valor and Pride partially feed into Khorne (via the subsumed Khaine) and Slaanesh (via the other subsumed Eldar gods, Lucius the Eternal being a good example for pride)

Love doesn't seem tied to any God in particualr (possibly, just possibly the Starchild, but that's old fluff). White Haven argues that Nurgle feeds on it - certainly it seems to use and abuse love for its own ends (Mortarion's surrender to Nurgle to save his legion being a good example)

[StarSword]

Does that make the Chaos gods technically True Neutral rather than evil?

[madd0ct0r]

Sort of - they don't actually care at all what their worshippers do, just as long as it produces steadily increasing extremes of emotion.

Being driven to produce extremes of emotion tend to result in followers commiting acts of great evil.

[Simon_Jester]

Normal intelligent life (humans, eldar in the setting, etc.) have to exist in some kind of mental balance. The emotions play off against each other, and against the higher faculties of reason.

Chaos gods overthrow all this balance in favor of one-sided fanaticism, and overthrow logic in favor of the power of their chosen trait (ferocity, sensuality, etc.). So they're very bad for intelligent life; you can't be Chaotic and truly human because nothing human can be as much of a demented caricature as the Chaos gods try to make you. The only choices are mindless (berserkers, pleasure-seeking cultists), or intelligent but powerful and inhumanly evil 'magi'-type rulers. Both of whom, in a way, trade their humanity for certain rewards.

[Formless]

Does that make the Chaos gods technically True Neutral rather than evil?

No, because that would imply some sort of dedication to Balance, Harmony, moral agnosticism or similar concepts. Most importantly, True Neutral would imply avoidance of extremism in all its forms, whereas the Chaos Gods feed on and create extremism. Remember, D&D's alignment system is Platonic and theological in nature; there is an Ideal Form for Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, and (bizarrely) Neutrality, and gods that define each of these things. By D&D logic, all four Chaos gods would be Chaotic by definition, and then their secondary alignment would be either Neutral or Evil depending on their Domains. Slaanesh for instance would be Evil because of his association with sadism. Tzeentch would be neutral because of his pure dedication to change, as opposed to destruction like a Chaotic Evil god would.

This is why one should be hesitant before trying to apply D&D alignments outside of its own context. In 40K, the only D&D Alignment which has an Ideal Form is Chaos. Anything else would be an abstract concept of the sentient species that inhabit the universe, such as mankind.

[Connor MacLeod]

The Chaos gods are the incarnation of emotion and thought and all that other stuff thats tied up in living beings. Its no more good or evil than the individuals making it up are. 40K is/was always big on that grey area and tended to slant things more in an order vs chaos sort of thing, with both sides having positive and negative aspects.

One could argue there are more 'positive' emotions in existnce in the warp, but they've been submerged by the fact that the active, sentient Chaos Gods are actually driven more by negative emotions, and active, sentient Powers have more impact than the unformed, sleeping Powers (like pre-Fall Slaanesh. The REalms of Chaos stuff went into alot of the whole god dynamic pretty well.) In a galaxy riven by pain, fear, anger, greed, hate, conflict, deceit, death and all the others, its rather hard for the positive stuff to get a toe in the door.

now if you want to throw an even bigger wrench into it, consider that 'deities' in the context of the Warp can be tied to specific emotions/sets of emotions, or they can be tied to particular races/cultures (The Eldar had their own gods, the Orks have their own gods, humanity may have their own god at some point in the future, etc.)

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

To expand on what Connor said, to understand Chaos Gods you need to understand the Warp. The Warp is a dimension that exists as the psycho-emotional mirror to our own physical dimension. Every (psychically active) sapient in the galaxy is tapped into this dimension, regardless of whether they are cognizant of the connection or not. Every thought, whim, and emotion a sapient entertains resonates in the Warp; the higher the grade of psyker, the more impact it has and the 'brighter' the emotional resonance is (and note that 99.9% of humanity are technically psykers).

All these combined psyches, particularly those of mankind and the Eldar (who are both strongly psychic races), eventually have a significant impact on the nature of the Warp. In its natural state, it's just a blank slate with no particularly unusual qualities save for being a convenient shortcut around the pesky laws of physics in our own universe. But by M41, in the thousands and thousands of years of sapient activity across the galaxy, the Warp has become so polluted with psycho-emotional garbage that it's taken on a sort of life of its own. Huge 'storms' of psycho-emotional turbulence wreak havoc in that dimension (and occasionally bleed over into reality as well!). Large clumps of related emotions coalesce and take shape - and like a multi-celled organism that was once just a group of single-celled organisms, that clump of garbage becomes something greater - a daemon.

And once again like a real organism, get enough daemons together... and suddenly you have something much, much greater. All the hatred, bloodlust, anger, aggression, violence, murder, and yes honor, discipline, and other such concepts have thus taken shape as the entity known as Khorne. Likewise for despair, malaise, wasting death and suffering, but also love and life - Nurgle. And so on and so forth.

[StarSword]

@Formless: Yeah, sorry, I got TN mixed up with plain N.

[Darksider]

What was the Fluff on when the Chaos gods were officially "born?"

I know Slannesh was born at the fall of the Eldar from their extreme perversion and such, but what about the others? At what point did they coalesce into the forms they currently have?

[al103]

What was the Fluff on when the Chaos gods were officially "born?"

I know Slannesh was born at the fall of the Eldar from their extreme perversion and such, but what about the others? At what point did they coalesce into the forms they currently have?

Sources disagree on that. IIRC there were mentions of "Before the War, they participated in it against C'Tan/Necron", "In result of the War" and "After the War". Between concept changes with time and editions + "we tell story from in-universe standpoint" it's really hard to tell which one is close to truth. In any case among major ones all three old ones + Malal/Malice are (much) older than GEoM.

[madd0ct0r]

What was the Fluff on when the Chaos gods were officially "born?"

I know Slannesh was born at the fall of the Eldar from their extreme perversion and such, but what about the others? At what point did they coalesce into the forms they currently have?

Old old fluff has it as Nurgle coalescing during the Black Death, Tzeentech during the Italin States period (Machiavelli) and Khorne even earlier, possibly the dark ages.

About the only way to sensibly reconcile this with the size of 40K, is that these dates are for the coalescing of the current faces the great warpstorms now wear, that gradually rose to dominance along with humanity, whereas before they were more influenced by alien races.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

If you view them as gods, that is. The warp is often described as a river or sea. By this going, the four major gods could be very powerful undercurrents. Which implies that the gods are not actually static, and the nature of a god could change over time (as, you know, befits Chaos). Or it could be that the warp itself is the self-aware god that has these four broad facets; everyone who looks into the warp is presented with an image of his own emotions. He thinks he worships a disctinct god, but it's just Chaos all the same deceiving him; if he can be tricked into fighting other followers of Chaos, all the better. So much for all the talk of the "false" Emperor and the "deluded" people who don't "accept the truth".

A funny thing about the whole mythology of Chaos; it can be spun whichever way you like.

[Cykeisme]

This really doesn't make any sense, but the latest Codex: Chaos Daemons (that came out circa 4th edition iirc) states that though Slaanesh "awakened" during the Fall of the Eldar, he has always existed, because time does not flow in the Immaterium (or at the very least, does not flow in the same way it does in the real universe).

To sum it up, each god has an event in the Warp where it awakened, that corresponds to a point in time in the Materium (the real universe)... but at the same time, those gods always existed, at all points in time in the Materium, both before and after their "birth".

I will get the exact quote from the Chaos Daemons book when I'm home, but the gist of it is that anyone who reads it and goes "that doesn't make sense" basically gets the answer "the Warp isn't supposed to make sense".

[Connor MacLeod]

It makes a ton of sense if you've read the old 'Realms of Chaos' stuff. Chaos Gods always exist in the warp, in some form, it's just they're not always awake or sentinet. What I remember of Realms of Chaos describing is that any potential chaos 'god' is essentially unformed and sleeping, existing and perhaps having some influence on things, but lacking the awareness and sentience that the Chaos Gods we know of have. Sometimes when the currents of the warp are right, they may come together and achieve a temporary sentinence, even creating some sort of daemonic entity which may act as a vessel for their power (such a case occured, I believe, in the old 'Farseer' novel, although that got made a heretic tome so..)

When a certain 'critical mass' of thought/emotion is achieved, they will develop sentience. This is pretty much what happened with Slaanesh in fact, and its why he always existed yet only 'awakened' at the time of the Fall.

[StarSword]

Going off the above, I read somewhere the Eldar are trying to build a Chaos death god to kill Slaanesh. I'm wondering what the consequences for everyone else of that thing becoming sapient would be (I know finishing it would require every remaining Eldar to die).

[jollyreaper]

Based off the fluff, a viable strategy for taking out chaos is wiping out all life for a good number of years, then bringing it back in a controlled fashion.

That would be a necron rationale that could make sense. Embrace death, put warriors in unliving bodies that don't add to warp energy. The tombs would be filled with sleeping masters ready to reawaken when chaos has been stilled.

These settings always seem unbalanced when you have demons and hell dimensions but never anything corresponding to heaven dimensions.

If the emperor ever died on his golden throne, it would be interesting if that released him to become the nucleus of a human warp god. Desire to protect humanity would not make him a happy god anymore than imperials fighting for man are nice people.

Warhammer always struck me like the Eastern Front, both sides are bad guys but if you're German, it's in your best interest to throw in with Hitler. You might not be killed on the front or sent to the gas chamber. And if you're a Jew, well, you're screwed because Stalin hated Jews, too.

Probably the least evil race is the Tau but they've been darkened up because you can't have good guys in Warhammer. If any side is sympathetic you're doing it wrong.

[starfury]

If the emperor ever died on his golden throne, it would be interesting if that released him to become the nucleus of a human warp god. Desire to protect humanity would not make him a happy god anymore than imperials fighting for man are nice people.

I wonder if the Emperor will be a cruel god as well, since he already tossed aside his compassion to kill horus, that Desire to protect humanity could easily mean to protect them from their own weakness and unable to control themselves as much as alien threats, a Cruel god of like the old C'tan fluff.

[jollyreaper]

More likely and Old Testament Jehovah. Jealous, vengeful God. Good to have in your corner but Woe unto ye who pisseth him off.

[starfury]

A idea that plays on the Emperor a order based warp God,I missed the C'tan as Gods of order aspect vs the Chaos gods and the Warp