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Worship? None.

Appease, Manage, Utilize? Any that suits their needs.

Here's my conjecture. The Iron Warriors (along with the Iron Hands) worked closely with the Adeptus Mechanicus. Their mindsets, their culture, were influenced by that. They're engineers (in siege warfare mainly), pragmatists, but they had to deal with Machine Spirits.

IMHO, the IW see the Chaos Gods similar to see how they see Machine Spirits. Something to respect, but just for its power. Like engineers, they don't "control" them so much as "harness" their power. They know how to appease Machine Spirits, so they do likewise for the Chaos Gods.

Obviously, I'm NOT saying Chaos God = Machine Spirits, but to Iron Warriors, it wouldn't make sense to worship either, but they want to utilize both.

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That said, there are instances of IW leaning towards 1 power.

I read a bit of Storm of Iron and of course they highlighted IW Khorne Berserkers.

In the latest Codex, IW allied with Nurgle to create a Technovirus Plague on Toil.

I'm actually working on an IW army to represent this.

CSM gaining a patron god isn't one sided matter. You can worship a chaos god 24/7, but if you don't catch its attention and please it, you'll never be marked.

I agree that IW as a whole don't worship any chaos in particular. But I imagine they are most pleasing to Nurgle. They turned traitor from a position of hopeless bleak despair, attrittion, moral decay and being undervalued (and Nurgle is the great eualizer among the chaos gods). Their chosen style of warfare is siege, which leads to despair, starvation, disease and needs incredible mental and physical resilience to win (see how some of the same words keep cromming up?). You could say the only reason they could keep undedicated is that Nurgle already had claimed an even more suitable Legion.

I agree that IW as a whole don't worship any chaos in particular. But I imagine they are most pleasing to Nurgle. They turned traitor from a position of hopeless bleak despair, attrittion, moral decay and being undervalued (and Nurgle is the great eualizer among the chaos gods). Their chosen style of warfare is siege, which leads to despair, starvation, disease and needs incredible mental and physical resilience to win (see how some of the same words keep cromming up?). You could say the only reason they could keep undedicated is that Nurgle already had claimed an even more suitable Legion.

lol! I was just going to post that I thought that IF they were to please one God it would be Khorne due to the fact that everything Khorne has is apparently made of some sort of metal (every other word in a Khorne entry is "brass") and they like battle so much. I was then going to say that I felt like since they are engineers and builders they would be less likely to get involved with Nurgle because I can't see the god of entropy liking that. Having read your post though, I think you've swayed me to your side. I'm going to say something you don't often hear on Dakka:

Well done sir! I believe your well thought out points out-weigh my own and I am now forced to admit defeat in the face of your superior reasoning!

So yeah. I vote Nurgle.

At most they would take mercinaries to help out different roles in their armyfor example if they need to charge a line zerkeres if they need to cross no mans land which is full of contagions plague marines and so on.

well I seem to remember they were mentioned as followers of slaanesh in the oldest fluff.

I'm with everyone else in that they're undivided. But, if they were to fall I say it would be khorne or nurgle. I lean towards nurgle but...I dunno!

 TheDungen wrote:
well I seem to remember they were mentioned as followers of slaanesh in the oldest fluff.

I think even GW was a bit confused on that - the only evidence for it was the art spread in Slaves to Darkness, which was unclear about the issue. It should have been sorted by the Chaos Terminator article for Space Hulk but they omitted the Iron Warriors from it (whilst including Word Bearers and Night Lords).

Regarding them worshipping undivided, in Storm of Iron one of the other Captains tells Honsou that despite being despised as a foul halfbreed he still some grudging respect because unlike the rest of them he still believes in the ideals of Horus, IE: Undivided. Whilst the rest merely pay lip service.

He means ideals of Horus as in how to lead and guide the galaxy as well as what to do to immortal beings that claim themselves Emperor, not in how to worship.

I can die happy knowing that Slaanesh was voted, lol.

Fundamentally they are undivided with some slight deviancy to Khorne. The Iron Wariorors view the dark gods as a source of power to be bargained with, not really a pantheon to be worshipped, and of those few that do worship the Dark Gods, it's Khorne. We have fluff references for this between BL, the 3.5E codex, and the Index Astartes books. I don't think i've heard of Iron Warriors worshipping any other gods but the whole pantheon and occaisionally Khorne


TL;DR 98% Iron is Mightiest, 2% Khorne.

Crushing pragmatism, inexorable force applied with needle precision to one objective, systematic elimination of every trace or vestige of personality that doesn't meet their vision of perfection. The Iron Warriors don't care about emotion, there's no place for that in siege warfare. One iron warrior would gladly dig through a fortified adamantine wall with a sewing needle if it was necessary, and do it completely calmly without any enjoyment or malice. They are truly the living embodiment of the phrase "big guns never tire".

I feel like, whether they want to or not, their entire ethos is extremely pleasing to Slaanesh (shocked? Don't be). Slaanesh is the god of perfection in all things. I think he would be extremely excited to see the Iron Warriors sacrificing so much of their lives and personalities in the pursuit of perfection. I blame the fact that GW doesn't have their fluff consistent for Slaanesh, they say repeatedly that there's more to him/her than sex drugs and loud music, but they never back it up.

That said, an individual Iron Warrior could fall into pretty much any god's category depending on his own personal outlook. If he stopped being detached and started relentlessly crushing his enemies, hating them every second for daring to think they were superior to himself, then he begins to listen to the will of Khorne. If he begins to despair at the cruising reality of warfare and starts destroying fortifications for its own sake, just to see them collapse, he begins to serve Nurgle as the physical embodiment of entropy and the desire to ensure his own personal survival survive no matter what the costs. If he begins to thirst for knowledge, amassing more and more information about machinery, construction, weapons... then he begins to serve Tzeentch.

It's hard to say really. The fact that GW never explicitly defines the boundaries of each chaos god and leaves them open to interpretation (indeed the same action could be pleasing to multiple gods simultaneously).

The Iron Warriors as a whole worship Chaos Undivided, or not at all, and just see it as a tool. In the case they do choose a single god, it's Khorne, as they sometimes use Berzerkers to throw into holes in Enemy Fortifications. This pretty clearly shows that even when they worship, it is only to use the gods as a practical tool for the job.

For in-game purposes, you could model Bionics as Mark of Nurgle (+1 Toughness due to modifications) or MoT to represent better Technology in their force fields due to Dark Mechanicus allies) Really only Slaanesh doesn't fit.

According to a novel in the Iron Warrios omnibus, they worship a minor chaos God called Ima Asada; he's the god of Ironworks and Ironshops.

bosobo wrote:
According to a novel in the Iron Warrios omnibus, they worship a minor chaos God called Ima Asada; he's the god of Ironworks and Ironshops.

Well, that's the stupidest fething thing I've ever read.

Slaanesh-God of Lust
Khorne-God of Wrath
Nurgle-God of Pessimism
Tzeentch-God of Optimism
Ima Asada-God of FETHING IRONSHOPS

IRON ISNT AN EMOTION. IRON ISNT A CHARACTER. IRON ISNT A GOD.

IRON IS JUST A FETHING METAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL.

The God of whining, I couldn't stand siege of Castelax, all the whining about how the Emp wronged them without even saying exactly what he did to them.

I can see Nurgle for the Obliterator Virus (and the plague and famine caused by protracted siege warfare), Tzeentch for Warp-Sorcery and other Daemon-engine related fancies, Khorne for their berserker tactics (again, useful in siege warfare once the enemy is cracked)... the only one I can't really see fitting in is Slaanesh.

Although dementedwombat raises a very interesting point about their strive for perfection, I view the Prince of Pleasure being more about excess and other such, let's say extra-curricular, activities beyond straight up warfare that I just feel the Iron Warriors would find a waste of their time and effort.

However, all their above obsessions with viruses, lots of big siege guns, daemon-engines, breaking the unbreakable etc, could in turn be viewed as excessive and end up appealing to Slaanesh all the same.

I guess in the end the Iron Warriors, perhaps more than any other Chaos Legion, exemplify a truly Undivided faith, as they tap into, explore and exploit traits from all four (although I can still only really see three out of four, at least in ways that are immediately obvious).