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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Talking Banana wrote:
A lot of interesting lore and interpretation presented here, guys. Thank you.

I have one further question. "The Great Game" has come up a lot. When (in real historical time, i.e., approximately what year) did the Chaos God's "let's-string-this-out-for-as-long-as-possible-because-it's-fun Great Game" enter the canon of Warhammer lore? Where did that term first appear? Was it there right from the beginning, or is this a more recent idea?

Been there since at least Realms of Chaos. It essentially reflects that their nature is chaos and insanity. They can work together for a time, but even when all four are United they still jockey for position and interfere with each other’s actions. And thanks to their followers often being beyond rationality, such unity even in real space is little beyond nominal, with Champions eager to take each other out should the opportunity present itself.

We see this write large in AoS. There, Chaos effectively won, thanks to Archaon’s skill. But even once they’d broken the back of organised resistance in the Realms? It all went wrong. Again. Infighting, undermining etc etc. And that is what allowed the remnants of Sigmar and his allied God’s forces to regroup and reorganise - and why when Sigmar sent forth his Stormcast, there was still enough left to be worth saving.

I'd argue yes and no - don't forget in the AoS setting the Chaos Gods aren't as restricted as in 40K in terms of winning. They did win in Old World and they did tear it apart. They would have done the same to the Mortal Realms as well. Heck one of the early stories has a mage readying to teleport a huge chunk of realm into the Chaos Realm itself before he was thwarted by the agents of Sigmar.

It's important to note that Sigmar isolated himself away from the realms that fell, so that he could build his army.
Also whilst Chaos had won and was continuing to win, the realms are insanely vast and thus it took time to "win".

Infighting and such means that when Chaos wins its a slow win not an organised sweeping advance. But the Chaos gods in AoS can win and destroy everything and move onto another world/realm setting.

In 40K we get a distinct impression that they don't want to win outright because the Milky Way is a finite resource to them if they do that. So what they do in 40K is this Great Game where they sort of try to win but undermine their mortal followers at the last so that they preserve the chaos. I think a key difference is that in the 40K setting Chaos feeds very much off emotions, whilst in the fantasy setting it feeds more of raw magical power