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Was thinking about the previous outbreak of the Enslavers leading to the reason the Necrons went into hibernation (at least in their old background I am unsure if the current has removed all mention of the outbreak) and while not usually one to make threads about hypothetical scenarios I was curious as to how the current setting would react to another large scale Enslaver outbreak. I know they still appear from time to time, though in a smaller number, and they may be kept in check partially by the actions of the black ships and possibly the Ordo Xenos. But what if somehow they managed to slip through?

Also I suppose would it be possible for them to get to the Grey Knights. They are beings of the immaterium, yet not Daemons specifically if I remember correctly, though they do apparently possess in a similar manner yet show no outward signs of possession other than subtly guiding their host to further their own goals. More of a parasite. Of course they find it harder to get into sanctioned psykers minds so that may make the Grey Knights as out of the question as if they were any other type of Daemon.

Awesomeness would happen.
No really, I'm all for another enslaver plague. It'll spark something new into the story.
We might even be able to field them.

Anyway, the IoM would respond as usual - with brute force and paranoia, and will probably call in the GK and inquisition. They will most likely blame it on the xenos as well.

The Tau will try to study/make friends with them...and get killed. I'd hate to see what happens when an ethereal that gets possessed.

Necrons will just shoot them; no biggy, just another "life" form. Besides, can enslavers possess machines? I thought they could only infect organic lifeforms.

The Eldar will have the best chances against them, since they know of these sort of things.

The Orks will be thrilled - more 'tingz for fightin'!

Tyranids...I don't know. Can you eat enslavers?

The Eldar are fethed, they don't have the numbers to withstand another incursion on that scale (they only survived the last one by hiding in the webway and waiting for the noise to stop). The Dark Eldar will be fine as psychic trickery is one of the only things that doesn't go in comorragh, that and I doubt the Enslavers will be even able to reach it. The Orks survived the last one just fine so they'll probably be alright, though it's likely they'll take quite a lot of losses. The necrons would shrug and go back to sleep and wait for the Enslavers to go away again. The Tau are mostly safe as they don't have the number of psykers needed to make them of much interest to the enslavers, but if they try to interfere too much the Enslavers will come and eradicate them utterly.

The forces of Chaos are fethed, if there are enough Enslavers to engage on another galaxy wide massacre of all life they're going to start overwhelming the Daemons and shoving them to the side and then snacking on their mortal servants. The Thousand Sons legion will in all likelihood be completely eradicated. I can only see the World Eaters with their lack of psykers avoiding being screwed over, and even then since they hang out in the eye of terror that may not be a surefire bet.

The Imperium is fethed, the Enslavers are going to omnomnom all of their astropaths and the whole system will collapse as they proceed to devour all the psykers in the Imperium they can before turning their attentions to the rest of mankind and making a mess out of them. I would go as far as to say that even the Horus Heresy itself didn't have quite as large an outpouring of warp entities as the Enslaver plague.

Now the Tyranids will be interesting, will the shadow of the hive mind protect them? Well it does seem to keep daemons away and presumably it also keeps enslavers away. But I can also see the two coming to conflict over morsels, Enslaver warp power against Tyranid biological perfection. For those who haven't been ruthlessly slaughtered by the Enslavers, it would be something worth breaking out the popcorn to watch.

What are enslavers anyway? I always thought of them as just being another type of demon that has that nice trick of possessing people and turning them into living portals.

CthuluIsSpy wrote:What are enslavers anyway? I always thought of them as just being another type of demon that has that nice trick of possessing people and turning them into living portals.

Enslavers predate Chaos and Daemons by millions of years. They're a very odd and antedeluvian sort of warp entity from a time before anything resembling the human pattern of thought was a thing. They're massively potent in the ways of mind bulletry and were originally brought into existence by the sheer trauma of the Old one's war with the Necrons, a trauma that the Old Ones kept on making worse by churning out highly emotional psychic race after highly emotional psychic race. The result was a warp incursion that would make the Horus heresy and the Black Crusades look like a pleasant stroll through the park in comparison. We aren't talking about just a few sectors of space, we are talking about the entire galaxy at once being knee deep in enslavers eating the psykers and ripping apart the rest with mind bullets.

I mean, an event on the scale of the Enslaver Plague would be so cataclysmic that it could very well threaten the chaos gods themselves for want of anything left alive to fuel them. The vast swarms of lovecraftian monstrosities floating around in the warp and blasting apart anything that tries to muscle in on their territory probably won't help as they start to outcompete the Daemons and become the dominant warp entity once again. Chaos would corrupt the galaxy for a while before burning itself out and things returning to normal if it won, an Enslaver plague would cripple it beyond all recognition for millions of years.

Essentially a new Enslaver Plague would mean "Game over, you're fethed, try again next geological era." For pretty much everyone.

Think angry xenos jellyfish roughly the size of a man (a touch bigger), they enter the world by devouring your soul basically and taking control of the empty husk like a puppet. If the husk dies they're freed into the world and there's no way to tell if they're possessed as they show no signs.

Now think if a "Daemon" could possess even non-psykers if they were close enough to a possessed psyker. Basically if it was alive and had a mind it could be consumed. At least I think I remember them being able to also possess non-psykers. So they could probably eat the Tau as well.

They look something like this. At least according to Lexicanum.

Kain wrote:
Enslavers predate Chaos and Daemons by millions of years. They're a very odd and antedeluvian sort of warp entity from a time before anything resembling the human pattern of thought was a thing. They're massively potent in the ways of mind bulletry and were originally brought into existence by the sheer trauma of the Old one's war with the Necrons, a trauma that the Old Ones kept on making worse by churning out highly emotional psychic race after highly emotional psychic race. The result was a warp incursion that would make the Horus heresy and the Black Crusades look like a pleasant stroll through the park in comparison. We aren't talking about just a few sectors of space, we are talking about the entire galaxy at once being knee deep in enslavers ating the psykers and ripping apart the rest with mind bullets.

One does kind of get that impression of "Err..what the hell did we just do?" when looking at the tactics deployed during the War in Heaven.

Old-Fluff wise at least, the initial outburst and losses during the War in Heaven between the Necrontyr and the Old Ones didn't really register much of a change in the Warp.

It could very well be that both races were not so predisposed to the emotional outbursts (and negative consequences) that characterize the later races like the Eldar, the Orks, or..well..us.

The Eldar and the Krork were purposely bred to not only take advantage of their use as combat troops during the actual physical war with the newly formed Necrons, but also to exploit their heavy emotional baggage and hurl it at their enemies.

And that in turn may have created the Eldar Gods (who may have been Old Ones who underwent a kind of apotheosis to further battle their Necron enemies)...and the Enslavers.

Well isn't the Warp currently dominated by Chaos now? So wouldn't most Enslavers already be battling Daemons in the Warp? I also assume that they lost given the prevalence of Chaos and the lack of Enslavers. That being said Enslavers would be a pretty cool new army, they would fill the Lovecraftian, sentient-evil- jellyfish archetype of alien that 40k is missing.

Enslavers plague broke out a while ago but very small scale. Not the War of heaven aftermath. (Reminds me of how much i love Eldar lore :B hugs.) But anyway the Enslavers would be a cool army to fight against. Especially lore-wise.

Enslavers have more or less been deleted from the story thanks to Ward. Now it's the Necrons went into hiding to avoid the Eldar.

Stop.Saying.That

The Enslavers are not gone. There is nothing in the codex to say that they are gone. All it did was change the reason why the necrons went into hibernation. It did not delete an entire race.
If anything, it proves that the Enslavers are still exist, since Trazyn has an Enslaver corpse in his collection.

In fact, I would say that now that an Enslaver plague just got a hell lot more dangerous, as there is now no experience against it.
Before, I wouldn't be surprised if the Eldar had some sort of trick to get rid of them, in case of another plague. Now they have no reason to have such a trick.

Harriticus wrote:Enslavers have more or less been deleted from the story thanks to Ward. Now it's the Necrons went into hiding to avoid the Eldar.

Thats not true. Storm Wardens had the entire chapter almost exterminated by the Enslaver plague.
Check your facts mate.

asimo77 wrote:Well isn't the Warp currently dominated by Chaos now? So wouldn't most Enslavers already be battling Daemons in the Warp? I also assume that they lost given the prevalence of Chaos and the lack of Enslavers. That being said Enslavers would be a pretty cool new army, they would fill the Lovecraftian, sentient-evil- jellyfish archetype of alien that 40k is missing.

The initial conditions for the post-war in heaven enslaver plague died away, and thus the Enslavers became far less numerous, allowing the upstart daemons to take over. But if the conditions became right for another enslaver plague on that scale, they'd simply overwhelm the daemons with sheer numbers. Who knows? They might actually kill the chaos gods themselves and cast down the forces of chaos to usher in a far more terrible reign in the warp. However, unlike Chaos, the Enslavers will always burn themselves out, they can't do the sustainable corruption of Chaos, they must OMNOMNOM delicious souls until there's nothing left to eat.

So the Devils have Devils?

Asherian Command wrote:So the Devils have Devils?

The Daemons are Demons from religious texts with varying amounts of lovecraftian influence (most for Tzeentchilist, least for Khornate), the Enslavers are by comparison, are way more weighted towards the Lovecraftian end of the scale. Daemons are evil, but usually understandable, even controllable. they're still the products of the mindsets of the current races of the galaxy (though really out of the major races only mankind really feeds into it). Enslavers are so greatly divorced from the human mindset that the kind of accord you can reach with a Daemon is flat out impossible to do with an Enslaver.

Yes so does this mean that Daemons would fear Enslavers?
I mean they can't do something to another warpbeast. Especially if it can nomnomnom your vassals.

what I have seen is that the Enslavers take alot of manpower to put down just one intrusion

Asherian Command wrote:Yes so does this mean that Daemons would fear Enslavers?
I mean they can't do something to another warpbeast. Especially if it can nomnomnom your vassals.

what I have seen is that the Enslavers take alot of manpower to put down just one intrusion

The Daemons likely try to keep the Enslavers from ever becoming a threat to their current rule of the warp. They probably do their best to hunt the enslavers in the warp but I can't imagine such monstrously powerful warp blasting entities as Enslavers go down easily. The best they can do is try to nomnomnom their essences or scatter them beyond reformation in a reasonable timeframe. A fresh Enslaver plague on the WIH scale would result in things being flipped, with small pockets of daemons cowering in the warp while packs of Enslavers turn the realms of the Gods into their own personal cribs.

Would be a cool concept to see written too. Probably would own an entire space marine company. And seeing how Pyskers won't do gakin

Asherian Command wrote:Would be a cool concept to see written too. Probably would own an entire space marine company. And seeing how Pyskers won't do gakin

It'd also make the Grey Knights useless, all they'd do is provide more food. Rather, the deathwatch would be better suited for dealing with Enslavers, as they won't be fethed over within moments of arriving on the scene.

Still the part I think would be most interesting with the GK is that they probably wouldn't realise until enough of them had latched on and it was too late. I suppose they could also wait in hosts to be transferred to even more hosts.

It'd be interesting to find out if they were able to look through the host's memories, it'd also make them a little more sinister.

Consider it this way..


Its the equivalent of having a Demon (with all the cultural baggage that word carries) now being forced to fight something equivalent to Great Cthulhu (in terms of mindset) to get a meal.

One set of creatures - despite their general detrimental attitude toward creatures of the Materium - speaks to our hopes/fears/desires.

In essence, they are the sum of our weaknesses.


The other set of creatures, we barely have a reference point to. They were born out of a different set of drives/urges that we as a species may only have the barest inkling/overlap with.

The Warp is a big place, I'm sure there is enough space in it where Daemons aren't living next door to Enslavers. The warps a crazy place as well, maybe they live within certain pockets of warp space that Daemons can't inhabit

I take it that the Daemons are the Imperium of the warp and the Enslavers are something like the Tau, although more dispersed. There are also lots of other entities that reside in the warp too, other than Daemons.

Daemons are probably more concerned with waging wars against each other or eating human souls rather than against lesser creatures. It's possible that they share some kind of relationship, they are anti - life after all.

Edit: Spelling

I like to think each God has its own sort of dimension within the warp as the realms which are described from time to time with the more minor Daemons in the gaps between them. Enslavers are probably in those gaps as well or something like that.

In the few recent fluff(-y, as they are not studio material, but BL or FFG publications) pieces featuring them, they are shown as lovecraftian entities, at least to a certain point: utterly incomprensible and detatched from any human set of thought to human minds, but fully capable of using their human hosts powers and knowledge to their fullest extent, coaxing other non-possessed mortals to do their bidding () and being able of long term, convoluted (but detatched from human logic, anyway) planning to further their own goals and regain a foothold in the Materium.
They could certainly be a match for deamons if they were to return with the massive post-War on Heaven numbers and strenght, but I doubt they have overlapping areas of interest, at least as long as their numbers aren't high enough to menace Chaos food source: where deamons feed on mortal emotions and worship, build empires and gain power, fight among themselves for influence and molding every planet they touch in a little extension of their own realm (being an extention of human's warped psyche on extra galactic scale), Enslavers's objectives are little little more than those of a hungry beast: feeding themselves, leaving every place they visit barren and wasted: they care not for power or domination, only for food.
They both feed on your soul, but, while a deamon's objective is to corrupt you, to coax you into willingly offering them yourself to them, enslavers just take what they want and feed.
Regarding their relationship with other races, while Eldars could be wiped out by a second enslaver invasion (being a psychic race, every one of them could be the starting gate for the invasion), old Necrons could be at best starved by them (or at least the C'tan could be), Newcrons not so much (they would probably welcome the news of a galaxy epurated of intelligent, living life forms), while the Tau empire could be easily smothered by them (IIRC, enslavers need just a psyker bridgehead to reach the materium, which they could easily find in some of the client races, from whiuch they can possess even non-psykers).

Pilau Rice wrote:The Warp is a big place, I'm sure there is enough space in it where Daemons aren't living next door to Enslavers. The warps a crazy place as well, maybe they live within certain pockets of warp space that Daemons can't inhabit

I take it that the Daemons are the Imperium of the warp and the Enslavers are something like the Tau, although more dispersed. There are also lots of other entities that reside in the warp too, other than Daemons.

Daemons are probably more concerned with waging wars against each other or eating human souls rather than against lesser creatures. It's possible that they share some kind of relationship, they are anti - life after all.

Edit: Spelling

If by some cataclysm the Enslavers returned to their peak numbers, the Daemon's grip on the warp would be greatly threatened if not outright obliterate it. They are competing for a resource, mortals. Daemons need mortals alive in order to feed off of their emotions, though they sometimes just eat them outright. Enslavers don't give a damn about the emotions, they only care about devouring them. While the Enslaver's system will always lead to a burnout as they simply burn through the available stock of living beings to consume, until that burnout happens when there's simply nothing left for them to eat, they won't be affected by the plummeting population of sapients across the Galaxy. Chaos however, will be greatly harmed by it. In the aftermath, with none of the races who usually feed them left standing, Chaos in it's present form would simply die even if the Enslavers didn't make a direct assault on it's warp realms.

The potential survivors are the Orks (they survived it once through unexplained means, though I assume it had something to do with their sporing, they'd probably survive it again), the Tyranids (the shadow can likely keep the enslavers from turning them into gates, but the gribblies would still have to fight them in the physical realm), The Dark Eldar (Enslavers are no more able than daemons to penetrate into the webway, it's how the Eldar survived the great enslaver plague), the Harlequins (same reasons as the Dark Eldar plus the protection of Cegorach), and the Necrons. Everyone else is fethed.

And note that out of these, all of these survivors have some way of denying the Chaos Gods their contribution to the warp. The ork's warp power goes to Gork and Mork and Gork and Mork only, the Tyranids have no emotions anyway and even if they did it would still only feed into the hive mind, the Dark Eldar drink the souls of others to substitute (though as Slaanesh would likely be dead they wouldn't have to do this anymore...but of course this is the dark eldar we're talking about) and the Harlequins are specially trained against Chaos and their devotion goes to Cegorach.

So yeah, Chaos is as boned as the rest. But seeing as how the Enslavers would only go after sapient beings (discounting the necrons, who are likely still off the menu for the Enslavers) only going after things that do not fit this bill (Necrons, Tyranids) if they try to interfere in their mind rape of everything capable of abstract thought, that would leave plenty of Biomass for the Tyranids to just stroll in and consume unopposed. Of course, that is assuming they weren't devastated in a war with the Enslavers and their mind bulletry.

So if the Necrons play it smart and just wait out the storm, depending on how bad the Orks and Tyranids are hurt, they might have the opportunity to sweep in and more or less achieve total hegemony over the entire galaxy. Hegemony achieved by default, but hegemony nontheless.

Kain wrote:
If by some cataclysm the Enslavers returned to their peak numbers, the Daemon's grip on the warp would be greatly threatened if not outright obliterate it.

That's not something the Chaos Gods would allow.

Pilau Rice wrote:

Kain wrote:
If by some cataclysm the Enslavers returned to their peak numbers, the Daemon's grip on the warp would be greatly threatened if not outright obliterate it.

That's not something the Chaos Gods would allow.

If they have enough numbers the Chaos God's opinion on the matter would be entirely meaningless as they are overpowered. Even the worst daemonic incursions are pretty much nothing compared to the great enslaver plague following the war in heaven. This suggests that at their absolute peak, the Enslavers were truly a force to be reckoned with, likely more dominant over the warp than the Daemons are now. The Chaos Gods are mighty, but if the conditions in the materium alter things in the warp to give rise to a new enslaver plague on the scale of the post war in heaven invasion, even they could very possibly be destroyed, if not by hordes of enslavers firing mind bullets at them then by them killing off pretty much anything that can feed them in the materium, or a combination of both; with the Chaos Gods and their daemonic servants becoming increasingly weaker and less numerous as the Enslavers destroy their power source in the materium until the Enslavers just eradicate them from the warp altogether.

Kain wrote:

Pilau Rice wrote:

Kain wrote:
If by some cataclysm the Enslavers returned to their peak numbers, the Daemon's grip on the warp would be greatly threatened if not outright obliterate it.

That's not something the Chaos Gods would allow.

If they have enough numbers the Chaos God's opinion on the matter would be entirely meaningless as they are overpowered. Even the worst daemonic incursions are pretty much nothing compared to the great enslaver plague following the war in heaven. This suggests that at their absolute peak, the Enslavers were truly a force to be reckoned with, likely more dominant over the warp than the Daemons are now. The Chaos Gods are mighty, but if the conditions in the materium alter things in the warp to give rise to a new enslaver plague on the scale of the post war in heaven invasion, even they could very possibly be destroyed, if not by hordes of enslavers firing mind bullets at them then by them killing off pretty much anything that can feed them in the materium, or a combination of both; with the Chaos Gods and their daemonic servants becoming increasingly weaker and less numerous as the Enslavers destroy their power source in the materium until the Enslavers just eradicate them from the warp altogether.

They are also the Gods of the Warp, if anything threatened their power over their own realm, they would be quick to change this.

The Chaos Gods did not come into true being until after the War in Heaven. Things are different now, the Daemons of Chaos and their Gods are the dominant power and that won't change.

Pilau Rice wrote:

Kain wrote:

Pilau Rice wrote:

Kain wrote:
If by some cataclysm the Enslavers returned to their peak numbers, the Daemon's grip on the warp would be greatly threatened if not outright obliterate it.

That's not something the Chaos Gods would allow.

If they have enough numbers the Chaos God's opinion on the matter would be entirely meaningless as they are overpowered. Even the worst daemonic incursions are pretty much nothing compared to the great enslaver plague following the war in heaven. This suggests that at their absolute peak, the Enslavers were truly a force to be reckoned with, likely more dominant over the warp than the Daemons are now. The Chaos Gods are mighty, but if the conditions in the materium alter things in the warp to give rise to a new enslaver plague on the scale of the post war in heaven invasion, even they could very possibly be destroyed, if not by hordes of enslavers firing mind bullets at them then by them killing off pretty much anything that can feed them in the materium, or a combination of both; with the Chaos Gods and their daemonic servants becoming increasingly weaker and less numerous as the Enslavers destroy their power source in the materium until the Enslavers just eradicate them from the warp altogether.

They are also the Gods of the Warp, if anything threatened their power over their own realm, they would be quick to change this.

The Chaos Gods did not come into true being until after the War in Heaven. Things are different now, the Daemons of Chaos and their Gods are the dominant power and that won't change.

As much as I dislike his fluff, the fact that the Chaos Gods are stated to be unable to do anything to Draigo suggests that even within their realms they are not all powerful. If a catastrophe in the materium (which the Gods cannot directly influence) were to bring the Enslavers back to their old numbers, the Chaos Gods would be hard pressed to overcome that much concentrated psychic energy. Seeing as how they cannot overcome the Shadow of the Hive Mind or the Light of the Astronomicon despite there being plenty of good reasons for them to do so, suggests that something on a similar scale would simply be beyond their ability to overcome. An enslaver plague capable of affecting the entire galaxy simultaneously would probably be a warp front of similar power to the Shadow of the Hive Mind or the Astronomicon. And unlike those two it's going to do a lot more than just passively affect the warp, they're going to actively blow up anything that tries to stop their nomming.

As the Enslavers in the materium (which again, the gods of the warp can't directly affect) slaughter everything that Chaos needs to feed itself, the Gods will become more and more ineffectual and their servants will likewise become a weaker and weaker force in the warp until the Enslavers decide to just finish them off once and for all and kill the Chaos Gods to prevent any further interference in their harvest of the materium after having weakened them enormously. Chaos has an achilles heel, and that is it's dependence on the Materium, while it is a hard achilles heel to exploit, if anything can do it, it would be a Great Enslaver Plague. We're talking about an event that would make the Horus Heresy and the Thirteen Black Crusades look like a minor scrap over cutting in front of a line.

There's lore regarding Enslavers getting through in the Dark Heresy supplements. I recommend looking up Creatures Anathema.