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General Badassery, plain and simple. I was flipping through my codex that i haven't opened in ages and noticed a certain lack of anti - heroism. Yeah i get it, they're all supposed to be sadistic murderers hell bent on the destruction of the imperium and the path to daemonhood but why can't they have a little more fun doing it? Im not saying we need anything mary sue of the sorts just something more....badass.

Has anyone ever watched Sons of Anarchy on FX? Something like that, just not as goodguy-ish. What do you folks think?

Read some of the books from FFG on the subject

Like the chick who managed to bind Four Greater Daemons of Slaanesh to keep her alive, and it was like nothing to her, till she was granted daemonhood by slaanesh as both Pride in her skills and an insult to his own greater daemons for failing.

Chaos are pretty lame. They don't really do much other than launch things that could ~potentially~ crush the imperium, but are ultimately crushed.
"The heretic within" as a fluff concept is much cooler but doesn't translate into table top very well.

Honestly, i think actual, non chaos aligned renegades would make better bad guys than wanna be daemons.

Chaos had some excellently written and quite bad ass fluff back in 3rd edition.

Read the Night Lords novels. In addition to being the best BL books I've ever read, they show not only how incredibly evil Chaos Marines are, but that there's some depth to them beyond moustache-twirling Saturday morning cartoon villains.

Chaos Marines are not misunderstood anti-heroes. They are villains. Codex: Chaos Space Marines 3.5 says that word for word.

Nitros14 wrote:Chaos Marines are not misunderstood anti-heroes. They are villains. Codex: Chaos Space Marines 3.5 says that word for word.

And so every single chaos worshipper is under a hive mind and thus controlled by the group host to be evil.

Yeah no, most of them are quite evil, some just try and use chaos to accomplish their goals without falling (yeah no) the big thing is how they get there, some try to continue on under them with their old personality, but many do end up failing.

Of course it usually goes to gack depending on who it's talking of, don't expect much from say the World Eaters.

They need to flesh out a new Imperial Sector and then have a black Crusade crush the thing and start screwing up the natives. New fluff can be on repeated failed attempts to take it back. It wouldn't hurt the established lore that much and would give Chaos a victory and make them a real threat (maybe have them neutralize a Necron Tomb world, slaughter some eldar and drive off some orks to boot.

Chaos needs an epic win that hurts somewhere in the galaxy.

Nitros14 wrote:Chaos Marines are not misunderstood anti-heroes. They are villains. Codex: Chaos Space Marines 3.5 says that word for word.

I'm assuming you're referring to my post about the Night Lords novels. They books do portray them as misunderstood antiheroes, they're evil through and through. They just have motivation and depth beyond "Let's kill a planet because why not?" cartoon villainy.

Suddenly......HOUNSOU

GW is determined to make anyone who isn't Space Marines no longer badass.

Chaos marines need to be like fantasy deamons or grey knights, someone sets them up across the table and you go "oh dear, this will be a bit of a challenge"

I agree that they need more character, not more badassery though, i want the chaos marines to be truely alien in mind set and mini's, i want chaos lords to be able to eat hive tyrants for breakfast, i want new plastic marines that are not just spikey, they need to be utterly dark and evil, the current ones are not that

Chaos needs depth and darkness. They most certainly do not need more bad-arse characters and 'villians'. Part of the motivation to produce my own post-heresy Emperor's Children with ForgeWorld parts is because of the sheer amount of spikes, skulls and more skulls and all things Chaosy in GW's range. It fething sucks, blows balls out of the water and really smells of a cheap way to make mahreeens evul!

The malice should not be overt. It should be lingering, festering upon the very fringes of one's ideas of the iconic Space Marine, corrupting from within and slowly destroying.

But no... Apparently it's easier to stick a skull on a stick and give it to the nearest Marine. Because that's what bad men do.

i think there is definitely great potential in chaos, my fav anit hero fabius bile seems to have a great background, i mean he is evil, but not mindless and gives rise for alot of great background badassery and depth. cypher the fallen angel also had alot of fantastic badass ideas behind him and even reflected this on the table top way back when.

but sadly the majority of chaos and table top chaos seems to be a bit mindless devotion k.k.n.d

i suppose it's difficult to reflect depth and story and badassery on the table top...but it can definitely be done, emphasizing on traitors and war bands...kinda like pirates that would be really awesome to see chaos pirate type fluff and renegade armys that are not mindless drones of daemon hosts

Fabius Bile is more of a psychopath than anything else. He doesn't feel any pity or remorse, just doing what's necessary to achieve his goals.

Also, does the Dark Apostle series mean nothing? Or the Iron Warrior books? Night Lords are also pretty awesome.

We just need more of those kind of things. And I hope the new Chaos Codex provides them.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Night Lords novels are pretty much what you're looking for. SRM beat me to it, but I thought I would second that opinion. Those books are the only ones I've seen where Chaos Marines are portrayed as anything other than "blarrkillmurdercuzI'mevilblaarrgh." While I generally dislike the concept of antiheroes, since it gets way overdone, (and pretty much every hero in 40k is an antihero) I do agree that Chaos needs more motivation.

If you want some good "try and use Chaos against itself and end up falling to Chaos" business, I recommend the Eisenhorn trilogy and it's follow-up, the Ravenor trilogy, both by Dan Abnett. (Starting with Xenos and Ravenor respectively.)

Eiríkr wrote:Chaos needs depth and darkness. They most certainly do not need more bad-arse characters and 'villians'. Part of the motivation to produce my own post-heresy Emperor's Children with ForgeWorld parts is because of the sheer amount of spikes, skulls and more skulls and all things Chaosy in GW's range. It fething sucks, blows balls out of the water and really smells of a cheap way to make mahreeens evul!

The malice should not be overt. It should be lingering, festering upon the very fringes of one's ideas of the iconic Space Marine, corrupting from within and slowly destroying.

But no... Apparently it's easier to stick a skull on a stick and give it to the nearest Marine. Because that's what bad men do.

so true... so so true

Chaos is there for the "good guys" to beat up. They are the goofy villains of 40k that always have their evil plans foiled. Now here's a Wobbly Model Syndrome comic I'll post for no good reason at all.

Villains don't have to be cartoony or lack depth. They just need to lack redeeming features.