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Sorry if this is a dumb question.

What is left when a deamon is banished (killed) and returns to the warp? Is there a phsical body containing bio matter or is just warp "stuff"? If it is bio matter, where does it come from? or is this just a hand wave

My thought is this, if there is no bio matter left behind, then deamons are the IoM's best hope to fight the nids. The nid expend energy to fight the deamons and take losses in bio matter that is unreplaced since the deamons leave nothing behind after they are cast back into the warp.

So, nids about to attack a planet? Just send a bunch of cultists you rounded up in the last cleansing and let them start summoning deamons, you can always exterminus it later after the nids have been stopped.

The Tyranids responded to daemons by treating them as other predators; adopting to all of their tricks (even nurgle couldn't disease them faster than they could evolve against his plagues) and then scouring them from the planet, crippling their chaos powers with the shadow in the warp and ripping them apart before chowing down. Shadowbrink is a pretty archetypical case of daemons vs tyranids as is Sondheim V, which was attacked by M'Kar the failborn. They might have done better on Sondheim V but they were lead by M'Kar who was won precisely zero things in his entire life, to the point that I think his promotion to Daemonhood was just a cruel joke at his expense so he'd probably find a way to screw it up.

In Siege of Castellax, a marine is possessed, and left behind a bit of goo, which is presumably biomatter, but a daemon entering the materium probably would leave nothing behind. In regards to letting a daemon incursion happen, that could get out of hand if the daemons escape, and I don't know if any servant besides radical Inquisitors would be willing to allow daemon's into the materium.

So I'm kinda getting conflicting answers. In the first, Kain is saying there is bio matter (I think, from mentioning that they are "chowing down") and Blackjack is saying that a Daemon Daemon (not a possessed guy) wouldnt be made of bio stuff (hence forth called "meat")

Is there anything definitve? Like an inquisitor doing a autopsy?

taurising wrote:
So I'm kinda getting conflicting answers. In the first, Kain is saying there is bio matter (I think, from mentioning that they are "chowing down") and Blackjack is saying that a Daemon Daemon (not a possessed guy) wouldnt be made of bio stuff (hence forth called "meat")

Is there anything definitve? Like an inquisitor doing a autopsy?

They don't eat the daemons, they eat the planet.

The sapient species on a planet offers a rather inconsequential amount of biomass; really what they get out of it is fancy new genes.

The real meat is in the plants, the fauna, the bacteria, and so on. The Tyranids just eat that.

taurising wrote:
So I'm kinda getting conflicting answers. In the first, Kain is saying there is bio matter (I think, from mentioning that they are "chowing down") and Blackjack is saying that a Daemon Daemon (not a possessed guy) wouldnt be made of bio stuff (hence forth called "meat")

Is there anything definitve? Like an inquisitor doing a autopsy?

I think Kain's statement of the nids "chowing down" was a more general idea of the bugs eating the planet and anything they can find in their typical behavior. To give a definitive statement, deamons do not consist of bio-matter in anyway. Instead, they consist of warp energy, like all warp creatures. Regrettably the only way I can back this up off hand is the fact that we know Horrors are absolutely NOTHING but rolled up magic jumping up and down. Now it would be assumed that other daemons are just the same, but horrors are explicitly mentioned because they are made much more...chaotically

When daemons are banished they do leave material remains behind. which is why Draigo was able to carve the name of the previous grand master in Mortarions heart. But that being said i would imagine that there wouldn't be enough to support an entire hive fleet. Also Tyranids don't consume planets just for sentient bodies, they consume all bio matter, plants, bacteria, protists, animals, so daemons bio matter is irrelevant if the planet itself is bio diverse. If it wasn't the nids wouldn't be there.

Some times they leave bits, some times they don't.
It probably wouldn't be very advisable to eat any daemon-goop though.

Yeah, I don't really know about this. Daemons leave behind bodies, or goo/bits or some kind, but whether they're actually physical matter (very unlikely in my opinion) or whether they're warp-stuff that has yet to dissolve back into nothingness isn't completely clear. I definitely lean towards warp energy that dissolves away after awhile, probably after eating through things like acid and being generally nasty. Let's just say I've never once read about an inquisitor or bio-magos with a daemon body preserved in a vat of liquid somewhere.

The point about sentient bio-mass being a tiny fraction of a planet's worth is important too. For instance, all insects combined weigh more than all humans combined on Earth today. Summoning a shedload of daemons to help fight instead of bringing more humans/eldar/whoever would be a negligible savings in bio-mass but would hopelessly ruin the planet no matter which side won.

Also Draigo carving things into Mortarion's heart isn't really relevant for two reasons: first, Mortarion is a daemon prince, which means he's part corporeal and part daemon (i.e. he's an immortal daemon but he still has a physical body which I suppose gets rebuilt anytime he dies), and second, that bit of fluff is so mind-numbingly stupid I refuse to really acknowledge it anyway.

Depends on who's writing the fluff, really. I would say, though, that a manifested daemon... that is, one that was conjured via sorcerous or psychic means, or stepped out of some sort of Warp Gate or Portal, and did not possess a mortal body, does not leave behind anything when it "dies", though one that takes possession of a sacrificial victim or psyker of some kind first would leave whatever mutated freak it appeared as after being destroyed.

Also I did some math on how much biomass the sapient population of a planet contributes.

There's about 7 billion people in the world right now and the average human mass is 65 kilograms so 455,000,000,000 kilograms or 455,000,000 tons. Seems like a big number right?

Well, the estimated biomass of the Earth is one to two trillion tons so humanity doesn't even make up 0.01% of the earth's biomass. Not to mention the Tyranids don't just eat the biomass, they also eat everything that is potentially useful for life. They drink the seas dry, they suck the atmosphere away, they consume all the minerals and compounds that might be useful for more organisms, so the amount of matter they consume goes up tremendously. Hell they even suck up and drink the lava with special magma-corers for nutrients.

You can reasonably get a figure of several quintillion tons with the amount of matter they consume per planet. Which means even living things make up only a tiny fraction of what they take from each world, and thus makes sapient beings an absolutely tiny percentage of what they eat. To put this in perspective, the sapient population of a planet is less a topping and more equivalent to a single bacteria on a delicious pizza.

The tyranids don't lose squat if the sapients are inedible so long as the rest of the planet is.

One has to wonder how "edible" Warp-twisted terrain is, though. How corrupting is its influence and all that sort of thing.

Of course, we are likely to put more thought into it than GW is.

So it would seem that my theory is unfounded. Yes daemons corrupt, but to the average beetle, this means nothing. And the nids would eat the beetle and all his buddies. So, although the actual daemons would put a loss on the nids books, overall, thier effect is not even worth noting.

I would argue that the life within the eye of terror would almost be completly warp energy, and therefor little/no use to the nids, so they would likely leave the stronghold of chaos alone in search of worlds that are not completly corrupted (or necron dominated).

Still and all, chaos needs the IoM to survive (to continue to have feelings that add power to chaos) and the nids are a threat to both of them. So would any of the gods feel a need to intervene to stop the nids from eating everything?

 GKTiberius wrote:
When daemons are banished they do leave material remains behind.

Yes, but unless the daemon has been permanently bound into an object the remains usually disappear after a while.

The only daemonic body parts that are permanently in the material plane are the few relics on Titan in which the daemon has been bound into. Like the skull of that one daemon who is forced to silently watch the GKs have century upon century of victories while he remains bound for eternity.

Yes daemons corrupt, but to the average beetle, this means nothing.

Not necessarily. Insect life in a corrupted landscape could take on daemonic traits, energies and the like. Beetles, for example, could become some sort of hideous, Nurgle-blessed monstrosity.

Don't you have to have someone to get rid of the demonic residue like the Grey Knights?

In the old original Realms of Chaos books, it described the Bloodletter's Hellblade and said it dissolved back into formless warp matter and rapidly disappeared if the Bloodletter was killed, and in fact the Hellblade was actually an integral part of the Bloodletter rather than a separate inanimate object. Presumably something similar happens to pure warp spawned flesh, so daemons remain mysterious to the average person since there isn't lots of evidence after the fact. For daemons that manifested through possessing a person, the vessel's remains would be left, albeit mangled, mutated, or disfigured, since there was real matter in the first place, just pumped full of energy from the warp.

Now GW itself is not entirely consistent either. For example, the Raiders of Commorragh has a bit of fluff background on the Archon Khadys Abrahak, and his picture depicts (and has labelled) a cloak described as:

Flayed Skin Cloak
The Archon proudly wears the flayed skin of a Herald of Khorne that he defeated in combat. The Daemon's life essence remains bound within its ragged hide
p. 51, Raiders of Commorragh

Technically I suppose one could argue the daemon isn't actually dead and is more imprisoned within the remnants of its own flesh. I could see how the Dark Eldar might be able to pull off something seemingly impossible like that since they seem to be a faction gifted at flesh crafting to the point of being able to do supernatural things with it.

In Path of the Outcast on p. 227, a Daemonette is killed and instantly dissolves into pastel blue mist. However on the cover of the 5th edition Eldar Codex and repeated in the latest Eldar Codex is a picture of a Saim-Hann Autarch stepping over the body of a slain Daemonette. So there may not be a clear rule for how or when a daemon's body dissolves.

 GKTiberius wrote:
When daemons are banished they do leave material remains behind. which is why Draigo was able to carve the name of the previous grand master in Mortarions heart. But that being said i would imagine that there wouldn't be enough to support an entire hive fleet. Also Tyranids don't consume planets just for sentient bodies, they consume all bio matter, plants, bacteria, protists, animals, so daemons bio matter is irrelevant if the planet itself is bio diverse. If it wasn't the nids wouldn't be there.

I don't think that the draigo example is worth mentioning:
firstly, it's horrible waridan skub, and should be forgotten as the fail it is (although the audiobook version is slightly more logical. SLIGHTLY.)
secondly, it was done with a psychic weapon by a person knowing his true name (and hence having enournous power over his very nature). I sincerely doubt that the Hive Mind could do that.

I guess it would all depend on how Chaos saturated the planet is. If the planet has only recently been attacked by a Daemonic Incursion then their link to the warp might be quite precarious, hence their almost instantaneous disappearance when they are slain. Whereas for a Daemonworld or a world soaked in warp energy, bodies hang around longer.

So a Tyranid attack on a planet where Daemons are based would have an increasing effect in severing the Daemons tie to the warp due to the shadow of the hivemind. More Tyranids, less stability for the Daemons.

 Pilau Rice wrote:
I guess it would all depend on how Chaos saturated the planet is. If the planet has only recently been attacked by a Daemonic Incursion then their link to the warp might be quite precarious, hence their almost instantaneous disappearance when they are slain. Whereas for a Daemonworld or a world soaked in warp energy, bodies hang around longer.

A good theory, but unfortunately the Path of the Outcast example of instantaneous disappearance occurred on a crone world in the Eye of Terror. Same sort of crone world location for the the Autarch stepping over the Herald of Slaanesh body example.

Perhaps instead it is related to the power of the individual daemon instead. Stronger daemons maybe have their bodies hang around a little longer, and during this time if someone is prepared and quick enough various special means can be used to preserve the body (explaining why a Dark Eldar Archon can be running around with the hide of a Bloodletter for a cloak).

Iracundus wrote:

 Pilau Rice wrote:
I guess it would all depend on how Chaos saturated the planet is. If the planet has only recently been attacked by a Daemonic Incursion then their link to the warp might be quite precarious, hence their almost instantaneous disappearance when they are slain. Whereas for a Daemonworld or a world soaked in warp energy, bodies hang around longer.

A good theory, but unfortunately the Path of the Outcast example of instantaneous disappearance occurred on a crone world in the Eye of Terror. Same sort of crone world location for the the Autarch stepping over the Herald of Slaanesh body example.

Eldar trickery!

 Beaviz81 wrote:
Don't you have to have someone to get rid of the demonic residue like the Grey Knights?

Not exactly. That's not what the GK are for anyway.... unless, by "residue", you mean "witnesses" and then, yes, you have to dispose of them. Permanently.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
Don't you have to have someone to get rid of the demonic residue like the Grey Knights?

Not exactly. That's not what the GK are for anyway.... unless, by "residue", you mean "witnesses" and then, yes, you have to dispose of them. Permanently.

Luckily the Tyranids do that in the process of nomnoming the planet.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
Don't you have to have someone to get rid of the demonic residue like the Grey Knights?

Not exactly. That's not what the GK are for anyway.... unless, by "residue", you mean "witnesses" and then, yes, you have to dispose of them. Permanently.

This was actually a darkly humorous post by you. Hehe. Ouf. I just think you need psykers to scour the evidence of demon being present like Ciaphas Cain has alluded to.

Civilians definitely get mind scoured, the PDF usually does, the Imperial Guard is incredibly inconsistent on whether or not they do, Even if you wanted to, the Space Marines, Soritas, Knights, Tempestus Scions, and Adeptus Mechanicus would probably tell you to piss off.