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Reading up on Warsmith Honsou, and his fluff describes him as someone who was born into Chaos as a newly created Marine in M41, rather than a recent renegade, or someone who dates back to the Heresy. He's also described as someone who is loyal to his code, and under different circumstances of birth, could have made a decent Loyalist Space Marine.

So, my question is, what other characters are culturally part of Chaos due to birth rather than by defection? If we take Chaos to be a religion, then there's loose real world analogies in people who didn't convert to say Christianity, but were brought up that way. And even though many don't really follow it too closely, still go to church occasionally, get their children baptised and get married, etc.

Most of the Chaos lore revolves around corruption and defection, with not much focus on this aspect as far as I can tell, despite many of the planets in the Eye of Terror and the Maelstron having populations in the billions who work and reproduce, live and die, generation after generation, as part of the larger Chaos civilization. I know many resources are stolen, and most workers are slaves, but there still must exist a form of administrative middle class on these planets at least to keep it all running.

There's the few-and-far-between antagonists of the Blood Pact mentioned in the Gaunt's Ghosts series.

Many of the worlds in the Gaunts Ghosts have chaos based societies. Look at the world of Devin, where Horus fell to Chaos.

Chaos worlds can be brutal, but they might not always be the case. I'm fairly certain the blood pact comes from a chaos human empire in the far corner of the Galaxy.

Judging by how the Blood Pact focus on Khrone's martial side over the rampant bloodletting, and how seemingly normal peasants make folk totems like khrone dolls, its probably easier than might be imagined.

Sure you've got Hellraiser-esque daemon worlds, but I imagine a 'normal' Chaos world is similar to its Imperial equivalent just with different churches and probably a few more ritual sacrifices. At its most benign you might have communities like Summerisle in Wicker Man or the town in The Lottery - fine, maybe even idyllic surroundings, but dark rituals are needed to keep it that way.

The Blood Pact was detailed more in a White Dwarf article that was GOING to be the start of a series called Index Malleus, before the magazine went to crap and then was reformatted. It didn't describe their homeworld too much, but apparently it's a tribal society, which at some point came under control of a single leader called the Gaur. They no doubt perform some blood sacrifices, but mostly they seem to focus their aggression outwards, at Imperium controlled worlds and rival Chaos factions. It's probably no worse than a lot of Imperium feral worlds that also believe in human sacrifice and honor through combat.

As someone else said, Chaos controlled worlds can also be very subtle in their corruption, particularly worlds where Tzeentch or Slaanesh holds sway. Summerisle and The Lottery are good examples of what these worlds might look like. Alternatively, you might have a Tzeentch run world where the bulk of the population is humans and mutants living together in harmony, and only the ruling sorcerers get up to the shady stuff.

On the other hand. a Nurgle world could be the exact opposite. It might look horrifying to outsiders, but to the people who grew up there, it would probably seem downright pleasant. It might be a peaceful place full of friendly natives, but everything looks like a hideous abomination, and the uninitiated can't so much as breathe the air without suffering a very painful death.

Two good sources for this are the FFG roleplaying game Black Crusade (which, despite its title, is set inside a mini-Eye-Of-Terror), and the Abbadon novel Talon of Horus, both of which feature 'just normal' life (in so far as there is such a thing) within the Eye.

The old Graphic Novel BloodQuest features the same sort of thing.

Some of the worlds are even.....I won't say "nice" but not inherently worse than many Imperial worlds.

The Hollows is a Forge World - granted, the bulk of the planet has been eaten away, leaving just the poles like a massive apple-core, and its primary export is daemon engines, but by and large it has many facets you'd recognise.

Q'Sal is even a fairly pleasant world - granted, it's inhabited by tzeenchian sorcerors, so the architecture treats gravity as an optional extra, but there are markets and shipyards and farms and people going about what are for them normal lives.

In Talon Of Horus, the leader of a freeport pointedly tells a chaos marine that the bulk of the 'empire of the eye' does not and never has belonged to them, any more than the imperium now does.


Black crusade is a good RPG. It's quite...wierd....for a lot of people seeing the Imperium from the outside. A perfectly valid story is an Imperial crusade rampaging through a region of space, essentially following the plot of Star Wars, with the Imperium playing the role of the Evil Galactic Empire.....

Just look at Earth.

 fallinq wrote:
On the other hand. a Nurgle world could be the exact opposite. It might look horrifying to outsiders, but to the people who grew up there, it would probably seem downright pleasant. It might be a peaceful place full of friendly natives, but everything looks like a hideous abomination, and the uninitiated can't so much as breathe the air without suffering a very painful death.

Now I want to see a story about a kitted-up Tau explorer team making planetfall through a thick, toxic atmosphere only to discover friendly grotesque natives. Nothing evil happens but the Ethereal in charge decides the Empire can do without some people, leaving the Nurglites sad their new friends didn't stick around.