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As we know, each Daemon is a (as the Lexicanum puts it) - 'fraction of the god's own power and act as an extension of their will'.
As a Chaos God's power waxes and wanes, so too does the power of its relevant Daemons. Obviously Greater Daemons have more power and act as a greater part of the will of the God they were created from.
We also know you can't kill Daemons - merely banish them back to the realm of the immaterium until they regain their strength.

Now, there have been some Daemonic entities locked away by the Grey Knights in tesseract labyrinths -
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tesseract_labyrinth
but due to the rarity and complexity of such devices, that isn't a very practical solution for ending Chaos as a whole.

What about Daemonhosts?
We know that they can be locked away and contained.
We know that Greater Daemons can be bound to them.

Why not bind millions if not billions of Daemons, lock them away and contain their threat? Convert Penal Worlds to Daemonhost Vaults.
The Imperium has the manpower, resources and will to get this done, especially considering it is the prime enemy.

----------------------------

As a side question - if the Imperium successfully managed to lock away a large enough percentage of a Chaos God's power/ will (as each Daemon is but a fraction of it) would it actually harm the God itself?

Because it's 100% heretical and monstrous. Remember that the IoM takes things like damnation and eternal torment very seriously. Condemning billions of souls to hell, by being eatern alive by Daemons is something that Lorgar would do, and indeed has done in his time. This is so far from the Emperor's vision for humanity that only the most debased and monstrous of radical Inquisitors would do... maybe.

The Imperium would essentialy turn into Chaos-worshipping hegemeony. Remember that to create a Daemonhost you need a proper ritual. A ritual of Chaos. Yeah...

Still, this is a very cool idea for a Dark Heresy campaign and I'm planning to steal it for just that purpose. Thanks for that.

Rituals to summon the daemon would require some kind or sacrifice, wouldn't they?
So there's a cost to this- presumably you'd have to offer something precious (maybe a life) and possibly strengthen the gods in the process.

So the ritual itself is heretical and traitorous.

The second heresy is the life you take- a soul consumed by the daemon when it inhabits the body. As noted above, condemning a human soul to eternal torment is frowned upon to say the least.

You could lessen both of these heresies by using alien lives. Orks should make good daemonhosts/possessed for the same reason Astartes do- their bodies are tough and able to withstand excessive mutation that might kill a human.

Lets say you go through with it, Radical Ordo Xenos/Malleus project.
Mass-summon and bind nurgle daemons into an Ork force 1000 strong. You then place them in a massive vault with runes of binding and turn on the gellar fields, then the stasis fields, sealing them powerless forever in green bodies frozen in time.
Job done, right?

Tzeentch loves your scheming and is fueled both by it, the hubris involved and the weakening of his rival.

Now you have mindscrubbed stormtroopers guarding the vault 24/7, which is on an asteroid field hidden far from the action with its own power generators- to keep the fields active. Maybe you've repeated the experiment, locked a few greater daemons up. Perhaps you've refined the process to employ sisters of battle teams wielding blessed aetheric proton cannons, weakening daemons so they may be bound to xenos creatures in jars, boxes or thrown spherical containers.

Now your collection has grown and the facility with it. You'll need to employ more staff to maintain the generators.

Maybe it's working and the warpstorms/eye/phenomena are receding with the waning power of the gods. You'll need to strike further afield to capture more daemons as the conditions for summoning worsen.
The Imperium makes great gains and pushes forward into areas previously unaccessible by warp travel. Your facility is far, far behind the front lines of Imperial expansion and the industry, trade and military strongholds which have been pushed forward to consolidate the gains.

One day, your stasis field flickers and the gellar field goes down. Maybe it was a genuine fault, mechanical failuure or unexpected cosmic radiation. Was there a chaos infiltrator among the mechanicum laycrews brought on to service your generators? Did you screen for heresy but neglect to screen for xenos influence- a genestealer hybrid come to weaken the imperium?

Or did the dark gods take a direct hand and have a daemon redirect a comet into your asteroid?

Suddenly ships start going missing and portals open on worlds thought safe. The gods' power restored, the warpstorms come rushing back, cutting off frontier worlds and plunging them into hell.
The Imperium's explorator fleets and its newly developed trade links, along with a crusade fleet suddenly stranded in enemy territory are lost forever, swallowed by the fell powers.

Your asteroid base is bathed in awful warp power as the thousands of daemon hosts ravage the guards and saturate the very stone with their twisted power. The base starts to move under its own power, minor asteroids orbiting it as it is propelled through realspace towards the nearest inhabited system.
Portals open on its surface and daemonic legions step through with dark mechanicus , binding deamons into the defense systems of your base, even as the surface of the asteroid takes on the appearance of a snarling horned skull, a smiling infant weeping tears of blood, a screaming woman whose eyes have rotted away and a serpent intertwining and penetrating all of the above.

You sealed evil away in a bottle, never considering that the bottle might break. This is Eldar hubris 101 and you have failed miserably.

Because bonding a Greater Daemon is an immense task in itself. Then you give that greater Daemon a material host, something it longs for, that is powerful enough to house it, likely a space marine or other superstrong human. Plus you literally have gazillions (that's a metric fethton of zeros) Daemons running about. And if it fails you've just summoned a Greater Daemon next to you.

Ignoring the fact it's heresy because let's face it - That won't stop it happening there are a ridiculous amount of problems.

You need to stop a zealous faction stopping you, you need to stop Chaos stopping you, you need a reliable system that won't stop to keep the Daemon hosts alive, you need somewhere to keep them all, there's the sheer amount of Daemons there are to seal away, you need to take all of these resources away from somewhere and it goes on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the plot from Ghostbusters?

 Skinflint Games wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the plot from Ghostbusters?

Haven't seen the new one and can't remember the old one.

This is exactly how more radical inquisitors start down the slippery slope; they see the futility of fighting Chaos head on and trying to eradicate Chaos entirely from existence, so they instead try to contain Chaos.

The next step would be to logically realize that daemons can be binded to one's will, and so daemon weapons suddenly becomes a viable option.

And so on, until the lines between fighting chaos and serving chaos becomes one and the same.

As everyone has pointed out this is a great idea but it comes with a bunch of problems that makes it impossible in practicality.

1st thing I can think of is that you can't really win against chaos. The gods are not really four dudes sitting around enjoying mayhem, they're more of an accumilation of what the living beings are up to in our galaxy. As long as theirs species populating the milky way those species will be mirrored in the warp. The galaxy being so filled with war has made the warp into the chaos hellscape far worse then any previous generation has had to deal with (with the possible exception of when Slaanesh was born). Putting away the deamons would treat the symptom but not the disease. Deamons wouldn't stop appearing no matter how many you put away.

2nd is that meddeling with chaos never ends well, particularly not on a grand scale. Chaos corrupts, and there is no such thing as being incorruptible. People tend to think that the GK and the SoB can't be corrupted but that's far from the truth. See chaos doesn't need you to fall, it just needs to control you. A rock can be corrupted. A soulles mindless rock. Hence can anyone and anything, given prolonged exposure. If you where to bind bilions of deamons into prisons then you can be sure of the chaos influence reaching a few of the eople who are involved in some step of this proccess. Once a few fellows are under it's influence you can be damned sure that more would follow and eventually you'd have a civil war on your hands. I'd argue it'd be the worst since the HH, given that so many warp enteties would suddenly have a reason to unite and put all their focus on the Imperium.

3rd with so many demonic enteties in the material realm who knows what unforseen consequenses it would have. We know that the warp can blead into our reality as many worlds has either been dragged into chaos or become "stable" points for warp enteties to enter from.

4th the idea would never be agreed upon. The Inquisition would never unify against something so radical and thus the project to do it on a massive scale would never be set underway (probably for the best really).

5th the average citizen knows nothing of chaos. It's usually kept under a strict lid. Something like this would require knowledge to be made available to a huge workforce, and as we know knowledge is power. Power corrupts. See number 2.

Finally I'd say that though I find the idea great I think it doesn't really work with how chaos functions. Don't view chaos as an evil army, it's something that can't be beaten unless the universe itself where to change. I like the idea of an inquistor getting this exact same idea and going about mass producing deamon hosts though.

Also...Is there even limit to daemons in warp? Bind more and more and maybe warp simply keeps spawning more of them...

 Otto Weston wrote:

Why not bind millions if not billions of Daemons, lock them away and contain their threat? Convert Penal Worlds to Daemonhost Vaults.

Welcome to team Xanthism. Please leave your puritan spies behind and pick up your daemon sword from that box.

Because, no matter how good your security, bindings, and wards are, eventually, someone will screw it up, a daemon host will get loose, and every one will die horribly.

Oh, and because it's a morally awful thing to do, even by the Imperiums standards.

The binding of a daemonhost is an extremely finicky thing that can easily fail if the most strict precautions aren't taken and the ritual isn't performed by the strongest willed individuals. One slip and you've not only summoned a daemon; you've actually made it MORE POWERFUL by giving it a tangible anchor to the physical world.

IF you succeed, a single bound daemonhost is a barely contained threat, constantly striving to undermine and screw over its master and break free of its bonds. These aren't dumb animals. They are ancient and cunning.

So you're "solution" to Chaos is to make millions or billions of these things that can all collaborate and combine their powers to get free and/or cause mayhem in a variety of creative ways.

Good luck.

 Crazyterran wrote:
Because, no matter how good your security, bindings, and wards are, eventually, someone will screw it up, a daemon host will get loose, and every one will die horribly.

Oh, and because it's a morally awful thing to do, even by the Imperiums standards.

Puritan spy detected.

 oldzoggy wrote:

 Otto Weston wrote:

Why not bind millions if not billions of Daemons, lock them away and contain their threat? Convert Penal Worlds to Daemonhost Vaults.

Welcome to team Xanthism. Please leave your puritan spies behind and pick up your daemon sword from that box.

Lol

Also remember the entities you bind are intelligent, always seeking a weak point. Plus then comes fact, two maybe old rivals, slug it out and level a entire jail.
Escape bad idea.
One is hard to kill. Hundreds or thousands.... So so bad idea.

Why do you have to do confine the daemons to humans or aliens? It's a well known fact daemons can be bound inside inanimate objects. Just stick them all inside rocks. Even if the vault gets breached then, a daemonically possessed rock isn't exactly capable of much.

 Ketara wrote:
Why do you have to do confine the daemons to humans or aliens? It's a well known fact daemons can be bound inside inanimate objects. Just stick them all inside rocks. Even if the vault gets breached then, a daemonically possessed rock isn't exactly capable of much.

Until the rocks all fuse themselves together and form a giant portal, or start combining into giant daemons made out of millions of tiny rocks. Any way you slice it, it's probably a bad idea. And heresy.

Funnily enough, there's a Daemonic rock in the Eisenhorn omnibus - "the Lith", which without going into spoilers, is not by any means a safe, inert object.

Otto if you could please have a seat in the chamber etched with hexagrams an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor will see you shortly.

But you may remember that Daemonhosts do eventually die, meaning that the daemon will go back to the warp so you would need far too many lives to keep it bound forever.

Also you can't bind lesser daemons, they simply aren't strong enough to manifest, they don't have names.

It is a bad idea.

 Dark Apostle 666 wrote:
Funnily enough, there's a Daemonic rock in the Eisenhorn omnibus - "the Lith", which without going into spoilers, is not by any means a safe, inert object.

Oh that rock. Yeah...its kinda dangerous....
You can bind it.. But you still have its power to persuade, corrupt and manipulation.

Bind them inside metal centimeter cubes, stack them up, and chuck them in a warded stasis field. Should work.

Bi'ios wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
Why do you have to do confine the daemons to humans or aliens? It's a well known fact daemons can be bound inside inanimate objects. Just stick them all inside rocks. Even if the vault gets breached then, a daemonically possessed rock isn't exactly capable of much.

Until the rocks all fuse themselves together and form a giant portal, or start combining into giant daemons made out of millions of tiny rocks. Any way you slice it, it's probably a bad idea. And heresy.

Dark Apostle 666 wrote:Funnily enough, there's a Daemonic rock in the Eisenhorn omnibus - "the Lith", which without going into spoilers, is not by any means a safe, inert object.

I'd rather have a million possessed inanimate rocks then something with arms and legs. So long as they're bound within rocks, they might be able to corrupt, but they're not getting off planet or moving around much if you keep them on a barren asteroid somewhere. There's not much fear of corruption if there's nothing there to corrupt, you know? Even the Lith required miners and suchlike.

I'm not saying it's an amazing idea, but it would be the safest way to try and undertake the mission as outlined by the OP. Rather than risking daemonhosts or even xenos daemonhosts, inanimate objects would be the superior solution by far.

 Ketara wrote:
I'd rather have a million possessed inanimate rocks then something with arms and legs. I'm not saying it's an amazing idea, but it would be the safest way to try and undertake the mission as outlined by the OP. Rather than risking daemonhosts or even xenos daemonhosts, inanimate objects would be the superior solution by far.

Sure, it's much safer than regular daemon hosts. But it would still be risky seeing as the binding rituals might go wrong from the start.

Kind of like fighting a deadly disease with another deadly disease. Sickle cell anemia is not a good thing to have, but it does make you resistant to malaria. Some physicians managed to cure 3rd stage syphilis by infecting patients with malaria (the high fever burned out the syphilis and could be treated with other medicines). Except in the case of daemons it's using ebola vs the plague or vice versa. It might work but the results of even the slightest mishap would be too terrible to think of.

 Ketara wrote:
Why do you have to do confine the daemons to humans or aliens? It's a well known fact daemons can be bound inside inanimate objects. Just stick them all inside rocks. Even if the vault gets breached then, a daemonically possessed rock isn't exactly capable of much.

Except corrupting the world around it, invading the dreams of all the sentient life living on the world above it, and slowly twisting the planet into a daemonic hellscape that invites only war, plague, twisted monstrosities and perversions not easily comprehended by mortal minds.

Spetulhu wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
I'd rather have a million possessed inanimate rocks then something with arms and legs. I'm not saying it's an amazing idea, but it would be the safest way to try and undertake the mission as outlined by the OP. Rather than risking daemonhosts or even xenos daemonhosts, inanimate objects would be the superior solution by far.

Sure, it's much safer than regular daemon hosts. But it would still be risky seeing as the binding rituals might go wrong from the start.

Kind of like fighting a deadly disease with another deadly disease. Sickle cell anemia is not a good thing to have, but it does make you resistant to malaria. Some physicians managed to cure 3rd stage syphilis by infecting patients with malaria (the high fever burned out the syphilis and could be treated with other medicines). Except in the case of daemons it's using ebola vs the plague or vice versa. It might work but the results of even the slightest mishap would be too terrible to think of.

Yeah, that "go wrong from the start" business happens a lot. Let me give you an example.

Inq. Bob has an ingenius plan to imprison billions of daemons within tiny pebbles in a vault. He researches and discovers a ritual to do such a thing. He carries out his plan and eventual manages to bind a billion lesser daemons in stones and hides them deep inside a vault. He deploys a whole regiment of Imperial Guard to defend it, who cannot go within a kilometre of vault but are tasked to destroy anyone and anything that lands on the planet. They have unlimited manpower and firepower due to the Inquisitor shifting numbers around to give that regiment large numbers of Baneblades and Leman Russ. His plan works and these daemons are bound in this stones for all eternity.

Now, what he does know is that Tzeentch foresaw this event decades before Inq. Bob was ever born. He manipulated the strands of time in such a way that Bob eventually discovers the binding ritual he needs, or thinks he needs. While the ritual does work, this particular ritual only binds Daemons of Nurgle into the stones. So when he places these stones in the vault, he seals away billions of Daemonic rocks that are slowly releasing a virus. The virus can pass through even metal and lies dormant within the host for decades without being detected. As the Guardsman guarding the vault age they are returned home, job well done. The virus eventually becomes active, and is passed through water (coughs and sneezing), contact (through pores and sits on surfaces) and can actively move through the air on breath. Within weeks of the first rotation of Guardsman, a dozen worlds are consumed with the plague. It lies dormant for another decade before activating, and then takes another decade before its full effect. Over that decade, the hosts of the virus slowly begin to fatten up and their flesh rot away, slowly mutating into Plaguebearer demons. In this time, another rotation of Guardsman infects another dozen worlds. Meanwhile, Bob travels about the galaxy on his Inquisitiorial business, job well done, slowly infecting an entire sector as he travels from world to world. Within a decade, the first dozen worlds are infected with plaguebearers and they're presences opens an enormous warp rift on each planet, through which legions of Horrors and Flamers slaughter their stumbling counterparts, having lain in wait for weeks. This happens on a dozen worlds, then a dozen more. Suddenly a whole sector of the galaxy is overrun with Tzeentch's mission and the GK have no choice but to cordon off the sector and all neighbouring sectors, commandeering the Segmentum fleet to destroy everything leaving the quarentine zone while they systematically Exterminatus each world. People start asking questions and the GK have two choices, either kill off trillions of Imperial military or come clean. If they tell, suddenly the cats out of the bag, people go to Chaos en masse because its Chaos. So they take the harder route and go wipe out a segmentum fleet and MIB several dozen Space Marine chapters.

So, by one little tap on the stands of reality, Tzeentch has not only managed to turn a whole sector into his evil genius lair to scheme, AND killed off an enormous swathe of Imperial troops and naval officers, but he's also manage to imprison legions of his rival's minions on a barren husk of a planet, unable to do anything but release a virus with no host to infect.

Mwhahahahaha Exactly as planned.

The number of Inquisitors you'd have to have performing the rituals would need to be large in order to make a dent in the demon population. Each Inquisitor added to the conspiracy has to be taught openly corrupting rituals. And each new participant exponentially increases the odds that someone will be corrupted and seek to release the bound demon army or use them for some apocalyptic purpose.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
Why do you have to do confine the daemons to humans or aliens? It's a well known fact daemons can be bound inside inanimate objects. Just stick them all inside rocks. Even if the vault gets breached then, a daemonically possessed rock isn't exactly capable of much.

Except corrupting the world around it, invading the dreams of all the sentient life living on the world above it, and slowly twisting the planet into a daemonic hellscape that invites only war, plague, twisted monstrosities and perversions not easily comprehended by mortal minds.

Who says it needs to be near a planet? Frankly, it would be easier to just pick an asteroid floating out in the middle of nowhere. There's far more of those than are moons or planets, millions more. Removes the whole civilian aspect from the equation immediately.

Not only that, if you only go near the asteroid when transporting fresh rocks, you can minimise any contact. Set up a Navy interdiction force a goodly distance away (space is huge, this would not be hard), and have any fresh deliveries accompanied by a dozen blanks. Your local inquisitor arranges drop runs (easily enough done, you don't even need to land, the untouchable bubble ensures the pilot is untainted (heck, you could train an untouchable as one), and you just drop your latest crate of possessed rocks in by standard Guard grav drop.

That way, there's no souls around to possess, no way of corrupting the pilot/delivery service, no physical life or matter to corrupt, and no innocents wandering past. You just have a bunch of very hacked off daemon rocks in the middle of nowhere talking to each other.

Heck, if you do it scientifically, you could calculate the critical mass before the warp presence gets too strong. Then only drop that number -20% (just to be safe) before moving on to using another asteroid. Nobody says you're limited to one, after all, there's uncountable trillions of the things about.

There are risks involved, but it would be more along the lines of the risk of taint/corruption by the Inquisitorial sealers than anything else.

 Ketara wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
Why do you have to do confine the daemons to humans or aliens? It's a well known fact daemons can be bound inside inanimate objects. Just stick them all inside rocks. Even if the vault gets breached then, a daemonically possessed rock isn't exactly capable of much.

Except corrupting the world around it, invading the dreams of all the sentient life living on the world above it, and slowly twisting the planet into a daemonic hellscape that invites only war, plague, twisted monstrosities and perversions not easily comprehended by mortal minds.

Who says it needs to be near a planet? Frankly, it would be easier to just pick an asteroid floating out in the middle of nowhere. There's far more of those than are moons or planets, millions more. Removes the whole civilian aspect from the equation immediately.

Not only that, if you only go near the asteroid when transporting fresh rocks, you can minimise any contact. Set up a Navy interdiction force a goodly distance away (space is huge, this would not be hard), and have any fresh deliveries accompanied by a dozen blanks. Your local inquisitor arranges drop runs (easily enough done, you don't even need to land, the untouchable bubble ensures the pilot is untainted (heck, you could train an untouchable as one), and you just drop your latest crate of possessed rocks in by standard Guard grav drop.

That way, there's no souls around to possess, no way of corrupting the pilot/delivery service, no physical life or matter to corrupt, and no innocents wandering past. You just have a bunch of very hacked off daemon rocks in the middle of nowhere talking to each other.

Heck, if you do it scientifically, you could calculate the critical mass before the warp presence gets too strong. Then only drop that number -20% (just to be safe) before moving on to using another asteroid. Nobody says you're limited to one, after all, there's uncountable trillions of the things about.

There are risks involved, but it would be more along the lines of the risk of taint/corruption by the Inquisitorial sealers than anything else.

Except when that Daemon rock exerts it force/Tzeentch's plan to alter the course of an asteroid to put it on a collision course with a major world and bring the rocks with it.

Or the daemon rocks are now floating in an asteroid belt and open a warp rift using the belt as its outer edges, allowing millions of Daemons to flood through

Or in a a team turn of events thousands of square cn deamon cubes form into a walking rock that fires deamon rocks at you from a weapon built of deamon rocks and cannot be killed as you have to destroy every of the the thousands of rocks it made of.

They win as there al released... And kill you too!

Just as planned...

Or the asteroid turns into a warp tear. Thus suckling in all surrounding ships