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There was a conversation in the AoS rumours thread about how Chaos is written in 40K I thought was interesting but I didn't want to derail it (I've been derailing too much lately!).

The discussion was essentially that the Imperium is supposed to be the worst regime imaginable, but various writers have made Chaos much, much worse. It's gotten more and more extreme over the years, to the point where worshipping Chaos is obviously extremely evil AND obviously extremely dumb.

I think for me the epitome of this was in the Horus Heresy series, where the Chaos side are written as fools for most of the books. The Loyalists are always really right, and especially in Dan Abnett books they're mowing down traitors left and right. It gets even worse in the Siege when most Chaos characters become non-characters and are just a stupid, possessed horde that all break and run at the end when their warp-juice goes away.

I found this to be the worst aspect of the Heresy, but it seems to be the unironic position of the BL authors that Chaos is completely evil and Chaos worshippers are all complete fools who are definitively in the wrong.

This has the effect of making the Imperium RIGHT to do all it's oppressive crap, and making them tragic good guys who are doing what they must. I've often seen fans making this point and referencing the books as proof.

As always in these sorts of threads, I have to clarify that I understand what the "canon" is and I'm not arguing about that. I'm saying that the canon is BAD, that the writers that wrote it have made the setting worse by being so one sided.

I think it's acceptable in an Imperium POV story to show Chaos without nuance. It doesn't really bother me when it's shown that way in a Gaunt's Ghosts novel for example - I think it can be quite effective. But in something like the Heresy which was showing both sides, I'd expect there to be some effort to show both sides with some nuance. The way Abnett writes chaos at the latter part of the siege, the way ADB has his mouthpiece characters denounce the chaos characters and the frankly awful way he wrote Angron in the fight between him and Sanguinius, well, you can see which side their bread is buttered.

And that's been present to an extent from the start, but there used to be at least more nuance. I much prefer the idea that the negative aspects of Chaos are amplified because the Imperium is such a miserable place - the echo of all that misery in the Warp sours it, the Imperium creating their own daemons. But I think that take is dead and buried "canonically" nowadays.

I can remember being really excited to get my hands on Black Crusade. I'd really enjoyed Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader and was really looking forward to an in depth exploration of Chaos from a Chaos Worshipper's perspective. Chaos as the protagonist. But I was very disappointed by what I got - basically your classic "play the baddies" campaign book. I didn't pick up any more FFG RPG books after that.

I think this is all very unfortunate, because it make the universe of 40K echo the actual arguments of real world fascists. Real world fascists always argue that the enemy is simultaneously terrifying, inhuman but also stupid and weak and easily crushed by our heroic fighters. In 40K this is just the actual reality. And the attractiveness of that as a set up for Imperium fans is really why fascism is so attractive in real life - it's fun to believe that stuff. Now. I want to be clear that I'm NOT saying that liking the Imperium, or liking this fiction means you love fascism, are a fascist, are going to turn into a fascist or any of that. I think the real world political impact of any of this is near nil. But it is a bit awkward and I think everyone can detect the awkwardness, and GW's discomfort with it. And when they try to correct for that, I think they usually go about it in a fairly ham fisted way.

But at the core 40K is a game with multiple factions, and the fiction shouldn't strongly favour one faction as correct over all the others. As it stands, the Emperor was a bit of a dick but basically correct and had "humanities best interests at heart", all the Loyalist primarchs are badasses who with one exception always win one on one duels with daemon primarchs and the traitor primarchs are all insane, fools or dupes.

I think it's very unfortunate and it didn't have to be like that - you don't have to show either side as "right", and you can just show that they have a point here or there without going so far with it all.

Subtlety and nuance don't shift units. It's easier to sell "good marines vs evil marines" than "well these are the marines defending a xenophobic and corrupt empire which has sacrificed morality and compassion for the sake of endless expansion and is so terrified of existential threats that it betrayed its own founding principles and they're going up against the people who used to serve that same tyrannical, oppressive regime but were offered a way out by extradimensional emotion-vortices that promised them the means to escape from the crushing weight of the Imperium and carve out a better life for themselves, only for the power to inevitably corrupt them and lead them to become just as bad, if not worse than the system they rejected, spurred on by entities that are fuelled by emotion so they encourage even more extremes for the sake of their own power"

As 40k has become more popular, it has sought to appeal to a mass audience and shades of grey don't sell. Kids come into a store and want to play good guys vs bad guys, not ethnocentric fascists vs misled oppressed masses.

WFRP has imo the best representation of Chaos and how it can appeal to people, the Tome of Corruption is one of my all time favourite books and it influences my thinking of chaos all the time.

GW have done a terrible job of answering the very basic question of "why do people turn to chaos?" - it's not just "power/shiny new demon sword/a pathological desire to look like an 80s metal album cover", it's desperation.

Sometimes you'll see a more nuanced approach, it's still in there buried deep but a lot of what you see is there to conform to an easily digestible good vs evil narrative (see also Dark Eldar)

The Chaos gods who want to torture your soul for eternity ARE evil and worse than the Imperium.

Yes, but that's a narrative choice, not a law of nature.

that is how things are written to sell more stuff, not how things started

like early on, Chaos was specific neither good nor evil but just chaos
Nurgle the god of all live (which includes all bacterias as well) and not just the evil god of plague
or Khorne started as he god of all conflict, from the noble warrior to the brutal berserkers and so on

and in contrast there was the evil Imperium that cares more about keeping up the existing order no matter the cost to control the chaos

Now that Chaos is just the pure evil and everything that keeps the order being pure good, the whole thing is rather boring and people falling for chaos like they catch a cold (and the only way to contain this is by killing everyone who knows people who might have a cold) removes any intresting development or characters

there is a reason why still the very old stuff is suggested for new readers instead of the newer books
(or why people hope the Amazon series is going with Eisenhorn instead of anything made in the past 5 years)

Drunk, he realizes that when a medium becomes popular and widely accessible, it becomes increasingly lacking in nuance and loses its subtlety in favor of a simplistic, easily recognizable message that is easier to sell.

Nothing new under the sun. But I have to say that 40K has the misfortune of becoming very popular at the same time as this blight known as meme culture came into existence, which further accelerates this transformation.

Chaos is wrong, that's the tragedy of the Traitor Legions.

They sold their souls (knowingly and unknowingly) to dark powers that see them as nothing more than pieces on a game board.
The realisation hits when their Primarchs by and large abandon them after Terra or they suffer further tragedy like the Thousand Sons.

The problem with 40k is that the main focus of Chaos are Space Marines, who don't fit the human condition. For WHFB and AoS, those that serve Chaos all start out as regular people who then suffer and fall to the Dark Gods.

The Bloodbound lore is a perfect example of this. If your tribe is conquered, you are either getting eaten by cannibals or if they think you put up a fight, they throw you into a death match then force you to also become a cannibal or they kill you and eat you. You might harbour thoughts of revenge but this only pulls you down the path to corruption. By the time you're strong enough to do anything about it, it's too late, you've become just like them.

40k doesn't have nuance because Space Marines don't have nuance. They're not human, they don't fear or love, they don't starve or despair for the death of friends or family. There isn't really anything to make them fall apart from hubris or "got stabbed by an evil knife".
The mortal side of 40k doesn't get looked at because Space Marines are the poster faction regardless of being imperial or Chaos.

TLDR, Chaos isn't the problem 40k is.

Yeah, FB chaos was way better. The chaos worshippers had humanity, they were not just mad monsters. And it certainly is a good point, that the lack of nuance in 40K might partly be due the focus being one marines, who are mentally stunted to begin with. I wish there was more focus on normal humans who follow chaos. Still, this is not the whole reason.

The lore is just being dumbed down, it is losing the satire it is losing the nuance, and in this process it is becoming fascist apologia. The cool space nazis are right! I find this both artistically poor and morally repugnant.

And I don't buy the argument that you need to dumb down things this way to sell to the masses. Yeah, some people might not get the depth even if were there, they would only see the surface. But the depth being there is not a detriment. Even as a kid I found it cool, when there was something more to be discovered behind the apparent.

 Gert wrote:

40k doesn't have nuance because Space Marines don't have nuance. They're not human, they don't fear or love, they don't starve or despair for the death of friends or family.

This makes sense from a more hard sci-fi POV, but for a narrative setting I disagree. I usually hate that SMs are basically just portrayed as film action hero types, very much behaving like normal humans, but going full blown "only exist to be warriors and no other personality" sucks for a space opera. So I'm happy to have a midway point.

I don't really buy the "simple sells" thing. Because the visuals are pretty simplistic and that's not where my problem is - someone who likes simple just has to see when they look at the models that these guys are bright and rounded and these guys are dark and spikey to think "aha, good guys and bad guys".

That can exist at the same time as more interesting and nuanced background material that you only find by reading a bit more, there's no reason they both have to be simplistic.

I think the explanation is really that the writers are just writing what they want to write, and for whatever reason this is it. I dunno why, I thought ADB in particular was a bit better when it came to writing Chaos with a bit of nuance but his Heresy portrayals are really very bad in my opinion.

And the other thing is, showing the Loyalists as awesome, righteous good guys sells LOYALISTS, but don't GW also want to sell traitors? Like why do I want to buy a big expensive model of ultimate chump and continual loser Angron?

The nuance in Space Marines is entirely down to how terrible of a person they are or if their Chapter are maniacs/fanatics.

You can't tell a story of a Space Marine falling to Nurgle in desperation because their village is dying from starvation brought on by marauders stealing their food. You can't tell a story of a Space Marine falling to Khorne after seeking righteous revenge after the love of their life is slaughtered by a corrupt local official.

That leaves stories about hubris i.e. seeking forbidden knowledge or power and being corrupted because the plot demanded it.
They aren't lazy options but when its the only option it's boring and leads to where we are now where every story is the same.

The difference between 40k Slaanesh and AoS Slaanesh is the perfect example of how Space Marines being the focus limits the faction.
40k Slaanesh is either Perfect Warrior TM or Loves Dubstep.
AoS Slaanesh is vanity, gluttony, martial perfection, daemonic corruption all present within the lore and current range.

I have always thought that it is bizarre decision to basically ignore the normal humans who worship chaos in the 40K. Like they are the overwhelming majority of the chaos worshippers, and like we've seen on the fantasy side, you can do interesting and cool stuff with them.

Yeah we're talking background here not models, and there's no reason you can't portray the kind of story you're referencing Gert with just you know, normal chaos cultists in 40k?

I also just sort of disagree with your model of chaos - I think it should just be outright less evil, or definitely have lots of less evil aspects to it. They've written it as being obviously evil all the time and I think that's a mistake - there should be real, not fake, positive aspects to Chaos. Not having those, downplaying them and removing them is a choice on the part of the writers.

I'm not saying the stories can't be told, the difference is the focus of the 40k setting compared to WHFB or AoS.

WHFB and AoS are far easier to tell stories from a mortal POV because it's everyone started there.
Stormcast were once mortals, raised to immortality but tortured with memories of their former lives that also slowly get eroded the more times they die. The various mortal races like humans, dorfs and elveses are all still motivated by the "human" condition.
Vampires/Undead also start as mortals so can still relate to or even have mortal concerns. Even old Rattlebones himself was mortal once.
Chaos worshippers fall for a huge variety of reasons so you can get books like Godeaters Son showing multiple facets of Chaos worship and followers.
Orcs is Orcs is Orks is Orks and so on.

For the 40k human factions, the focus is on Space Marines because they sell. So we can get stories about Average Joe, but they are far eclipsed by stories about Space Marine Dave.
It's not the writing about Chaos that's the issue, it's the characters all being Space Marines and having naff all about them but fighting and killing because they aren't human.

That still doesn't explain why the Traitors are written to be a bunch of idiot failures. It doesn't require much nuance to make Traitor Fighting Space Man as cool as Loyalist Fighting Space Man, and I think it's just a weird choice to be so one sided when you know there are loads of people out there with Chaos armies who are gonna feel hard done by.

Read better books then.

ADBs Night Lords, Black Legion, and HH Word Bearers stuff. The Word Bearers Omnibus by Anthony Reynolds. The Iron Warriors Omnibus by Graham McNeill. Master of the Maelstrom or Harrowmaster by Mike Brooks.

Y'know books where CSM are actually protagonists and not just generic bad guy of the day.
The End and the Death books, or even Heresy as a whole, are not where anyone should be going for CSM content.

Poor response. The Heresy is the biggest series GW has going and it started showing both sides relatively equally.

It's very poor writing to turn it into a good vs. evil struggle the way they did, it honestly ruins the whole thing.

Read better books my arse. I've read ADB's Night Lords and Black Legion and his HH stuff read the first Word Bearers book by AR and I didn't like his prose, same for any Graham McNeill I've read, he's just not a very good writer in a technical sense. And none of the suggested novels as far as I have read them address the main point I'm making.

None of them are books that show the Traitor Legions as "idiot failures" as you put it.

And again, you don't get Cultist Jeff novels because Cultist Jeff isn't selling millions of pounds of product every year.

Chaos isn't the problem, the writers aren't the problem, Space Marines being a faction that dumps most of the motivations for pledging to the Dark Gods is the problem and it's a problem that won't go away.

But they also don't show Chaos as having any positive aspects. The Word Bearers book is about cackling, reveling in it villains. Iron Warriors and Night Lords both reject Chaos as something bad, and in the Night Lords books giving in to Chaos is shown as being a terrible idea that results in total loss of self.

I quite like the Night Lords books as it goes, but they're not addressing what I'm talking about really at all - if you side with Chaos in 40k you are wrong, and if you side with the Imperium you are right, that is how it is written. And I don't believe that has to do with Space Marines particularly.

 Da Boss wrote:
I don't really buy the "simple sells" thing. Because the visuals are pretty simplistic and that's not where my problem is - someone who likes simple just has to see when they look at the models that these guys are bright and rounded and these guys are dark and spikey to think "aha, good guys and bad guys".

I don't think it's a "simple sells" thing either. The truth is still economically motivated though, and that's "simple is cheaper". Nuance takes more skill, can be harder to hire for, and takes more time. If you can be profitable while also being cheap and lazy. . . Hey why not, right?

For the record I don't think Space Marinea are necessarily emotionally stunted protagonists either. They can be written with more interesting motivations as well. But again, it'll take more time and effort.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yes, but that's a narrative choice, not a law of nature.

No, in the Warhammer settings, it really is a law of nature.

"Chaos shouldn't be depicted with more depth and nuance because Chaos isn't currently depicted with depth and nuance" is tautologous.

 Da Boss wrote:
I quite like the Night Lords books as it goes, but they're not addressing what I'm talking about really at all - if you side with Chaos in 40k you are wrong, and if you side with the Imperium you are right, that is how it is written. And I don't believe that has to do with Space Marines particularly.

That has to do with giving the setting a grounding and you see that in all things. Even our own history has a LOT of that going on. It's not just raw facts but interpretations, impressions and so forth. Indeed its honestly inherently part of telling a story over just presenting raw fact. Even if you go way back to ancient history where there's a huge separation from events to modern times and emotions; it still happens.

GW has to make a "choice" on matters on how to present their story because its a LOT easier for people to get into a story if there are key reference points along the way.


I think also for BL and GW it is exacerbated because at one time they could pretty much only make material for Imperials. You really feel this as a Xenos player because they have a tiny number of books considering most are as old as the core Imperial factions (heck some like Tyranids, Eldar and Orks are older than Sisters of Battle and yet I'd wager have fewer books).




Also because the lore is quite broad I feel like discussions on this end up getting messy on two fronts
1) Mixing up Old World and 40K references to things, esp with regard to Chaos. IT's super easy to take thoughts on one and impose them over the other without realising that you're doing it.
2) Everyone reads different books. The books you read shape your impressions and this is before we layer on interpretations over the top of that. So those who might be less widely read will have a very different and perhaps very singular viewpoint to those who have read a wider variety of GW books and might have a more broad concept of things.

This is why I dont read BL dross. The old lore is more than enough for me to "world build" a clear mental picture of a Galaxy forever at war, and everyone's always making excuses why they got to be the ones who win

I do see what Da Boss is getting at, but I think Gert is right about it just kind of depending on which books you read. Some BL fiction is better/worse about making it clear that despite how obviously messed up chaos is, the imperials are still *also* the bad guys.

In a lot of the Heresy stuff that I've read (lots of Magnus and Curze and Corax stuff), this is handled fairly well. A lot of the characters involved are portrayed as flawed and incorrect, but not cartoonishly malevolent in their intentions. Magnus absolutely had a hubris problem (as wizard types often should), but there was enough good intent there to make him sympathetic even if you don't ultimately condone or agree with his acitons. Corax's loyalty to the Emperor and the great crusade are presented as actively contradictory to his supposed anti-tyrannical/pro-freedom stance, and my interpretation of his stories was that he may have been actively mind whammied by the Emperor. Curze is a monster, but he's a monster cursed to know that he's a monster, *and* cursed to be aware that the other primarchs are monsters too even if they can't see it. In other words, lots of decent examples of characters who are varying levels of sympathetic but still portrayed as being wrong/unethical/hypocritical on both the loyalist and chaos sides. Heck, the Wolf Spear story even has a paragraph that goes into how proud Leman Russ is of himself for being good at double-think.

Other stories in both the HH and 40k settings are a little hit and miss on remembering that the imperials are the bad guys, and I agree that that can be a problem. It's easy for writers to have a protag shiver uncomfortably at the sight of a servitor and then spend the rest of the book basically being unambiguously heroic while beating up tyranids and daemons. Or being mildly grimdark/edgy, but no moreso than the setting around them so it feels almost like apologetics for their behavior.

There's this weird phenomenon where the more likable/heroic factions in-universe kind of read as more sinister on a metatextual level. Because yeah, that Salamander saved the human refugees, but don't forget that Salamanders do genocides too and ultimately work to perpetuate the imperium's fascism. And then conversely, a faction like the Templars might seem more overtly like they'd be pro-fascism, but the way they wear their evil on their sleeves means that on a metatextual level they come across as jerks that you don't want to emulate rather than being apologetics for the imperium.

Basically, I think the problems Da Boss has identified do happen sometimes. But not all the time. As Gert pointed out, there are plenty of books where chaos forces (both mortal and otherwise) are depicted as behaving in non-idiotic fashions (though I wouldn't include the Iron Warriors Omnibus on that list), and there are plenty of stories where it's made pretty clear that *neither* the imperials nor the forces of chaos are good guys.

I *do* think there's a bit more room for sympathetic chaos mortals in a similar vein to how the GSC are handled in Day of Ascension, and I think marines tend to be pretty meh characters because "child soldier who probably had his memories wiped" tends to limit your options for motivations, aspirations, relationships, etc.

This reminds me of a complaint made about a show (IIRC it was Hazbin Hotel). In essence, people noticed that whenever the writers wanted you to like or empathise with a horrible character, they'd invent an even worse character to make the first horrible character look better by comparison.

It's the sort of strategy that doesn't tend to work in the long term because before long it doesn't really matter if Paul has eaten 50 babies while Bob has only eaten 5 (and one of those was a toddler, so does it really count?), they're still unlikely to feel much investment in Bob-the-Lesser-Baby-Eater or whatever he's trying to accomplish.

Now, this could perhaps work with the older philosophy of 40k - where there basically aren't any good factions and everyone was committing atrocities so regularly that they basically just became background noise. The trouble, as always, is that GW wants SMs to be the protagonists that everyone roots for. This really doesn't gel with the nature of the Imperium or that of Space Marines generally. But rather than trying to address the fundamental flaws with the Imperium, GW are instead going for the 'make the other factions even more depraved so that they look better by comparison' approach.

This also creates the issue that heroes are often judged by the quality of the villains they face. So if all their victories are down to their enemies being weak, stupid, incompetent etc., it doesn't exactly show said heroes in a good light. But then I'd argue this is an issue with SMs in general. Imperial propaganda aside, I'm pretty sure the idea used to be that they were the best of mankind. However, given that many of their foes were not human to begin with, that often merely put them on even footing with their enemies. Alas, the propaganda and power-fantasy dials were turned up. And then turned up again. And then turned up yet again such that SMs are now canonically the BEST GREATEST MOST STRONGEST AND AWESOMEST FIGHTERS IN THE UNIVERSE!, to the point that it just starts to feel a bit absurd.

So while I definitely don't disagree that Chaos (as well as the other antagonist factions) could do with some better writing, I would suggest that a modicum of restraint on how SMs are portrayed wouldn't go amiss either. And perhaps GW could actually commit to either having them be largely a force for good (all past fluff be damned) or otherwise commit and accept the consequences of them being fanatical, fascist killing machines.

 Da Boss wrote:

I think this is all very unfortunate, because it make the universe of 40K echo the actual arguments of real world fascists. Real world fascists always argue that the enemy is simultaneously terrifying, inhuman but also stupid and weak and easily crushed by our heroic fighters.

Eh, in fairness I don't think this is in any way unique to fascism.

You can see the same thing in how the 'Far Right' are discussed - where they are both the greatest threat to all of civilisation but also a bunch of stupid, unwashed football-hooligans.

You can see it in how the current Russian war is talked about - where Russia is both a paper-tiger, perpetually on the verge of total collapse, and yet also somehow the greatest threat to the world with an army poised to sweep across the whole of Europe.

Hell, you can see this with a lot of war-propaganda in general (regardless of which side the fascists are on, if either). It's the perpetual balance between making sure everyone knows that your nation is in the right and that the enemy are useless, gullible idiots, while also balancing it against the obvious question of 'if our enemies are all useless idiots, why haven't we won already?'

 Da Boss wrote:

But at the core 40K is a game with multiple factions, and the fiction shouldn't strongly favour one faction as correct over all the others.

I mean, I don't disagree. At the same time, I think it's fair to say that that particular ship has already sailed, circumvented the globe, and has now returned with exotic Space Marine Sergeants.

I'd be surprised if they did it, but I almost want Space Marine 3 to have a bit where Titus decides to like, burn down an orphanage because he suspects some of the kids of being tainted by GSC or something. Let the people who really only know of 40k through the more shiny bits of media go,

"Oooooh. The blue guys are bad guys too..."

I think a lot of separate issues are conflating to create a bigger problem and disentangling them to discuss them one at a time is the only way to tackle the whole. Here's how I see it:

Chaos IS, and has always been depicted as a process. It begins with discontent... And the oppressive Imperial regime provides plenty of it. This is the stage of the chaos life cycle lives. Many Cultists, at this point, have valid ideas that, could improve upon the regime.

For whatever reason, of course, the desired change does not come. And some cults will keep fighting "The Good Fight." Others will continue to fight for "Good Cause," but escalate to the point where the cause becomes more important than the toll on "innocent" lives. The spectrum here is one of the morality of the cultists- the more extreme their methods and choices, the more "relatively" evil they become. They may become equal to their oppressors in evil; they may surpass their oppressors in evil... Or they may be just and wise enough to maintain the moral highground, but be forced to fight as the Imperium weaponizes propaganda against them because they perceive genocide as the only viable solution to dissent. The point is that at this stage in the chaos life cycle, the "problem" is still largely human.

But sometimes... Not always, just sometimes- it escalates to the point where the erstwhile freedom fighters make deals with impure supernatural entities. And those entities, while the concepts they represent can be twisted into a framework that includes elements that could be perceived as neutral or even positive, the entities themselves are so destructive, even at an existential level, that they can only truly be regarded as evil. They will seek to grow their power regardless of the consequences to the cultists who summoned them into being. Because they are utterly alien and inhuman in their desires and motivations, many of the things they do, or force or coerce their summoning cultists to do may seem erratic or tactically unsound to the human observer (be they good, neutral or evil). But these deeds, regardless of their individual places on the good-evil spectrum, or the reckless-intelligent spectrum are ALWAYS in the sole interest of entities whose existential destructiveness prevent them being labelled as anything but evil.

Here, the struggle is no longer about human morality and ethics; it is about how well the erstwhile freedom fighters resist those otherworldly entities and how closely they engage, whether willingly or not.

At any stage, factors from within or without can cause the demise of the "Cult" - and already you can see who broad the diversity is. But now it gets even MORE chaotic. Because if a Cult survives to the Macro-scale, it then brushes up against OTHER Cults that survived to the Marco-scale. And then the calculus shifts again: the morality spectrum is now the relational webs between macrofactions with their own positions on either the human ethics spectrum, the demonic engagement spectrum or both.

Real World Example from Canada's political past
Warning: This spoiler hides both an off-topic distraction and political opinion. Care has been taken to be kind, reasonable and far to everyone regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum... But if you are sensitive to political discussions, or if you just want to stay on topic, that's why I hid it.
Note: This spoiler contains NO references to current politics, whether Canadian, American or International as an intentional strategy to further limit the capacity for political discussion to divide Dakkanauts



Peace, regardless of where you sit politically, or the degree to which you do or do not bear the taint of chaos

The trouble with good intentions and Chaos is that Chaos Corrupts.

There are many noble intentioned paths that can lead to the Dark Gods. And, for a time, the end result can be positive.

But eventually? The corruption kicks in, and that’s pretty much you done.

As soon as you tread that path? Your goose is cooked. Regardless of exactly how? You’re damned. And all you worked for is going to burn.

The Gods don’t care about you. They’re utterly insane and quite incapable of such care.

This is what makes Abaddon and Belakor unique. Abaddon as I understand it doesn’t actually worship the gods. He’s not a dedicated follower, but still his every action advances one or more gods’ designs.. Yes he has multiple blessings, but remains his own man. Belakor was elevated by all four, and so no one god can control him or destroy him. And like Abaddon, albeit in a different way, he’s a useful if anarchic tool for any given god at any given moment.

Mere mortals? No chance of that. The gods learned the mistake of Belakor who knows how long ago, and they won’t repeat it. Abaddon is, to all intents and purposes, already immortal and wields such power no one god really has much more to offer.