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Fear is one of the strongest and most important emotions. Any of the current Big 4 is emboding it - and it cannot be reduced to emotions which are embodied by them (no, Khorne is not god of fear, just because victims are afraid of his worshippers - he is actually god of bravery and he doesn't want his sacrifices to be afraid of him, he wants them to be slaughtered asap). And he would be an obvious patron for the Night Lords.

Fear is just short term, immediate despair, so it'd be in Nurgle's domain.

The Gods aren't just embodiments of emotions, though, and while each has an emotion tied to them, they also have other aspects.

Khorne is the Blood God, Nurgle the Plague God, Tzeentch the Trickster God, and Slaanesh the God of Excess.

These aspects define them more than the emotional side of it. Being sad doesn't empower Nurgle; feeling despair at your entire family rotting alive from a plague while you alone survive does. Being angry because you lost your keys doesn't empower Khorne; slaughtering an entire village of your enemies people in a mindless rage does.

 Gert wrote:
The Gods aren't just embodiments of emotions, though, and while each has an emotion tied to them, they also have other aspects.

Khorne is the Blood God, Nurgle the Plague God, Tzeentch the Trickster God, and Slaanesh the God of Excess.

These aspects define them more than the emotional side of it. Being sad doesn't empower Nurgle; feeling despair at your entire family rotting alive from a plague while you alone survive does. Being angry because you lost your keys doesn't empower Khorne; slaughtering an entire village of your enemies people in a mindless rage does.

They also all have positive aspects, which is one of the ways they corrupt followers in the first place. Khorne has aspects of martial honour and prowess, for example. Nurgle of life.

Humans indulge in agression, excess, apathy and lust for power. Not in fear, really. Little to lure souls in, not much potential for ruinous temptation.

 Gert wrote:

These aspects define them more than the emotional side of it. Being sad doesn't empower Nurgle; feeling despair at your entire family rotting alive from a plague while you alone survive does. Being angry because you lost your keys doesn't empower Khorne; slaughtering an entire village of your enemies people in a mindless rage does.

While this is how I *want* it to work, I do think the fluff is a little inconsistent about this sort of thing. Sometimes people will claim that like, enjoying a cigarette on your lunch break empowers Slaanesh. I tend to think that the chaos gods can probably "eat" most emotions that are tangentially tied to their shticks, but that emotions tend to be easier to eat or are "magnetized" towards certain chaos gods' domains when they more strongly align with a given shtick.

So a sufficiently creepy and hedonistic serial killer style murder might be food for both Slaanesh and Khorne, but it might be easier for one of those two to get at the emotions involved than the other.

If there were going to be another chaos god, I would have guessed fear (certainly not "machines.") But we do already have some warp fauna that sorta have that covered in the khymarae. I imagine there is probably minor god/unalligned greater daemon of fear out there somewhere.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
While this is how I *want* it to work, I do think the fluff is a little inconsistent about this sort of thing. Sometimes people will claim that like, enjoying a cigarette on your lunch break empowers Slaanesh.

Which is absolutely not true. Slaanesh is the god of excess. A single cigarette is not excessive. Even a basic addiction is not excessive. It's too normal. Slaanesh wants shocking extremeness. That is why Slaanesh is also drawing on the slices of the pie owned by his brother gods. Some books like the 2e Slaves to Darkness rulebook over in AoS details this, it's why Slaanesh has the highest potential of the gods. A madly devoted gladiator may feed Slaanesh as much as Khorne.

Charax wrote:
Fear is just short term, immediate despair, so it'd be in Nurgle's domain.

No, Nurgle is definitely NOT fear. His flavour of despair is full of acceptance. It is not "OH NO BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!!", but "Of course that bad things will happen, that's how it must be (and the best solution is to embrace them)".

BTW, fear does not have to be short term. There are people who spent their whole lives in fear.

According to how they explain it, the Chaos Gods as they are make no sense and it's not worth spending too much time thinking about it.

The "they're the dominant emotions" argument has never really held water and fixing a mechanic to it in that way will always lead to weird "logical" outcomes.

Better to just accept that the Warp is a realm of madness and makes very little sense.

Personally, I like the WFB version where they are just the Chaos Gods much more. No need to explain it or provide a mechanism for their existence, they're just these mad gods in a realm of endless insanity, deal with it.

To me, Nurgle is the god for fear. Fear of death, of weakness, of loss...can all be archieved with the right plague.

Although, like someone else mentioned, while the chaos gods are allegedly linked to emotions, in practice they are not.

An actual god dedicated to fear could be interesting. Lesser demons could be animal phobias. Greater demons, more esoteric fears. Agoraphobia. Aibohphobia. Apeirophobia.

Any of the chaos gods could be linked to fear for one reason or another, so I think its more of a shared domain.

Someone who is terrified of dying to a disease or other pestilence could be driven to Nurgle.

A scholar who is searching for immortality might be led to Tzeentch or Nurgle.

Someone who is terrified of losing and dying in battle would go right to Khorne.

Someone who is terrified of being bored we fit in with Slannesh.

Fear itself is far too specific but also too generic of an emotion for the setting as is. It might make sense to have a god of fear in a more traditional fantasy pantheon, but it doesn't really work here.

The liber chaotica goes through this which was originally intimated in the realms of chaos books..it's how chaos was originally conceived

It's pretty clear that they were going for a Nietzschian, primal man, fundaments of sentience angle. Which is why chaos is more than just bad hell dimension monsters you can fight.

They are a reflection of the presence of sentience, the consequences of your existence thrown back at you. Nega Jeff, stu, Sally and bob.

And they force you to realise that you are nothing more than a bunch of primal emotions driving a monkey suit with an accidentally evolved ego overinflating those emotions importance and taking credit for them.

Anything less than that robs it of its ever present, Lovecraftian inevitability, forever undefeatable but also unwinnable (the great self destructive game). It just becomes wormhole aliens.

And the emotional aspect treats these concepts as fundamental elements of sentience, like the flavours of quark. Warp quarks. Rage, desire, despair, hope quarks. From which warp entities emerge in the same inevitable way that consciousness emerges in sufficiently emotive realspace organisms.

Again the dark mirror. Khorne rages because you do.

As an aside, excess isn't an emotion, it's a state of action, to perform actions in excess. Excess to slannesh is like violence to khorne, desire and rage underpin them.

But in the great swirl of chaos undivided, they all overlap a little, just as sentient minds overlap in their emotional spectrum.

The positive side of the chaos gods comes specifically because emotions aren't good or bad. You can rage for justice, you can hope for peace, you can desire equality and you can despair at the ill treatment of others.

But in that Nietzschian way, 40k sees that you always default to your baser atavistic side, that it is the true default and no amount of ivory tower navel gazing changes the fact that you are a raging, horn bag, evolved to survive through violence, assault and greed, despairing at your mortality and impotence and taking it out on everyone around you.

Now this isn't true in reality, but its an evocative downer presumption that sits at the core of 40ks foundation, where you can only rage at the dying of the light.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Any of the chaos gods could be linked to fear for one reason or another, so I think its more of a shared domain.

Someone who is terrified of dying to a disease or other pestilence could be driven to Nurgle.

A scholar who is searching for immortality might be led to Tzeentch or Nurgle.

Someone who is terrified of losing and dying in battle would go right to Khorne.

Someone who is terrified of being bored we fit in with Slannesh.

Fear itself is far too specific but also too generic of an emotion for the setting as is. It might make sense to have a god of fear in a more traditional fantasy pantheon, but it doesn't really work here.

Good points, but we are talking about different things. I am saying Nurgle is the manifestation of fear, the essence of the god itself. You are saying that what motivates an individual to beg of a god's assistance, the reason why the cultist does what he does.

As an example, a greek sailor makes an offering to Poseidon because he is afraid of dying at sea. But Poseidon is not the greek god of fear, that is Phobos.

I think the Chaos Gods are incoherent thematically.

You can say Nurgle is the god of Despair, but then why is he also the god of Plagues? Do wars not also bring despair? Does addiction not cause despair? Why plague? He's much more the plague god than he is the god of despair - his minions and theming have essentially nothing to do with despair. Sure, if you're dying of plague you might succumb to despair but that's hardly the main source of despair in existence, is it? Nah, it's that plague was one of the big sources of fear in medieval times, and they had some cool designs around it. The emotion argument was backfilled. You could argue that Nurgle is about the primal force of entropy, which I would buy, but he only shares that sort of theming with Tzeentch.

Slaanesh is god of "excess" so that they can argue that castrated and asexual space marines training too hard get lured into Slaanesh. But really, Slaanesh is about desire - sexual desire originally and mainly, but also drug addiction and hedonism generally. They've moved around a bit with this because it's an awkward thing to have as part of a set of models that you're (nowadays) going to be selling to kids, so they've got more gluttony and greed and so on, but the sexual stuff is deep in the bones of the aesthetic and the theming has always been heavily around sexual desire. But then...Noise Marines? Like obviously, Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll but it's pretty incoherent and not very serious, and attempts to make it fit are pretty silly imo. There should be loads of Slaanesh cultists but bugger all of them should be Space Marines.
But excess can hardly be called an emotion as Hellebore points out.

Khorne is rage? Okay I suppose. But rage does not equal war, does it? Rage and blood, okay yeah maybe. You're angry enough to kill. Khorne is the one where it sort of works, but then they try to bring in more to it because Khorne is kind of one dimensional, and they have all this blood ocean and skull taking stuff that's actually kind of off theme. Space Marines should be falling to Khorne almost universally - it makes very little sense for them to fall to anything else. But rage isn't war, has nothing at all to do with martial honour, and so it's still a bit of a wonky fit.

And last of all Tzeentch. Okay so...what emotion is Tzeentch about? Hope, some will say, but that's clearly just backfilling because Nurgle and Tzeentch are opposed and Nurgle is supposed to be despair. But what Tzeentch is about is change, complicated plots, and magic. Which of those are emotions exactly? Being a Machiavellian schemer probably involves a common emotional profile but it's hardly a primal emotion. Change is a primal force in the universe, but it's not an emotion. And magic? It's got nothing to do with emotions at all. What about Tzeentch has anything at all to do with any emotion?

So again, it doesn't make sense, has never made sense, and is better not to think about. It's fine to have inscrutable mad gods that don't require any sort of systemic explanation, and the Chaos Gods as written work much, much better that way. Any attempt to explain them using the logic given just doesn't work.

 Da Boss wrote:
Slaanesh is god of "excess" so that they can argue that castrated and asexual space marines training too hard get lured into Slaanesh. But really, Slaanesh is about desire - sexual desire originally and mainly, but also drug addiction and hedonism generally.

Not at all. Slaanesh is very consistent. The hedonism, sex and drug addiction makes for an easy visual design language for miniatures, but Slaanesh is about absolutely anything taken to deranged extremes.

Are you a dedicated fan of model trains? Slaanesh doesn't care. Are you a deranged fan of model trains, murdering others to get more rare models, fashioning train tracks from their malformed bodies? Slaanesh is interested.

Do you adore ice cream so much a doctor would call you an addict? Slaanesh might raise an eyebrow, but really just shrug, food addicts are common. When you start feasting on it until you burst, though? Slaanesh smiles. And when you start mixing victims into the ice cream factory's supply so everyone can share in some unique flavours, well, then Slaanesh sits up in his chair!

Do you love gold? Pfah, everyone does that. But if you love gold so much you have everything around you made of gold, demanding your servants eat gold, replace ever more of their bodies with gold augmentations, use chemical devices to spread gold-laced gas into the air, do anything and everything to get more gold? Fantastic!

Space Marines can easily fall for this if lured into excess. They definitely are not creatures of restraint. Excessive violence and hate for example is beaten into their very bones.

 Da Boss wrote:
I think the Chaos Gods are incoherent thematically.

That is the jist of it, really. They are said to be born from emotions, but not really depicted that way. Anything you can come out with is going to be a square peg in a round hole. And while you can have a god of various things, some of the things chaos gods do are fighting each other.

Khorne is probably the one that works best. Everything about him is unga-bunga violence. Saying he is the god of rage leaves very little out, except maybe the superheavy engines of war from Epic.

I think Nurgle is the worst offender of the four. You have disease and plague, life and rebirth, joy, misery...the last two are emotions, but mortal Nurgle followers are not joyful, and the demons are not miserable at all! Fear is the best square peg to the bloated, oozing round hole that is Nurgle.

Going back to the topic, how could one depict one of the more esoteric fears?

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:
I think Nurgle is the worst offender of the four. You have disease and plague, life and rebirth, joy, misery...the last two are emotions, but mortal Nurgle followers are not joyful, and the demons are not miserable at all!

Plaguebearers may disagree with the latter statement. If they can build up the energy to do so.

Ashiraya: I'm still not sure that "excess" is an emotion as I understand the term. And if it is, I'm also not convinced it's common enough or primal enough to justify one of the main 4 gods formed of gestalt emotion being based on it?

I just don't think it all hangs together that well as described. But I also think that's fine, I don't mind the Chaos Gods being exactly what they are, it's just the explanation and mechanics behind how they're supposed to work that doesn't click for me. But I don't believe otherworldly monstrosities from beyond time and space need a mechanism for their existence that would be comprehensible to me - I'm fine with them just existing, contradictions and all, and being what they are because that's just how it is.

It's not like real world physics makes that much sense when you really get down to it, it just is the way it is a lot of the time, so I find an inexplicable (at least to us) Warp more satisfying and believable. I don't mind the emotions thing being an in universe theory or something the Eldar tell themselves about their fall or whatever (although I think the whole fall and she who thirsts part of the eldar is over done and I'd tone it down personally).

 Dysartes wrote:

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:
I think Nurgle is the worst offender of the four. You have disease and plague, life and rebirth, joy, misery...the last two are emotions, but mortal Nurgle followers are not joyful, and the demons are not miserable at all!

Plaguebearers may disagree with the latter statement. If they can build up the energy to do so.

Wait, are they the one Nurgle demon that is miserable? Barring the bloatflies, I know those are miffed.

 Da Boss wrote:
Ashiraya: I'm still not sure that "excess" is an emotion as I understand the term. And if it is, I'm also not convinced it's common enough or primal enough to justify one of the main 4 gods formed of gestalt emotion being based on it?

I just don't think it all hangs together that well as described. But I also think that's fine, I don't mind the Chaos Gods being exactly what they are, it's just the explanation and mechanics behind how they're supposed to work that doesn't click for me. But I don't believe otherworldly monstrosities from beyond time and space need a mechanism for their existence that would be comprehensible to me - I'm fine with them just existing, contradictions and all, and being what they are because that's just how it is.

It's not like real world physics makes that much sense when you really get down to it, it just is the way it is a lot of the time, so I find an inexplicable (at least to us) Warp more satisfying and believable. I don't mind the emotions thing being an in universe theory or something the Eldar tell themselves about their fall or whatever (although I think the whole fall and she who thirsts part of the eldar is over done and I'd tone it down personally).

I agree with you on the whole, but it does occur to me that 3 of the 4 long predate humanity (with the 4th explicitly birthed by the Eldar), so it may be that the "emotions" they represent are not human emotions, and we are left with a sort of interpretation of that translated into human.

Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch don't predate humanity, they came to fruition as humanity started to become civilised.

The Black Death was the result of the birth of Nurgle for example.

The Gods aren't emotion powered, being angry doesn't give Khorne sustenance. That sort of stuff is coming from years of Internet Knowings getting mixed up with memes and lore videos doing research from Wikis rather than primary sources.

Emotions inform decisions made by sentient beings but it's the act not the feeling that gives sustenance to the Dark Gods.

 Gert wrote:
Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch don't predate humanity, they came to fruition as humanity started to become civilised.

The Black Death was the result of the birth of Nurgle for example.

The Gods aren't emotion powered, being angry doesn't give Khorne sustenance. That sort of stuff is coming from years of Internet Knowings getting mixed up with memes and lore videos doing research from Wikis rather than primary sources.

Emotions inform decisions made by sentient beings but it's the act not the feeling that gives sustenance to the Dark Gods.

Wait, really? Nurgle is that young? That's... I'm not a fan of how human-centric it seems for a time when humanity was barely a blip within the galaxy.

 Da Boss wrote:
Ashiraya: I'm still not sure that "excess" is an emotion as I understand the term. And if it is, I'm also not convinced it's common enough or primal enough to justify one of the main 4 gods formed of gestalt emotion being based on it?

It is not an emotion, but it is what Slaanesh is consistently based on.

Slaanesh is absolutely feasting. Excess is everywhere in this setting. It's a setting with satirical roots, after all, so it's no surprise.

 Gert wrote:
Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch don't predate humanity, they came to fruition as humanity started to become civilised.

Wait, I was under the impression Slaanesh was the youngest of the four. Is that only in Fantasy?

 Haighus wrote:

Wait, really? Nurgle is that young? That's... I'm not a fan of how human-centric it seems for a time when humanity was barely a blip within the galaxy.

That's just the human marker for it. Humanity didn't cause the rise of the Dark Gods, but their manifesting had implications for Earth and humanity.

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:

Wait, I was under the impression Slaanesh was the youngest of the four. Is that only in Fantasy?

The collapse of the Aeldari was around M30 so the difference between the middle ages of Earth and then is still a long time for sentient species.

It's important to remember that until the Fall of the Aeldari, the galaxy wasn't the crazy mess it was in the time of the Imperium. Apart from the Cybernetic Revolt it was humanity building its empire, the Aeldari doing crazy amounts of drugs within their borders, and the Orks just muckin about.

Adamantium Dodecahedron wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch don't predate humanity, they came to fruition as humanity started to become civilised.

Wait, I was under the impression Slaanesh was the youngest of the four. Is that only in Fantasy?

Slaanesh is the youngest, being born circa 30k CE, vs circa 1350 CE for Nurgle. (According to the RoC section Gert is referencing)

It’s not explicit when the other two were born Tzeentch was when ‘nations and politics grew to adulthood’ which could be many things. Sumeria in 4-5k BC (unlikely, see below)? Greek city states and Athenian democracy circa 500 BC? Roman Empire circa 0 CE? Something in the Middle Ages shortly before the birth of Nurgle?

Khorne was when ‘an age of wars and conflicts raged across the globe’. So could be anytime tbh, though apparently ‘many thousands of years after’ the Emperor’s birth in circa 7-8k BC.

So this is all explained when you take realms of chaos and liber chaotica together.

As for the chaos gods being incoherent thematically, well that's the problem with relying on corporate spoon feeding to give you an accurate depiction of something.

It's no different to saying marines are the Maine fighting force of the imperium because of how gw promotes them..or that the imperial guard is only made up of death korps, cadians and catachans because of how they promote the guard.

If you take gw chaos at face value. Slannesh is the least excessive excess based god in fiction. Basically a nun in comparison to the cenobites which were clearly an inspiration.

If slannesh was advertised the way it is actually described you'd have units with slave women growing foetuses pumped full of drugs to be used as battle suppositories while the squad carried their favourite granny slaves living head as a fleshlight. And a million worse things than that.

You would also have slannesh people with speakers on their butts and bongo drumb balls with Harp flayed penises to play.

Etc etc.

The position that nurgle is just disease and therefore despair doesn't make sense and therefore chaos is incoherent, is simple to disprove.

These days gw wants passive consumption of their products. When they first began they didn't have products so they relied on evocative imagination to sell concepts rather than products.

Chaos was far more deep. Rich and complex when it didn't have to confirm to a narrow advertising aesthetic and theme to shovel into the consumer

 Gert wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

Wait, really? Nurgle is that young? That's... I'm not a fan of how human-centric it seems for a time when humanity was barely a blip within the galaxy.

That's just the human marker for it. Humanity didn't cause the rise of the Dark Gods, but their manifesting had implications for Earth and humanity.

Per the Slaves to Darkness battletome, at least in AoS/WHFB Nurgle has existed as long as reality has, since decay is one of its foundational building blocks.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Gert wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

Wait, really? Nurgle is that young? That's... I'm not a fan of how human-centric it seems for a time when humanity was barely a blip within the galaxy.

That's just the human marker for it. Humanity didn't cause the rise of the Dark Gods, but their manifesting had implications for Earth and humanity.

Per the Slaves to Darkness battletome, at least in AoS/WHFB Nurgle has existed as long as reality has, since decay is one of its foundational building blocks.

The comparative ages of the Chaos Gods is really only 40K lore - even in RoC it was in a 40K section specifically about the Emperor.

In WFB, despite Slaanesh still being described as ‘youngest’ all the gods were present when Chaos entered the world.

Chaos is also eternal. As soon as they existed they have also always existed. Time doesn't really exist in the Warp, it's why Slaanesh wasn't birthed until M30 but also was able to be one of the Colchisian Pantheon and the patron of the Laer.