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KamikazeCanuck wrote:Their faith is a shield against chaos and helps in a small picture but also persecutes people whose pain and suffering fuel Chaos in the big picture.

No, those are two different points.

(1) The Sisters' faith shields them from Chaos.

(2) Human suffering strengthens Chaos.

The first point has lots to support it in the fluff. And this is the point that we were talking about.

The second point actually doesn't have much support in fluff or it's at least not as big of a deal as you seem to be making it. Think about it: there are a million worlds in the Imperium. The overwhelming majority of them are centers for human suffering on a massive scale. And yet, daemonic incursions are pretty rare. Also, daemons might come to a world and kill millions and yet they are beaten back by a hundred or so GK. One would think they'd be awfully strong thanks to all that regular suffering and then the particular suffering they themselves inflict.

So:

- the faith of one Sister makes her extremely resistant to Chaos

- the death of millions doesn't strengthen daemons enough that they can defeat GK

Even if we were formerly talking about the second point, it seems clear that the strength that Sisters derive from their faith is quite a bit more potent than the strength that daemons derive from suffering.




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Tadashi wrote:Which makes them a complete mockery of the Fallen Emperor's ideals and dreams.

That's what Horus told himself so he could sleep at night.

Manchu wrote:

Tadashi wrote:Which makes them a complete mockery of the Fallen Emperor's ideals and dreams.

That's what Horus told himself so he could sleep at night.

Unlikely. In the impossible event of the Emperor's return, he's going to be very angry. After a major butt-kicking session for any eminences on Terra, the Convents and Palaces of the Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition will go the same way as Monarchia. The Sisters will be forced to kneel on the ashes of their idols ala Word Bearers by the power of the Empeor and made to renounce his divinity and acknowledge his humanity.

The Emperor gave a direct okay to the Sisters and continually blesses them with His miracles and His Living Saints. I'm fairly certain he isn't gonna be angry with them.

Manchu wrote:I'd say the idea that other species are aware of Four make their existence a bit less doubtful than the racial legends of the Orks and Eldar. For all we know, those pantheons might be dim memories of the Old Ones.

Humans are aware of Gork and Mork. As, very likely, are Eldar.

@Manchu: I've noticed through our many conversations that you like your fiction rather black & white. Straight up good vs. evil. I like that sometimes but I appreciate a little complication in my conflicts. Some nuance and irony. I just don't see the never ending war between The Imperium and Chaos as good vs. evil. Chaos is undoubtably evil but the side it's representing is, of course, chaos. The Imperium on the other hand is order and there is no length it will not go to, nothing it won't do to instill that order. Don't get me wrong, they're definately not as evil as Chaos but that is not what the core of the conflict is.

My point is Daemons are negative emotions made manifest. That is often stated in the background. If The Imperium fosters a lot of suffering then it is contributing to the Dark Gods power. You're making it sound like the warp is just some other planet with a standing army. The warp beings are completely dependent on real space for sustaneance. Khorne is the god of war and murder. He can not survive unless there is war and murder. Nurgle the god of disease and decay. He needs things to decay to thrive.
If the galaxy could magically be turned into some perfect utopia then The Pantheon would be near death if not just dead.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:My point is Daemons are negative emotions made manifest. That is often stated in the background. If The Imperium fosters a lot of suffering then it is contributing to the Dark Gods power. You're making it sound like the warp is just some other planet with a standing army. The warp beings are completely dependent on real space for sustaneance. Khorne is the god of war and murder. He can not survive unless there is war and murder. Nurgle the god of disease and decay. He needs things to decay to thrive.
If the galaxy could magically be turned into some perfect utopia then The Pantheon would be near death if not just dead.

I would dispute part of that statement just a little. Daemons are not negative emotions made manifest rather, negative emotions allow deamons to manifest in this/our reality. The deamons and Gods of the warp exist whether or not someone believes in them. Utopia as you put it would not kill them, just stop their ability to emerge into our reality. Which, from our POV, would make it appear that The Pantheon is dead/dying.

I think that Manchu is right in his assertion that the warp/chaos would exist regardless.

Cheers

Andrew

We know for a fact in the fluff of 40k that the Eldar gods were not just myths and legends but actually were real. Evidence is the fact that when Slaanesh shattered Khaela Mensha Khaine into many different pieces, those pieces came to rest on the many different craftworlds through out the galaxy. If the eldar gods were only a myth, then this would never have happened.

AndrewC wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:My point is Daemons are negative emotions made manifest. That is often stated in the background. If The Imperium fosters a lot of suffering then it is contributing to the Dark Gods power. You're making it sound like the warp is just some other planet with a standing army. The warp beings are completely dependent on real space for sustaneance. Khorne is the god of war and murder. He can not survive unless there is war and murder. Nurgle the god of disease and decay. He needs things to decay to thrive.
If the galaxy could magically be turned into some perfect utopia then The Pantheon would be near death if not just dead.

I would dispute part of that statement just a little. Daemons are not negative emotions made manifest rather, negative emotions allow deamons to manifest in this/our reality. The deamons and Gods of the warp exist whether or not someone believes in them. Utopia as you put it would not kill them, just stop their ability to emerge into our reality. Which, from our POV, would make it appear that The Pantheon is dead/dying.

I think that Manchu is right in his assertion that the warp/chaos would exist regardless.

Cheers

Andrew

No, they really are. Slaneesh was created by the emotions of the Eldar. They made him. He has a birth date: M29. He even had a gestation. He is basically an Eldar god.

No. That is how it seems in realspace terms. The thing mortals call Slaanesh has no beginning or end in the Warp. At the very best, the so-called "birth" was just the moment in which the decadence of the Eldar allowed Slaanesh to catastrophically interfere in the Materium. I have had to correct a lot of people on this over the last two weeks. Codex: Chaos Daemons makes this clear.

As for black and white fluff, I don't think you understand what I am actually saying. And you seem to be the one using a binary, substituting chaos and order for good and evil. No part of anything I have posted about the Sisters indicates that they are "good." The power their faith has against the daemonic is not related to them being "good" at all. I can't understand where you are getting this from; it certainly isn't my posts.

In any case, many mortal beings have a psychic presence in the Warp. Strong emotions magnify that presence as does use of psychic powers or having the psyker mutation. Dembski-Bowden described it in Cadian Blood as something like lights: every human "soul" is a dim light in the warp. An untrained psyker using his powers for the first time is a much brighter light. The astropathic choir is a light so bright that it shines 50,000 light years in all directions from Terra. The last throes of the ancient Eldar empire must have been similarly of bonfire magnitude.

The light attracts daemons proportionate to the strength of a given light. Where emotions are kindled high, the psychic resonance light of mortals shines brighter. The brighter the light, the more powerful are the daemons who take note -- all the way up to one of the Four themselves, or all of them in the case of the Emperor. But this metaphorical light doesn't seem to merely attract the daemons. It seems that it can also weaken whatever separates real space from the Immaterium so that daemons can pass through. This is why Chaos Cultists, especially under the auspices of the Word Bearers, perform cruel rituals on a vast scale: to draw the attention of the Dark Gods and invite a daemonic incursion into real space.

And yet, all the billions of lives' worth of suffering in any given hive city on any given Imperial world doesn't seem to attract regular daemonic incursions. The idea that any and all human emotion feeds and strengthens daemons and the Ruinous Powers is therefore obviously oversimplistic. Yes, there is some relationship. How exactly it works, however, remains mysterious. One thing that is clear is that the Chaos Gods do not rely on mortals for their existence. The Warp is Chaos; Chaos is the Warp. The extinction of beings capable of emotion would not mean the end of Chaos any more than it would mean the end of real space itself.

I think there are a few things being overlooked.

First, chaos didn't start being aggressive with the material universe after the Imperial Truth was established. Quite the opposite. Humanity started evolving again: into psykers.

Psykers are one of the entry points daemons have to this realm. Once the number of "doorways" started expanding, more of them could come through.

Three guesses as to the major cause of Old Night....

The Emperor had to get control of humanity in order to stop chaos from coming in. To do that he made a deal with those very powers to create the Primarchs. Which is the duplicity they have accused the Emperor of. He used the help of chaos to create the very army designed to bring humanity back together under a banner that would forgo a belief in those very same beings...

Further by eliminating the alien and forging humanity into a single direction, a lot of powerful negative emotional power would be denied to the warp.

He was also trying to buy time to repair sections of the webway so that humans could travel safely without warp technology.

The Emperor has been fighting chaos since day 1. He needed humanity to stop believing in them and to stop providing power to that realm.

Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out the way he wanted and he had to go to plan B: godhood.

Quite simple really.

There is absolutely no evidence in the fluff that "believing" in the Chaos Gods strengthens them.

Manchu wrote:There is absolutely no evidence in the fluff that "believing" in the Chaos Gods strengthens them.

It's impossible to be a true believer of something without having an emotional attachment to it. Get rid of faith in "gods" and you remove a large emotional crutch.

True, there is no evidence that actual belief in their existence affects their power, but there is a lot of evidence that emotions (especially negative, and especially especially those emotions directly connected to the Power in question) is what feeds them, gives them form, and gives them strength. It's described very clearly in literally all of the text on page 8 of the CSM codex. It's not just any emotions (like the emotional attachment to a religion), but those emotional echoes specific to the god in question.

Now, I don't know about the Daemons codex (again, it's been a while since I read it), but it's fairly widely-accepted that Slaanesh was born (as opposed to just touching the material realm) in M29. His emotional connection was always there, but he only gained sentience as a true Power at the Fall of the Eldar, from all their lusts and desires and hedonism.

It was also stated in Lost and the Damned that Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle awakened to full consciousness at the end of the Middle Ages (lots of change, bloodshed, and plague in a species very connected to the Warp). This may have been retconned, but I assume we can still run with it if nothing explicitly contradictory has been published?

Chaos is the Warp, and the Warp is Chaos and all that, it's true, and these emotions have been present and feeding into the Warp long before that, but they only got powerful and intense enough to truly awaken into a sentient Warp Entity at those dates.

Summing up the Imperial Truth would be this statement from the Fallen Emperor:

"Only in the light can it achieve its full potential. Humanity is the same, and only when the suffocating shadows of a religion that teaches us not to question is gone from this world will we see its true brilliance."

- The Last Church on Terra

Elector wrote:
Now, I don't know about the Daemons codex (again, it's been a while since I read it), but it's fairly widely-accepted that Slaanesh was born (as opposed to just touching the material realm) in M29. His emotional connection was always there, but he only gained sentience as a true Power at the Fall of the Eldar, from all their lusts and desires and hedonism.

It was also stated in Lost and the Damned that Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle awakened to full consciousness at the end of the Middle Ages (lots of change, bloodshed, and plague in a species very connected to the Warp). This may have been retconned, but I assume we can still run with it if nothing explicitly contradictory has been published?

You are right and from the Eldar perspective and Mankinds this is true, but time flows differently in the warp and Slaanesh has never and always been.

Oh dang, that's true, the Warp really messes with time. Alright, fair enough.

My point was actually more that it has been stated repeatedly that the Chaos Gods derive almost all of their power from the negative emotions they are connected to. And souls.

Nope, that's still not the whole picture. That's just what it looks like to real space beings. If the Four, in some sense or another, have always and never existed then they obviously do not depend on real space beings for their existence or non-existence.

The idea that they have always existed and never existed is only in that time in the Warp doesn't flow like it does in the material universe. Their point of awakening by Warp-reckoning is impossible to pinpoint, so they become both eternal and finite.

It has, however, been stated regularly that their connection to the material realm, and their formation into that of a conscious Power is due to the concentration of intense negative emotion so powerful it affects the Warp's connection to that emotion, changing from a vortex of that emotional psychic energy to a sentient warp entity. I figure that there have always been beings with some form of psychic link to the Warp, with negative emotions, somewhat feeding and growing. These Four are linked to what some could call the most potent of the negative emotions, and have always existed, technically, but only truly awakened into a psychic entity (as opposed to a slurry of emotion) when the emotion got powerful enough.

Ergo, they have always existed technically, but only as a collection of minor emotional psychic energy, and only became gods when that energy got powerful enough. Who's to say there haven't always been beings who had a connection to the Warp and harbored some forms of negative emotion?

Think of the definition of "eternal." Now think about whether it is possible to "become" eternal.

So it's probably not a good idea to think of the Chaos Gods as discrete actors -- they're not characters like Kharn or the Emperor or Caiphas Cain. We really have no idea how they experience existence. Our names for them were made by us. Our conception of them was made by us. Whether or not we even have the capacity to comprehensively understand their being is questionable -- and, in my opinion, extremely unlikely. Everything that we say about them is only pseudo-scientific because their existence does not fit into the categories upon which material investigation of the real universe is premised. In fact, our conceptual tools for understanding them are so weak that what we do know about them is actually expressed as mythology. (For example, the GK using hexagrammatical wards, etc.)

It's certainly possible for the idea of eternal to change if the definition of time (as it pertains to the Warp) changes, no? (besides, the 'become' part of that argument was syntax. I meant only that due to the nature of time in the Warp, they can be considered both eternal and finite)

And I agree that we would not be able grasp their existence, because due to the nature of them, of the Chaos, and the Warp, it would shatter our minds. It's beyond our comprehension.

If they weren't fictional, and if canonical fluff wasn't regularly describing their nature. Like in codexes, where what they feed on, an analogy of the nature of the Warp, and what gives them power is literally described in a few paragraphs.

By the setting's reckoning, Chaos is not understandable, and how it operates with regards to its needs is impossible to know. But by our reckoning? Chaos is described at length in various books. They might not be fully described (it would ruin the magic, as how can we believe they are beyond our minds' comprehension and then have it described to us?) but the key parts to this debate have been stated very explicitly.

Elector wrote: but the key parts to this debate have been stated very explicitly.

And then explicitly contradicted. Please see Codex: Chaos Daemons. This is the point of Chaos -- you can't pin it down. There's some kind of connection between the Warp and real space but it's not something we can exactly express. If it was as simple as you are implying, we wouldn't even know of any Chaos God but Khorne considering that "there is only war."

Alright, I concede your point, I haven't read the Chaos Daemons codex nearly enough to know.

I really did think that the Gods fed off emotions though...

Elector wrote:I really did think that the Gods fed off emotions though...

Well, you're not wrong, they definitely do "feed" off of emotions -- just not in the sense of how we eat food.

What do you mean?

I mean that, in the warp, they are drawn to the psychic resonance of real space experiences. And, in real space, they are strengthened by these same experiences. (For example, sacrificing people to keep daemons from slipping back into the Warp.) But they cannot "starve to death" in the absence of mortal emotions. Nor can they overcome one another in strength simply because some thing or another is going on in real space (like a 10,000-year war).

Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense now. Alright, I have no problems with that, thanks for the explanation!

No prob. The published fluff doesn't make it easy on us.

It doesn't matter that the Warp has non-existant laws of space-time. Realspace does. It's subject to chronology. It's flat out stated that Slaneesh is the youngest and Khorne is the oldest. First a series of events happened in realspace that caused the creation of a lifeform that then within the imaterium's non-chronological timeframe claimed he's always been around. The main point is that the first event was still happened in Realspace where time does matter.

So basically, you are reiterating the same point I have been making: Slaanesh's "birth" is really just the first time that mortals inhabiting the Milky Way encountered the thing they call Slaanesh.

Manchu wrote:So basically, you are reiterating the same point I have been making: Slaanesh's "birth" is really just the first time that mortals inhabiting the Milky Way encountered the thing they call Slaanesh.

No, I'm saying that there's a clear chronology:

1) Eldar have a bunch of orgies
2) Slaneesh starts to gestate causing a bunch of warp storms that cut of most human worlds from each other
3) Slaneesh's birth blows up the Galaxy.
4) Time's is kinda wierd in the warp and stuff.

4 does not nullify 1-3. In fact it's completely pointless because they don't have time anyway so really only realspace events matter.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:In fact it's completely pointless because they don't have time anyway so really only realspace events matter.

By insisting on trying to understand the Immaterium only in terms of the Materium, you are setting yourself up for failure.