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I was talking in another post about how far a Chaos Gods influence/power can go and came to the conclusion that the Chaos Gods are weaker where there are no sacrifices, negative emotions, etc., so they are effectively contained within the Milky Way Galaxy due to other galaxies being so far, far away that they can't be touched. That being said, if Chaos needs the aforementioned requirements to sustain themselves, they cannot bring the Immaterium and real space to be one and consume everything, otherwise they will effectively destroy themselves. So are the Chaos Gods put in a position where they can't "win", but instead be at a "eternal stalemate" with other factions to continue their existence? In other words, they throw "the game" in favor of their opponents here and there, but come back to "win" that effectively gives them the influence/power they need.

The Ruinous Powers are not contained to the Milky Way. In addition, their end goal doesn’t appear to be to conquer the material dimension.

So any of the Chaos Gods in the Milky Way can just pack up and leave for another galaxy? What is their end goal? Just asking out of general curiosity.

 Psionara wrote:
I was talking in another post about how far a Chaos Gods influence/power can go and came to the conclusion that the Chaos Gods are weaker where there are no sacrifices, negative emotions, etc., so they are effectively contained within the Milky Way Galaxy due to other galaxies being so far, far away that they can't be touched. That being said, if Chaos needs the aforementioned requirements to sustain themselves, they cannot bring the Immaterium and real space to be one and consume everything, otherwise they will effectively destroy themselves. So are the Chaos Gods put in a position where they can't "win", but instead be at a "eternal stalemate" with other factions to continue their existence? In other words, they throw "the game" in favor of their opponents here and there, but come back to "win" that effectively gives them the influence/power they need.

There's nothing stopping the Chaos Gods from 'farming' human worlds within the Warp.

 Psionara wrote:
So any of the Chaos Gods in the Milky Way can just pack up and leave for another galaxy? What is their end goal? Just asking out of general curiosity.

They aren’t “in” the Milky Way. They exist beyond time and space, in the Warp.

 Manchu wrote:
They aren’t “in” the Milky Way. They exist beyond time and space, in the Warp.

Sorry, I misspoke, but what I meant by that was that the Immaterium and real space are closely connected, and if rifts, like the Eye of Terror occur, the Immaterium and realspace become one, making them "in" the Milky Way. Not in the capacity of being able to manifest themselves wholly, but at least parts of them in the form of greater and lesser daemons.

Sure but the same sort of thing could be happening at points all across the material universe.

 Psionara wrote:
I was talking in another post about how far a Chaos Gods influence/power can go and came to the conclusion that the Chaos Gods are weaker where there are no sacrifices, negative emotions, etc., so they are effectively contained within the Milky Way Galaxy due to other galaxies being so far, far away that they can't be touched. That being said, if Chaos needs the aforementioned requirements to sustain themselves, they cannot bring the Immaterium and real space to be one and consume everything, otherwise they will effectively destroy themselves. So are the Chaos Gods put in a position where they can't "win", but instead be at a "eternal stalemate" with other factions to continue their existence? In other words, they throw "the game" in favor of their opponents here and there, but come back to "win" that effectively gives them the influence/power they need.

It stands to reason to say that the Gods of Chaos aren't "smart". They are more akin to forces of nature powered by raw emotion, self destructive emotions like rage, deceit, excess, fear, etc. "Winning" for the Gods of Chaos implies them killing themselves a bit like a species that conquers its environment so thoroughly that in the process it destroys the biodiversity it required to exist in the first place. The Gods of Chaos cannot stop or balance themselves; that's why they are called gods of chaos and not gods of evil for example.

The chaos gods are a lot more abstract then this, and the warp far less concrete.

The eye of terror is only geographically certain in real space, there is no location within the warp that it exists relative to other things.

It's far more Jeremey bearemy than that...

The Chaos gods are completely and utterly insane.

The play The Great Game because that's just what they do. It's sibling rivalry, with no clear end to it. One gains ascendancy, until they stop being The Big Cheese.

Indeed, Khorne has enjoyed a long time at the top, because being the god of War will do that for you. But, with Slaanesh getting at least a sliver of power everytime someone does something to excess, like, I dunno, gathering thousands of skulls for the Skill Throne, Khorne's position is seriously far from secure.

While I agree with others that the Ruinous powers are not technically contained/located in the Milky Way, because you can't think of it in such paltry mortal limitations, I do think their "source" of power is indeed limited in the Milky Way.
In a galaxy full of War, the big 4 are sustained. They were also "created" by the emotions and psychic energies of the mortal races in this galaxy, so they are certainly connected.

But if we look as the lore in Age of Sigmar, specifically the End Times, Chaos DID win and completely destroyed the Old World and everyone in it. But that didn't destroy the Chaos gods, they just temporarily moved on because they broke their toys and got bored.
But once Sigmar started resurrecting peeps and made his own Space Mari...uh...Stormcast Eternals, the Chaos gods returned.

We could see this is 2 ways: either the Chaos gods "disappeared/faded out of existence" after the Old World was destroyed, only to reappear when the mortals came back. This would suggest the Ruinous Powers are actually a manifestations of emotions/energies of mortals in the Warp as some kind of gestalt conciseness.
Alternatively, the gods really did "go somewhere else" only to return once "food was back on the table"

Or both. Either way, I'd imagine the same would happen in 40k if the Ruinous Powers ever "won"

-

The Chaos Gods tell you that they are eternal and all-encompassing, that they dwell beyond time and space, that any victory against them is a defeat in disguise, that they only play with mortals for sport and could crush the cosmos if they truly cared.

The Chaos Gods lie.

Once there were three Gods, and before that there were two, and before that there were none. It may be that in times to come, there will be five. It may be that in times to come, there will be none again.

The Chaos Gods are psychic parasites grown bloated on their own legend, daemon kings who maintain their authority only with a paranoid and iron grip, charlatans who dared to claim the garden of the Old Ones only after its masters were dead and buried.

And no, they don't have power beyond the Milky Way. They don't consistently have power within it.

RevlidRas wrote:
The Chaos Gods tell you that they are eternal and all-encompassing, that they dwell beyond time and space, that any victory against them is a defeat in disguise, that they only play with mortals for sport and could crush the cosmos if they truly cared.

The Chaos Gods lie.

Once there were three Gods, and before that there were two, and before that there were none. It may be that in times to come, there will be five. It may be that in times to come, there will be none again.

The Chaos Gods are psychic parasites grown bloated on their own legend, daemon kings who maintain their authority only with a paranoid and iron grip, charlatans who dared to claim the garden of the Old Ones only after its masters were dead and buried.

And no, they don't have power beyond the Milky Way. They don't consistently have power within it.

I think this is pretty convincing to me. Good argument!
I've always wondered that if they're so awesome they could crush everything (which they claim is their goal most of the time). If they were that powerful how come they couldn't overthrow the Emperor? Oh... not winning was part of your plan all along to create 10,000 years of strife?

RevlidRas wrote:
The Chaos Gods tell you that they are eternal and all-encompassing, that they dwell beyond time and space, that any victory against them is a defeat in disguise, that they only play with mortals for sport and could crush the cosmos if they truly cared.

The Chaos Gods lie.

Once there were three Gods, and before that there were two, and before that there were none. It may be that in times to come, there will be five. It may be that in times to come, there will be none again.

The Chaos Gods are psychic parasites grown bloated on their own legend, daemon kings who maintain their authority only with a paranoid and iron grip, charlatans who dared to claim the garden of the Old Ones only after its masters were dead and buried.

And no, they don't have power beyond the Milky Way. They don't consistently have power within it.

The problem with that is that it's not the Chaos Gods saying it, it's just the fluff. When you just start throwing that out as lies as you like you're not left with a common basis for discussion.

Well, no. We know that Slaanesh was born, and before then there was no Slaanesh. There was a real-space time when Slaanesh wasn't. I believe it is also known that before the major space-faring races, the warp was calm. And it was (I believe) calm again during the great Enslaver plague, for totally different reasons.

The Chaos Gods are not people with rational motivations. They raging storms of psychic energy given shape and character by the emotions they feed on and the races who fear/worship them.

Even Tzeentch (who one might imagine is in it for the long game) does not truly have a grand master plan for everything. Tzeentch schemes and plots and twists because that is its nature. Why are its schemes so convoluted and contradictory that it sometimes even defeats itself? Because it has no sense of balance or moderation. It only hungers to perpetuate itself. If it did not constantly plot and scheme (even to its own detriment), it would not be Tzeetch anymore.

Trying to work out the long term strategy of the Chaos Gods is like trying to work out the long term strategy of a storm. The wind seeks only to blow because if it does not blow it ceases to be the wind.

The Chaos good, as pointed out present themselves as invincible and beyond time and space and I can well imagine that such beings in the end convince themselves of that.

The paradox of the chaos gods is that they are almost unlimited power that fluctuates independently from their own will, but still since they exist and can influence reality in turn, they can well end up in some kind of blur, nonsensical vicious circle where getting more might from sentient creatures in the galaxy makes them devastate it further (since they hail from somehow destructing emotions), even it it should deplete their supply.
What's more, as implied by the sole existence of Malal who embodies it the best, chaos is such.... chaos, such sea of twirling madness and logicless that it tends to self-destruction.

In a very 40k way, their power is only lent and leads them to appear insane or ridiculous, in truth they are simply energy trapped in its nature.

As for choas being limited to the milky way, I don't think. It was more or less established in another thread that after all we could totally imagine the warp infringing in all real space, not only in the milky way. But that it simply isn't agitated enough for them to get interested in other galaxies, maybe, (I guess the barren one the tyranids came from must mirror quiiite quietly in the warp now)? Or maybe we just don't care because in the setting as it is, it as no influence on 40k?

That's it for my incomprehensible 2 cents babblings!

 Galef wrote:
While I agree with others that the Ruinous powers are not technically contained/located in the Milky Way, because you can't think of it in such paltry mortal limitations, I do think their "source" of power is indeed limited in the Milky Way.
In a galaxy full of War, the big 4 are sustained. They were also "created" by the emotions and psychic energies of the mortal races in this galaxy, so they are certainly connected.

But if we look as the lore in Age of Sigmar, specifically the End Times, Chaos DID win and completely destroyed the Old World and everyone in it. But that didn't destroy the Chaos gods, they just temporarily moved on because they broke their toys and got bored.
But once Sigmar started resurrecting peeps and made his own Space Mari...uh...Stormcast Eternals, the Chaos gods returned.

We could see this is 2 ways: either the Chaos gods "disappeared/faded out of existence" after the Old World was destroyed, only to reappear when the mortals came back. This would suggest the Ruinous Powers are actually a manifestations of emotions/energies of mortals in the Warp as some kind of gestalt conciseness.
Alternatively, the gods really did "go somewhere else" only to return once "food was back on the table"

Or both. Either way, I'd imagine the same would happen in 40k if the Ruinous Powers ever "won"

-

I think they have got a lot of energy from all the emotions at the End of Times, but if the new cycle did not start, they would disappear.
Even in AoS, the Chaos Gods were afraid that Nagash would turn everyone into undead.

darkoms wrote:

 Galef wrote:
While I agree with others that the Ruinous powers are not technically contained/located in the Milky Way, because you can't think of it in such paltry mortal limitations, I do think their "source" of power is indeed limited in the Milky Way.
In a galaxy full of War, the big 4 are sustained. They were also "created" by the emotions and psychic energies of the mortal races in this galaxy, so they are certainly connected.

But if we look as the lore in Age of Sigmar, specifically the End Times, Chaos DID win and completely destroyed the Old World and everyone in it. But that didn't destroy the Chaos gods, they just temporarily moved on because they broke their toys and got bored.
But once Sigmar started resurrecting peeps and made his own Space Mari...uh...Stormcast Eternals, the Chaos gods returned.

We could see this is 2 ways: either the Chaos gods "disappeared/faded out of existence" after the Old World was destroyed, only to reappear when the mortals came back. This would suggest the Ruinous Powers are actually a manifestations of emotions/energies of mortals in the Warp as some kind of gestalt conciseness.
Alternatively, the gods really did "go somewhere else" only to return once "food was back on the table"

Or both. Either way, I'd imagine the same would happen in 40k if the Ruinous Powers ever "won"

-

I think they have got a lot of energy from all the emotions at the End of Times, but if the new cycle did not start, they would disappear.
Even in AoS, the Chaos Gods were afraid that Nagash would turn everyone into undead.

Ahhh not quite

The lore is very specific that even the Mortal Realms are just one of the places they hang out and play, that uncounted worlds have and are and will be their plaything.

Thing is for the most part the Chaos Gods don;t really want to win - several of them had second thoughts during the End Times as once you win the games over but they got over that, finished the game and went to play elsewhere - then came back when the board had been reset by Sigmar and co....

40k will be the same I would think...