Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Supposedly, Khorne has little use for psykers and even holds them in contempt. But doesn't he still need them to facilitate daemonic incursions into realspace?

I think this element of the fluff is rooted in the perception of magical/psychic ability being the realm of scholarly or tricksy types... which, let's face it, is often more about game balance than anything else. The old nerds-vs.-jocks dichotomy. Yet psychic powers, being honed through practice rather than learned via books, are not at all incompatible with a warrior spirit or Khorne's extreme social Darwinism. I could easily imagine a Khornate school of psychic powers rooted in slaughter and bloodshed, not unlike the ritual sacrifices of WFB's beastfolk shamans and Druchii sorceresses, the haruspicy (entrails-reading) of skink priests, or the gory religion of ogre butchers.

It's not about dirty tricks, which Khorne does loathe. It's about creating the conditions for the fair fight that your foe would deny you.

"Oh, you have fancy powers to conceal your fighters from view? Well, I have powers to make their heartbeats audible to my fighters."
"Your psyker can rust my axe to dust? That's cuuuuute. Mine can give me the strength to rip your spine from your back with my bare hands."
"What's that, you can foretell the future in the stars? I have someone here who can read your entrails, let's find out together what he has to say about your future."

.

Khorne hates many things but also "does not care from where the blood flows as long as it flows"

You can still serve him as a psyker, wizard, etc but have to work quite a bit harder to gain his favour same as you can by being an assassin, murderer etc.

Daemonology and rituals aren't inherently psychic acts.
It certainly doesn't hurt to be a wizard for such shenanigans of course but it's not a requirement.
Kyril Sinderman accidentally summoned a Daemon and is a baseline mortal.

It's like how there's wizards, mages and sorcerers in DnD. Book learning magic, inherited/genetic magic, and dark pact magic.
Book magic is how the Word Bearers got started on their side learning rituals, genetic magic would be the Thousand Sons, and dark pact magic would be accepting power from a Daemon like Grendor Skraivok of the Night Lords.

Where does the line lie between Sorcery and Ritual? Pretty much wherever Khorne decides it does.

Some form of magic/sorcery when dabbling in Chaos is inevitable. One has to weaken the barriers between realspace and the warp after all.

Where Khorne seems to have a firm opinion is using Sorcery/Magic to do the fighting for you. So, summoning Daemons to fight alongside is one thing. Flinging dark power up the nostrils of your foe is another.

Daemons Weapons are also an exception. Not only do you need martial skill to wield them (Good Little Khorne Follower), but also engage in a battle of wills with the Bound Daemon. Thus, even if much of your skill comes from the Daemon? You’ve still actively fought for that power, and must continue to do so.

There is a kind of logic to it, just suitably twisted and situational as befits a completely insane and capricious god.

-Guardsman- wrote:
But doesn't he still need them to facilitate daemonic incursions into realspace

Nope. Look up Khorne Daemonkin. They essentially just create acts of bloodshed and butchery so intense and vast that the walls of the materium weaken and allow their chosen legion of Khornate daemons to enter and partake of the slaughter. No ritual required.

That in itself is the ritual. It’s not all chalk, incense and incantations.

In some of the various Gaunt's Ghost books and other spinoffs in the Sabbat crusade we see blood witches show up from time to time. Veiled woman who perform blood based rituals of detection and identification. So it seems the writers want to give khornate worshippers some level of sorcery.

Again though, there's a difference between casting spells or using psychic powers and enacting a ritual.

The ritual sacrifice of a bull to the gods of Olympus before the Trojan War myth isn't magic, it's religion. It's the same thing for Khornate rituals.

Weakening the barriers between reality and the Warp is also something that can just happen without any specific invocation of gods or use of sorcery.

In my headcanon, the difference between sorcery and psychic powers is in what direction the power is being channeled from. Psykers use their talents to draw warp power from the warp to create supernatural effects in realspace. Rituals are beseeching entities from the other side to do channel the warp power from their end and do things for you. The former Khorne frowns upon whil the latter is grudgingly acceptable (though Khorne's daemons show no gratitude when summoned since Khorne cares not from whom the blood flows).

This explains why cultists with no psychic ability can do sorcerous rituals and get supernatural effects. The line gets blurry when Chaos Space Marine Sorcerors get involved because they can be both psykers and engage in sorcery by utilizing daemonic pacts.

In my mind Khorne's hatred is less for the usage of magic and more for the study of magic. Yeah it would be cool to blow someone's head off with a lightning bolt, but spending years reading books to learn how to do it? Shameful, you could have killed hundreds of people with a shotgun in that timespan. (Or died trying, but that's Khornate too.)

I think if a rogue psyker just started blasting as many people as possible, and honed his skills solely through doing that, Khorne would like him well enough. But he probably wouldn't last long enough to call himself a "sorcerer" doing things like that.

Iracundus wrote:
This explains why cultists with no psychic ability can do sorcerous rituals and get supernatural effects. The line gets blurry when Chaos Space Marine Sorcerors get involved because they can be both psykers and engage in sorcery by utilizing daemonic pacts.

It's blurry due to game mechanics rather than anything else. Malefic Daemonology allowed players to summon Daemons, but to make it a game mechanic, it had to be a Psychic Discipline.

When 8th rolled around, Daemon summoning went back to being Chaos only, and it wasn't Psyker exclusive, which more accurately represented the various ways Daemons are summoned. A Sorcerer might open a portal using their psychic abilities, while a Dark Apostle will enact a ritual to summon Daemons forth.
A Daemon Prince doesn't need either of these; it simply calls forth minions, and they manifest. No wizardry or ritual required.

A Daemon Prince like any other daemon is a warp creature manifested in realspace and maintains a connection back to the warp directly that allows it to generate supernatural effects. This link can also be presumably used for communication and to summon minions, assuming there is enough warp energy to sustain them in realspace.

Normal living beings without any psychic ability are not able to directly communicate with warp beings, so a sorcerous ritual is the means to do so and to beseech or bribe a being on the other side to cross over and manifest or possess someone or something.

In 40K, the Law of Congation exists (like attracts like), so sufficiently intense or extreme actions can thin the barrier with the warp to the point where daemons can manifest. That seems to be more what Khorne prefers rather than some bookish types summoning daemons with rituals. Spill enough blood in Khorne's name and Khorne's own daemons will fight with you and then you and each other. Of course this can also be augmented by sorcerous rituals on a mass scale as demonstrated by Angron during the First War for Armageddon when he delayed pressing the attack and instead engaged in what seemed pointless monument raising and rituals. It was actually to keep the warp energy flowing and the barrier with the warp weakened so that his daemonic army could still stay manifested.

A ritual isn't necessarily sorcery though. A priest isn't a wizard because they wave their hands about shouting words in a different language.

I would say rituals are sorceries if they are repeatable codified distinct actions meant to achieve a specific response. They would be choreographed specific entreaties for specific results from warp entities. Follow these instructions like an IKEA guide in order to summon a daemonette. More complicated rituals can do more complex things like binding the daemon into a machine.

Randomly performing extreme acts and asking Slaanesh for aid would not be a ritual but more a freeform request that might get any result ranging from nothing to getting mutated or getting daemons to manifest depending on the whims of the god or the daemons.

By that line of thinking, any time an Imperial force prays to the Emperor for victory and they win, they're all sorcerers or Psykers.

They enacted a ritual for a specific response and then got the response.

That isn't to say that there aren't rituals that do require a Psyker or that explicitly benefit Psykers (like the Rubric of Ahriman) but they aren't inherently taboo for those who worship Khorne.

 Gert wrote:
By that line of thinking, any time an Imperial force prays to the Emperor for victory and they win, they're all sorcerers or Psykers.

They enacted a ritual for a specific response and then got the response.

That isn't to say that there aren't rituals that do require a Psyker or that explicitly benefit Psykers (like the Rubric of Ahriman) but they aren't inherently taboo for those who worship Khorne.

Praying for victory and winning would be like a freeform prayer not a ritualistic sorcery.

Ritualistic sorcery is like the stereotypical magic ritual involving specific material ingredients, specific phrasing, specific codified actions. They can be written down in grimoires and passed down. Their effects seem to also be far more specific and limited (of a size and scale appropriate to the scale of the ritual) than something vague like praying for victory. They're not open ended requests like D&D Wishes.

The Chaos books put out by Black Library on the Chaos gods gave an in-universe explanation for how that person thought magic worked in WHFB but I think the explanation is applicable to 40K as well. Specific spells channeled the magic energy in tightly controlled specific ways to achieve specific effects otherwise the magic would be random and dangerous. The analogy the book used was like pouring water into a container and then the water effectively took the shape of the container. The same analogy applies I think to specific psychic powers in 40K. Sorcery is getting outside forces to do the pouring of water whereas psychic power the psyker does the pouring themselves. The training of the specific psychic power or the specifics of the ritual generate the metaphysical "container" for the warp energy.

A freeform prayer is asking a warp entity for help but not specifying the specific terms in a way that would bind the warp energy to achieve specific effects.