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All I'm really aware of in this regard is that high ranking plaguebearers get to ride the plague drones (which they love). Is it possible for a lesser daemon, like a bloodletter or plaguebearer, to become a greater daemon, or otherwise gain power beyond access to mounts/vehicles?

Not really. Daemons are mostly made as is.. lesser - Herald is about it.

Daemons in the fluff are more individualistic than the ones on the tabletop.

Yeah, an individual Bloodletter or Plaguebearer could eventually gain enough personal power that they could become something greater than the run of the mill line trooper.

There was one fluff instance of a Nurgling, Ku'Gath, being upgraded into a Great Unclean One when he fell into Nurgle's cauldron and drank the contents, but that one is a rather unique case.

I don't see why not, but it would probably take the form of being 'elevated' by their patron god.

Actually, it gets a little weird with that, seeing as they themselves are just a smaller part of their 'patron god'.

Bear with me here...

Actually, thinking about it, the warp-gods are truly weird forms of life. At their basest form they're swirling miasmas of soulstuff in the empyrean so large that they have gained consciousness. They're basically galaxy-spanning self-aware thunderstorms, formed of chopped up bits of soul in a dimension with no recognisable physical laws. Basically a Boltzmann Brain made from soulstuff.

So, all of this talk of 'gardens of nurgle' and nurglings falling into cauldrons is less what is actually there, and more the only representation your hopelessly ill-equipped mortal brain can possibly concoct to explain the irreconcilable stimuli it's receiving when looking into the warp.

If we assume that daemons are formed the way we're told, by their patron god spinning off a portion of its power and imbuing it with consciousness, we can see that as the megastorm that is Slaanesh calving off a smaller (yet still self-aware) storm that becomes a daemonette.

When these little mini-self-aware storms 'manifest' in realspace either their form is interpreted by physical laws as a daemonette, or they're just pretending to be that form for reasons known only really to them.

I find the description of the Raksha in Exalted to be perfectly fitting for daemons here.

All other characters in the Exalted setting are unique beings with their own unique Motivations, personalities and memories. A raksha is not a being like that — not really. Instead, a raksha is actually an incoherent and incomprehensible mass of seething chaos that — for some impenetrable reason of its own — pretends to be a unique being with its Motivation, personality and memories. The first step in understanding and creating a raksha character is to understand that everything about that character is a deception engineered to facilitate an interaction between a shaped being of Creation and an entity so far removed from Creation as to be utterly beyond mortal comprehension.

So, how does this relate to a teeny little incoherent seething mass of conscious chaos that is the true form of what we know as a 'nurgling' becoming a much larger incoherent seething mass of conscious chaos that is the true form of what we know as a 'Great Unclean One'?

Probably some form of messed-up fluid dynamics and weather chaos theory as manifests in a realm with no recognisable physical laws where the weather itself is sentient, which our woefully inadequate mortal minds interpret as 'a nurgling falling into a great cauldron and drinking the contents' in the same way that we see shapes in clouds...

Daemons are a fragment of a God power. They have all personality and individuality, but the more power has the demon, the more independent him becomes.

So a Lesser demon can gain more power and "ascend" by Virtue of taking attention of his patron God. Then, that God can give the demon more part of himself, in other words, made him more powerfull.
But those are rare cases. Normally as other have mentioned, Daemons are pre-made.

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
I don't see why not, but it would probably take the form of being 'elevated' by their patron god.

Actually, it gets a little weird with that, seeing as they themselves are just a smaller part of their 'patron god'.

Bear with me here...

Actually, thinking about it, the warp-gods are truly weird forms of life. At their basest form they're swirling miasmas of soulstuff in the empyrean so large that they have gained consciousness. They're basically galaxy-spanning self-aware thunderstorms, formed of chopped up bits of soul in a dimension with no recognisable physical laws. Basically a Boltzmann Brain made from soulstuff.

So, all of this talk of 'gardens of nurgle' and nurglings falling into cauldrons is less what is actually there, and more the only representation your hopelessly ill-equipped mortal brain can possibly concoct to explain the irreconcilable stimuli it's receiving when looking into the warp.

If we assume that daemons are formed the way we're told, by their patron god spinning off a portion of its power and imbuing it with consciousness, we can see that as the megastorm that is Slaanesh calving off a smaller (yet still self-aware) storm that becomes a daemonette.

When these little mini-self-aware storms 'manifest' in realspace either their form is interpreted by physical laws as a daemonette, or they're just pretending to be that form for reasons known only really to them.

I find the description of the Raksha in Exalted to be perfectly fitting for daemons here.

All other characters in the Exalted setting are unique beings with their own unique Motivations, personalities and memories. A raksha is not a being like that — not really. Instead, a raksha is actually an incoherent and incomprehensible mass of seething chaos that — for some impenetrable reason of its own — pretends to be a unique being with its Motivation, personality and memories. The first step in understanding and creating a raksha character is to understand that everything about that character is a deception engineered to facilitate an interaction between a shaped being of Creation and an entity so far removed from Creation as to be utterly beyond mortal comprehension.

So, how does this relate to a teeny little incoherent seething mass of conscious chaos that is the true form of what we know as a 'nurgling' becoming a much larger incoherent seething mass of conscious chaos that is the true form of what we know as a 'Great Unclean One'?

Probably some form of messed-up fluid dynamics and weather chaos theory as manifests in a realm with no recognisable physical laws where the weather itself is sentient, which our woefully inadequate mortal minds interpret as 'a nurgling falling into a great cauldron and drinking the contents' in the same way that we see shapes in clouds...

This is the best and most accurate depiction of Daemons I've seen since Battle for the Abyss.


They don't actually have those forms in the Warp, they don't fall into cauldrons and they don't have gardens. That decription is just the only way our pathetic minds is capable of understanding the pure information going in.

Thanks man! I aim to please

It also feeds neatly into my headcanon for Kaldor Draigo being a pitiable lunatic that every now and again gets spat out into realspace and goes on a rambling diatribe of all the trippy wacked out gak that his mind's concocted when exposed to the warp.

Less Mary Sue, more tragic and pitiable fall from grace and sanity.

How would you Explain the daemon primarchs? Unexplainable like the daemons or crazy like Draigo? Or perhaps somewhere in the middle?

The grey knights in general all suffer from that same delusion, don't they? Or are battles on the mortal plane less about interpretation?

kingleir wrote:
How would you Explain the daemon primarchs? Unexplainable like the daemons or crazy like Draigo? Or perhaps somewhere in the middle?

The grey knights in general all suffer from that same delusion, don't they? Or are battles on the mortal plane less about interpretation?

Well they are tied to Chaos from their "mortal" origins because of how the Emperor supposedly made them, but they are Daemons now the same as other Daemon Princes. Unexplainable. The difference between them and regular Daemons is that normal Daemons enter existance as Daemons, and their forms in our reality is as alien and incalculable to them as their Warp forms are to us. They're perceptions and envisionments of themselves is totally based on their whim at the time, and when they push into the mortal plane they then take a form pleasing to them, or based on their host's form and twisted to shape. Whereas Daemon Princes were born as mortals, and so their vision of themselves is inevitably mortal and more humanoid based. Its why, for example, Mortarion still has the Grim Reaper form, and other Daemon Princes hold on to their Power Armour, even long after their original body is annihilated.

Deamons are Created in a couple of ways, the Chaos god can create them, or a Deamon can form from the collected emotions coming together in the warp, for example in talon of horus there is a very powerful Deamon that wasnt created by Khorne, but was dedicated to Khorne (I think), It was born during the sacking of Rome (IIRC) and formed from the collected terror and bloodshed of that event, Deamons like this can theoretically go as far as they want, absorbing lesser emotions like the chaos gods did and becoming gods themselves eventually, its just more likely that the big 4 would stop them from getting this far.

Anything can go from zero to daemon prince or greater daemon depending on the whims of the chaos gods. I mean, the majority of mortals are a weak and frail shell compared to even a most basic daemon. But Mortals can be elevated to the heights of a Daemon Prince too. Much less any Daemon.

The concept of daemon princes and daemon primarchs is an interesting one. I'm wondering whether they're sort of composite-beings with a form that's part mortal flesh and part 'celestial thunderstorm that doesn't conform to physical laws'. If so, that must be a very strange existence indeed.

Really there are 3 possibilities:

1. The mortal is merged with a soul-thunderstorm creating a composite being
2. The mortal is transformed into a soul-thunderstorm, meaning they're no different to daemons in anything other than their origin
3. The mortal is destroyed and a facsimile is spawned by the chaos god to provide the illusion that at the end of all the Chaos worship there's the promise of immortality when in actuality all that happens is your soul is torn apart just like everyone else as punishment for the hubris of thinking a mortal can ever be an equal to the gods.

Personally, I like the idea of leaving all 3 as equally likely to be true.

I think those 3 things could happen together?

The mortal's actions in the materium cause a soul storm to grow. This soulstorm could either predate the mortal or be generated by his actions.

A part of the mortal's soul is closely linked to that soulstorm.

As the mortal pleases his god and the soulstorm grows bigger (aka the mortal commits horrific atrocities) and the mortal become more influential over the soulstorm.

While this happens 1) the overlap between the soulstorm and the mortal's soul gets bigger and 2) the mortal loses his grip on his humanity and the 'human' elements of his soul get stripped away.

Eventually a huge soulstorm is generated, almost entirely under the power of the mortal. At this point only token/superficial fragments of the mortal's original soul remain. Anything not relevant to the soulstorm is likely discarded from the soul. It is at this point that daemonic ascension can occur.

Most chaos followers merely contribute to their God's overall soulstorm, instead of embowering their own sub-soulstorm. This is why most chaos followers are not able to ascend to daemonic prince status.

Based on what happens to Living Saints, it would indeed seem to be all three at once; the mortal soul is infused with a vortex of daemonic power which merges and blends until the original mortal is lost in the storm and is then squirted back out into "reality" as a twisted mockery of its former self.

For Imperial saints this process merely takes much longer, occurring over repeated "deaths" as they are banished and reformed.

Brilliant explanation on both counts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Yes, according the old Slaves to Darkness lore

Why do i now have the image of lesser demons running around the warp leveling up rpg style....

I would just add that the forms and characteristics of Daemons, and the Chaos Gods themselves, are neither self-determined nor random. They are based on the emotions, expectations and beliefs of the mortals whose psychic energy creates the substance of the Warp. So in a way, all Chaos entities are some version of the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.

To answer the OP, it depends on the daemon. Unique cases aside (of which there are many, as others have mentioned) a lesser daemon can generally only aspire to be a herald. The fluff is vague and self-contradicting in places (ironically that's how it probably should be) but from what I've seen there are mentions of bloodletters and plaguebearers being promoted up to heralds, while tzeentch heralds are simply created that way. But the reality is that any daemon can probably become any other daemon if the god wills it, so it's more a question of how far a lesser daemon ranks up 'normally' without it following an unusual process. And that answer seems to be herald-status. Though theoretically they could go higher still, as unique herald daemons like Skulltaker or Epidemius suggest.

 Deadshot wrote:

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
I don't see why not, but it would probably take the form of being 'elevated' by their patron god.

Actually, it gets a little weird with that, seeing as they themselves are just a smaller part of their 'patron god'.

Bear with me here...

Actually, thinking about it, the warp-gods are truly weird forms of life. At their basest form they're swirling miasmas of soulstuff in the empyrean so large that they have gained consciousness. They're basically galaxy-spanning self-aware thunderstorms, formed of chopped up bits of soul in a dimension with no recognisable physical laws. Basically a Boltzmann Brain made from soulstuff.

So, all of this talk of 'gardens of nurgle' and nurglings falling into cauldrons is less what is actually there, and more the only representation your hopelessly ill-equipped mortal brain can possibly concoct to explain the irreconcilable stimuli it's receiving when looking into the warp.

If we assume that daemons are formed the way we're told, by their patron god spinning off a portion of its power and imbuing it with consciousness, we can see that as the megastorm that is Slaanesh calving off a smaller (yet still self-aware) storm that becomes a daemonette.

When these little mini-self-aware storms 'manifest' in realspace either their form is interpreted by physical laws as a daemonette, or they're just pretending to be that form for reasons known only really to them.

I find the description of the Raksha in Exalted to be perfectly fitting for daemons here.

All other characters in the Exalted setting are unique beings with their own unique Motivations, personalities and memories. A raksha is not a being like that — not really. Instead, a raksha is actually an incoherent and incomprehensible mass of seething chaos that — for some impenetrable reason of its own — pretends to be a unique being with its Motivation, personality and memories. The first step in understanding and creating a raksha character is to understand that everything about that character is a deception engineered to facilitate an interaction between a shaped being of Creation and an entity so far removed from Creation as to be utterly beyond mortal comprehension.

So, how does this relate to a teeny little incoherent seething mass of conscious chaos that is the true form of what we know as a 'nurgling' becoming a much larger incoherent seething mass of conscious chaos that is the true form of what we know as a 'Great Unclean One'?

Probably some form of messed-up fluid dynamics and weather chaos theory as manifests in a realm with no recognisable physical laws where the weather itself is sentient, which our woefully inadequate mortal minds interpret as 'a nurgling falling into a great cauldron and drinking the contents' in the same way that we see shapes in clouds...

This is the best and most accurate depiction of Daemons I've seen since Battle for the Abyss.


They don't actually have those forms in the Warp, they don't fall into cauldrons and they don't have gardens. That decription is just the only way our pathetic minds is capable of understanding the pure information going in.

It's a good description, but incomplete. Because while being energy that is only given shape by our perceptions, that shape is also real. They really do have those forms in the warp, really do fall into cauldrons, and really do have gardens. These things also do not exist outside of our perceptions and don't exist in anything resembling a physical form. To say that it is energy mimicking matter, sentient storms that are merely perceived as physical is to also say there is a difference between physical form and energy, idea and reality, which in the warp there is not. In the warp, the very idea that there is a nurgling falling into a cauldron is itself real, and also not, because there is no distinction between those things existing physically and existing only as energy.

Do they really have those forms though, or is it all just hallucinations our puny mortal minds conjure in a vain attempt to make sense of the roiling incomprehensible insanity that is raw chaos?

Is suppose both maybe, and neither. Both at the same time? Ultimately its sofar beyond our conprehension that none of this is really accurate

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
Do they really have those forms though, or is it all just hallucinations our puny mortal minds conjure in a vain attempt to make sense of the roiling incomprehensible insanity that is raw chaos?

Is suppose both maybe, and neither. Both at the same time? Ultimately its sofar beyond our conprehension that none of this is really accurate

In the warp, the perception becomes reality just as reality is merely a perception. There is no difference, and we are incapable of understanding the concept beyond a theoretical perspective. Like trying to imagine a color you've never seen.

So I like to think of Daemons as the warp equivalent of viral internet memes.

nareik wrote:
So I like to think of Daemons as the warp equivalent of viral internet memes.

Spoiler:

Perhaps there is even a daemon of exquisite perfection, it's iridescent edges sharp and bright as the blade of a power weapon, its shadows deep and smooth.

Those who cross paths with this abomination of perfect colour but somehow survive are left forever mumbling 'Just two thin coats... just two thin coats'.

Haha, exalted