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I understand that aside from the C'tan, virtually all godlike entities in the galaxy draw their power from the Warp in some way.

- Gork and Mork, as well as the Eldar gods, are tied to their respective races' psychic powers.
- The Chaos gods are born from the emotions of sentient races: rage, hope, despair, and pleasure.
- The Emperor has such vast psychic ability that he is almost a god in his own right, though he is also fed by humanity's collective psychic power... in fact I suspect the Emperor may be a double entity: the comatose man who once led the Great Crusade, and a psychic simulacrum brought to life and sustained by the faith of trillions of people and based upon 10,000 years of distorted, propagandic dogma.


So what are the major differences between the types of Warp gods? Are they all, in essence, Chaos gods?

Could a Warp god who isn't one of the Four carve their own realm or plane out of the Warp and create their own daemons?

What do different types of gods need in order to sustain their existence? For example, do the Dark Gods need worship and belief, or merely emotions? Could the race-specific gods (Mork, Gork, the Eldar gods and the Emperor) be sustained by the worship or deeds of people from other races, and would they offer something in return?


Note that I'm intentionally excluding the Hive Mind from this discussion, as I think it's more of a "consciousness soup" than a personal god in the theological sense.

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I think the key is to realise that "God" in so far as the Warp is concerned doesn't mean "God" like a deity.

They are basically demons in the Warp. Birthed by specific major emotional events in the real world (like Slaanesh being birthed by the hedonistic elements of the Eldar); and then powerful enough to command great territories (in so far as its a thing) within the Warp itself.


So "Gods" can rise and fall.



Far as I'm aware there are two "different" gods

1) The Emperor - possibly. The belief powers of the Sistesr of Battle is hinted at being different to regular psychic power; but its not an area we know much about (it might even get retconned or just be proven to be a a missunderstanding from in-world characters)

2) The Hive Mind. Tyranids are totally alien but they have a presence in the Warp. It's so alien it drives other warp entities from it creating the "Shadow" in the warp. However the specifics of their relationship is entirely unknown save that they do draw psy power from it and use it.

Ohhhh boy, here we go:

So, in the beginning, the Warp was more removed from the material universe, and it was calm. Souls still penetrated into the Warp but there wasn't as much turbulence from emotions as there is now. Creatures still lived in there, and they were Warp Entities
Warp Entities include both things made of Warpmatter, like Vampires and physical creatures that spend the majority of their lives in the Warp, like Enslavers

Then the War in Heaven came, unleashing massive destructive weapons AND birthing the Eldar and the Krorks. The weapons unleashed during the War in heaven churned up the Warp and made it dangerous and volatile - it brought Chaos
This riled up the Enslavers and god knows what else and that's how the Old Ones died, because an incredibly psychic race pissing off creatures that can turn psykers into Warp Portals is a bad idea

With the influx of new souls and the turbulence of the warp there started to be currents and eddies in the Warp formed by different emotions - Warpmatter is heavily influenced by thoughts and emotions, and like attracts like, so eventually these streams of similarly-aligned Warpmatter flowed together
The thing about warpmatter is that in large enough amounts it displays intelligence, and in very large amounts it displays Sapience.
Another thing about the Warp is as well as being affected by the emotions of the material races, it affects them in turn. So a large enough concentration of warp matter can become a self sustaining maelstrom of emotion - a Chaos God

Most of these gods dissipate over time, in fact an infinite number of them are being created and destroyed constantly as they fail to gather enough energy and influence to become self-sustaining, but the three (later 4) largest ones are referred to as the Chaos Powers. Because they are self-sustaining, the Chaos Powers can split off a portion of their warp essence into semi-independent creatures with their own intelligence (Daemons) or imbue a Mortal with enough of their essence that they essentially become a warp entity themselves (Daemon Princes). Lesser Gods and even independent daemons can do this too, but it takes up a lot of their essence to the poiunt of being dangerous

So:
Warp Entity: Anything that spends the majority of its life in the Warp, even if it's not made of warpmatter
Chaos God: A maelstrom of warp energy formed by the collection of a large amount of aligned warpmatter into a maelstrom of energy to the point where it develops sentience
Chaos Power: A Chaos God that is powerful enough to become self-sustaining
Daemon: Fragment of a God given intelligence and semi-independent action, or an independent collection of warpmatter formed with its own purpose (Also a Warp Entity)
Daemon Prince: Mortal soul imbued with Warp Energy to the point where it can function independently from its original physical body

Now, that's pretty simple for the ones we think of as Chaos Gods, but what about other races?
Gork and Mork: They are Chaos Gods, in that they are formed in the same way as the others. This was explicitly stated in Waaargh! The Orks. They share some aspects with the other Gods and if Orks stray too much out of the Orky domain they may end up feeding Khorne.
The Eldar Gods: Never explicitly stated. They do some decidedly un-warpish things like directly interacting with their followers and creating literal physical artefacts, and being shattered into physical remnants, but at the same time they also interact with the Chaos Powers on a somewhat even level.
Liber Chaotica has this extract that seems to imply they are Warp Gods created by the Eldar, but bear in mind this is from an insane man from another universe relaying visions

I watched as the First Ones encouraged the younger race to reach further into the other realm, and with their vibrant minds and passionate souls create beings of power to fight the star gods. But the battle was long and the First Ones were now few, and as their numbers dwindled so too did their influence over their young creations. Without the wisdom and might of the First Ones to bind them, I saw the Eldar's warp-beings evolve from sentient weapons into living gods – the first true gods of the Immaterium. How I wept when the Eldar embraced them as such.

Personally I think they're more like Warp Entities that had the ability to take physical form. We know the Old Ones had Warp-based technology, I don't think it's inconceivable that the Eldar Gods had physical war-forms that could house them, using technology similar to Wraith-constructs. They would need to have a physical presence because they also fought with...
The C'tan: These are creatures that feed off of stars. A completely distinct category of creature from the others, they do not interact with the Warp at all, in fact it is anathema to them. I barely even classify these as Gods really, but they were given that role by the Necrontyr and they have control of the fundamental physics of the Material universe in a similar way to the Chaos Gods' control over the Warp, so I guess by that definition they'd count.
The Emperor: Bunch of Shaman souls in a flesh container. He's effectively a nascent Chaos God in the process of being born, but still tied to a physical body. He's accumulating his "belief" and able to manifest in some ways as miracles or living saints, but he's not fully formed yet. The Inquisition has and is fighting wars over what will happen when he finally snuffs it, whether that's a good thing for humanity and whether they should kill him themselves to kickstart the process. It's not called "The battle for the Emperor's Soul" for nothing
The Hive Mind: The collected gestalt psychic presence of an innumerable number of individual beings, acting with common purpose. Appears as a "shadow in the Warp" that can disrupt communication and interfere with daemons manifesting (sometimes, varies by author). DID NOT LIKE the Great Rift opening up, experienced something akin to pain. Not a Chaos God by technical definition because it's not a maelstrom of energy, it's more like a roaming cloud.

Marijan von Stauffer's writing in the Liber Chaotica in my mind is the best metaphysical description of this concept. The 4 chaos gods represent the 4 elemental forces of sentience, which are effectively elemental particles of the warp (a ragetron if you will). This is the fundamental structure of the warp, in the same way that gravity just IS in realspace.

As more sentience forms, each species generates their own flavour of these particles (isotopes if you will) which while still the same thing, don't function completely identically. What this means is that each warp god entity is actually just a face of the core 4, or blends of them depending on the psyche of the species.

The warp is thus just a big venn diagram of overlapping god domains, with the big 4 forming the background on which all the others are overlaid. this is why chaos gods aren't good or bad, and chaos undivided is the purest expression of sentience, as it literally represents all domains of the soul.

The 4 chaos gods are the fundamental forces on which the more abstract gods are built - even the ork gods are just orkish emotions that have a consciousness within the consciousness of the greater 4. The current face of each chaos god is just the purest image of that emotion produced by the species most heavily influencing it. 15 million years ago, Khorne would have looked more like Khaine as that's the eldar face.

The emperor is more of a daemon prince that generated a warp face, carving out a piece, but still ultimately composed of aspects of the background 4.


The c'tan are like realspace chaos gods - they are representatives of the elemental forces of realspace, gravity, time, the strong and weak nuclear forces. Which is why they can twist or bend them. They are realspace ruleslawyers. But they have nothing to do with chaos at all.

The necrontyr and the old ones would have had an impact on the warp, the background 4 would have coalesced in some form back then, but the ordered minds of the old ones would have left it pretty benign. It was only the warlike necrontyr and the created younger races that threw out that balance, running 'hot blooded' with destructive emotional isotopes rather than the stable non reactive isotopes of the old ones.