- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Oh god, Jen! I love his work from the Exalted forums. I didn't know he read Divided Loyalties! Or did you commission this?
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Nurgle is the Chas God of sadness and grief and despair. In both Fantasy and 40K, the Chaos gods are fundamental emotional concepts from which, in the metaphysics, just about all other emotions and thoughts derive.
Khorne isn't just anger. He's honour and the desire for justice ad all sorts of good things as well as bad ones.
You're trying to shave down the chaos gods into being gods of bad stuff, when instead they're each meant to be gods of a significant fraction of the sapient experience. Collectively, the Chaos Gods cover all aspects of emotional/mental existence.
Slaneesh is the god of 'emotions are good things', because it's a subset of its nature as the god of 'sensation/experience is a good thing'.
You're also missing that gods aren't exclusive. Gods overlap. They're Venn diagrams over part of the Aethyr. Ulric overlaps with Khorne and Nurlge. Myrmidia overlaps with Khorne and Slaneesh and Tzeentch. The gods quite possibly are human created masks imposed on different sections of the collective unconscious.
At least according to many of the descriptions.
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It basically comes down to an Aristotelian view of good and evil, evil is extremes of emotion and passions, good is balance and self control. The Realm of Chaos entourages the former and not the latter since the more extreme the emotion the more power you get. Thus order gods are self-limiting shallow and lesser, not using their environment to its fullest potential and that is why Chaos is stronger. The opposite of Chaos is not Order, Order is a pale imitation, a compromise with the Aethir rather than embracing it.
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- Location
- Czech Republic
There are Gods of Law but they are also not very nice.
That is really old lore, it's debatable if they exist in this quest.
As you say, Order isn't the opposite of Chaos, it's the various points of balance, different golden means between the extreme poles the Chaos Gods embody/represent.
- Location
- Greece
I am trying to shave the chaos gods into being gods of bad stuff because in practice, that is what they are. If they were more ambiguous, again, like they are in 40k, they wouldnt get shoved on that box. I am not buying that those gods, except maybe Khorne, represent those other emotions because they discourage them and smother them. And there are still emotions missing.
That should still mean the chaos gods are powerful idiots in comparison to the order gods. So why is Tzeencth the god of planning? At best they should be the god of base cunning or plotting, not the magnificent bastard that is smarter that the side that, according to Aristotles, is the smart and measured one. By that reading, they are still too threatening, because they do not get outmaneuered constantly the way they should be if they were raw excess and power.
Tzeench is an idiot, his defining feature is messing up his own plans.
- Location
- Greece
Fair enough, guess my osmosis failed me here.
It still doesn't explain their continued success though, only their power level.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Essentially he's not. He's the god of making people do bad things and then claiming that they were all part of a master plan, but it's so uselessly vague that it's indistinguishable from random chance. They claim to have so many irons in the fire that they don't actually have any, they're just generally making it an iron-ish fire and then taking credit for anything that results.
- Location
- Australia
I commissioned it.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
Part of the reason a lot of these problems exist is that in bot 40K and Fantasy, the Chaos gods are for all intents and purposes pure evil. The way they're set up to be though is from an earlier time in Warhammer history, when the setting was envisioned to be far more Moorcockian. They were supposed to represent one half of the Order/Chaos divide but over time as the settings grew, that worldbuilding fell away in favour of more black and white, good and evil style conflicts, because those are easier to hang stories around.
- Location
- Greece
Thats a good Doylist reading but it doesn't help Watsonially.
In canon, the evidence that most of the Order Gods even exist as beings with agency at all is left very unclear, deliberatly, for much of the run of the setting. For a long time it was intentionally unclear if they existed at all apart from in the faith of their worshippers.
The Chaos Gods aren't just gods of bad stuff. That's how they hook in their cultists. Artists and social reformers and honourable warriors who take things just a step too far become part of the feedback loop of obsessions and then excess that leads to corruption. ALl those good things lead to bad things when taken too far in this metaphysic.
IIRC, that's part of why standard Warhammer is a proper polytheism of Order gods, where everyone worships just about every legal god in their spehere of influence, even if they have personal favourites, as when you commit to a single god too hard, that's when you can cross the line and start hitting the point where you aren't balanced any more and start tipping into the mindset where you become a cultist to the chaos god that sits behind that order god.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Here's all our greatsword traits:
@BoneyM, there seem to be two benefits here; a flat +5 to our martial from the two traits, and another +10 against certain kinds of foes and situations. It would straightforward that the +10 would only come while using the greatsword, but do the martial bonuses come from physical conditioning and tactical reasoning, or are they also something we'd lose out on if we were using a different weapon? Basically, are there benefits from cross training?
That's a flat +5 to our martial, plus another +10 against foes in certain circumstances... but it doesn't actually say that we need to be using a sword to get either of them, which is weird. Like, it's easy to guess that they do need that, but I'm not sure to what extent.
@BoneyM, there seem to be two benefits here; a flat +5 to our martial from the two traits, and another +10 against certain kinds of foes and situations. It would straightforward that the +10 would only come while using the greatsword, but do the martial bonuses come from physical conditioning and tactical reasoning, or are they also something we'd lose out on if we were using a different weapon? Basically, are there benefits from cross training?
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The Chaos Gods are evil. As described, this s Aristotelean morality. Evil is an excess or lack of a moral quality. Good is having a moderate amount. THe Chaos gods are all about lack of moderation.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
I believe that Boney's last word is that they don't up until he thinks of a way to use them, but even then, they'll just be regular gods, not "Chaos without the chaos".
I think that was almost entirely about Solkan though, I don't recall the other two being in the conversation at all.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
How about we put a mushroom on the top?
Killing skaven, trolls, and greenskins is it's own reward.Oh, absolutely. I was just responding to the specific notion of replicating the mask and distributing it to the expedition. I agree that the insights from studying the gas mask are valuable.
I mean. They'd better be. We killed an awful lot of skaven, trolls, and greenskins to get it
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
On this topic... I have a few thoughts onto how it all shook out.
If I were to speculate, it's that the Chaos Gods only represent hostile concepts because those are the ones that are eventually going to hit critical mass when resources are unlimited and not expended in the long run. Game Theory operating on a divine scale. The negative feelings and thoughts will inevitably stab out, the winner gets stronger, and is in a better position to overcome other forces. Cooperation gains a godling nothing, it just prevents them from losing.
In the end, four clusters of thought and emotion congealed that devoured or co-opted everything else. The idea of bloodshed, the idea of disease, the idea of excess, and the idea of treachery. Anything else that springs up gets devoured or broken up into uselessness, but the four are too well balanced to be able to contest one another, since any clashes will have both sides simply trading memes in the end because they're too big to subsume each other, and equally balanced so that each attack loses as much as it gains. They're also too incapable of cooperating by nature of the mechanism through which they rose to power so they don't understand the idea of ganging up on a weaker party and sharing the load, so if one god ever gets in a position of weakness it gets a chance to recover because the other three start infighting instead of devouring.
In the end, four clusters of thought and emotion congealed that devoured or co-opted everything else. The idea of bloodshed, the idea of disease, the idea of excess, and the idea of treachery. Anything else that springs up gets devoured or broken up into uselessness, but the four are too well balanced to be able to contest one another, since any clashes will have both sides simply trading memes in the end because they're too big to subsume each other, and equally balanced so that each attack loses as much as it gains. They're also too incapable of cooperating by nature of the mechanism through which they rose to power so they don't understand the idea of ganging up on a weaker party and sharing the load, so if one god ever gets in a position of weakness it gets a chance to recover because the other three start infighting instead of devouring.
- Location
- Germany
i mean if the chaos gods were just embodiments of their emotions it would not realy make sense that they are evil(they would not have a mind). So my personal belief is that they are very powerful beings, that have decided on what they would feed, and now try to get as much as they can.
They existed before the first ones breacht the warp so maybe there are still many more than the four known?
OOC it's just GWs inconsistent and sometimes pretty crappy lore.
They existed before the first ones breacht the warp so maybe there are still many more than the four known?
OOC it's just GWs inconsistent and sometimes pretty crappy lore.
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deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
That's true, but I will point out that a lot of this stuff was never intended to be justified in-universe. Warhammer is a game first. A wargame at that. Now, that doesn't undermine your point, that these mechanics are very poorly explained when they're explained at all.
While it was certainly intended to be that way (see the idea of the Gods of Law) I feel the setting moved away from that. Luthor Huss is a fanatical maniac who has basically zero chill, but he's absolutely written as a hero.
- Location
- Aotearoa
So... you're saying they need to learn Skaven Number Theory from the Horned Rat?