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[nenjin]

On the note of minor deities, like that chap Vashtorr, who is a minor deity who actually has a model, I have an idea for a Daemon World ruled over by multiple minor gods. Dozens, perhaps hundreds or even an infinite number of barely distinct gods who blur and shift into one another because they all exist for a brief moment and also for eternity in the timeless Warp.

Not put much thought into it yet, but I'm essentially thinking of gods that are all related to ritual combat, honour duels, gladiatorial combat and so on. Obvious overlap with Slaanesh and Khorne, into whom each of them will likely eventually be subsumed, but for the brief infinity in which they exist they are gods in their own right.

Their world is in a perpetual tournament to decide which of them gets to be in charge. If it ever ends the victorious minor god gets to eat the others and ascend to a higher state of godhood, closer in stature to the Four. Because time is weird in the Warp the tournament can never end, so the ascension can't happen. Human, xenos and daemon warriors of Chaos are all invited to the world to champion one of the many small gods in the tournament in exchange for Gifts and clout. Eventually most champions either get bored and move on to pursue their own interests elsewhere or die.

Long lost warhammer 40k 90's arcade fighting game

Honestly, this sounds somewhat like a 40k novel from the 90s I read. The name escapes me atm. But it's basically a war for dominance between the gods played out on a single world.

[Loud Whispers]

Their world is in a perpetual tournament to decide which of them gets to be in charge. If it ever ends the victorious minor god gets to eat the others and ascend to a higher state of godhood, closer in stature to the Four. Because time is weird in the Warp the tournament can never end, so the ascension can't happen. Human, xenos and daemon warriors of Chaos are all invited to the world to champion one of the many small gods in the tournament in exchange for Gifts and clout. Eventually most champions either get bored and move on to pursue their own interests elsewhere or die.

Also obligatory
-Gods of alien races no one notices in 40k like the Q'Orl
-A pre-war in heaven messenger god who is too fast to be eaten by the chaos 4
-A pre-war in heaven stealth god who is the hide and seek champion of the 41st milennium
-A tiny, diminished hearth god who used to be a servant of the Eldar. Only survives on a single exodite world's infinity circuit, but all the exodites are dying and the hearth god is slowly killing itself to keep the exodites alive
-The obligatory ascended mortals & minor deities of rogue warbands and religions
-Gods that are like the chaos 4 but place more emphasis on family values. No one is sure if these deities are just a facet of the chaos 4 or actually separate deities

If I ever get around to writing up my idea for a Black Crusade game where the players are all piloting Chaos Knights it might be something to flesh out. A great tournament against hordes of enemies and greater daemons, duelling mortals without the Knights and so on.

Using the only war rules for vehicles combat and having the game turn into urban mech duelling with artillery, tanks and titans would just be sublime

I also got an idea for a Genestealer Cults campaign. As in one where the players are genestealer hybrids, not one where the cult is the enemy.

I love this one. I've got a fondness for throwing these kinds of POVs at players, especially when they end up discovering why certain factions behave the way they do. Like the hereticus playthrough where my players just purged so swiftly the actual enemy couldn't organise a response faster than they realised they were being hunted

So far my long list of stupid one-shot ideas I hope to get up and running soon:

-Grox burger worker sleeper agent. Fast food workers who get an order that turns out to be their sleeper code activation signal.

-The all natural WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! Either players play as or against the ork-natural WAAAAAAAAGH!!! (A waaaaaaagh of orks who reject the reliance on tech/augmentations as stunting Ork growth, and have special rules allowing them to aim for power cables/power units in enemy power armour/meganob armour). Wields all kinds of anti-tech EMP weapons & haywire devices, focuses on growing big and orky the "proper" way

-Arbites and gangers uniting to defend the outerhive from ocean nids

-A standoff with a tau police cordon on a "rebel outpost." Unfortunately inside the rebel outpost are player khornate berserkers.

-Players are all afriel strain warriors with ridiculously high unnatural willpower/intelligence/fellowship and very good physical stats + skills + talents but I get a significant number of fate points to give to NPCs and enemies to represent Afriel strain boys having Lamenter-tier luck

-More primitive world stuff that plays like a fantasy campaign and no one ever mentions anything to do with 40k, but the planet is full of orks, ogryns, eldar & dinosaurs

Campaign ideas:
-Continuing the Temple Tendency plot
-Reviving the campaign where one of my players' feral worlders killed three men with a single arrow in the luckiest crit rolls & righteous fury ever
-An all psyker party where they try to free Isha from nurgle

[Kagus]

I still carry a great fondness for Necoho, for as much as he does/doesn't exist.

[Loud Whispers]

I still carry a great fondness for Necoho, for as much as he does/doesn't exist.

Not using Necoho in your games pleases Necoho

[Duuvian]

The Grox Burger idea is a good one for a one-off campaign, and it seems like it would be a good way to surprise with a boss in a set up by a bad contact with resources to have a one-off surprise like that.

Arbites and gangers would be cool, maybe they could defend whatever passes for a courthouse in WH40k though maybe that makes less sense against Tyranids rather than heretics unless it's genestealers.

Khornate berserkers vs Tau would be neat if it was like an endless dungeon where they keep plowing through until they get stopped. Or they could reach the boss fight location, then they control the other group raging towards their objective and see if either group makes it there. Each team could have a mini-boss organizing the defenses they could defeat or bypass at the cost of the mini-boss helping in the boss fight. I guess it would make sense to narrate there are other groups not under player control as well, but the players' two groups are the most angry.

I read the link on the Afriel warriors, it wasn't very clear how the bad luck works so I guess it's up to the GM. Maybe they could be the last survivors of one of the groupings who live in isolation and are trying to stay concealed with disguise checks, and bad luck drawing visitors causing it to be very difficult. At some point a switch to an investigation game (that would seem to be especially difficult for Afriel warriors) to see whether they need to move or if escape routes are open for the group to escape unnoticed.

Primitive world sounds like a way to start a longer campaign with a feral worlder group starting with very limited gear and knowledge. I suppose then it becomes a question of how do they get space guns eventually, especially if Guardsman class doesn't mean for example Imperial Guardsmen but instead feral world fighter. If a few are eaten by dinosaurs maybe a new character from off world could be introduced to give a reason and help fill out the group.

Does everyone get fate points or is that specifically an Inquisition/Emperor related thing?

[Egan_BW]

Every player character gets Fate points I think. I guess a representation of the fact that if a story is focusing on you, you're a pawn in someone's great game scheme, and they don't want you dying too soon. :p

[Loud Whispers]

Arbites and gangers would be cool, maybe they could defend whatever passes for a courthouse in WH40k though maybe that makes less sense against Tyranids rather than heretics unless it's genestealers.

This one makes surprising sense, since 40k courthouses are usually covered in guns and are basically bunkers. Wouldn't be much of a stretch for an arbites chief to look at the wall of space bugs and decide "it's time to open the doors of justice" to the underhive as criminals loyal to the Emperor are all sacred in the eyes of necessity

Alternatively, the arbites are mid-way through another crime crackdown when the space bugs attack. Arbites and scum both reach a tacit understanding of "let's not kill each other today" and begin fortifying the underhive until reinforcements can arrive

Khornate berserkers vs Tau would be neat if it was like an endless dungeon where they keep plowing through until they get stopped. Or they could reach the boss fight location, then they control the other group raging towards their objective and see if either group makes it there. Each team could have a mini-boss organizing the defenses they could defeat or bypass at the cost of the mini-boss helping in the boss fight. I guess it would make sense to narrate there are other groups not under player control as well, but the players' two groups are the most angry.

Khornate berserkers being what they are don't have "bypass defences" in their vocabulary. They're happy little tiger idiots whose only solution for problems is to smash into it repeatedly until something breaks
I like this dynamic because the khornate berserkers don't carry ranged weapons but are godly in melee, and the tau suck in melee but are godly at range. So there's that nice dynamic where the players can win as long as they can keep close to their foes

Primitive world sounds like a way to start a longer campaign with a feral worlder group starting with very limited gear and knowledge. I suppose then it becomes a question of how do they get space guns eventually, especially if Guardsman class doesn't mean for example Imperial Guardsmen but instead feral world fighter. If a few are eaten by dinosaurs maybe a new character from off world could be introduced to give a reason and help fill out the group.

They could also just go down the route of melee or sticking to primitive weapons. One of the reasons why I was so keen to revive my old primitive campaign was just how one of my players stuck with the bow even after gaining access to space guns. I allowed him to add his strength bonus to ranged damage (normally SB is only added to melee, but I figured this would make sense for a weapon whose draw strength is... Strength), for the damage type to lose primitive quality with monomolecular arrows, and I did see somewhere that the kroot have a krootbow whose damage is comparable to being hit by an antitank rifle whilst the interex bows regularly nailed space marine armour. There's also the partisan crossbow, which managed to kill a chaos space marine with toxic quarrels and very well-placed shots.

Bow
+Quiet
+Surprisingly dangerous
+Bypasses some force field systems
-No ability to suppress enemies
-Struggles with armour
-Can't deal with vehicles

But all in all while it's not a melta gun or a las gun it is still good in the hands of a sneaky feral worlder assassinating soft targets

Does everyone get fate points or is that specifically an Inquisition/Emperor related thing?

Fate points represent people who are marked by destiny/your god of choice for great things. So each starting character rolls their starting fate points depending on their origin. Some people are just luckier than others, and it's possible for some characters to start with no fate points whilst others start with 3 or more. So it's noted that voidborn people are a superstitious lot, and they are believed to be luckier than most... This is true.

Fate points let you do lots of things like reroll a failed roll, regain some wounds or activate faith-based miracles to represent this incredible luck/destiny, and it greatly increases the survivability and success of characters who would otherwise succumb to one lucky hit from an enemy's blade. Fate points are regained after a game session but can be permanently used to activate certain abilities, or to avoid a death, to represent someone "tempting fate"

Player characters are generally assumed to be extraordinary examples of their social strata, so most should have fate points. Rare NPCs also have fate points, so it's not uncommon for a high ranking Imperial Navy Admiral to have a fate point or a traitor-inquisitor to have three. Black Crusade also adds their own infamy points to signal favour of the chaos gods but it's essentially the same thing.

You get some fun interactions with fate itself, like a tzeentch demon gaining a fate point every time someone uses one nearby it to represent it literally eating their fate. For the Afriel strain troopers, I would probably give them something ridiculously overpowered like giving them unnatural bonuses x2 to every stat (doubling every degree of success they make) but then giving them no fate points, whilst their enemies get a pool of fate points to draw on - that can only be used to target the Afriel strain troopers. So a cultist could shoot at an Afriel strain trooper and miss, but thanks to their fate point can reroll and this new result hits. This could help represent that quality of being always unlucky enough to have a bad day

[Loud Whispers]

YOUR BRAIN IS SQUIG

KRUMP IT

[scriver]

Aside from Eldar and... the name escapes me right now, the lusty argonian chaos deity -- aside from those, are there any depictions of Chaos laying under their heels or corrupting non-human species or aliens appearing in their forces?

[Grim Portent]

Aside from Eldar and... the name escapes me right now, the lusty argonian chaos deity -- aside from those, are there any depictions of Chaos laying under their heels or corrupting non-human species or aliens appearing in their forces?

Loxatl are a race of chaos aligned, presumably corrupted, lizard aliens. As in actual lizards, four legs, claws, 6+ feet long, crawl on walls, communicate in part through colour changing their skin. They're intelligent and use guns that strap to their bodies with harnesses, but details on them are scarce. Chaos use them as assassins because of the whole wall crawing and chameleonic skin.

Sslyth, another chaos aligned race of reptiles, four armed snake-people associated mostly with Slaanesh. They mostly show up as part of the Dark Eldar menageri, but they've also appeared in books in service to chaos. Their homeworld is in one of the Chaos Storms.

The Laer, another race of Slaanesh aligned snake aliens, were indirectly responsible for corrupting Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children. It was their relic, the Laer Blade, that introduced a daemon to Fulgrim when he claimed it for himself, and it was their body modifications that inspired Fabius Bile to delve into the arts of fleshcrafting.

The Yu'vath, a race of monstrous arachnid-like sorcerers that ruled over what is now the Calixis Sector (the setting for Dark Heresy) using chaos magic, human sacrifice and worse stuff besides.

The Rak'gol, an ambiguously corrupted successor or servile species of the Yu'vath. Four armed centauroid reptiles. While not overtly aligned to Chaos, they have an obsessive desire to collect items of Yu'vath origin, and given that they were chaos corrupted it's probably fair to say the Rak'gol are too.

Genestealer hybrids, and presumably their genestealers, have been corrupted by chaos a few times.

Scythians have been seen selling their wares and services to chaos, but whether this is actual corrupted xenos or just mercenaries is unclear.

There's a bunch of others, but their names escape me at the moment. Suffice to say that a lot of minor xenos are chaos adjacent if not explicitly subjects of Chaos in their entirety. More than a few signed up because of the Imperium's genocidal efforts in the past, others because their homeworlds were swallowed by warp storms when Slaanesh was born, and some were just already inclined to work with Chaos for reasons of culture or biology.

[pisskop]

Its my understanding that 'souls' are more of an 'essence of life' or at least a 'connection to the realm of spirits'.  Nothing needs it to live, its an attunement sort of thing, and it largely comes naturally to a species.  This 'realm of spirits' was fucked by ancient strife, creating the chaos realm, so, since long before humanity rose, it has been hell, or the warp.

Your 'soul essence', or whatever you possess that is connected to the warp gets sent to the warp by default upon death.  Because of the hostility of the place these days that usually means getting seized upon and sucked up for whatever power you still possess.  Psychics largely or entirely get their power from their attunement to the warp, and thus races that have 'a soul' are more capable of using psychic or magic powers.  The warp entities feed upon souls.

'Warp demons' exist in many, many forms.  Some are barely sentient animalistic things that follow 'instincts' and patterns.  Some of small demons that cant do much more than whisper in your ear gently when youre having a bad day.  Some are so powerful they can be termed 'gods'.  There seems to be an exponential increase in power once you can tap into the real world and start affecting people (again, races and people with souls tend to be more corruptible) and causing them to do things that directly increase your power.

thus, once a demon/entity becomes strong enough to be 'a god', it generally moves away from ingesting pure soul stuff for organizing religious cults around what it prefers to promote.  For a comparison, while it works for you to sell cookies out of your kitchen, it works better if you open a bakery and get 10 employees to make you cookies.

These gods become so strong they can use the souls of others to create new homunculi.  They start embuing these with aspects of themselves and thus in theory shouldnt break ranks since theyre creations of the gods.  Except, we all know how that goes eventually.

I guess Im getting away from my original point though, which is that souls=warp sensitivity, and a lot of buggers sidestep the whole 'having a soul' by having some sort of gestalt psychic power (tyrannids and orcs both use psychic powers but seem to generate it more by siphoning the power rather than being individually connected to it.  Both were genetically engineered, by ancient races or themselves) or by simply not having that connection at all.  The tau are supposed to be pretty soulless, meaning they lack the ability to sense, use, and generally believe in the warp.

Since the chaos gods eat souls, and influence people who have souls to do things that cause more power to flow to them, chaos spends their time focusing on those.  Humans have this innate connection to the warp, and unlike eldar dont have the technology, history, or understanding to not touch it.  Its in our nature, and even the empire recognizes it by having a policy of enforced ignorance and salted earth wrt chaos.

[scriver]

Aside from Eldar and... the name escapes me right now, the lusty argonian chaos deity -- aside from those, are there any depictions of Chaos laying under their heels or corrupting non-human species or aliens appearing in their forces?

Loxatl are a race of chaos aligned, presumably corrupted, lizard aliens. As in actual lizards, four legs, claws, 6+ feet long, crawl on walls, communicate in part through colour changing their skin. They're intelligent and use guns that strap to their bodies with harnesses, but details on them are scarce. Chaos use them as assassins because of the whole wall crawing and chameleonic skin.

Sslyth, another chaos aligned race of reptiles, four armed snake-people associated mostly with Slaanesh. They mostly show up as part of the Dark Eldar menageri, but they've also appeared in books in service to chaos. Their homeworld is in one of the Chaos Storms.

The Laer, another race of Slaanesh aligned snake aliens, were indirectly responsible for corrupting Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children. It was their relic, the Laer Blade, that introduced a daemon to Fulgrim when he claimed it for himself, and it was their body modifications that inspired Fabius Bile to delve into the arts of fleshcrafting.

The Yu'vath, a race of monstrous arachnid-like sorcerers that ruled over what is now the Calixis Sector (the setting for Dark Heresy) using chaos magic, human sacrifice and worse stuff besides.

The Rak'gol, an ambiguously corrupted successor or servile species of the Yu'vath. Four armed centauroid reptiles. While not overtly aligned to Chaos, they have an obsessive desire to collect items of Yu'vath origin, and given that they were chaos corrupted it's probably fair to say the Rak'gol are too.

Genestealer hybrids, and presumably their genestealers, have been corrupted by chaos a few times.

Scythians have been seen selling their wares and services to chaos, but whether this is actual corrupted xenos or just mercenaries is unclear.

There's a bunch of others, but their names escape me at the moment. Suffice to say that a lot of minor xenos are chaos adjacent if not explicitly subjects of Chaos in their entirety. More than a few signed up because of the Imperium's genocidal efforts in the past, others because their homeworlds were swallowed by warp storms when Slaanesh was born, and some were just already inclined to work with Chaos for reasons of culture or biology.

Thanks for the examples! I don't think I've ever heard of any of them, or if I have I have forgotten about them so much that even rehearing it didn't bring it to mind again...

[Radio Controlled]

snippety

Seeing this list got me thinking: aren't some of the chaos legions still kinda in the mindset of the great crusade, or at least still on board with the human (or marine) supremacy project?

Would be neat to have a big conflict like that within the eye of terror itself, some chaos warbands deciding "suffer not the xeno-witch to live" and going full ham. Wonder how their respective deities would respond to that actually.

Khorne: Good job fellas, keeping smashing each other's heads/pseudopods/beakfaces.
Nurgle: No kids, no fighty with each other!
Tzeentch: All as planned???
Slaanesh: At least make it look good.

[Grim Portent]

snippety

Seeing this list got me thinking: aren't some of the chaos legions still kinda in the mindset of the great crusade, or at least still on board with the human (or marine) supremacy project?

Would be neat to have a big conflict like that within the eye of terror itself, some chaos warbands deciding "suffer not the xeno-witch to live" and going full ham. Wonder how their respective deities would respond to that actually.

Khorne: Good job fellas, keeping smashing each other's heads/pseudopods/beakfaces.
Nurgle: No kids, no fighty with each other!
Tzeentch: All as planned???
Slaanesh: At least make it look good.

Word Bearers preach a chaos creed of human supremacy, it's basically just the Imperial Creed but with all references to the Emperor replaced by Chaos. Same manifest destiny type of stuff, humanity is the chosen people of the gods and will rule the galaxy in their name, all xenos will be enslaved or sacrificed to the glory of the gods. Some use aliens anyway, others kill them on sight with almost the same priority as Imperials.

Other legions are more just normal levels of xenophobic. Aliens are weird and gross and you can't trust them, but some of them are useful and some warbands incorporate them begrugingly.

To my knowledge no chaos marines see any xenos as true peers,* though some have begrudging respect for Orkz, and the chaos gods like it that way. Humans, especially marines, are the favoured plaything of Chaos for now. If a new alien race rises up and is more interesting, humanity will be discarded like other races before them, left to pick at scraps and be subjugated by the new favoured servants.

Remembered another chaos xenos race, there's a Khornate daemon world that goes through cycles. Powerful champion arrives, turns the world into a massive gladiatorial world dedicated to themself, rules for ages, maybe gets overthrown and replaced a few times, eventually tensions boil up and everyone dies in a combined slave revolt and attempted coups. All the while a race of alien beetle-men serve as slaves, prodding things along to keep the cycle going, because it is their world and they are farming the offworlders for a grand sacrifice to Khorne. At the end of each cycle they arm up, ensure everyone else on the planet is completely destroyed, then the powerful ones go back into hiding and wait for the next cycle. Can't remember their name at the moment, they were in a novel I read about a decade ago.

*It is Warhammer though, anything can happen.

[Loud Whispers]

Remembered another chaos xenos race, there's a Khornate daemon world that goes through cycles. Powerful champion arrives, turns the world into a massive gladiatorial world dedicated to themself, rules for ages, maybe gets overthrown and replaced a few times, eventually tensions boil up and everyone dies in a combined slave revolt and attempted coups. All the while a race of alien beetle-men serve as slaves, prodding things along to keep the cycle going, because it is their world and they are farming the offworlders for a grand sacrifice to Khorne. At the end of each cycle they arm up, ensure everyone else on the planet is completely destroyed, then the powerful ones go back into hiding and wait for the next cycle. Can't remember their name at the moment, they were in a novel I read about a decade ago.

*It is Warhammer though, anything can happen.

Are these the beetle dudes?

Also yeah there are a fair few instances where chaos space marines work alongside xenos, hire xenos as mercs or use them as slaves, but they already treat most humans as worthless or contemptible so xenos don't exactly get a fairer mark. The Emperor's Children are a funny one as a lot of them are spliced with xeno-DNA dating back to the Horus Heresy, sometimes even with xeno-DNA from species they genocided pre-Horus Heresy. Idk how many mods you need to make before you become a xenos but they would certainly fail the Imperium's litmus tests for what is acceptable human.

I reckon you're most likely to find xenos-acceptance amongst CSM warbands that are;
-Renegades who don't worship chaos, but just think everyone is idiotic.
-Pirates who always need more crew and don't care who is being churned up in war.
-Iron Warriors who always need more cannon fodder and servitor materials.
-Night Lord successors who bring deathworld xenopets with them to torment their new landlords.
-Death Guard and Emperor's Children warbands who are not... Exactly... picky...
-A Word Bearer. There's been a few lore instances of a single Word Bearer breaking away from his warband to go act as a missionary in far away lands for the worship of chaos. Such a lone preacher is more likely to also "mellow out" their xenophobia in favour of sharpening their zeal, and would have to recruit apostles amongst the xenos.
-Alpha Legion. They actively integrate xenos ships into their fleets and xenos agents/soldiers into their schemes. They're noted to rely more on using xenos & human cultists than other chaos legions since they tend to operate far away from warp rifts, where demons tend to suffer from instability and "disappear" back to the warp too quickly >:[

Also I finally got my players together to resume my campaign after doing a month of preparation and... Cancelled, 12 hours before we were to start.

END ME