Squandered Resources

[Iron_Within]

I view the difference from living in lowest class in medieval Europe to living in the lowest citizen class in Aztec and other South American ancient cultures (more looking at through a modern lens rather than true history buff).

 

In Europe, disease, malnutrition death are all daily part of your life but you're not likely to end up on the sacrificial altar, Aztec you have a greater chance, but your gods are real, you can witness them and there acts. Imperials being sacrificed is better than Chaos Cultists so a human under chaos would be used as appeasement or achieving a ritual needed and to other humans be a great man/woman to others in their community, they made the ultimate sacrifice for their fellow man and their god. This of course is under the WB or BL. 

 

I think it's important to remember that we only see Slaves at the front line, the point of the dagger where everyone emotions are high and everything is worse. Most slaves are going to die anyway, they are acceptable losses.

For Slaves of stronger cult based worlds, I think things would be different. I think the Emperors Children HH novels on Fulgrims ship caught the essence nicely, it would be like an insane asylum, everyone is off their med's and the Joker is running the show, I think that those infrastructures would collapse very quickly which further support why they attach themselves to other warbands; they simply cannot maintain the infrastructure needed to maintain combat readiness beyond their own weapons and armour. Similarly, Khorne would be like a constantly sacked city (think the latest Spartacus War of the Dammed), they'd eat through everything in bloodshed and competitions when not fighting in warzones. With PM's and TS their attrition rates would be incredibly high, due to disease or mutation. 

 

Iron Warriors and Night Lords play out like dystopian Orwellian futures for humans I think.

 

There are caveats in how these roles play out. firstly, the Warp, specifically the eye of Terror and Maelstrom etc. These could remove the need for food, for drink for anything, because time doesn't flow properly and hunger etc. are based upon passage of time and the laws of physics don't apply this could essentially screw over any need for society in the traditional sense. Humans are a disposable resource when you can bind daemons to machinery, nothing rusts unless Nurgle wants it too (so you appease him), nothing breaks. Human lives (and deaths) become less like living creatures or even a resource and become currency. This would also potentially explain the difficulty in extended realspace raids, no one can manage that long in realspace as they are so warped psychologically they are simply incapable of not wasting slaves lives. They become like the DE, they need realspace for slaves and fresh blood but cannot stay their for long because the lack the means. Only when a particularly (in)sane Lord comes to the fore can they kept in line long enough to maintain supply lines etc. without killing everything in an orgy of destruction.

[Nehekhare]

not to mention that warp energy is basically emotion - so terror, pain and despair are never wasted, only harnessed.

[*Furyou Miko]

:D I'd love to discuss it in a PM thread though.