Were Daemons much more powerful in the War in Heaven than in 40k?

[Moonreaper666]

The Ynnari storyline and the introduction of Vashtorr in the Lore changes everything

 

The two most powerful civilizations during the most destructive war in this Grimdark Universe ALLIED TOGETHER just to fight Chaos 60 Million Years Ago. Neither unrivaled magic nor unrivaled technology alone could beat Chaos when they were much weaker back then

 

(Gav Thrope might have spoiled how Neoth, Ollianius Pius and the others are going to beat Horus in the HH Finale. Thematically.)

 

Seriously, where are these Uber Daemons present day!?! Not even the Emperor in his prime could take on a dozen of these Warp-monsters let alone BILLIONS!

 

Imagine a Daemon capable of fighting an Eldar Psyker a hundred times more powerful than Eldrad and a Necron Phaeron that is slightly below the Silent King in power at the same time!!!

 

Vashtorr is the only Daemon confirmed to be during or before the WiH. Be'lakor is implied to be from that time due to his rivalry with Vashtorr

 

Ironically, modern Lore gives certain similarities to the C'tan and Chaos Gods (except the former is infinitely weaker tham the latter). Vashtorr and the Void Dragon both emphasize technology. The Nightbringer is physically affected by emotions. The WiH Daemons don't seem to be negatively affected by emotions and symbols

Edited January 4, 2023 by Xenith

[Xenith]

This is indeed interesting stuff - I haven't seen the new lore for Vashtorr, can you link your sources please so I can have a read?

[Karhedron]

I believe the novel Wild Rider makes passing reference to the ancient Aeldari and Necrontyr allying at one point during the War in Heaven to contain the spread of Chaos. However this is a Gav Thorpe novel and we know from past experience that he loves to give contradictory historical accounts from inside the setting just to stir up discussion. I would put this in the same category as "the Dark Angels are traitors and the Fallen are really loyalists" memes until anything more solid confirms it. Remember Black Library's approach, everything is canon but not everything is true.

 

I have not seen the fluff about Vashtorr and Be'lakor either so would be interested in the references.

[Special Officer Doofy]

See none of this makes sense to me. Daemons come from the power of a chaos God, and Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle became sentient in M2 (source: Realms of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned). And Be'lakor was created by them, meaning he could not have been created until M2, and he was the first mortal ascended to daemonhood.

 

Warhammer 40k lore constantly contradicts itself and is full of retcons. I gave up on following it along time ago. This vashtorr predating the chaos gods by 60 million years is terrible writing.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Special Officer Doofy

[Karhedron]

Time has no meaning in the Warp so in a sense, the Chaos Gods have always existed

[Special Officer Doofy]

16 minutes ago, Karhedron said:

Time has no meaning in the Warp so in a sense, the Chaos Gods have always existed

 

Not necessarily true. The Warp always existed and time flows differently there but there is a point in time in real space where the chaos gods emerged from the raw emotion and became sentient (M2). That's like pouring a glass of water and putting it in the freezer and sometime after it froze saying it was always frozen. No, it was always H2O, but at a certain time it froze.

[N1SB]

1st, thanks to you guys for bringing this new lore to my attention.

 

I was just reading this Rick Priestley interview (thanks to Brother Closet Skeleton) at https://www.tabletopgaming.co.uk/features/the-making-of-warhammer-40000-rick-priestley-on-the-birth-of-the-sci/ where he said this:

 

Quote

A lot of the mystery that I left in it has been defined. A lot of the subtlety that I’d engineered to give you a very rich and varied and detailed universe just got swiftly kicked aside.

 

This sort of thing brings some of the mystery back.  It is important because 40k was designed with that in mind.  Andy Chambers told me that Priestley taught him to, and I don't remember the exact words, never tie up loose ends.  Loose ends were there for players to play with, to build on, by design.

 

11 hours ago, Special Officer Doofy said:

See none of this makes sense to me. Daemons come from the power of a chaos God, and Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle became sentient in M2 (source: Realms of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned). And Be'lakor was created by them, meaning he could not have been created until M2, and he was the first mortal ascended to daemonhood.

 

I might actually have a genuine No-Prize for this, let me eat breakfast first, be right back to edit this post of how I'm stitching it together.

 

Edit - I've had breakfast, all is well.

 

 

All We Know Isn't All There Is

 

 

Exec summary of mah longpost - what we know isn't wrong, but it's only a tiny part of the whole picture.  Thus, this is NOT Everything You Know Is A Lie (another Gav Thorpeism), but Everything You Know Is True But It Is Far From Everything There Is.

 

 

This guy is Zardu Layak of the Word Bearers, most trusted of his Primarch, Lorgar, but he probably was even more devout to the Chaos Gods than his genefather.  Right before the Siege of Terra (in the novel Slaves To Darkness), Lorgar tried to usurp Horus with Layak's help because the Aurelian thinks HE should be the Everchosen of the Four Gods rather than the Warmaster.  After all, Lorgar was worshiping Chaos since he was found on Colchis, Horus only hopped on the Chaos bandwagon after Davin.

 

Layak kinda goes along with it until the last moment, betraying his own Primarch to the Warmaster.  His point, overgeneralised, was like the Chaos Gods know their own will better than Lorgar, who is he to contradict them?  He wasn't so much pro-Horus as he was anti-hubris of Lorgar.

 

Layak was truly devoted to The Truth, meaning the Chaos Gods (even more than Lorgar).  In this same story, he had a guide, some blind Chaos cultist doing his bidding off-screen.  They had a conversation that went something like this:

 

Layak said something like, "The four Chaos Gods are The Truth!"

 

She looks at him (reminder: she's blind) like oh my sweet summer child and replied, "Well...they are A Truth."

 

In other words, this seemingly minor character, (who probably was the true mastermind of this little plot) pointed out something we know but tend to kinda push aside: Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, Tzeentch are four Chaos Gods, but there are more.  I'm not even counting Malal, nor things like Gork & Mork, but also in Age of Sigmar's Warcry there's a Snake Chaos Cult and a Raven Chaos Cult that compete/co-exist with those of the Four Powers.

 

Her tone was like, "The Four aren't even the big boys...you should see the real major players."

 

 

Human Understanding (both ours and in-universe) of Chaos Is Very Limited

 

 

Before anything, kudos to Brother Duffy for remembering the 1st ed Chaos sourcebooks.  I recall what he's saying because my friend had a copy of both books, and Khorne was said to have come to being during the human European Crusades or something.  So I worked with this a bit, starting with 40k, going as far back as we know from different sources, contradicting nothing, just reverse-engineering the lore a bit.

 

Starting with the current era...

 

In the 40k era, we know of 4 (well, mainly 4) Chaos Gods: Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, Tzeentch.  The human (not just us, but I mean in-universe) understanding of Chaos is nil to bare minimum.  The returned theoretical-practical galaxy brain that is the Primarch Roboute Guilliman was trying to ask his Eldar envoy, a certain Illyanne Natase (yes, another 1st ed 40k reference), about the nature of Gods, and he got an eye-roll like, "It'd take me a decade just to explain why your question is stupid."

 

...10 thousand years before that...

 

Just a leetle bit before the 30k era, there were only 3 Chaos Gods: Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, until the Eldar, through some hard partying, gave rise to Slaanesh (who's stupid now, Illyanne Natase).  It was the Fall of the Eldar, their gods actually battled the now 4 Chaos Gods, most die, Isha gets captured /rescued by Nurgle, Cegorach runs away laughing).  This incident prompted the Emperor, Beloved By All, to accelerate His plan for Humanity (Erda, who knew Him as Neoth, kinda called The Great Crusade a rushjob in Saturnine).  Even back then, there weren't Daemons as we understood them; there wasn't exactly Bloodletters during the Siege of Terra, there were these Neverborn mutant dog things still deciding which form they should take (again, Saturnine).  Angron doesn't look so much like a Bloodthirster as the other way around; Greater Daemons of what we would call Khorne hadn't finalised a shape yet, but noticed humans really freaked out at the sight of a giant red devil charing them, so they just kinda became that.

 

...28 thousand years before that...

 

According to the original 1st ed sourcebooks, that's when we gave birth to Khorne specifically, around M2 like Brother Duffy mentioned, what I remembered as the Crusades/European Dark Ages/whatever it was.  Iirc and it might be wrong (this was about 30 years ago irl, even my memory for silly 40k trivia is fallible), they didn't go into the specifics for the other Chaos powers.  For us, that's a long time, but to Chaos, not even the blink of an eye.

 

...a few thousand years before that...

 

A Daemon was born from the 1st human murder, a man killed by his own brother.  The victim was, according to the Emperor, Beloved By All, His own father.  It's technically the 1st Daemon known to humanity, because the Emperor kinda sensed it and recognised it millennia later during the War of the Webway.  Born from human suffering, it has a special tie with us, and it has a name: Drach'nyen, and it is bound to Abaddon's sword now.

 

...gazillions of years before that...

 

The War In Heaven.  There were early Eldar, the Necrontyr before they became robo-skeletons and the real power at the time, the Slann.  Be'lakor and  now Vashtorr were around, Daemon Princes raised from mortals that would be ancient aliens to us.  Chaos reigned, but it wasn't the Four Gods that we know about.  These were truly Old Gods, with totally OP Uberdaemons before they got nerfed because Balance Datasheets didn't exist yet.  They had like obsolete miniatures like Fimirs and stuff, from like 40k 0th edition, Rick Priestley's original design for a game here merely named Rogue Trader.

 

I went through this exercise to show how all the lore that's been written was really only from the last 10,000 years, from the Horus Heresy 'til now.  We're like young children who don't know superheroes came in comic books rather than via a whole cinematic universe with streaming TV shows.  We're like "you mean there's Chaos before the 4 Gods" while they're like "you mean you had to READ superhero stories?  Wow, this picture book is like they drew the movie in a really ugly way!"  All we know is a tiny fraction of all there is.

 

In short, what we know is largely based on what Mankind knows in 40k, and they don't know much.

 

 

What Does This Imply?

 

 

How could Be'lakor have been active during the War of Heaven yet be the 1st to align with "all" Four Chaos Gods?  Imho, quite easily, because even though he's a Daemon Prince and they're gods, he's older than they are, because remember the Four aren't all there is.

 

With Slaanesh technically only being 10,000 years old, it just meant Be'lakor was the 1st to approach him as well as the others with his sales pitch before anyone else did, because S/he Who Thirsts hadn't existed before then.  Well, Horus would do so shortly afterwards, then even Abaddon...so it's less of a big deal then Be'lakor makes it sound, but he DESPERATELY wants credit for it.  By the way, this sounds very in-character for him.

 

Long before that, Be'lakor would have pledged himself to the true Old Gods of Chaos.  He was a mortal of some ancient alien race that co-existed with the Slann and the Necrontyr.  However, praying to the Ones That Came Before, he was elevated to Daemon Princehood.  At some point, they went away, while he stayed behind, and now peddles his services to the young new generation.  So Be'lakor is like this old grifter, going from one Flavour of the Millennium to another, it happens right now it's Khorne/Slaanesh/Nurgle/Tzeentch.

 

I think the most important takeaway is we explored much of this Galaxy In Flames, but the universe is far greater.

 

I used to describe the 40k Imperium as a crumbling Space British Empire.  However, after being pointed out certain things, I kinda use the analogy of it being Space North Korea (this is non-political).  It elevates its leader to godhood, is constantly in a state of war, thinks it is this amazing nation but is in actuality an absolutely miserable place.  But most of all, it is a tiny insular country that doesn't realise it's less significant than it thinks it is.

 

Everything we know about 40k is no lie, but it's a tiny backwater in the greater scheme of things.  The Imperium had a civil war that's still technically ongoing while facing other threats, but we were really just a proxy for another war by far greater powers.

 

For all we know, there is a far greater war against a much more powerful Chaos, of which we only saw a tiny part.  They didn't disappear, it's just the Dark Imperium now and the War In Heaven before was but a small skirmish on a minor front compared to the whole.

 

Those far greater powers have moved on.  Our one saving grace was that we were beneath their notice.

 

And now we tore a hole in the fabric of the universe with the Great Rift.  Did someone notice the ripping sound?

 

I'm going to stop right now as not to do what Rick Priestley was complaining about, trying to explain the mystery away.  I'm just really glad this exercise reminding me that the mystery is still there.  I will also check out those new books.  Thanks for the recommendation...I know it's Gav Thorpe.

 

(That said, now I'm seriously thinking about a mixed army lead by The Last Slann or something, I can't help it.)

Edited December 20, 2022 by N1SB

[MithrilForge]

... I miss the old days of Rick Priestly being at the helm, it's like back then you had to write well and have OK models as compared to nowadays they dazzle you with great models to distract you from the lack of great lore...

 

M.  

[Moonreaper666]

4 hours ago, Special Officer Doofy said:

See none of this makes sense to me. Daemons come from the power of a chaos God, and Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle became sentient in M2 (source: Realms of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned). And Be'lakor was created by them, meaning he could not have been created until M2, and he was the first mortal ascended to daemonhood.

 

Warhammer 40k lore constantly contradicts itself and is full of retcons. I gave up on following it along time ago. This vashtorr predating the chaos gods by 60 million years is terrible writing.

 

Slaanesh awoken during the Fall of the Eldar. She has existed prior

 

Vashtorr represents the idea of chaotic innovation. This Daemon of Chaos Undivided is from the Forge of Souls

 

Old Lore has Lorgar and Konrad, plus their entire Legions, in the Siege. Horus was never wounded in the Old Lore by Russ. Only 1.5 Guardsmen in the Siege of Terra

 

War in the Heaven is the most castratrophic event in 40k. Heck, one of the most brutal war in fiction general!

 

So much bloodshed, death, debauchery (C'tan eating souls like crack) and ambitious-backstabbing during that conflict. That should be the event that brought the Main Four Chaos Gods into existence. Malice too since the WiH was full of anarchy and infighting

[Trokair]

Where is this coming from? This is the first time I hear of a ‘Chaos’ tie to either version of the War in Heaven.

 

The elder version is their gods fighting amongst them self and may or may not be a misremembered mythologized account of the Necron/Ctan vs Old one War in Heaven.

 

The Necron/Ctan war was them fighting against the Old Ones, potentially resulting in the creation of the Orks (and several other species) as a weapon by the Old Ones. Towards the end of it there was the Enslaver plague, and while wrap based entities I don’t recall them as being overtly ‘Chaos’.

[Xenith]

On 12/19/2022 at 5:02 AM, Moonreaper666 said:

Vashtorr is the only Daemon confirmed to be during or before the WiH

 

Confirmed where?

 

@Moonreaper666, I'm going to have to ask you to cite your sources for this information - you can see lots of people are confused by the things you are writing, and haven't heard of the background you mention. Is this from a real source (Wild Rider, as mentioned by @Karhedron?) or just something that you imagine happened? If you cannot provide actual locations of this inforation for people to discuss, then we're going to wrap this topic up. 

 

6 hours ago, Moonreaper666 said:

War in the Heaven is the most castratrophic event in 40k. ...That should be the event that brought the Main Four Chaos Gods into existence. Malice too since the WiH was full of anarchy and infighting

 

We already know it isn't. All appeared around M2, being the Crusades, the Black Plague, Machiavellian scheming during the renaissance, and then in M30 with the fall of the Eldar. Being multidimensional warp-beings, once created, their existence spread out in all dimensions - just as we occupy 3d space as humans, the chaos gods occupy 4D space and exist through time. 

[Special Officer Doofy]

6 hours ago, Moonreaper666 said:

 

Slaanesh awoken during the Fall of the Eldar. She has existed prior

 

Vashtorr represents the idea of chaotic innovation. This Daemon of Chaos Undivided is from the Forge of Souls

 

Old Lore has Lorgar and Konrad, plus their entire Legions, in the Siege. Horus was never wounded in the Old Lore by Russ. Only 1.5 Guardsmen in the Siege of Terra

 

War in the Heaven is the most castratrophic event in 40k. Heck, one of the most brutal war in fiction general!

 

So much bloodshed, death, debauchery (C'tan eating souls like crack) and ambitious-backstabbing during that conflict. That should be the event that brought the Main Four Chaos Gods into existence. Malice too since the WiH was full of anarchy and infighting

 

Pointing out a bunch of retcons only makes me think even less of the lore haha.

[Xenith]

Though GW has associated three of the gods with the emotions of humanity, it is beyond question that not only humans can gestate and birth chaos gods, as evidenced by Slaanesh. Despite being a much more psychic race, Slaanesh has always been portrayed as the youngest and weakest chaos god, that consumed ~half the souls of an entire warp-sensitive race at birth, so we know that a race's psychic acuity doesn't really have an effect on the power level of the god, or the daemons it might spawn.

 

If the Necrontyr had strong emotions, they might have created parallel gods in the warp, that might have indeed had very strong daemons, however Necrontyr technology has the ability to just shut off the warp. They were not concerned about immaterial gods or daemons whatsoever. A single necron installation has stood for over 10,000 years on Cadia holding the great rift at bay - at the height of their power, chaos gods would be nothing to the Necrontyr - they were much more concerned with radiation and the actual physical gods that were eating them. As the Necrontyr shut themselves off from the warp, then removed emotion from themselves and made some kind of eternal soul-reincarnation, whatever gods they may have spawned in the warp would have starved and died, just as they did to the C'Tan. Even if those gods/daemons that existed during the lifespan of the Necrontyr were more powerful than those of the current pantheon, they're dead now. 

 

As pointed out above, we know that some of the first daemons encountered by marines were of un-fixed shape, generic daemon dogs, or perhaps Flesh Hounds, that had not been named yet in Saturnine (also remember Abnett takes liberties with the lore) and the crusade daemon list is quite generic, but I'm also pretty sure we have clear depictions of plaguebearers attacking the Eisenstein and such as it travels through the warp, I recall quite fixed, 40k familiar daemons in the Ruinstorm novel.

 

So we can assume that there are both generic and common/fixed form daemons around during the heresy, but these generic ones seem to get winnowed out in favour of the more effective models by they 41st millenium. This would suggest that daemons are getting stronger, probably due to the 10,000 years of chaos that took place post-heresy. We can surmise that the the chaos gods, and therefore their daemons, were at their weakest right after the birth of Slaanesh (who reduced the total tithe of human and eldar souls that would go to the other 3, so now instead of 1/3 oh humanity's emotions each, they now get 1/4) hence their gambit on the primarchs - the Emperors webway project was going to isolate humans from the warp forever and effectively kill off the gods, in a way. With the chaos (little c) during the heresy, each god, and their daemons grew in strength throughout, until we have the grimdark future where there is only war.

 

This doesn't really relate back to the WiH, however we don't really have sources for that - Chaos probably took a stepped back laughed as the Eldar and Necrontyr killed one another. 

Edited December 20, 2022 by Xenith
Forgot to add the bit in blue.

[Closet Skeleton]

9 hours ago, Moonreaper666 said:

 

Slaanesh awoken during the Fall of the Eldar. She has existed prior

 

 

This is correct, pre-awakening Slaanesh was part of a feedback loop that led to the fall in the first place that also blocked Terra off from the Galaxy via warp storms. Ynead is another sleeping Warp entity that hasn't been fully born yet.

 

Be'lakor is a Warhammer Fantasy character whose 40k presence is a hackjob, much like Syl'Esske is a Age of Sigmar character who is even more just kind of there in 40k.

 

Doombreed and N'Kari were on Horus Battle barge during the siege. Ka'Banda was running around all over the Heresy. FW's generic Daemons were just some weird semi-thought out thing reaching for a reason for HH to not just be another game you can re-use your daemons in.

[Paradigm]

Long Post, TLDR at bottom
 

Xenith has pointed out something very important, but the scope of what it means isn’t really being recognized or responded to.
 

Time effectively has no meaning in the Warp. You can visit yourself there if you know when and where you are at any point in space or time. Time is a dimension that can be travelled in the same way space can be. 
 

This means several specifically important things, and it also means a bunch of things that aren’t specific to the topic, but important for context.

 

1 - In the warp you can not only travel to the WiH but you can do things now, that take place then. So in the warp the echos of what has already happened and what will happen all intersect. It’s a feedback loop. So more or less within the empyrean the WiH never ended, but it also hasn’t yet happened and is also already over, depending on when you are.

 

2 - Like Xenith said, once a chaos god is born, it always was. It’s born at a specific point in our understanding of time and then spreads via the warp in all temporal directions. So Slaanesh was born at X time, therefore Slaanesh has always existed. The same is true if anything is ever truly destroyed in the warp. It ceases to have ever existed because it’s an ever present now.

 

3 - Daemons don’t really fight over turf and influence in the warp, it’s all a game to them, they're immortal and they’re all always as strong as they ever were in the warp. It’s why they care about reality, it’s the only thing that really “matters” to them, if you could even say that anything matters to them. It’s the only way they can gain true power in any meaningful sense.

 

4 - Because of these things, anything introduced at a later point in the lore, in-universe retcons itself. So everything is true that has ever been true. While in-universe a mortal born before X might remember a time when X didn’t exist, its because mortals are both a real and empyrean presence, and have a permanent anchor in both sides. An in universe mortal born “after” X existed could know logically that at one point X didn’t exist but would never remember a time when they didn’t. Even the one who remembered a time when X didn’t exist, wouldn’t necessarily remember things as they actually were anymore. 
 

5 - the warp is a place where something can both be X and not be X at the same time. This is why it drives mortals to madness. The more they learn about the warp, the more they realize how little, they are or, they understand. It’s a catastrophic epistemic crisis. When you stare into the void long enough in 40k the void not only stares back, but is malevolently sentient and can enter reality, ephemerally via your attention and physically by altering your brain and body. Tweak a brain even a little and it can no longer function in a sane way.
 

6 - Bel’Lakor might not have been born yet. At least in the way we think of birth. The gods all live in their own time. Temporally they’re only in synch with themselves and not each other or anything else. Maybe not even their own daemons. Sure he was an ancient warlord. But ancient to reality or ancient to himself? The mistake of his creation, could have happened at the end of reality relative to the 40k setting instead of near the beginning.  Ancient in the sense of the warp, just means a long way from now. It doesn’t mean it’s a long way in any *specific* direction, and this isn’t even including time on different vectors than the ones the chaos gods exist on or the one reality exists on. It could be a long way in along many different planes of time within the warp. It could even be at different points along the individual Chaos Gods own temporal vectors.

 

As for Vashtorr existing before the gods goes.   I’d also need to see the source on that. Sure he existed as long as the warp is. Because once born in the warp you always existed, but I’d be surprised if they make the claim that he was born so long ago. If they do, it’s both tautological conceptually, and pointless to the fluff in a meaningful way. Because the gods have been born, and therefore always were.

 

In universe the only ones that really understand the warp’s temporal properties on any level, are the Eldar, the Emperor, quite a few KSons sorcerers, some psychers, and some navigators. There’s a smattering of others that may get it on some level as well, but the general pop hasn’t got a clue, and this includes Astartes and even Custodes. 
 

TLDR- So at the end of the day. No, daemons didn’t used to be stronger, because if they were, they’d invade now within the warp and replace the gods we know currently in the lore. Because reality is the only way for warp entities to grow in a meaningful way, there isn’t much of an argument that if there are stronger entities out there, they wouldn’t obliterate their weaker rivals to gain access to their followers and thus realspace.

 

 

Edited December 26, 2022 by Paradigm
Spelling and Legibility.

[Moonreaper666]

14 hours ago, Paradigm said:

Long Post, TLDR at bottom
 

Xenith has pointed out something very important, but the scope of what it means isn’t really being recognized or responded to.
 

Time effectively has no meaning in the Warp. You can visit yourself there if you know when and where you are at any point in space or time. Time is a dimension that can be travelled in the same way space can be. 
 

This means several specifically important things, and it also means a bunch of things that aren’t specific to the topic, but important for context.

 

1 - In the warp you can not only travel to the WiH but you can do things now, that take place then. So in the warp the echos of what has already happened and what will happen all intersect. It’s a feedback loop. So more or less within the empyrean the WiH never ended, but it also hasn’t yet happened and is also already over, depending on when you are.

 

2 - Like Xenith said, once a chaos god is born, it always was. It’s born at a specific point in our understanding of time and then spreads via the warp in all temporal directions. So Slaanesh was born at X time, therefore Slaanesh has always existed. The same is true if anything is ever truly destroyed in the warp. It ceases to have ever existed because it’s an ever present now.

 

3 - Daemons don’t really fight over turf and influence in the warp, it’s all a game to them, they're immortal and they’re all always as strong as they ever were in the warp. It’s why they care about reality, it’s the only thing that really “matters” to them, if you could even say that anything matters to them. It’s the only way they can gain true power in any meaningful sense.

 

4 - Because of these things, anything introduced at a later point in the lore, in-universe retcons itself. So everything is true that has ever been true. While in-universe a mortal born before X might remember a time when X didn’t exist, its because mortals are both a real and empyrean presence, and have a permanent anchor in both sides. An in universe mortal born “after” X existed could know logically that at one point X didn’t exist but would never remember a time when they didn’t. Even the one who remembered a time when X didn’t exist, wouldn’t necessarily remember things as they actually were anymore. 
 

5 - the warp is a place where something can both be X and not be X at the same time. This is why it drives mortals to madness. The more they learn about the warp, the more they realize how little, they are or, they understand. It’s a catastrophic epistemic crisis. When you stare into the void long enough in 40k the void not only stares back, but is malevolently sentient and can enter reality, ephemerally via your attention and physically by altering your brain and body. Tweak a brain even a little and it can no longer function in a sane way.
 

6 - Bel’Lakor might not have been born yet. At least in the way we think of birth. The gods all live in their own time. Temporally they’re only in synch with themselves and not each other or anything else. Maybe not even their own daemons. Sure he was an ancient warlord. But ancient to reality or ancient to himself? The mistake of his creation, could have happened at the end of reality relative to the 40k setting instead of near the beginning.  Ancient in the sense of the warp, just means a long way from now. It doesn’t mean it’s a long way in any *specific* direction, and this isn’t even including time on different vectors than the ones the chaos gods exist on or the one reality exists on. It could be a long way in along many different planes of time within the warp. It could even be at different points along the individual Chaos Gods own temporal vectors.

 

As for Vashtorr existing before the gods goes.   I’d also need to see the source on that. Sure he existed as long as the warp is. Because once born in the warp you always existed, but I’d be surprised if they make the claim that he was born so long ago. If they do, it’s both tautological conceptually, and pointless to the fluff in a meaningful way. Because the gods have been born, and therefore always were.

 

In universe the only ones that really understand the warp’s temporal properties on any level, are the Eldar, the Emperor, quite a few KSons sorcerers, some psychers, and some navigators. There’s a smattering of others that may get it on some level as well, but the general pop hasn’t got a clue, and this includes Astartes and even Custodes. 
 

TLDR- So at the end of the day. No, daemons didn’t used to be stronger, because if they were, they’d invade now within the warp and replace the gods we know currently in the lore. Because reality is the only way for warp entities to grow in a meaningful way, there isn’t much of an argument that if there are stronger entities out there, they wouldn’t obliterate their weaker rivals to gain access to their followers and thus realspace.

 

 

 

And yet an Eldar-Necron alliance was required to beat them during the War in Heaven

 

Funny how the Ynnari and Harlequins know little about the WiH compared to Necrons

[Paradigm]

If you wanted to beat chaos now, it would take the combined might of the major powers, too. Just like it did during the WiH. I don’t really see how a Necron-Eldar alliance is an argument that daemons were ever more powerful.
 

Besides, chaos is arguably winning so handily only because everyone is too busy squabbling with each other now anyway.

 

I think it makes good sense that the Necrons know more, because there are Necrons that were alive now and fought in the WiH, but there aren’t any living Eldar from that time. 
 

 

 

[Xenith]

On 12/26/2022 at 3:55 PM, Moonreaper666 said:

And yet an Eldar-Necron alliance was required to beat them during the War in Heaven

 

Again, @Moonreaper666 I'm going to ask you for the source of this information, along with the Vashtorr existing during the WiH, or is is just your own head canon?

 

I can find no reference to the Eldar (who didn't exist as we know them) allying with the necrons to fight daemons of the current chaos gods.

 

The Old-One/Necrontyr War in Heaven was ended by the Enslaver plague, warp-xenos entities attracted by all the psychic energy from the Aeldari, who then enslaved most of the living things in the galaxy - after that, the Necrontyr retreated to their tombs and the Old Ones abandoned this galaxy. Most definitely a loss.

 

Do you mean the Enslavers?

[Closet Skeleton]

Enslaver plague hasn't been canon for a long time. Current fluff is that the Silent King was just too weak after sucessfully rebelling against the C'tan to challenge the Eldar so decided to wait for the Eldar to destroy themselves.

[Moonreaper666]

On 1/3/2023 at 1:16 AM, Xenith said:

 

Again, @Moonreaper666 I'm going to ask you for the source of this information, along with the Vashtorr existing during the WiH, or is is just your own head canon?

 

I can find no reference to the Eldar (who didn't exist as we know them) allying with the necrons to fight daemons of the current chaos gods.

 

The Old-One/Necrontyr War in Heaven was ended by the Enslaver plague, warp-xenos entities attracted by all the psychic energy from the Aeldari, who then enslaved most of the living things in the galaxy - after that, the Necrontyr retreated to their tombs and the Old Ones abandoned this galaxy. Most definitely a loss.

 

Do you mean the Enslavers?

 

Wildheart, one of the Ynnari books, drastically changes EVERYTHING about the Eldar, Necrons AND Chaos

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/cvbx5e/on_chaos_predating_the_war_in_heaven/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

 

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/cbth9o/recentish_lore_change_chaos_in_the_war_in_heaven/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

 

Ironically, this gets Warhammer Chaos closer to the themes of Moorcock's original Chaos itself

 

The Shadowkeepers, Custodes that make normal Custodes look like weak Neophyte Astartes by comparison, guard some of the toughest, unkillable, unbanishable Daemons...

 

...and those Daemons are neither the only ones nor are they even close to the Ancient Veterans that fought in the War in Heaven!!!

 

The Celestial Orrey that scares even the Necrons themselves isn't even a blimp or a minor inconvenience to the raw, unrivaled, brutal might of Chaos itself!

 

True Grimdark is knowing that for ALL of EVERYONE's STRUGGLES against the Nightmarish Creatures of the Void it is all for NOTHING!

 

The END and The DEATH indead. The Ancient Greeks saw Chaos as an Endless Void with Infinite Possibilities (Go Play Hades it's a good game) which is why this retcon is great!

 

Honestly, these WiH Daemons are what Doombreed, Full-Power Horus and Be'lakor should be in terms of power and fear!

 

 

[Brother Tyler]

I don't think anyone wants to read Reddit as a source of information, especially when the linked Reddit post is just someone's summary (read: interpretation) of lore. What we want is quotes directly from the books.

[The Neverborn]

Depending on what you mean by "40k"

 

Because GW use multiple authors, typically will try and push how "Epic" their characters are

 

The Grimdark style already mentioned every faction gets its "So unbelievably powerful" moment at any given time. Again depending on what the author is pushing at the time.

[Moonreaper666]

15 hours ago, Brother Tyler said:

I don't think anyone wants to read Reddit as a source of information, especially when the linked Reddit post is just someone's summary (read: interpretation) of lore. What we want is quotes directly from the books.

 

Um, those links do have quotes from Ynnari Wildheart. Why didn't you just read them?

[Paradigm]

Because nobody wants to read a bunch of Reddit threads. It isn’t a source. You can feel free to quote a source yourself anytime you want. 
 

Also most of the threads are speculation based on poorly interpreted quotes.
 

Those interpretations are not canon, in most cases they’ve taken what they’ve read and speculated greatly.

 

For example the paraphrased line “both races fought chaos”, does not imply that they were ever allies in said fight. But that’s exactly where the OP’s interpretation goes. All factions fight all factions in 40k— the Imperium and Tyranids aren’t allies even though they both fight chaos.

 

It’s also a discussion in universe, so not canon. Spoken words in all fluff are limited. As in characters speaking in universe isn’t canon without supporting evidence. It’s part of the, “everything is canon, nothing is canon,” GW policy with their fluff. The character’s belief, or hyperbolic statements don’t count on their own. Like when a couple Word Bearers during the heresy implied the Ultramarines grew in size so quickly because they absorbed the 2nd and 11th legions. The only canon part of that is that Word Bearers have sour grapes.

 

The statement that the cages existed long before life existed on earth for example is obviously one of, hyperbolic, the speaker didn’t realize just how long life has been here, or most likely the Author of the story didn’t check the statement against established fluff. All other evidence and fluff contradicts it, so it isn’t a retcon, it’s just a discussion.

 

In other words it’s canon that this was said, it may or may not be the truth of what occurred  in-universe.

 

 

Edited January 23, 2023 by Paradigm

[Khornestar]

This is tangential but hopefully relevant and interesting, but I’ve always wondered: has it ever been commented on or written about how this is just one galaxy out of the entire universe? I’m not as versed as you folks in the background narrative. Obviously the stories we mostly care about take place in this galaxy, but is that relative isolation (or not) ever touched upon/relevant? In regards to chaos in particular.