So if in 40k Nurgle was born due to the disaster of the Bubonic Plague and Khorne was born from the extremely bloody conquests of the Mongols and other hordes, why aren't gods being born nearly every minute now?
Think about it. Even the Mongol conquests and Black Death didn't kill on the same scale as the war and destruction in the galaxy in M41. Hundreds of thousands of beings of every race collectively perish or suffer every day. If something on the scale of a devastating but single-planet plague or warlike genocide from steppe hordes can form (almost always malevolent) gods, then why aren't there hundreds of gods in the 40k universe now?
A single major siege alone should be birthing dozens of Khornes.
Owen King
Its widely accepted they were the straw that broke the camels back
Also a siege wouldn't spawn hundreds of khornes, it would make khorne himself more powerful
Jaxon Morgan
Think about it as the birth of a star. Random feelings and emotions are attracted to one another, forming elements more and more complex, also attracted to each other (maybe due to some force similar to gravity?). After a while, there are conglomerates so big and massive that there can't be any more individual element, due to being absorbed by the god almost instantly.
Luke Jackson
Because all that potential god-energy is now getting slurped up by the existing pantheon. It never hits critical mass.
Matthew Rodriguez
So they basically evolved via Darwinism? Fighting other potentially-born gods until they eventually won and became so powerful that by now the energy that made them just fuels them rather than form gods outright?
Levi Cruz
This I guess.
You need a huge event to birth a god, but once it exists anything else in that vein is just going to fuel it, not create another. I guess if there was someone a mass peace brokered, and everyone in the galaxy was overjoyed by the event you'd get some kinda Joy-Peace Chaos God?
Parker Torres
>if in 40k Nurgle was born due to the disaster of the Bubonic Plague and Khorne was born from the extremely bloody conquests of the Mongols and other hordes
Was it that way round ?
The last time I read something like that, all it said was that the birth of those gods happened at the same time as those events. Nothing about if the events created the gods or the gods created the events.
We do have one example of what happens when a single species creates a chaos god: The Eye of Terror was created over the Eldar civilisation when the Eldar created Slaanesh.
The lack of anything resembling the Eye around earth suggest that humans weren't the only contributor to Nurgle or Khorne.
Isaiah Baker
It depends on the source.
Some state that the Black Death and the Mongols directly created Nurgle and Khorne and brought them into existence, and through thousands more years of disease and war they became powerful Chaos gods.
Other material says that Nurgle and Khorne existed before those events, but were not sentient, conscious, or powerful. Basically infants sustained only by the emotions they were associated with, but not truly living entities. Khorne was "born" with the mass blood sacrifices carried out in the Americas, especially by the Mesoamericans, while Nurgle's origins are unknown. It was the Black Death and Mongol invasions that "awoke" them and gave them sentience.
I'm honestly not familiar on the origins of Tzeentch. Being associated with change and inconsistency is pretty difficult to pin down to any one event in human history.
Then of course Slaanesh was outright created by the greed, gluttony, and excess of a huge portion of the Eldar, and gained his power by attacking/eating the Eldar gods after they lost millions of followers and were greatly weakened.
Jonathan Perry
>Its widely accepted they were the straw that broke the camels back This. If we're going by that fluff, the chaos gods were forming long, long before any of those events. Those events were the final catalyst to their full formation.
Isaiah Carter
That would actually be rather terrifying because you'd have a God that would like be perverted into peace = non action, so you'd have daemons possessing people until they died of starvation/thirst or even suffocation as they stop breathing. It would be hard to fight because you couldn't just punch it in the face since its greater daemons likely wouldn't even bother materializing, and if they did, they'd likely radiate pure apathy.
