How do we fix Chaos?

I've heard that in WHFB back in the day their Knight guys were rare and powerful units that stood head and shoulders above most Chaos or Chaos allied units. I think it'd be pretty interesting of Chaos Space Marines were like that: a rarity rather than the basic backbone unit and significantly more powerful than normal SMs and other Chaos units to signify their status as First Founding badasses who fought alongside the Emprah and the Primarchs before giving themselves over.

Unfortunately that would not be compatible with most existing fluff and would require a radical redesign of their army. Oh well.

Make them more Lovecraftian. Don't characterise them as simple things like characters. Make them forces of nature. Don't anthropomorphicize them. Make them just be. Monolithic but mutable. Emphasize their multifaceted nature.

>The number of Bloodthisters is a set number.

Wrong.
That's only the number in the eight hosts.
Others exist outside it.

CHAOS. Limited numbers? Fuck you chaos makes more. Because Chaos Chaos Cahos Hacoos!

>Make them more Lovecraftian.
Not everything needs to be lovecraftian. Its so overplayed and overdone and ALWAYS misses the point of lovecraft.

Lovecraft isn't a big spooky alien monster. Its entropy. Dark holes are more lovecraft the 99% of all "Lovecraftian" work in the past 20 years.

And Oh sure, fix Chaos being dull because of no hard limits by going the MOST "No hard limits we win anyway fuck you" direction.

>CHAOS ISN'T INTERESTING BECAUSE IT COULD KICK MY ARMY'S ASS.

Cry harder jellybabbies.

What's the recommended number of survivours?

Each GD is a shard of his or her god. If the god creates too many he dies.

Where is your source?!

The gods sent their GDs after an elf king in Fantasy fluff because they were too afraid to fight him in person and that's official, not even made up or interpreted. A knife-ear had the gods of all chaos too scared to come fight and this knife-ear madman killed all 4 GDs in a 4 v 1 duel. GDs really are extensions or avatars of the CGs themselves, so even the death of a single GD is a significant loss.

Slayer.
The Gods have a dumping ground of daemons and Be'lakor takes command of them.

Chaos Chaos Chaos Fuck you doesn't have to make any sense!

And tell me that's not how it functions?

>The gods sent their GDs after an elf king in Fantasy fluff because they were too afraid to fight him in person and that's official

Bullshit.

>Be'lakor

Nufluff is not Trufluff. Argument invalidated GW shill.

Not really. The Chaos Gods fear nothing. It's just near-impossible for them to cross into the material world.

When Slaanesh attempted to enter the Material World in the End Times, it was said that his entry would unmake everything.

The Eight Hosts in nufluff though.

Turns out it's actually not, and it turns out the same Elf killed demons like Yarrick killed orks. warhammerfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aenarion

>mfw this is probably no longer canon

>in the End Times

>Turns out it's actually not,

It is though.
I've read the story of Aenarion many times and the Chaos Gods were never scared of him.

Actual fluff defeats fanfiction, not matter its origin.

as a person who likes what chaos stands for in 40K, I agree withI think that chaos marines should be more powerful. they are GOD sponsored super humans vs regular super humans [no the emperor does not count he has not taken an active role in his angles directly]
and as a point they should be fewer because in the eye on of the key tenents is "survival of the fittest or, pic related

and for fucksake make slanesh less a whore and more of a civilised person thing like the old world one

Simple. Drop the "Chaos is united against the Imperium" theme. Focus on Chaos being a fractured mess of groups of varying sanity pursuing their own goals and/or serving whichever god they serve. Working together when it suits them, fighting among themselves when that suits their goals better.

Have followers of the same god sometimes fighting each other because they disagree on how to best serve their god. Or maybe because they agree that killing each other serves their god the best.

Sure, they will still hurt the Imperium. Left unchecked they will destroy it. But the destruction of the Imperium is not their goal, only a side effect. Maybe have some who want the Imperium to survive, eg Khornites who want it to keep providing foes for them to kill.

>Simple. Drop the "Chaos is united against the Imperium" theme. Focus on Chaos being a fractured mess of groups of varying sanity pursuing their own goals and/or serving whichever god they serve. Working together when it suits them, fighting among themselves when that suits their goals better.

>I didn't read the new 8th ED lore

The infighting and suddenly breaking up of the united Chaos forces is the only thing that prevented the Imperium from collapsing fully. Read the new rulebook lore section.

>16 million bloodthirsters
You can't simply calculate 8^8 based on that text. A full command chain is (8^0+8^1+8^2+...+8^7), roughly 2.4 million. But it doesn't say how many Bloodthirsters there are in the 1st Host, and how many of those chains there are.

>muh endless numbers

Daemons aren't infinite. Each daemons created takes away from the power of its patron.

>muh just as planned

You mean "I totally meant to do that, you didn't win"?

>muh yoir stakes don't matter we already won lmao

See above.

>muh so much more powerful than anything else in the setting nothing stands a chance

Just like every other faction. Tyranids are just a vanguard, the real thread is yet to come. Orks just need a strong leader to unite them and they could wipe the galaxy. Necrons haven't even fully woke yet.

>muh can nothing personal your entire defenses and army with warp bullshit

Apply system wide null field matrix, like in IA vol. 12.

>Simple. Drop the "Chaos is united against the Imperium" theme. Focus on Chaos being a fractured mess of groups of varying sanity pursuing their own goals and/or serving whichever god they serve. Working together when it suits them, fighting among themselves when that suits their goals better.
>Have followers of the same god sometimes fighting each other

This shit happens all the time.
Like in the brand new edition when the Rift tore the galaxy a new ass crack the various warbands told Abaddon

>BYE

and went off to do their own shit.

Then you've got Typhus and Mortarion arguing how best to serve Nurgle.

Do you even read Chaos fluff or just complain about it?

Chaos has never been interesting because the Chaos they were plagiarized from was uninteresting, only "on purpose" to "make a point."

Moorcock is a fucking hack is what I'm saying, a pinhead who is contrary for the sake of it. I bet he posts here.

Anyway, the best you can do is let them lose, often even. Chaos's shtick is inevitability, after all. They can afford losses. Make the big names actual characters with flaws who can lose, and when the fans roundly reject a char - like Archaon the Nuthin Personnel or Failbaddon - get rid of them.

The long defeat is difficult to use as a literary device, since it tends to disinterest and disinvest fans.

Entropy isn't Lovecraft. An inescapable sense of of immeasurable smallness is Lovecraft.

To make Chaos Lovecraftian is to make them truly the inevitable. Make the chaos gods these things that will subsume the whole of everything. It doesn't matter to them if it takes a day or a week or another 40,000 years. It will happen and they neither want nor care to speed it up.

With that you then must wonder why men and Space Marines follow then and push the galaxy further down that inexorable path. Some do it for power. Some do it for the thrill....

But some... Some do it because they have surrendered to the inexorable. Some do it to hasten the inevitable. To drag the galaxy kicking and screaming into whatever the forces of chaos will do with it. What they do with it isn't necessarily bad, but it will be different, new, and most likely painful for all, even them. At least as whatever amounts to pain for something like them.

I always use them that way.
Old Lost and Damned rules supported that list and in 8th you can do it again.
But CSM feel like regular marines with spikes, not 10k yo veterans. I want them to be rare as fuck and badass like custodians. We chave cultists zomies and lesser deamons to fill troop choices anyway.

>Orks would wipe the galaxy if united
Already proven completely false, they tried this and had their god emperor ork and primorks, eldar level technolgyl, and managed to get to terra itself. They lost to an imperium that was far more incompetent than the current one, and didn't have to deal with Necrons, tyranids or major daemon attacks. Orks BTFO

One thing I'd like to see for CSMs specifically is more weapon and wargear options. Right now, way too much of the CSM armoury is just the loyalist Marine armoury with half the shit cut out of it. Maybe tap that Forge World well and bring some more weapons from 30K to 40K, like how Volkite weapons were adaped from 30K for the Cult Mechanicus book. And then add some more bizarre warp tech and Dark Mechanicus fuckery, stuff that doesn't don't have any obvious Imperial roots.

Make chaos more insidious. Less "OMG WE CAN'T DEFEAT THEM EVAR!!!111onetyone," and more "Don't look straight at it or your eyes will grow teeth."

Stories about people whose blood won't clot after coming near a khornate daemon, or whose nerves are too sensitive to function on the day-to-day because of a secret slaanesh cult nearby. Make it an existential threat, because the imperium's normal response of overwhelming military force does dick against an insidious threat.

Make the very act of being near chaos more corrupting, but in an all-out war, chaos should get its shit kicked in due to poor supply, infighting, poor discipline, etc.

Reboot the entire setting, with a commitment to giving all factions reasonable and genuine weaknesses as well as strengths, not playing favourites with any particular faction just because they're popular, and slapping down power-creep as much as possible.

The only reason 40K's fluff is such a clusterfuck right now is because it's been going through DBZ-style power creep for the past decade. If the setting didn't take itself so desperately, laughably seriously, this wouldn't be a problem. But it does, and so we're forced to choke down terrible melodrama between character with all the depth of a puddle and all the likeability of a chest infection.

Easy. Each time a god empowers one of their servants, it's an investment of a small portion of their power. If said servant takes a melta blast to the head, that power is gone and their god diminished by the loss. Yes, they can invest more power to bring them back in hopes of recouping their investment, but that carries the risk of it just happening all over again. In other words the Chaos Gods lose when their servants do, not "hurr durr Chaos winz even though they got massacred".

>each an incalcuably vast throng of blood red killers
>incalcuable

Yeah, that's totally a set number that we can figure out with a little math.

Well hey, I think one of the biggest problems with Chaos is the idea that they'll always win in the end with no serious hope for survival, so making them 'inevitable' doesn't make shit better for me.

Basically, get rid of ADB and everything he wrote. He's literally the source of everything wrong in 40k that isn't Cruddace's fault.

Go to bed, Ward. You're still awful.

make their contradictory moral nature more prevalent

make their unity less prevalent and goals more futile

make their numbers and powers not limitless

make the interactions of the gods less personal

make the pantheon more populated and varied

make their endgame not completely inevitable

actually make their endgame more like a side effect of their own natures than a goal they strive for; this chaos apocalypse bullshit should be reserved to just the guys that want to use chaos for that (like abbadon and archaon) not what the entirety of chaos should be about, as it fits more as the other side of the coin that is reality

also spend a few lines to explain how chaos is not a force that manifests in its absoluteness in every corner of the multiverse ever but only surfaces as reflection of the relative situation both in qualitative and quantitative terms

finally give them more advanced looking stuff like guns and daemonic biomechanical shit, fantasy is dead and buried, they might as well drift off from the necessity to keep an appearance that fits both settings

>when Nidfags call Chaos 'boring'

>inb4 OP responds saying he isn't a xenos player

"Actual" fluff doesn't beat old fluff, not when the "actual" fluff is total horseshit. It's also not even fanfiction if it's lore that was lore at a previous date, and I think a lot of people who dug the old lore will disagree that the new lore is anything to follow or admire.

>please don't come fight us just go home we'll leave you alone -chaos gods
>fuck you assholes i'm done and we're closing the warp -aenarion
>shit send in the armies send in the demons send in everything -chaos gods
>ah shit you have my sword and just killed a ton of demons -khaine
>oh shit he has khaine's sword and killed a ton of our demons yeah greater demons time aspects of us assemble please stop him or we're dead -chaos gods
>fuck you -aenarion + how to tame your dragon
>fuck we lost and almost died fuck elves -chaos gods
>nice work buddy too bad i gotta curse you -khaine
>fuck -last words of aenarion

That's pretty much exactly how it went down.

Tyranids are meant to be boring, though. Chaos isn't: Chaos is supposed to be interesting, and in doing so it ends up being even more dreary and stupid.

The funny thing is almost every suggestion here aside from rebooting the franchise is how Chaos actually was in older editions.

Fuck End Times, Fuck Age of Sigmar, Fuck Modern GW. They ruined it.

he's right tho

you could tell ward had fun while writing the fluff, but ADB daddy issues are destroying both him and his work

what is this shit

That's the nature of GW selling strategy - each new release has to be more over the top and uber than the previous models, or people wont buy them. Thats why they have to reset the game with a new edition every couple of years, to start the cycle again.

i'm going to concede on the fact that such high number actually make sense on the scale of the galaxy (not in AoS though)
but that mean there is more bloodthirster than there is space marines in the galaxy, which is ridiculous

one game play thread, one newfag baiting a discussion by trying to apply logic to 40k and one thread questioning the quality of the fluff.

also
>not surpassing the panda

What is the source for there being over 16 million Necron Lords?

Those three seem like they were made by the same person for similar trolly reasons.

Just ignore everything after the Overlord left. It's how you get all the best 40k lore.

The Necron codex says that there are hundreds of Necron lords populating each of the Tomb Worlds. The tomb worlds are said to be millions.

You do the math.

Nice fanfiction you got here.

Aenarion opposed the Caledor's plan.

welp I geuss I'm reading both of those now
and i don't mean the threads

>Aenarion opposed the Caledor's plan.

Yet eventually reasoned that it would be the only answer since killing the Chaos Gods would upset the natural balance and break the world.

>this

Wrong, Aenarion had no intention of killing the Chaos Gods. It's impossible. He just wanted to protect his people until it was clear that even with the sword his people would eventually be consumed by Chaos.

Stop with the headcanon. The Elf, dwarf, and other Gods of Order were crushed by Chaos.

Just so you know, Pink Sniper is straight mostly, it's femdom-orientated and there's some gender switching and futa. Pink Sniper Maniax is gay or well, bisexual.

Gas Carnac.

A warp entity that represents order?
Or maybe make Chaos a bit more ambigious, and not entierly evil.

Or both, and maybe make the ip more morally ambigious, chaos space marines reject the constraints and laws forced upon them which ultimately reduces their identity to nothing more than soldiers, while ordinary space marines accept it, perhaps as to something they believe to be an necessary evil?

>Stop with the headcanon. The Elf, dwarf, and other Gods of Order were crushed by Chaos.

Except they weren't.

Your only basis for this is "Yeah well everything you said happened but it was clear that Chaos would win." No, it wasn't. Aenarion defeated four Chaos invasions and later four Greater Daemons, alone. Chaos lost when fighting him.

The only headcanon here is your own, and if Chaoswank headcanon is your thing then feel free to move on to End Times, Age of Sigmar, or recent 40,000.

>ADB
Yeah it's reall fucking sad to see what that guy is doing to the fluff. I don't understand why he has so much influence over the lore nowadays.

>A warp entity that represents order?

Those exist or at least they did before GW dun fucked up.

Fantasy had Gods of Order and the Emperor in 40k was hinted at becoming a God of Law. Granted that in Fantasy the Gods of Order were much less malevolent than the Gods of Chaos but their end goal of destroying Chaos and having eternal order didn't actually look as good as you'd think.

I'd give a bit more focus on the non-marine forces of chaos to make it less purely marine on marine action.

That and make it more concrete that faith, purity and exorcisms do actually do very good work against the forces of chaos. Make it more clear the role of the ecclessiarchy in such things. Helps make chaos a bit less constantly overwhelming in fluff and also helps the ecclessiarchy feel like it has more purpose after a lot of time where it's just the 'And Zoidburg' of the Imperium.

It would be nice to bring that sort of idea back.

With the whole 'The emperor is less and less there' you could do something cool with St Celestine on that front. Have her empowered as the avatar of this growing god of light and order the emperor has given form.

That + New Eldar God + Maybe rescue Isha and you've got a pretty nice trio of gods of Order to oppose Chaos.

>chaos gods encroaching
>trio of order gods desperately fighting
>but they're outnumbered
>tzeentch cackles as his plans come to fruition
>just as the day seems lost a blinding light flashes across the galaxy
>another entity emerges and impales tzeentch's skull
>the light fades and the entity can be seen
>it's motherfucking S O L K A N

You really think Tzeentch would be so basic as to have a skull?

You guys are arguing about fluff strength, and none of you are even in the same lore spheres. It is like comicbook nerds arguing about 7 different batmans without ever realizing the batmans are different except to say the one they like is the only true batman, then going right back to being retarded.

You're not wrong.

And behind Solkan another flash of light appears.

youtube.com/watch?v=q_9SsX7HJhE

Warhammer fluff has always been incredibly inconsistent to begin with, bordering on comic book levels. Everyone has their own idea of canon and even official canon has always contradicted itself or had thematically nonsense shit happen to the levels of continuity breaking. Arguing Warhammer lore is possibly worse than comic nerds arguing who's more powerful out of 19 different Spidermans.

>distand laughter of a feathery nature
>wisper bearly heard by psykers around galaxy
>"Just as planned"
You lost again.

Tzeentch is truly unprankable.

Fuck off with your heacanon. I got the Elf lore here with me. The Elf Gods INCLUDING KHAINE were defeated by the Chaos Gods.

In fact, the bulk of the Daemons were attacking the Elves. They were busy with Be'lakor's wars and the Lizardmen extermination.

Eat a dick you lying bastard.

We have been through this a thousand times. Solkan is a lie. He doesn't exist and never existed.

>uses 8th ed lore
>gets extremely defensive and angry when people discuss lore otherwise

I like Belakor memeposters like but people like you just come off as weird. It's like every 8th+ ed player is in denial that nearly everyone who played older editions hates 8th+ ed.

Just start reading other stuff than Warhammer fluff. Soon you will see how poorly written Warhammer is.

I have plenty of the old material already. Please lets fact check you. Cite where Aenarion was going to destroy the Chaos Gods in personal combat.

It's Carnac.

Just a few years ago, people were regularly joking about Chaos being the least important threat in the setting. Hell, your OP post could be damn near applied to the Imperium at the time, since they were never threatened meaningfully by anything.

You can't reason with Carnac because he is autistic. Non of your arguments will stick with him and he probably thinks he is trolling you.

>Cite where Aenarion was going to destroy the Chaos Gods in personal combat.

Probably when he took the cursed sword of the God of Murder and set out to destroy the Chaos gods in personal combat.

You mean your lack of evidence and headcanon will cause all your arguments to fall on their face.

Notice that when threatened with fact checked, that bitch of an user stopped talking.

kek

Carnac thinks that Warhammer has canon. It's best to just ignore him.

>it's carnac

Who?

Wrong, he didn't do that. After his wife died, he delivered himself to Khaine via the sword and returned to his kingdom protecting it from the constant onslaught from the daemons that never ceased until he eventually realised that not even the sword can protect his people and went with Caledor's plan.

You are so shit at the fluff. Go losten to Aenarion's audio, read elf novels, or for fuck sake just read the army books.

The only dude who set out to slay the Chaos Gods was Grimnir and he failed.

A resident autist that thinks he is the shitposting king. He will show up and ruin any fluff discussions with an avalanche of sperg posts.

It's the reason I stopped talking fluff on Veeky Forums.

Continued....

Notice that there is no citations. Speaking about the "oldie" lore and yet fails to deliver anything to support himself. A total poser, I say.

>The only dude who set out to slay the Chaos Gods was Grimnir and he failed.

Grimnir slew a Daemon Prince which severely pissed off Khorne, recovered from lethal injuries, then went into the Chaos Wastes and was never heard or seen again.

The outcome is ambiguous, much like Sigmar wandering off into the north.