Fanatical warrior-monks blindly believing in god-emperor of mankind

All Chaos offers is the right to put daemons in your head or mutate into a unnameable sack of crap on the whimsy of your psychotic overlord.

>IoM,
>IiM
whats that?

Chaos corrupts.

There is no choice.

Imperium of Man?

>a chapter that was granted the "boon" of hearing every lie spoken in the IoM, took them only days to go full renegade
What chapter?

The Seekers of Truth, aka "The Scourged"

Get out of here goodkind and your libertarian propaganda

True... but they also offer you the right to do as ylou please, in so far as you have the strength to fight back. They offer you the right to tell everybody who's ever held you back or hurt you "no, fuck you!" They offer you the chance to try for greatness, and the chance to succeed.

Make no mistake, Chaos has a pretty horrible selling pitch. It only works because life in the Imperium can be even *worse*. A 1% chance (yes, I know I'm exaggerating, shut up) of turning into an immortal deity is better than a 100% chance of dying a horrible, painful, pointless death and achieving absolutely nothing pleasant in your entire life.

Plus, a lot of the time, people turn to Chaos either because they're ignorant of what it actually is or because they don't have any other choice. You can be protesting against the Imperium for completely legitimate reasons, with absolutely no ties to Chaos, and they will treat you exactly the same as if you were a Chaos worshipper.

And, really, when your choice is "lose the fight and die the most hideous deaths the Imperium can devise, or make a pledge with the guys promising super-powers and armies of demons, in which case our fates if we lose will literally be no worse AND we might actually win", most people will go with option #2.

>True... but they also offer you the right to do as ylou please, in so far as you have the strength to fight back. They offer you the right to tell everybody who's ever held you back or hurt you "no, fuck you!" They offer you the chance to try for greatness, and the chance to succeed.
Except they don't. Everyone who joins Chaos is immediately enslaved, in the obvious sense or simply having your soul hollowed out and replaced by daemon bile. If there's anyone in the universe treated worse than an Imperial conscript, its a Chaos cultist. Say what you will about them, the IG high command aren't liable to feed your soul to daemons because they felt like it.

>Make no mistake, Chaos has a pretty horrible selling pitch. It only works because life in the Imperium can be even *worse*. A 1% chance (yes, I know I'm exaggerating, shut up) of turning into an immortal deity is better than a 100% chance of dying a horrible, painful, pointless death and achieving absolutely nothing pleasant in your entire life.
This scenario is talking Space Marines, but even for the normal folks in the IoM their overlords are far more likely to give them a tolerable existence than the psychotic lunatics that comprise the Chaos upper class. IIRC there's one old WD short where Abaddon has a human slave tortured to death for looking at him.

>And, really, when your choice is "lose the fight and die the most hideous deaths the Imperium can devise, or make a pledge with the guys promising super-powers and armies of demons, in which case our fates if we lose will literally be no worse AND we might actually win", most people will go with option #2.
Except your fate will be much, much worse if you pick option two, win or lose.

That second point literally isn't even true.

Chaos corruption is best seen when its a series of totally reasonable decisions that just get worse, and worse, and worse and the character gives up a little bit of their convictions one at a time. A great depiction is in (I know shut up) the Beast Arises series, where in order to fight against the Orks, a space marine chapter has to fight alongside orks. Cut off from the greater imperium by the ork hordes, they start being forced to take increasingly drastic measures to survive alongside the IW that when the Imperium comes back, and says "Kill these dudes that you literally owe your lives to" the answer was to turn. The only "correct" answer to deal with that situation without falling would have been to attack the Iron Warriors in the beginning and just let both groups die to the orks.

Its the same with religious zealots who become nearly militant atheists
If they feel lied to or betrayed people do crazy shit
Everyone has a breaking point

Ego usually. Marines almost unilaterally consider themselves better than everyone else and the genuine masters of the galaxy

Usually it's done for survival. Sometimes a decent chapter will end being accused of heresy for silly reasons and to survive they turn to Chaos.
The Crimson Slaughter had a similar story

>Chaos offers them power and freedom, the ability to do what they want whenever they want to.
It doesn't. The freedom thing is a point for renegates, but chaos is full blown slavery. Just look at the Death Guard, do you think they can choose to not be a rotten carcass?

Ol' Morty himself didn't want to be a part of Chaos. Doesn't mean he likes the Imperium, but still.

>to fight against the Orks, a space marine chapter has to fight alongside orks

Falling isn't a matter of faith. They fall because they believe so strongly that if they see any failure in themselves they think they are utterly dammed and should consider themselves monsters.

Imperial command will sacrifice Guardsmen's lives for the most idiotic of reasons.

That's not even remotely funny.

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/The_Scourged
>>"The lies, the lies, the lies..."

Wow. So they're basically the redpill crowd?

How did that end? Never heard the while story. Did they kill IW?

>rabid lunatics who only see lies and conspiracy
>are hating on everything
>can't see the bigger picture because of it

Accurate.

But that's heresy, onichan !

this. And even then they only know a fucked up fragmented version, and even then only because Guilliman was autistic about keeping records (something the Imperium immediately stopped doing and even working against, so much so Guilliman has founded a literal librarian army to fight against agents of the inquisition)

Furthermore, the Chaplaincy, which exists to monitor the spiritual health of brethren, didn't exist pre-heresy because the Emperor kept Chaos a secret. They believed all their problems were just normal human PTSD; and warp fuckery is on a whole other level

the funny part is canonically many Chaos Marines miss the regimented life and camaraderie of the old days. These tend to be the most dangerous ones, because they're usually veterans of the old war, not fresh recruits culled from savages and warp mutants with gene seed stuffed into them by a half insane black apothecarian. They also tend to be the ones to build warbands around them that echo the true legends.

Read the Fabius Bile book Primogenitor, it's all about this shit

>"The Emperor Protects"

Soul Drinkers started mutating horribly, so they were cast out of the Imperium. The entire Death Guard legion pretty much got shat on by Nurgle, turning them into plague husks. Shit happens bro, not everyone converts willingly. Most are corrupted in some fashion, over some obsession.

the best example IMO is going to be the Badab war, where you have the confluence of slow warp corruption, Imperial politics, and unavoidable shittery causing a massive civil war and even dragging good and loyal chapters down

Two important factors have to be mentioned.

One, falling to Chaos is not a matter of weighing pros and cons and deciding what is better for you. It involves daemonic temptation, corruption of soul, and other thing that supernaturally MAKE YOU fall.

Second, gods and daemons actively reach out for Space Marines. They make most powerful champions to wage their unholy war, so a Space Marine is a tastier prize than a regular mortal cult leader or something. So they push their temptations more.

>canonically
>black library

and who the fuck decided this was a good idea?

Sounds like Tzeentch. Probably Tzeentch.

>black library
>not canon

your butthurt echoes through the warp like the shrieks of a thousand autists

They are "not canon" in the sense that these stories are told from the perspectives of people in those wars, and therefore have layers of subjectivity added to them. The major events are all part of the setting as far as I know, it's just that GW wants to be able to rewrite the setting and make small mistakes.

I prefer the audiobooks to reading, it puts things into context better.

...

For the most part, Chaos corruption is not voluntary.

Death of Antagonis had a daemon corrupting people by broadcasting a low level psychic signal that "The Emperor Does Not Exist", with people who believed the voice for a second turning to Zombies

>I prefer the audiobooks to reading, it puts things into context better.
What are you, dyslexic?

The chapter master was plagued with doubts because the inquisition kept telling him to burn random people, so he wished for the ability to tell if someone was lying about their innocence. Tzeentch granted his prayer in the sense that he was able to hear ALL THE LIES ALL THE TIME.

>Bioengineered child soldier murder machines
>not falling to Chaos

Okay.

>Among all the Imperium, only the space marines know about the Imperial Truth.
And the Custodes
And the Sisters of Silence
And certain sects of the Mechanicus
and probably a ton of others I'm forgetting

Most chapters kind of lack the brainpower required to think normally.

Chaos is pretty weak against people who know what it is, and the fact that the IoM keeps it hidden is probably its downfall.

Generally chaos corrupts those who are ignorant, simple because those who know about it tend to not touch it with a mile long pole.

Unless he heard them in sequence it was probably the sound of a roaring waterfall

It goes against what we know about Orks.
The reason Orks can't be corrupted by Chaos is because the Boyz krump anything not Orky enough.
The taint of Chaos ain't Orky and the Space Marines ain't Orky.
The Space Marines should have been krumped.

It's explained really well in the beginning of the 4th edition Codex: Chaos.

>And remember, the Imperium is just as evil as Chaos is, just with a different goal.
Sad that many don't realize this...

>Chaos corruption is best seen when its a series of totally reasonable decisions that just get worse, and worse, and worse and the character gives up a little bit of their convictions one at a time
Yes, that's when it's most delicious...

>>Bioengineered child soldier murder machines
>>not falling to Chaos
Should have been women...

>Chaos has a pretty horrible selling pitch
They really don't, they sell exactly what you think you need or want, exactly at the right time. The real problem is that like, 99% of converts have no idea what they're getting into. Most sorcerers know absolutely nothing besides what the whispers and propaganda tells them, and learned scholars barely know more than daemon princehood.