Warhammer 40,000/WMG: Difference between revisions

* Jumping off that, the Imperium NEEDS Chaos. [[With Us or Against Us]] is pretty much the life and blood of the Imperium: if you're not with the Imperium you'll succumb to Chaos. Without the Warp and the mutations and other unfun things, the Imperium would eat itself alive in civil war. With nothing outside, the Imperial Guard, Space Marines and Imperial Inquisition would come to blows.

Being a ridiculously high powered psyker that even the Chaos Gods feared must hint at the insane presence he has in the warp. Hell, the Astronomican was powered by him before his interment in the Golden Throne. His body withers but his warp presence grows ever stronger, fueled by the fanaticism and zeal of the Imperium. Not only that, but any alien which shows emotions of righteous zeal is also indirectly feeding Empy.

* Dude, that's impossible in so many ways. Firstly, the Emperor is the result of a combination of a few thousand psykers. Secondly, the Chaos Gods came into existence in the Middle Ages except for Slaanesh, who appeared during the Dark Age of Technology, due to the emotions of mortals. Thirdly, why would a fragment of god seek to stamp out all religion?

* No, the shaman thing was but one of many explanations being thrown around. It is still unclear what the Emperor truly was. Secondly, time means nothing in the Warp. They manifested and gained their sentience at the very dawn of Creation, but that translates to trillions of years later in the material universe. They have always been sentient, and yet, have never truly been so to mere mortals. Confused yet? Well it's Chaos. Lastly, The EMPRA decided to stamp out Religion not because he thought it was 'STUPID AN' EVUL', but rather because he knew that there were ''certain gods'' in the galaxy and decided that if he allowed Humanity to continue to go down such a path, it would eventually lead to them meeting with said Gods. And also, he thought that if people stopped believing in daemons and shit, they would eventually go away. What the Great Throne Vegetable didn't realize is that Chaos is fueled by sentient thought, not explicit belief. Just clearing that up.

Think about it; The Adeptus Mechanicus has a pretty strong to a massive presence in every other Adeptus/Adepta, Officio, and Departmento in the Imperium. The Adeptus Mechanicus is capable of being completely independent from the rest of the Imperium if it choosed to be as it has all the production capacity, military might, organization, population, and resource pool to survive on it's own, though it may be somewhat diminished from secession; but the Imperium of Man would probably not survive without the Adeptus Mechanicus, and in fact the Adeptus Mechanicus can more or less destroy any other organization in the Imperium on a whim by simply withdrawing all support from it while the AM would be far less affected if another organization tried this with them. So it stands to reason that in reality, it is the Techpriests and not the Administrators, Generals, Inquisitors, Chapter Masters, or what have you who hold all the real power in the Imperium and it is Holy Mars, not Holy Terra that is the center of power in the Imperium of Man.

* Keep in mind that the Machine Cult still needs the rest of the Imperium for supplies and the like. Forge Worlds need to import food and so forth. Plus their armed forces (while powerful) lack the sheer numbers to defend themselves from all the threats they would face without the assistance of the Guard/Navy/Marines/Inquistion/etc.

** And that some SM Chapters are pretty self sufficient and tech savy on their own.

*** I knew about the human daemon prince it pissed off atleast one person for implying that it was Genghis Khan a national hero to your average person from Mongolia being the only mongolian anyone outside the country knows the name of.

*** Since the Tau seem to be the goodiest of the races, that means that they actually make Chaos look like mischevious schoolchildren.

The Adeptus Mechanicus are a group of elitist 'players' or 'priests' - the l337 - operators of machines (computers or tanks) who look down upon those who are not knowledgeable about the machines - the n00bs - and value their machines more than the lives of others, or themselves, and wish to incorporate themselves more into these machines - using headsets to chat, implanting hard drives into your spine - and practically worship them.

In the issue, Doom becomes '' {{spoiler|omnipotent, conquers the Earth and turns it into a utopia after defeating all the remaining super-heroes. He then turns his attention to space and conquers or destroys most of the alien races and super-beings there as well. The Celestials arrive and Doom engages in a 400 year long war with them, from which he emerges victorious, but with most of his power gone and the earth disloged from its orbit and freezing. Doom, rather than humankind go extinct, uses up his remaining power to restore the Earth's orbit. He then lives among them, but muses that given the proper motivation humanity could be made into an unstoppable force.}}'' Doom, in this reality, has his face restored, and has been possession of great cosmic power for centuries. Civilization has already fallen once, hostile alien races have been subjergated or destroyed by his power. Is it so unlikely that his power returned to him, and he then led humankind back to the stars as the Emperor of Mankind?

Since the 5th edition put the game into so bad that there's really not much pushing left, Games Workshop now has an excellent opportunity to pull out something totally unexpected and make everything loads better in one go. Because I dunno about you, but all this darkness makes the whole thing kinda depressing, and why would you want to play with anything other than Tyranids or Necrons since you know one of those two is gonna win the whole thing in the end? Anyway...

****** I've imagined a breed of Tau Plasma Warriors. They're basically the Tau's (or just Farsight's) attempt to imitate the Space Marines. They're Tau Fire Warriors with a mishmash of genetic augments and splicings from Tau aligned species.

** And then the Necrons kill all the Tyranids. The universe ends.

Everything is going, more or less, as planned for old empy, perhaps he didn't intend to get quite as injured as he did, and yes magnus bursting in trashing one of his biggest projects with his good natured bumbling probably wasn't something intended, but by and large things are going pretty well for the Emperor.

** Let's see. He spends most of the game gathering power by telling people what they want or need to hear, resulting in enlightenment for both him and the person he's <s>manipulating</s> befriending. He has the power to rapidly switch between various styles of magical abilities on the fly by putting on and replacing personas. His color theme is mostly blue. {{spoiler|And at the end of the game, his soul ends up trapped in a metaphysical place outside reality as we know it where time doesn't work right, where he is fated to do battle with the [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] of despair for all eternity.}} You get three guesses as to who that makes him, and the first two don't count. Any problems him being the Lord of Change causes the timeline can be handwaved by the general weirdness of time in the Warp. IIRC, Tzeentch has a favored creepy herald/servant he uses as an emissary outside the Warp: it could be Elizabeth, Aigis, or both, elevated to the level of a Demon Prince (although Elizabeth may have qualified as a [[Eldritch Abomination|minor deity]] to begin with).

** The latter has been ''heavily'' implied to be the case several times.

** One of the radical factions of the Inquisition believes the latter part of this theory, and is actively trying to "pull the plug" in order to allow the Emperor to complete his apotheosis.

**** There may be some truth in that. According to [[The Other Wiki]] "Malal was at some point cast out or separated from the rest of the Chaos Gods. [...] Malal was perhaps the first of the Chaos Gods and seems to exist only to destroy the other gods and their followers. The Outcast God is both feared and loathed by the other Chaos Gods, and his power may parallel the collective power of the other Chaos Gods. [...] they were the chosen human champions/followers of Malal. Dedicated to seeking out and destroying the followers of the other Chaos Gods" Sound like anyone we know? * coughtheemperorcough*

*** Which makes a lot of sense in a world where enough belief spawns new gods (and innumerable demons too) and you know it.

**** As far as can be seen, a warp god is no different to a * cough* regular warp entity, just WAYYYY more powerful. Perhaps you are a god if you become powerful enough in the Warp. In that sense, the Emperor could very well be a Warp God, just not one of the very loose chaos pantheon.

* Assuming that the Emperor ''is'' a Chaos God, he is the god of fear and loyalty. His chosen warriors are freed from fear, just as Nurgle's worshippers are freed from despair.

*** A. Yeah, my point is that people think that the Chaos Gods draw their power from the number of people who have an explicit belief in them. They don't, hell, the Imperium's violent foreign policy has likely done more to strengthen Khorne than any of his faithful's exploits. B. No, he wasn't.

***** Any anger at all serves Khorne. That's how the metaphysics of the Chaos Gods' sustenance works. And the reason they've grown so powerful. Also, depending on how you define 'righteous fury', Khorne's followers and the average Word Bearer has it in droves. Khorne's followers tend to be the most idealistic of Chaos Warriors, they believe they exist for nothing else but glorifying Khorne through glorious battle, after all. For example, Angron is turned to Khorne by his burning fury and obsession in avenging his fallen companions. Sounds pretty 'righteous' to me. Furthermore, in a recent Horus Heresy, it is revealed that the Emperor knew from the start that no matter what he did, Horus was gonna tear him apart. So he's likely not as high on the divine totem pole as is implied.

First, a warp storm conveniently cuts the Imperium off from the Tau homeworld just as they were planning to colonize it. Then, the Ethereals show up at the darkest time in the Tau's history, to pull them out of a self-destructive spiral. Then, the Tau just ''happen'' to find a crashed ship on their planet's moon, when they really need the technology to travel faster than light. And of course, the tiny Warp signature of Tau souls keeps them from being a tempting target for the Daemons of the Warp.

To serve as sentient cattle (it may not be coincidence that the Tau are said to be descended from grazing herd animals). They have had impossibly good luck during their development, implying that somebody has been pulling the strings to ensure the survival and propagation of the Tau against the many threats that they are faced with. The Tau are a completely Warp-insensitive race, making them excellent victims for the Warp-averse C'tan and their Necron minions. By ensuring the rise of the Tau Empire, the Necrons have been setting up fodder for their return so that this time there will be less of a chance of them running out of victims. And if conflict between the Tau and their enemies ends up going poorly for the more Warp-savvy races, that's just the icing on the sentient, screaming, doomed cake.

== Two Space Marine Legions were too cowardly to fight in the Horus Heresy. ==

** Conversely, something awful happened to the 2 missing legions BEFORE the Horus Heresy that had little to do with Chaos...

*** I kind of assumed that the two missing Primarchs got screwed over while being cast into the Warp as infants. I mean, Sanguinus grew wings--it's not too far-fetched to assume two got so badly mutated they couldn't serve as sources of gene-seed any more.

**** But if they were so warped that there gene-seed couldn't be used anymore, why were the legions founded?

*** No, the 2 missing Primarchs are never named and the records are deleted because their names where actually Gork and Mork, and where involved in a time travel accident that send them and their legions at the time of the War in Heaven.

***** Doesn't work. There has been several sets of rules for Cypher, and none of them had the stats to indicate he was anything more than a skilled Space Marine, let alone a Primarch. Or the points cost. ''However'', {{[[User|Tiroth]] this Troper}} believes that Alpharius/Omegon merely pulled their "we are all Alpharius" trick and fooled the Smurfs into killing a normal Alpha Legionnaire. It wouldn't be the ''first'' time their charade had fooled fellow Space Marines...which means that ''both Primarchs are still out there''.

****** Space Marines, maybe, but Guilliman was a ''primarch''.

*** There is a theory that the Eldar DID create the Tau, but didn't know about The Outsider - another C'Tan who may or may not be sleeping under the surface of the Tau planet.

Alternatively they are the Yehat.

** Let's see. Who in Warhammer 40k is bugfuck insane, hilarilously awesome, and Chaotic Neutral? Da Orks. When Waaagh!Dedpool gets going, the galaxy will burn. Then he'll move on to whatever the Nids are running from.

** Shinji is <s>Chaos</s> W40K Undivided, as he's got all the factions running around in his skull. Apocalypse Rei is obviously Gork and Mork ("waaagh."). Asuka has Khorne's aggression and Slaanesh's pride, and both are struggling with the Greater Good ideology for dominance, but there may be the potential for a Primarch somewhere in all that confusion.

* There's no inherent contradiction. The Imperial Guard really ''are'' professional, competent, even heroically badass soldiers. They just can't do much against the Cosmic Horrors, space dinosaurs and assorted demigods except act as cannon fodder. The Imperial Faith is ''at one and the same time'' a comfort and inspiration to humanity ''and'' an excuse/rationale for its worst excesses (true of many real faiths). The Imperium is both a fascistic nightmare of Orwellian conformity and the only real chance we've got. In addition, it spans vast amounts of worlds, easily enough to cover everything from forge worlds to remote agri-colonies.

** That would only be enough dakka if the weapon can hit every point in the multiverse WITH every point in the multiverse, at every point in time in the multiverse, infinity times per 10^-infinity seconds. Remember, one of the key points of dakka is rapid-fire capability. Hitting everything once isn't orky enough.

The Chaos Gods, if they ever win, will destroy themselves. So, obviously, they need something or somebody to stop them from winning. So, why not create a diety that would oppose them? And who's better than a person, who already has a cult and already is a danger to them?

* 6th Edition will be the [[End of the World Special]]. Those naive Tau will have their hopes crushed by Tyranids, Orks, and xenophobes. The C'Tan on Mars will wake up. The Eldar craftworlds will become silent tombs drifting through the void. Abaddon will finally, ''finally'' win a campaign. And everywhere, humans will be dying in droves as the tide of unspeakable horrors plaguing the galaxy utterly extinguishes the Imperium like the tide washing over a candle. The narrative campaigns players take part in will not determine ''if'' the "good guys" live or die, but ''how'' they die - more specifically, how long humanity lingers before succumbing to its inevitable fate. On the one hand, we'll get to play out the Final Siege of the Imperial Palace. On the other hand, one helluva [[Downer Ending]]. Afterwards, the game will only continue as "historical reenactments" with occasional rules tweaks and new models, for if a 7th Edition is attempted to advance the plot, a black hole will swallow the Earth.

*** But as of the publication of the Cain Archive, he's been dead and buried with full military honors for a number of years (while still on the official payroll). So how could he...oh, duh, Cain must be Jesus. And, therefore, also God/The Emperor.

* Actually, there is one other way to make 40K even more [[Grimdark]] - portray the Imperium as evil. Eliminate all language portraying the Space Marines and Imperial Guard as the Defenders of Humanity. Show records of dozens - hundreds, even - of alien races exterminated by the Imperium. Make a big thing out of how callous the Imperium is towards its subjects. And finally suggest that an Imperial ''victory'' would result in the extinction of all other alien species and a permanent dark age for the human race.

** What is the one thing that all the races (or at least their leaders) are completely terrified of? [[Incorruptible Pure Pureness|The Cosmic Force of Peace and Love!]] Think about it, the Imperium would lose their Orwellian war footing, the Nids wouldn't be able to consume, the orcs wouldn't be allowed to fight, it goes against chaos' nature, the Eldar would lose their regimented structure (and craftworlds would be obsolete, and what farseer leader wants that?),the Tau would lose their moral highground (and thus, no one would want to join the Greater Good), the squats would come back, etc etc. Therefore, when a [[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|bunch of ponies using friendship magic]] appear in their rainbow ships, the entire Milky Way will unite in a desperate fight to protect their GRIMDARK way of life.

** That's what {{[[User|Tiroth]] this Troper}} thought. Where is the material that suggests the 'nids are running scared?

The sheer power and numbers of both forces will utterly crush every other faction, leaving only the two to battle it out--cold mechanically-encased lifelessness versus wild all-consuming life. Either one will prevail or both will destroy each other.

* But how is he going to overcome the size issue?

** Very heavily implied to be the case in certain early fluff.

* If they believe so strongly in dieing and being reborn wouldn't that mean they will make the legions of chaos strong enough to defeat them, even as the orks get stronger? In the end there will be the ork company, and a their chaos enemies as the strongest creatures in reality. Then the sheer force of their awesome will rip apart the barriers that keep them (both of them) imprisoned. The logical conclusion is that they will then proceed to annihilate everything including each other, before being reborn again the next day. Thus making their endless cycle a destructive force more potent than the chaos gods multiplied by how awesome orks are.

**** To give a bit more detail then that, Tzeetch is hope, ambition and change. He gains power form everyone trying to make a difference, everyone trying to gain some small amount of agency or relavence in the univerese (this being 40K, the only plausible way to do so for anything not already a demigod is to be a shadow puppetmaster of other poeple). Nurgle meanwhile is acceptance, despair and compassion. People tryingto make due, thanking heaven for small miracles and trying to help other do the same are his.

Prety much the same for Khorne and Slaanesh, rage and destruction versus longing and possesion.

* Conversely, the little girl is the Emperor and the guard dog... huh. One of the lost Primarchs?

* Alternatively, the Codices are 'In Character' and the Black Templars are lying in order to make themselves look important, or are just bitter that THEY weren't given a Soulspear to play with.

*** Tau in fact have no psykers, as their rave has almost no connection to the warp. Similarly, Dwarves have no mages, as their race is inept in casting spells. However, dwarves do have the ability to forge magic runes, an ability the Tau lack.

* The recent introduction of the Demiurg to the tau army simultaneously both josses and confirms this theory.

* Just a few problems with that. Superman was an alien and knew it, so why would he be anti-alien? Also, did Horus strike him down with a kryptonite sword?

Void Dragon (two miles under the surface of Mars): "-ture. Wait? What the hell?!"

** I always tought that the 'gods' who endorsed the emperor were humanity's own warp entities, like [[Greek Mythology|Zeus]] or [[Norse Mythology|Thor]] or possibly [[Egyptian Mythology|Ra]]. They got consumed by Chaos a long time ago (they only had energy from one planet of sentients, and they were so many of them that they didn't have enough power to resist) but were able to give their power to the Emperor before they were fully consumed. But since there's no canon evidence for such a thing, that's another WMG entirely...

*** That doesn't really work, because the Emperor is supposed to have been around since prehistoric times, which means ''before'' any of those beings were worshiped, or even dreamed up. But consider this: who puts that inscription about the Emperor at the beginning of all the Warhammer 40K novels? The publisher, obviously. And who is the publisher? The Black Library. And what is the Black Library? It is the repository of all the information the Eldar have collected on Chaos over the millennia. So why are all these stories about the ''Imperium'' coming out of an archive that's supposed to be about ''Chaos''? Because the whole Imperium unwittingly serves Chaos, because the Emperor is an agent of Chaos. It's all some big [[Xanatos Gambit]], probably by Tzeentch.

** It's being powered by all the psykers who get sacrificed to it every day. The Imperium just claims that it's still being directed by the Emperor in some way as part of the propaganda that he's still alive.

Consider: warp entities, including gods, are created by the worship of living beings in the materium. The Eldar created Slaanesh because, whatever lip-service they paid to Asuryan, Vaul, and the others, by the way they lived, they were actually serving Slaanesh. So Asuryan and the others were transformed into Slaanesh. The Eldar experienced this as Slaanesh "devouring" their gods, because that is how it would have seemed: the old gods were being absorbed into the new one. The warp storms the preceded Slaanesh' birth were, metaphorically speaking, the chrysalis by which the bulk of the Eldar pantheon metamorphosed into Slaanesh.

The reason Khaine, Cegorach, and Isha survived is that they were the only remaining of the old Eldar deities who were still receiving sincere worship anymore, so they were able to remain distinct from Slaanesh.

* The histories of the legion II and XI were deleted during the Great Crusade. Even the Primarch's considered it a taboo to even mention them. Little is known about their fate, save that they are referred to as the "forgotten" and the "purged". This could potentially refer to two separate events. The only other bit of information is a subtle reference from Leman Russ immediately after the destruction of Prospero; he implied that the Emperor ordering a Legion to fight against another legion was not "unprecedented".

We know that The Emperor had to throw out his compassion away so he could kill Horus. The Star Child theory that exists in-universe tells us that his compassion can bond to itself in the form of a new facet of The Emperor's personality comparable to the Omnissiah, different, but still part of the greater being.

Now consider what would happen if his compassion could make simple decisions. It would probably want to get as far away from the GRIM DARK 41st millennium where its favorite son had just been killed by his own hand. The Emperor has been stated to have time warp powers, and an aspect of him that did not have to do anything like powering the astronomicon could possibly muster enough psychic power to achieve true time travel.

The compassion aspect would travel to the late first/early third millennium, where there are far fewer horrors that imperil humanity. It would be very weak and could even be scattered over the planes of existence, like an egg that broke and spilled on the floor (in a pan-dimensional sense). The first instinct upon arrival would be survival. It would go about this by attaching to human hosts in whatever form it could, becoming various transformation trinkets in a manner akin to soul binding.

The form Chaos takes in this time frame to threaten man is small time Daemon lords trying to take a few billion souls to jump-start there carriers. The first choice for the aspect would be to fight would be daemons serving Khorne, god of hate.

All this time attached to the host, the aspect will amplify the power of love to insane levels to fuel the hosts powers to fight anti-lulz. When the host is in civilian mode the aspect will squirrel away psychic compassion resonance to send to the future for the Star Child.

My reasoning for this theory? Well, Obliterators are basically living guns, and as our God [[Zardoz]] has said, '''THE GUN IS GOOD.''' They (like most Chaos Space Marines, or for that matter most Space Marines, or most Chaos forces, and in fact most people in this 'verse) like to use most of their time to '''GO FORTH, AND KILL.'''

After the Ruinous Powers snatched the young Primarchs from the Emperor on Terra and scattered them across the Galaxy, one of the two that were never found again was Ed Tom. He had been launched back in time to twentieth-century Texas. There, he was found and adopted by a normal human, a la Superman. But the trauma of the journey stunted his growth, so he only became a man of normal stature rather than reaching the imposing size of a normal Primarch, and he aged as a normal man, as well.

His first dream (which he doesn't remember well) is of trying to find his father to get some money, which Ed Tom thinks he lost. The second is of his father leaving him alone in the cold to go ahead and start a fire.

The "father" that Ed Tom sees in both dreams, the man he knows as his father, found and adopted the Ed Tom when he found him as a baby, alone and abandoned, in the Texas desert. The dreams are not really about this man, however. They are about Ed Tom's true father, the God-Emperor of mankind.

The first dream is fragmentary and partially forgotten because Ed Tom was spirited away as an infant, and so had no knowledge of who or what he was, but his latent Psyker abilities have painted him an incomplete picture of this. He knows he has a greater destiny than to be a sheriff in rural Texas. The "money" that his father is going to give him is his rightful destiny as one of the sons of the Emperor and leader of a legion of Space Marines, defending Mankind and building the Imperium. He has the fundamental feeling that he has lost this, which he has, by virtue of being cast back in time and stripped of most of his power.

In the second dream, his father passes him by on a cold mountain pass without pausing to speak, in order to go ahead and light a fire in "all that cold and all that dark." This is about the God Emperor's mission to take the reigns of leadership over Mankind, in order to light a fire of inspiration and hope in the cold, dark distance of the far future. But because of the upset in time, Ed Tom can only stay behind and watch as he goes on ahead. Because Ed Tom was meant to be -and should be- immortal and able to simply take The Slow Path to join the Emperor and his Brother Primarchs in the Great Crusade, he has a moment of hope that whenever he gets there, his father will be waiting. But the same Psyker abilities that fill him in on the past break that hope by giving him the premonition of Horus' betrayal, and his own knowledge reminds him that he is cruelly mortal. And so he wakes up.

* The Warp is the Umbra, almost completely dominated by the Wyrm. Each chaos god is a head of the Triatic Wyrm, with Khorne being the Beast of War, Slaanesh being the Eater of Souls, and Nurgle being the Defiler Wyrm. Tzeentch is the last remnant of the Weaver.

* Long-range artillery doesn't suffice when your enemy can [[Teleporters and Transporters|freaking teleport]]. Or when their [[Zerg Rush|numbers are endless]]. Or when they are [[Boring Invincible Villain|utterly invincible]]. Or when...well, you get the picture.

It's the past.

** Nonsense. In the future of Warhammer 40k, something happens that wipes out the Necrons and the Tyranids, while reducing the scale of the conflict to one world.

*** ''All'' Space Marines are [[Seme|Semes]], it's the Imperial Guard who are the [[Uke|Ukes]] (except for Gaunt, and Cain).

The robot war was the start of the Dark Age of Technology, with the war for survival prompting humanity to begin colonization of space and jumps in technology. The eventual defeat of Skynet's Terminators left humanity in shambles, starting the Age of Strife. All of this is forgotten since the Emperor, the only one who would remember this, decided to suppress this information for the good of humanity; and the Eldar see no ideological difference between the Necrons and the Necrontyr. Also, the Iron Men STC found by Gaunt were the plans for the original Terminators.

* Mind you, even if there ''was'' some degree of thruth to those rumors, the Tau would ''still'' be good guys compared to everyone else...which says a lot.

*** Pity that fear is already a small portion of Nurgle's sphere of influence.

The second thing the Eldar lack is positive fan identification in the form of a tie-in story, a la the Ciaphas Cain and Gaunt's Ghosts novels. I don't think Pirates of the Caribbean: Yriel Edition is a good idea, but it still remains that the one major fan-followed Eldar character is Eldrad Ulthran, and he's looking pretty dead. I think this could actually be the start of the story the Eldar need. Have a young prophet rise up, say Q'sandria the student from the codex, saying that Eldrad's presence in the Warp is in order to jumpstart the rise of Ynnead and go on a long campaign to unite the craftworlds in harvesting souls to feed the birth of the new God, and you've got the makings of a novel series that has the kind of creepy, disquieting but powerful premise that fits the Eldar fluff but can still be compelling to readers, watching the race unite under the banner of what amounts to a carefully organized mass suicide while the forces around them try to thwart their fragile, careful plans. Each of the craftworlds can join for their own reasons and bring their own methods and issues, for example Iyanden offering the wealth of it's Infinity Circuit but requiring that the God incubate for some time in the Craftworld to honor the lost, or Saim-Hann wanting to feed the God the souls of “lesser” races and thus clashing with the more doctrinaire Ulthwe Seers. The Picture of the Eldar moves away from The Dying Race to a more interesting and compelling patchwork of survivalists uniting under their new hope, created in the same way as their greatest foe.

Sounds really stupid at first given how dark the setting is, but taking account that The Immaterium is the collective psyche of all sentinent beings in the galaxy, if a considerable amount of defectors drom decadence formed another faction made from their alliance with each other, if they changed their way of life to a more peaceful, caring and stable one and just resorted to violence when defending themmselves from other factions, the gods and daemons from The Warp would either take a severe blow in their strenghts or start transforming into more benevolent entities, specially Khorne who relies on violence and war to keep powerful, and Nurgle, who is the god of despair and decay. This shift in the balance of power would make things a lot easier for the other factions, now being able to concentrate on the Tyranids, the Necrons and the Orks. Seeing that following the Defectors ais a good idea, more and more people would migrate to Defector's territory to improve their way of life, which further weakens the Chaos.

But not one which actually hates them, as they can not truely hate, but only get annoyed at the mess that they make. They see the Chaos Gods as being the sum of everything they disaprove of, sloppy crude thinking that gets in the way of the efficient running of the universe, simply piling up the paperwork. Ultimately when chaos ends, the last moments of the chaos gods shall be witnessed by trillions opon trillions of identical grey empty robes floating which will tell the fading beings this...

Lion el'Jonson and Roboute Guilliman will revive, mostly because they have sensed their father's soul awakening. Vulkan, Russ, Corax, and the Khan all return as well, knowing that they have critical tasks ahead of them: the Imperium must be reforged as it was during the Great Crusade.

Alpharius/Omegon, realizing that the galactic stage has changed so much that their gambit no longer matters, will return to Terra, bringing the Alpha Legion with them.

From Kyras' speech at the end of Retribution:

* Isn't this canon already?

** Chaos has always had a lighter side, people like Magnus The Red who join chaos out of desperation or simply misguided fools who believed they could save people with the power of Chaos the problem being that Chaos corrupts entirely turning paragons of righteousnesses into bloodthirsty berserkers and the light.

And then an Inquisitor discovers the devastated world and orders Exterminatus, having found signs of yet another [[Eldritch Abomination|nightmare monsters]] that are 19th and more Angels. And then the said nightmare monsters wake up and eat the star fleets sent to the planet. And invade other planets as well. Cue the White Crusade (named for the body color of those monsters).

No, not [[Shinji and Warhammer40K|Shinji and Warhammer 40 K]]: instead, after the [[Endofthe World As We Know It|Third Impact]], Shinji, having retained his [[End of the World Special]] powers and thus able to draw powers from Instrumentality / Warp, became an immortal powerful psyker, and being the only surviving man, decides he can finally strip off his [[Butt Monkey]] tendencies and unify humanity (his descendants) as more of a Ubermensch this time, molding human history for millenia and finally leading to the creation of the Imperium of Man. This of course would also make a good [[Freudian Excuse]] for the Imperium's actions. Alternatively, both Shinji And Warhammer 40k and Warhammer 40000 canon are Alternate Universes Shinji created during Instrumentality with him placing himself into the role of the possible God-Emperor.

Second Law of Thermodynamics and sheer amount of despair will bring victory to Nurgle. There, Nurgle will eat every soul, break them into slavery, turn them into pale, shaded excrement of their former selves, and attach their decapitated and beheaded torsos (or spiritual equivalent of it) to neurons so that his realm would be powered by their sheer misery and despair. It's such a horrific fate that even Slaanesh's tortures are orgasmically pleasurable in comparison.

So beautiful, Slaanesh is nothing against him. Nurgle appears to be putrid and disgusting only because the mortals are so afraid of dying and decay. His followers, however, can see his true form.

The Chaos gods are already [[Evil Counterpart|Evil Counterparts]] to ''each other'', due to the natures of chaos-- Nurgle/Tzeentch, and Khorne/Slaanesh, though none of them really get along, being, well, ''[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Chaos]]''. The Emperor is sometimes thought to be the [[A Lighter Shade of Grey|good]] counterpart to them collectively, being the [[Id Superego and Ego|Superego to the Chaos' Id]], but when you think about it, the Tyrannid [[Hive Mind]] is a better candidate as his Id/[[Evil Counterpart]]. The [[Memetic Mutation|EMPRAH]] is an intelligent, reasonable individual who wants humanity to grow infintely across the galaxy and eventually the universe (not necessarily opposed to Xenos so long as they stay out of humanity's way). The [[Hive Mind]] is a mindless, completely unreasonable collective (even to Chaos itself) whose instinct tells it to reproduce and eat all that lives until nothing remains but (due to the fact that the tyranids are basically one psychically-linked organism) It, in both the Materium and the Immaterium. The Emperor shines like a [[Light Is Good|light in the warp]] (the Astronomicon) while the [[Hive Mind]] is a [[Darkness Equals Death|Shadow in the warp]].

As the only people in the entire Milky Way that actually are improving their tech, it stands to reason that given time, their reverse-engineering skills and technological prowess will trump of all the others. In only a short 6 thousand years they have went from "spear wielding people on planet not important enough for the Imperium to bother with" to "killing you with rail guns." The horrors of the Chaos, the determination of Man, the hunger of the Tyranids, the elegance of the Eldar, the [[More Dakka|Dakka]] of the Orks can deal with the Tau now, but about in a thousand years, or the next ten thousand?