Editing Races of Warhammer 40k (section)

==Forces of Chaos==

===Chaos Space Marines===
[[Chaos]] Space Marines are to the Space Marines what the Dark Eldar are to the Eldar, that is to say EVIL SPACE MARINES!

One day, over 10,000 years ago, the Primarch Horus and Warmaster of the Imperial fleet got into [[Heresy|some bad shit]] during The Great Crusade, being wounded by some weird weapon that put him into a coma wherein he was visited by the [[Chaos Gods]]. When he eventually decided he couldn't take the goddamn voices any more, he turned to Chaos and took about half the Imperial army with him - including half the Adeptus Mechanicus and their titan legions!

This was the Horus Heresy. They fought a big war, with the rebel marines fucking shit up all the way back to Terra. Sooo grimdark, but then the Emprah killed Horus (but not after Horus took a pretty sizeable chunk out of the Emperor). Since then, the Emperor has been down and out for the last 10,000 years in a persistent vegetative state while acting as a lighthouse, and his empire has really gone to shit (read the Horus Heresy, compare with today's Imperium). Every once in a while, [[Abaddon|they launch a Black Crusade that ends in failure]]... except for that last one! Sure, those 12 previous crusades were about toppling the Imperium as an overarching goal, but that's a bit of a stretch goal for each individual crusade. In the fluff, Abaddon accomplishes a few things each crusade that build up for the next one. 

The remaining CSM fled to the Eye of Terror wherein they adorned all their stuff with spikes, chains and severed heads while steadily mutating. They were also busy being a continuing pain in the ass running up the bulk of the Imperium's defense budget. Though a lot of them exist in scattered warbands, they tend to be a real nuisance by engaging in piracy, starting planetary/sector uprisings and just generally engaging in the usual terrorist shit except with genetically modified super soldiers bolstered by literal magic and these fucking things...

===Daemons of Chaos===
Daemons are creatures from the warp made from raw emotional energy. Considering the setting for 40K, these are all necessarily and universally ''bad'' emotions, so the Daemons created by these tend to be rather evil. Like, they live only to destroy reality kind of evil. The greatest, most-powerful warp entities are the Chaos Gods [[Khorne]], [[Tzeentch]], [[Nurgle]] and [[Slaanesh]]; they command daemons born of the most powerful concepts prevalent in 40K's reality. When fervor burns hot in a sector, warp storms happen and that usually leads to a breach in reality and then BAM! Daemon incursion. This is usually followed by literally apocalyptic events and then the Grey Knights show up and play Ghostbusters to clean up the sector. This also doesn't end well for the populace as they are either mind-scrubbed to the point of feral animals, are executed after the Daemons are repelled or perhaps they become experiments for radical inquisitors.

Additionally, proud fa/tg/uys talk of a time when Chaos Space Marines and Daemons were once part of a much larger force that included other... things. They were also a real and terrifying threat to the Imperium in cannon and on the table-top instead of stand-in punching bags for [[Ultramarines|the fanboys' current favorite fap-fiction army]] just like all the other overtly villainous armies.

===The Lost and the Damned===
Not every follower of Chaos is a Space Marine or a Daemon and indeed, the gods have many normal (haha!) human followers. Basically, the Lost and the Damned are to Imperial Guard as the Chaos Space Marines are to their Loyalist brethren.

There was once a time when you could play a Lost and the Damned army back in the heady days of third edition. They were part of 4 new army lists in Codex: Eye of Terror and they were excellent, combining cultists, mutants and renegades into a single list backed up by some ordnance. Nowadays, they're available as a dataslate (in name only) or can be approximated using the new allies rules plus the Forgeworld Renegades and Heretics list from the Siege of Vraks series.