Chaos

And thanks to Moorcock, who's fault all this is. - Warhammer Fantasy, crediting Michael Moorcock.

Chaos is a concept which appears in various games, including 40k, WFRP, Warhammer Fantasy Battles and the Fighting Fantasy books. There is even a board game dedicated to Chaos where you get to play as the major powers. It means more than simple disorder, and incorporates elements of the Lovecraftian concepts of godlike tentacled abominations, evil cults and "things man was not meant to know" with a 1950s B-movie interpretation of nuclear radiation. There is even a material, warpstone, which is analogous to fissile material with regard to chaos.

Common features of Chaos include:

• Insanity.
• Secrets that the ordinary man cannot be permitted to know.
• Knowledge that corrupts the bearer and leads him into the service of dark gods.
• Dark gods who capriciously reward and punish their followers.
• Daemons that may be summoned or escape from the Warp/Realm of Chaos.
• Mutations both as a result of the radiation-like influence of chaos and as gifts from the chaos gods.
• Areas blighted by Chaos (such as the Chaos Wastes or the Eye of Terror) and uninhabitable by right-thinking people.
• Roaming warbands or dark cults of Chaos-worshipers.
• Furries.

Chaos as 40kfags know it was inspired by Moorcock's ideas about Law vs. Chaos from the Eternal Champion series. Radiation-like qualities are likely the result of the games in question having been written during the Cold War, with the paranoia that entails. In more recent Warhammer canon, Chaos exists in a multiverse and is connected to numerous other Warhammer settings other than the two (three, with Blood Bowl) known to us. This means any Chaos entity with an external origin was once a mortal being in every universe they appear in, who combined in the Warp like a terrible comicbook reboot.

Followers of Chaos

Arnas, Kristupas, Edvinas, Justinas