Daemons

The world is awash with unseen magic that comes from the dark dimensions between time and space. It was introduced into the world when the great intra-spatial gateways of the Old Ones collapsed, creating a rift in space and spewing magically volatile warp-matter over the whole planet. Magic is a malleable energy that can be harnessed and wielded, but the very act of doing so reshapes and changes everyone and everything it comes into contact with. Whether used for good or ill, magic is ultimately corrupting and dangerous.

The ancient gateways continue to leak raw magic from the dark dimension to this day. The dark dimension is home to things of an altogether different order to mortal creatures. These are not living creatures of flesh but a network of ethereal forces whose consciousnesses continually flow and interchange. Individuality and linear thought are meaningless concepts in the dark dimension. In that timeless, spaceless, nothingness there is only endless being: a single moment extending through all eternity.

Just as magic pollutes and disfigures the material world so the dark dimension is reshaped by the world of mortals. Thought, ambition, emotion and other gross forms of individual consciousness leak from the material universe. This focused consciousness overwhelms and transforms the naturally guileless intelligence of the dark dimension. It becomes aware. It coalesces into a kind of distinct consciousness. Things stir in the dark dimension. Gods, daemons and spirits are made manifest in the stuff of the warp. Reshaped in turn by these newly created consciousnesses other lesser beings are created, and so it goes on.

Thus are the gods of the Old World, and the bitterest agents of man‘s own destruction, self-created from the terror of mankind itself. There may be a thousand gods or a million aspects of a single deity - it matters little. The daemon armies of Chaos constantly reshape and reform in the face of man‘s ever shifting fears. Most of all men dread the elemental horrors of life, and these are represented by the four great gods of the Marauder tribes of the north. They are worshipped under many names and in many guises but in the lands of the south they are recognised (by those who dare pursue such studies) as the great powers of Khorne the Blood God, Tzeentch the Changer of the Ways, Nurgle the Plague Lord, and Slaanesh the Lord of Pleasure. These are the Great Gods of Chaos of which all other gods are but parts or conjunctions. In the lands of the Empire many a theologist has been burned for saying as much.