The Gaming Den

Blade wrote:Linking Chaos and Evil means that you consider change to be evil.
...
But if you think that change is ok, then you shouldn't use Chaos as a synonym for Evil.

Does chaos have to be a synonym for change? I mean, imposing order on disorder, or building an ordered system are indisputably big changes, and seem pretty obviously Lawful.

Remember, in Moorcock's work, the symbol of law isn't a stop sign, it's an arrow pointing up, "representing dynamic growth"
maybe "All change =Chaos" should be dismissed as chaotic propaganda.

OgreBattle wrote: Banker+Bum: Hmmm, not really sure.

Sweet Dee

Warhammer Chaos owes about as much to Pat Mills' Kaos as it does to Moorcock's Chaos, and the Mills version is about being pagan rebels against an ultra-reactionary theocracy. (Well, originally it was about really metal moving violations, but the concept evolved.) Kaos was progress (even if it was messy and alienating), and the opposition was regression. It was a thinly-veiled rejection of Thatcherism.

Before GW started drinking their own imperial Kool-Aid, selling your soul to insane monomaniacs was supposed to be a reasonable life-choice compared to living in the Imperium. And while the Empire of WHF was better than the Imperium of 40K, it used to be that if you were gay or a woman or one of the other traditionally-oppressed groups, Chaos was probably a better deal than Karl Franz was offering.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Before GW started drinking their own imperial Kool-Aid, selling your soul to insane monomaniacs was supposed to be a reasonable life-choice compared to living in the Imperium. And while the Empire of WHF was better than the Imperium of 40K, it used to be that if you were gay or a woman or one of the other traditionally-oppressed groups, Chaos was probably a better deal than Karl Franz was offering.

Really? Did they mention LGBT? I thought the fluff tended to quietly ignore them, and mostly forgot women existed, rather than depicting them as oppressed.

Thaluikhain wrote:Really? Did they mention LGBT? I thought the fluff tended to quietly ignore them, and mostly forgot women existed, rather than depicting them as oppressed.

Often that's exactly what oppression looks like.

No, I don't think that LGBT are particularly mentioned, but when the guiding principle was 'like the Holy Roman Empire,' well...

I don't think that they ever said anything explicitly, but I've always felt that Space Marines were built on a homosexual model. Lion El-Johnson is named for a poet (Lionel Johnson) and his poem 'Dark Angel' is about being gay. If the first chapter of the first founding is a reference to being homosexual, how much else in the setting is as well?

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Often that's exactly what oppression looks like.

In the real world, certainly, not necessarily in fictional ones, IHMO. That the authors decided not to have any LGBT characters out of zillions is telling, but more about them than in-universe.

deaddmwalking wrote:I don't think that they ever said anything explicitly, but I've always felt that Space Marines were built on a homosexual model. Lion El-Johnson is named for a poet (Lionel Johnson) and his poem 'Dark Angel' is about being gay. If the first chapter of the first founding is a reference to being homosexual, how much else in the setting is as well?

Ian Watson's ancient Space Marines stories about the Imperial Fists do come across as being very homo-erotic. Later fluff overlooks that, which is a shame as it was a lot better than later stuff.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Before GW started drinking their own imperial Kool-Aid, selling your soul to insane monomaniacs was supposed to be a reasonable life-choice compared to living in the Imperium.

This. The key to Chaos working as a faction which people could possibly want to be a part of is that Chaos has to offer something meaningful in exchange for forsaking your home culture, family, friends, mores, etc. WH40K Chaos has nebulous offers of "power," but that doesn't really lend itself to well-fleshed out characters. If you believe Black Library, the Horus Heresy was motivated by various Primarchs getting back at Dad for the shitty stuff that he did to them, to the point where the Chaos element seems almost incidental.

If you go with DrPraetor's idea of all Chaos worship being a result of having already lost your volition, you eliminate the possibility of having Chaotic characters as fully realized people because definitionally a Chaos worshipper is already broken in a way that prevents further personal development.

That said, there's room in a Chaos army for all motivations, as long as the main characters are still real people. You can have your Daemons, who are gibbering incarnations of PURE KAYOSSSSS. You can have your Cultists, who fit DrPraetor's definition of someone whose will and mind have been broken to the service of Chaos and is irredeemable. You can have your Chaos Spawn, who are what's left of Cultists and Champions who burn out without dying.

It's mandatory, though, that you have your Champions. These guys have to be mortals who needed something and could only get it by making a pact with Chaos. These guys aren't mindless puppets; they're just ambitious, selfish, and vicious. Darth Vader isn't interesting because he's got a nifty black outfit and chokes people. When that was all he was, he was just some Imperial stooge. Darth Vader got interesting when we found out that there used to be a good person in there, and that person had a reason to become Darth Vader and to remain Darth Vader. Then we got the prequels. ;_;

Um... what? My idea of Chaos worship compromising your volition is, like, directly cribbed from Star Wars.

Yoda wrote: Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice.

It's true that Vader isn't a mindless cultist, but (even aside from the prequels), he wasn't on the Dark Side because he wanted something, he was on the Dark Side because it had consumed him.

Hell, Return of the Jedi has an entire 20 minutes devoted to the Emperor baiting Luke into striking him down in a fit of rage, because if he does, he will turn to the dark side, right? Since turning to the dark side is pretty clearly a bad idea, the seductive power of the dark side is quite clearly a supernatural phenomenon.

Now, Star Wars doesn't cover the full palette of Agents and Champions of Chaos that you can have. It's a better plot device if there are various sleeper agents and if people are able to keep their slide into the service of Chaos secret at least for a while and so on.

But the character arc is basically:
[*] Cry of rage/despair/whatever
[*] Do something evil
[*] Be corrupted/turned evil thereafter, consumed by dark forces but still able to make your own decisions, with redemption very difficult and probably lethal

If we're counting the prequels, Vader wanted the power to protect his wooden girlfriend and live up to the crushing expectations of being the Chosen One, as well as to unfuck the Jedi Order.

Vader got more interesting when he was shown to have higher principles, and there was a man beneath the monster. Even the famous force choke scene was showing a religious fervor, a believe in something greater.

DrPraetor wrote:Um... what?

This here is what I was responding to:

DrPraetor wrote:I think, in order to hold together, turning to Chaos is an affliction rather than something anyone rationally chooses to do.

So a hazard of practicing healing magic is, under stress, you might go insane, and start spreading plagues and worshipping the Great Horned Rat. This doesn't happen because you were persuaded on the merits by a Skaven plague monk, but because you went mad.

This frees you from the requirement of having insane gods of grimdark and then claiming that people choose to worship them (for, like, power or something?) which makes zero sense in Warhammer.

Your later reference to "Evil Spock and Evil Kirk" made it clear that your concept of turning to Chaos doesn't reduce you to cardboard antagonism, but I still disagree with your afore-quoted position that joining Team Chaos need exclusively be the result of insanity or some other involuntary condition.

It's all well and good to have some people on Team Chaos be totally unhinged people who got their brains fried by a page from the Necronomicon or something, but if that's the only kind of person on Team Chaos, Team Chaos is pretty boring. To be sure, people who have been zapped with the Evil Beam are more engaging if they are still capable of carrying on a conversation and acting with some degree of restraint or subtlety, but you're needlessly cutting off a very fruitful narrative branch if you declare that no one could ever end up on Team Chaos for reasons related to their own motivations and emotional states without being zapped with the Evil Beam.

The problem you're addressing with this mandatory insanity ("This frees you from the requirement of having insane gods of grimdark and then claiming that people choose to worship them (for, like, power or something?) which makes zero sense in Warhammer.") is a real one, but your solution is no good. It makes a lot more sense to address the "like power or something?" question, by explicitly filling in the reasons why someone might freely choose to worship Chaos.

I think it's eminently reasonable that someone from an oppressed minority (as mentioned earlier - women, LGBTs, minorities) might choose Team Chaos if that meant a chance to earn power and respect on their own merits, in exchange for being "forced" to help tear down the society that hates them and that they hate right back.

Yoda may be right that the Dark Side will dominate your destiny once you start down the path, but as Obi-Wan said, "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force." You can't have seduction without some kind of enticement. Obi-Wan did not say "Vader rolled double sixes on a Force check, got Perils of the Warp, and was mind-raped into the service of the Dark Side of the Force." Let's ignore what the content of that seduction may have been, because Natalie Portman is a pretty poor excuse for burning the galaxy.

DrPraetor wrote:Hell, Return of the Jedi has an entire 20 minutes devoted to the Emperor baiting Luke into striking him down in a fit of rage, because if he does, he will turn to the dark side, right? Since turning to the dark side is pretty clearly a bad idea, the seductive power of the dark side is quite clearly a supernatural phenomenon.

Here is where you are absolutely wrong. There is nothing supernatural whatsoever about goading a guy into getting so pissed off that he does something his better self knows is wrong. That's exactly why the lure of the Dark Side is so dangerous - the fall simply consists of giving in to your own hate, rage, fear, or despair and letting those feelings guide you into doing something unforgivable. You stay on the Dark Side by rationalizing your selfish and destructive actions, aided by the elation that comes from exercising power and imposing your will on others. This is why Sith are such assholes.

Luke could resist the pull of the Dark Side because he recognized that his own anger in the face of Vader's threat to Leia was about to lead him to murder his own father, and he chose to reject that path. Once Luke overcame this final temptation, the Emperor knew he had nothing else to try to bait Luke with, and acknowledged that Luke had truly become a Jedi. Out of options, he then decided to make Luke ride the lightning.

Thaluikhain wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Often that's exactly what oppression looks like.

In the real world, certainly, not necessarily in fictional ones, IHMO. That the authors decided not to have any LGBT characters out of zillions is telling, but more about them than in-universe.

deaddmwalking wrote:I don't think that they ever said anything explicitly, but I've always felt that Space Marines were built on a homosexual model. Lion El-Johnson is named for a poet (Lionel Johnson) and his poem 'Dark Angel' is about being gay. If the first chapter of the first founding is a reference to being homosexual, how much else in the setting is as well?

Ian Watson's ancient Space Marines stories about the Imperial Fists do come across as being very homo-erotic. Later fluff overlooks that, which is a shame as it was a lot better than later stuff.

Ian Watsons space marine also features vore n face farting, today he is an award winning erotica writer

What exactly is bad about Luke killing Vader or palpatine, I don't quite see how slaying the killers of millions will turn luke against the rebels

Anger and hatred will lead a force sensitive to the Dark side. If Luke had taken the bait and finished a defenceless Vader while raging then Palpatine would simply get an even more powerful disciple. Or if Luke had then kept raging and killed fhe emperor, it would only to take their place and become a new tyrant just as evil if not more. Luke would be too addicted to hatred and anger to stop by himself anymore.

OgreBattle wrote:What exactly is bad about Luke killing Vader or palpatine, I don't quite see how slaying the killers of millions will turn luke against the rebels

There's nothing ethically wrong with killing Vader, Palpatine, or Hitler. Indeed, taking those guys out of the equation is a net positive for the human race regardless of how or why you do it. If Luke had ambushed them with a rocket launcher while they were dedicating a new orphanage surrounded by puppies, he would still deserve a medal.

However, the Force and your position on its brightness scale is not just about what you do, it's about why and how you do it. Cutting down the Emperor for the good of the galaxy is something you can do as a Jedi, but doing it because he pissed you off is not. Killing the Emperor in a fit of rage (or in a way that inflicts loads of collateral damage) is justifiable, but your moral compass becomes skewed towards killing stuff that makes you angry (or because it's convenient). Apply the kinds of stresses that Force-sensitives tend to be surrounded with over enough time, and you could find yourself murdering people who could have been reasoned with; where there could have been a better way; who were themselves interested in doing the right thing. Keep sliding down that slope and you become the Emperor yourself.

The same principle has an analogy in 40K Chaos - the difference between a noble Assault Marine and a vicious Khorne Berserker is not whether he is willing to rip his enemies to shreds with a twin-linked power chainfucker (he is), it's whether he is doing it for the service of mankind or to satisfy his own bloodlust, rage, and/or desire to exercise power over his victims. Obviously most Space Marines will straddle that line, which is why you have to keep such a close eye out for HERESY.

Mord wrote:There is nothing supernatural whatsoever about goading a guy into getting so pissed off that he does something his better self knows is wrong.

You know that becoming the monsters you fight is just a metaphor right? Like, without supernatural interference you don't literally become a Nazi just because you killed Nazis without following proper procedure.

There are good reasons to want to overthrow tyrants in the right way. But without some sort of mystical compulsion you don't literally join a group because you hate that group too much. That doesn't even.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Mord wrote:There is nothing supernatural whatsoever about goading a guy into getting so pissed off that he does something his better self knows is wrong.

You know that becoming the monsters you fight is just a metaphor right? Like, without supernatural interference you don't literally become a Nazi just because you killed Nazis without following proper procedure.

There are good reasons to want to overthrow tyrants in the right way. But without some sort of mystical compulsion you don't literally join a group because you hate that group too much. That doesn't even.

-Username17

"Force sensitives who have fallen to the Dark Side" is not a unified political bloc. The Rule of Two was invented to try to fix that, and according to all canon it failed miserably and wasn't actually followed.

It's still a bit weird that the Emperor thought that getting killed by Luke in a way that caused Luke to fall to the Dark Side was a win condition, since he presumably wouldn't actually lose the selfish parts of his motivations so would probably want to tear down the Empire.

Luke committed to not killing his father, and if the Emperor successfully goads him into killing his father, that is a failing according to Luke's own declared moral code, which certainly would make him more likely to accept further failings in the future. It's super weird how he expects Luke to immediately become a Sith, though. Like, getting him to cross any kind of line is a start, but a start is kind of the opposite of a completion of a journey to the Dark Side.

FrankTrollman wrote:You know that becoming the monsters you fight is just a metaphor right? Like, without supernatural interference you don't literally become a Nazi just because you killed Nazis without following proper procedure.

The danger isn't that you become a literal Nazi; it's that you become something just as bad.

Frank wrote:There are good reasons to want to overthrow tyrants in the right way. But without some sort of mystical compulsion you don't literally join a group because you hate that group too much. That doesn't even.

This hinges on your definition of "group." If you're talking about a "group" as "a specific organization" then yes you're absolutely right. No one spends their life hunting members of Abaddon's party, goes too far, and wakes up one morning to find themselves wearing a Black Legion uniform.

However, if by "group" you mean "class that includes everyone who acts with certain type of motivations and behaviors," it's easy to see how fighting monsters can make you into a monster. You'd be a different species of monster, to be sure, but part of the same genus.

40K Chaos treads the line between those two definitions, which makes it murky. Taking the Dawn of War II example with the traitor party member, you literally do have someone who spent his entire life fighting Chaos end up an explicit Chaos worshiper in direct cahoots with the guys he was just shooting at, all because he handled a few cursed artifacts. This is not plausible on an emotional level and you have to play the "supernatural mind influence" card for it to work.

Back to Star Wars, though, the Emperor was playing at least two games at the same time. On the one hand he explicitly stated that he wanted Luke to serve him personally, but on the other it seems like he was also trying to prove a broader point about the power of the Dark Side. I don't think he actually wanted Luke to strike him down - that seems counterproductive - but rather to get pissed off enough to try it, exposing what Palpatine saw as the intrinsic hypocrisy of the Jedi. From his point of view as the most arrogant fuck in the galaxy, there was probably no difference between turning to the Dark Side in general and working for him specifically. Palpy turned out to be wrong about pretty much everything in that scenario, though, since he misjudged Luke and Vader's motivations completely.

So, bringing this back to the subject at hand: Chaos needs to be something you can turn to as an individual for personal reasons, without necessarily pledging your loyalty to the specific Big Bad you were just fighting. Having a rotating lineup of Chaos Gods, or at least Chaos Gods with mutual antagonism helps with this, because then you can be driven to despair in fighting a Champion of Nurgle and accept an offer of help from Tzeentch. You end up falling to Chaos, but you don't need to be zapped with the Evil Beam nor do you end up being friendly with the guy who you wanted to kill so much that you made a literal deal with the devil.

Mord wrote:40K Chaos treads the line between those two definitions, which makes it murky. Taking the Dawn of War II example with the traitor party member, you literally do have someone who spent his entire life fighting Chaos end up an explicit Chaos worshiper in direct cahoots with the guys he was just shooting at, all because he handled a few cursed artifacts. This is not plausible on an emotional level and you have to play the "supernatural mind influence" card for it to work.

I went through a phase in '13 of listening to videos of the betrayal mission for each party member instead of podcasts, and I feel I should nitpick that your description isn't precisely fair; all the versions of "your party member betrays you" give a reason and imply that they have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I won't say it's particularly well thought out but they at least try to make it more than "I now wear the hat of people I hate for no reason". (Except the one where it just plain is that the "traitor" was possessed by a daemon and is still actually loyal underneath said possession.)

Thaddeus gets Ulkair the Great Unclean One telling him that it can save the Blood Ravens from the Tyranids, and asks "so little in return" during what you're meant to think is your hopeless last stand at the end of the original campaign. And then his chapter master calls him aside and goes "btw, I know you sold out to Ulkair, I also made deals with Ulkair, do XYZ for me plz". (It is heavily implied that Ulkair is straight up bullshitting here, as Jonah claims to have got his ship out of the Warp with no daemonic assistance.)

Tarkus sees that the chapter is going to shit and is willing to use evil artefacts to give it the strength to not die. A few deals with Kyras and Eliphas to get said evil artefacts later, and then oh look his treachery's been revealed, no more chance of sticking around in the chapter after that. (And he thinks so little of his Black Legion lackeys that he shoots them with one of said evil artefacts to demonstrate why he thinks it still isn't too late for him to be proved right.)

Avitus is haunted by all the people he's killed and his faith in the Imperium is shaky because of that. Kyras gets to work on him back in Dark Crusade, celebrating all the Imperial Guard he killed there and ultimately convincing him that the chapter has no honour. And even then he holds his Black Legion lackeys in contempt and it's implied to be something of a suicide-by-old-comrades when he lets the party find him.

Cyrus is established as having an insubordinate streak and a lack of faith in chapter command, which... somehow... leads to Kyras, despite being his Chapter Master, being able to convince him to betray the party. Honestly this is the weakest one now I think of it.

Martellus (if your playable party are all pure) was converted when Eliphas found him and saved his life. This is not played like it was a sword-point "convert or die" but under the circumstances that's very much a matter of semantics.

Jonah's the odd one out here as he never willingly betrays the Blood Ravens - if he's the traitor, it turns out he was possessed by a daemon the whole time because after he was weakened from fighting off the 'Nid hive mind Kyras sold said daemon the password to his psychic hood so he was weak enough to get possessed.

The Fully Corrupted ending where Commander Hairgel turns evil because you got your Corruption meter to 100% has no such excuse.

If you want to be especially protean, you could go with the basic limbic drives: Hunger, Lust, Fear, and Rage. Disgust is actually a very complex reaction that many animals don't possess.