Order is one suggestion I’ve heard. The “everyone and everything is an unthinking cog in the Imperial machine” variety of order.
The Chaos God of Order?
Holy dichotomy, Batman!
One of the big fan theories is that the Emperor could become a Chaos God, and he almost did become one once, so domination/tyranny/oppression/fascism would make sense.
What property does the Emperor currenty lack that makes him a “powerful warp entity” but not a “chaos god”?
He’s still anchored to his body (and the material world) which somewhat stabilizes and limits him, IIRC.
It seems odd to me to have the Emperor become a chaos god. All the other ones poofed into existence as a result of various strong emotions or violence or whatnot in the universe.
The emperor is(was?) a person so he’d more be assuming a role as a chaos god. Moving into the job so-to-speak. Seems weird given the other chaos gods.
Per the wiki link above, he almost intentionally became one during the battle with Horus, but was talked down by one of the other immortals who’d known him since prehistory.
It seems like the Emperor could become a god, but not of chaos. Maybe he’d be the equivalent of a god, but a God of Empire. Surely, the rock-solid belief of all the zillions of human zealots would be enough to elevate him to a warp-based entity.
If there was such a thing as an Order God, I could see him becoming one of those, but it would still probably be a Very Bad Thing.
(Warhammer Fantasy, which has the same four Chaos Gods, has “Gods of Law” who are dead and absent from the cosmos, but I don’t think 40K has anything similar.)
The Gray Knights (and the whole Ordo Malleus) would be very confused.
I don’t think “Law” exists in 40K - there’s only Chaos, and the material world. Anything and everything we’d think of as “supernatural” is an aspect of chaos. That’s one reason why everything sucks.
I assume Games Workshop got the Law/Chaos dichotomy from Moorcock, just like TSR did before them. In the Elric saga, the Lords of Law exist, but they’re weakened and enfeebled compared to the Lords of Chaos, who become progressively more powerful over the course of the series due to Pan Tang’s omnicidal war (conquering nations, drafting all the men into their army, and sacrificing all the women and children on thousands of altars in continuous operation all day and night) giving them more and more power. The Lords of Law only show up at the very end of the saga, at the end of the world and the extinction of mankind, to usher in the new age.
I assume that if there are Law Gods in 40K, they were so weakened and/or terrified by the birth of Slaanesh that they said “Alright, you’re on your own”, and nobody even remembers them anymore.
The difference is that Moorcock depicted a multiverse of worlds, with Chaos and Law influencing all of them - in some the former is dominant, in others the latter. Elric’s world is a Chaos-dominated word, which means that as Eternal Champion, his (unwilling) job is to restore balance between the two alignments.
40K has no multiverse - just the two universes, material and Immaterium - and no concept of balance, just degrees of entropy. Having some sort of positive element influencing the universe, even a minor one, goes against its fundamental grimdark principles.
I would personally assume that 40K and Warhammer Fantasy are part of the same multiverse, since WF has the same Chaos Gods that 40K does.
That would be awesome if true.
Most of the other named gods got eaten by the Chaos Gods, with the exception of the Ork gods Gork and Mork who are in the same league as them.
As for the Elric series there’s pretty blatant influence from it, Warhammer Chaos even uses almost the same star-of-eight-arrows symbol. In Moorcock’s multiverse though as said there’s plenty of worlds where it’s Law that’s the main antagonist (one of the Lords of Law is Satan, for example) and where the Lords of Chaos are fighting against the fascists of Law. The Cosmic Balance between the two is the more mortal-friendly option; both are fundamentally hostile forces when taken to the extreme.
As opposed to Warhammer 40K, where everything sucks and there aren’t any good sides or even reasonable sides. The fantasy version is actually somewhat less dark I understand.
Used to be they were different time periods of the same universe. The Slann of WHF being the Old Ones of 40K or some such. And some demon models were for both games. Although that means Slaanesh kind of preexisted, I think.
The Chaos Gods are supposed to be somewhat atemporal.
I’m not sure we know that for sure, aren’t there implications that the chaos realms connect to multiple material worlds?
Slaanesh forming in the far future due to the depravity of Space Elves and then retroactively existing all the way back in time to the beginning of history sounds about right. And exactly according to Tzeentch’s plan, somehow.