The Warhammer 40k verse as a whole is a bit of an interesting setting for me. As a setting, it's a science fiction-action sorta universe with quite a few smackings of fantasy and a large, healthy dollop of black comedy. What intrigues me, however, and the reason that I love the RPG Dark Heresy far more than the actual miniatures game (other than the fact it doesn't cost me a full year's allowance to buy a squad), is that the setting immediately changes when you bring it down to a personal level.
Dark Heresy is effective for very much the same reason that Call of Cthulhu is effective. Looking at it from a meta point of view, it isn't really that scary. But when you're an inquisitorial acolyte facing down the triple-dicked horrors of Slaanesh, or the whacky football hooligan-meets-serial killer aesthetic of an Ork, suddenly it becomes quite a terrifying setting, and one of the coolest villains in 40k, or RPG's in general, are the forces of Chaos.
Chaos is a really good antagonist because it comes in so many flavors. Like the Wyrm in Werewolf, or the Abyss in Mage: The Awakening, Chaos can be subtle and subversive, slowly corrupting and insinuating itself into society, or it can be flat out, tentacled, acid spewing, in your face nastiness. One of the best ways to show its power and pervasiveness is to lure the PC's in with one flavor, and then switch it to another. It shows the diversity of an enemy that realistically should be, well, chaotic.
The one thing to remember about Chaos is that it basically cannot be beaten, without a complete overhaul of the setting. Every emotion, positive or negative feeds one of the Chaos gods, which in turn, spews out endless waves of daemons into the world. Chaos can be driven back, it can be repelled and rendered dormant for millenia, but there isn't any way to truly defeat it. Chaos may have once been a benevolent force, in very much the same way Silent Hill may once have been one, but ultimately, eons of slaughter and trillions of gallons of blood have stained it irreversibly, and rendered it totally corrupted. Any victory the PC's achieve against Chaos should ultimately be fleeting, and leave them corrupted and questioning whether it was worth it.
I've heard Chaos be referred to as 'Lovecraftian', something that I find to be a bit of a misnomer. Lovecraftian horror stems from the idea that the universe is a scary place, and will destroy you because you are beneath its notice. Chaos, in a way, is much worse. It stems from the idea that the universe is a scary place that hates you personally. Chaos is a lot more intimate than typical Lovecraftian horrors, largely because it stems from the emotions of sentient beings. Cthulhu may eat you, or step on you, or drive you insane because he doesn't notice you on his way out of bed and to the office, but Chaos will go out of its way to torture each person, individually, for all eternity. Chaos should feel dirty, in a certain way, because it should feel familiar. It's a lot more comforting to think of Chaos as some vast alien force, because the instant you start understanding it is the instant it taints you. The horror of Chaos is that interacting with it in any way, even to utterly purge it, should leave you feeling unclean, infected. Chaos finds a way in, because, as dangerous as it is for you to understand it, on a very instinctual level, it understands you, and knows exactly how to get past your defences.
From an RPG context, I actually find the idea of Chaos working a lot better if it's somewhat excised from the setting's idea of it as a whole. The canon description of the Chaos gods, really, in my opinion, don't go far enough. Khorne shouldn't just be the god of martial might and war, but a god of merciless, ugly, slaughter. Khorne is the dark side of rage and aggression, and crimes of hate and rage and passion come under his preview. When I portray Khorne, he isn't the lord of some kind of cyberpunk valhalla, but the butcher lord of viscera-stained extradimensional halls. His warriors are frothing 28 Days Later style infected in power armor. Khorne doesn't appreciate happiness, he only wants bloodlust. Slaanesh, likewise, isn't as simple as a god of sex, or decadence, but of excess, dripping, hungry, amorous urging to debase and defile, not for anything constructive like reproduction, but just for the disgusting need to make something unclean. My point is, that the Chaos gods are far too comprehensible, to be truly good RPG antagonists. What many people miss is that they aren't true gods, but something that exists, in a minor form in every person, corrupted and hideously co-mingled with the sex drives, despair, battle lusts and hopes of every being in the entire universe, personified. The plans of the Chaos gods and their themes should be bizarre and contradictory, but always, on a very personal level, disturbing. The players should recognize something of themselves in their enemies, and hate themselves for it. Chaos is an opportunity to have a very psychological antagonist, that is simultaneously omnipresent and a force of the universe.
To close off this article, (and something I'll update my previous RPG Antagonists posts with), I'll give you a few of my favorite examples in fiction that I think are good inspirations for campaigns that use Chaos as an antagonist.
Event Horizon: Basically already a Warhammer 40k movie in its own right, this movie shows exactly why space ships need a Gellar field, and show exactly what it's like to face an unknowable enemy that intimately understands you.
The Thing: This movie doesn't explicitly identify as a 'demonic' horror movie, but it definitely shows the kind of atmosphere that Chaos can create, especially with the fear of tainting oneself and one's colleagues, and the power of paranoia.
House of Leaves: Quite an obscure little book, and one of my personal favorites. The book itself is a pretty good Chaos artifact aligned to Tzeentch, and shows exactly the kind of weirdness that can occur when the line between fiction and fact is blurred.
- Kephn
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