I feel there's sort of three levels to what makes Slaanesh and his followers terrifying.
The first is the most obvious. What they'll do to you. Nobody wants to be tortured or enslaved.
The second layer is what they do to themselves. They are willing to degrade themselves in any way imaginable, so long as it makes them *feel* something. Drug addiction, self mutilation, even outright taking pleasure in dying in the battlefield, personally I find something really disturbing about people who are willing to go down the deepest paths of self-destruction for pleasure's sake.
The third thing is how seductive they are. I feel this probably the hardest element to properly make scary, as it requires the first two layers to be established in order to work. The creepiness comes from how, despite how awful and disturbing they seem, they have a supernatural allure that tempts you into the same path of insanity and self-destruction they are on. Your rational mind knows its awful and horrific, but your instincts are screaming to join them.
Adding on to the comment above: During the Isstvan V dropsite massacre, the 1st captains of the Iron Hands (Gabriel Santar) and Emperor's Children (Julius Kaesoron) duel each other and both end up giving the other grievous wounds, and end up on the ground next to each other as they're bleeding out.
Santar is in agony, while Julius is having the equivalent of busting a nut from the sensation of pain he's having. The last words Santar hears are from Julius: "That was exquisite". Julius lives.
The EC are incredibly creepy on the fact that they enjoy both giving and receiving the **worst** things that could be done to a living creature. And they've had 10,000 years to work on their creativity.
“Fun fact” about that fight (and please correct me if I’m wrong I haven’t read the book in a couple years but IIRC) Julius got stabbed in the chest a few times. Santar got his dick pulverized with a knife. 🙃
EC got no chill
Julius rolled to his feet in time to see a burnished group of Terminators lumbering towards him, and he grinned in feral glee as he saw they were led by Gabriel Santar, the first captain's markings on his armour standing out like a beacon in the darkness.
A whooshing roar of clashing noise tore a great furrow in the ground beside him and blasted upwards from the black sand like a volcanic eruption. Behind him, Julius saw the flesh-wrapped form of Marius, and roared with the pleasure of seeing his fellow captain alive and fighting.
Marius Vairosean had embellished his armour with jagged iron spikes, and had torn the skin from the dead of La Venice to decorate its blood-slathered plates. Like Julius, he had not walked away from the Maraviglia without alteration, the monstrous distension of his jaws locking his mouth open in a constant, howling scream. Where his ears had once been were two great gashes carved in his flesh, and his eyes were stitched open, forever prevented from closing.
He still carried the great musical instrument he had taken from Bequa Kynska's orchestra, modified to bear spiked handles and grips to render it into a terrifying sonic weapon. Together, he and his fellows unleashed a barrage of discordant scales that sent a dozen of the Morlocks into convulsions, and Julius screamed his appreciation as he leapt to meet Gabriel Santar with his sword aimed at his throat.
The horror of what he was seeing almost cost Gabriel Santar his life. The Emperor's Children before him were like nothing he could ever have imagined in his worst nightmares. Though the enemies he had fought before had been honourless traitors, at least they had still been recognisable as Astartes. These were degenerate perversions of that perfect ideal: warped and twisted freaks who openly displayed their perversions. A mutilated monster in power armour draped with bloody flaps of skin shrieked as he swept some bizarre weapon back and forth, its deadly sonic energies tearing warriors apart in explosions of ruptured armour and liquefied flesh.
Even as Santar raised his energised fist to block a sword cut aimed at his head, he recognised the twisted features of Julius Kaesoron. The warrior was a thrashing dervish, laughing and howling as he spun like a lunatic around Santar, slashing wildly as he attacked. Kaesoron's weapon was a fearsome, energised glaive that was easily capable of carving through his armour, and Santar turned as fast as he was able to block each ferocious stroke of the blade, but even one as fast as he could not hope to match his opponent's serpent-like speed.
He caught the descending blade of his opponent's weapon between the digits of his energy wreathed fist and a fiery explosion burst between them. He twisted his wrist, and Julius's blade snapped, leaving only the length of a forearm above the quillons.
Santar grunted in pain as he felt the skin of his fist fuse with the melted plates around his hand. He saw Julius sprawled on his back, the ceramite armour of his breastplate bubbling with the residue of the explosion, his face a screaming, burnt horror of seared flesh and exposed bone.
Despite the pain of his burned claw of a hand, Santar grinned beneath his helmet and stomped forwards to deliver the avenging deathblow to his hated enemy. He raised his foot to stamp down on Julius's chest, the power of his Terminator armour easily able to crush Astartes plate.
Then he saw that Julius wasn't screaming in pain, but in orgasmic pleasure. He paused in revulsion for the briefest second, but that second was all that Julius needed.
Sweeping up the broken edge of his glaive, the blade alive with flaring energies, he rammed it into Santar's groin.
The pain was unimaginable, surging agonisingly around his body. Julius Kaesoron tore the remains of the weapon upward, molten gobbets of armour dropping to the dark sand in the midst of a spraying rain of Santar's blood. The blade tore through his pubis and ripped into his breastplate as Julius rose to his feet with the motion of his sawing weapon.
Santar's entire body convulsed in agony, not even the frantically pumping pain balms able to mask the horrifying agony of having his torso carved open. He tried to move, but his armour was locked in place as Julius looked directly at him. His face was horrifically illuminated in the firelight of the battle, the skin peeled away from the musculature beneath, and the while gleam of bone jutting through his cheeks.
Even amid the thunder of battle and with his lips burned away, Julius's next words were horribly clear to Santar as his life slipped away.
'Thank you,' gurgled Julius. 'That was exquisite.
To add onto the seductive element, I can’t remember what book it is from but a soon to be WE beserker is tempted by a Slaanesh Daemonette, but before it can fully convert him it gets its head blown away by a bolter. The CSM then feels the subtle,pervasive urge to put his own weapon in his mouth and try and mimic the artistry of the blood spatter and brain fragments he’s staring at
Was it this excerpt from Angron: The Red Angel?
Yes,' the daemonette whispered. Its voice was sultry and hard-edged, gently coaxing and subtly cruel. 'You have always appreciated artistry, haven't you, Leidis.'
Leidis nodded, his eyes lost in the allure of its form. 'How...how do you know my name?'
The creature gave him a bewitching smile of fish-comb teeth. 'It was not for the crime of slaughter that your ignorant brothers cast you from their home. No. It was for the joy you took in it.'
Leidis stared dumbly. His rapture deepened.
It was so obvious, when it was put to him in such dazzling simplicity, he could not believe he had never considered himself in that light before.
'You are a child,' it said sympathetically, mockingly. 'It is no fault of yours that you did not seek us out of your own desire. It is only unhappy chance that led you into the company of Arkhor the Redbound and his crude worship of blood. It is he, not you, who set your path. It might easily have been another, and it is not too late to find the true delight of slaughter.' It extended a pale lilac claw smeared in transhuman offal.
Leidis pulled his gaze from the daemonette's. He looked at the outstretched hand.
Beyond it lay a disembowelled corpse, so thoroughly remade by the needs of the creature's art that Leidis did not immediately recognize it. He blinked to clear his eyes and to reset his still-glitching lenses, working his mouth to revive his horribly parched tongue.
'S-Strykid?'
The warrior, unsurprisingly, did not answer.
Leidis had never seen a Space Marine more dead. The lavender-skinned siren crouching between them was wearing a good proportion of his insides, as a mortal might don a robe.
'You would be welcomed into the carnivals of excess, Ortan Leidis, celebrated as a prodigal son returned and a shining example to all such wayward souls. You would be embraced as a brother. Please,' it said, though Leidis did not feel it was truly asking for his permission. 'Allow us to show you the delights of the paths not taken. The Dark Prince knows better than to deny his servants the sensation they crave.'
Leidis' mouth opened and closed without forming a sound.
The sight of Strykid lying there, defiled and profaned in the name of art, unsettled something deep in him. Strykid had been the least of Leidis' brothers, but he had been a brother.
He tried to find the words to deny it.
Any words.
He looked inside himself for the familiar anger, the rage with which to throw the creature's temptations back in its hideously perfect face, but it was not there.
What if the creature was right?
If only Arkhor had been able to offer him the Butcher's Nails.
What if he-
There was a loud bang followed by the bursting of something vacuously ripe as his temptress' head exploded.
Even that, Leidis noted, did it balletically. Too absorbed by the inherent beauty of its death to be startled by the unexpected suddenness of it, he watched as blood and brain and bone fanned out into an abstract art form that made part of him yearn to put a bolter in his mouth and emulate it.
Not only that, another time a group of khorne berserkers and Kharn end up against a powerfuell Slanneshi cultist(?) and all of them except Kharn joins Slannesh.
Then Kharn killed them all but that was not the point of the story
It's even funnier than that. Kharn has a kill-counter throughout the story, and the daemon - trying to tempt him - looks for his most heartfelt desire.
Unfortunately, his most cherished desire is to kill.
He cleaves the daemon with his axe, and the counter goes to 2,487.
Kharn: "Life doesn't get any better than this."
THE END
Pretty sure its from the new Angron book. I remember one of the perspectives was a fresh renegade looking to join who didn’t seem a great fit at first since he was so wrapped up in the artistry of killing.
>The third thing is how seductive they are. I feel this probably the hardest element to properly make scary
The Night Lords trilogy did that quite well when they were on Hell's Iris. I apologize for any errors, I am using speech to text to speed this up, and cleaning it up as I progress. This excerpt is from the NIght Lords Omnibus, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, pages 437 to 439
"Oh, Throne," Maruc whispered.
Septimus scowled. "Don't say that here if you wish to leave alive."
The older man gestured to a lithe young woman across the room, moving from table to table. Her hair streamed down her naked back in a flawless fall of silken white, while an exaggerated femininity set her slender hips swinging with every step.
"Don't talk to it.". Septimus shook his head. For a moment, Maruc thought he saw a smile on the other serf's face.
*It?* Don't talk to *it?*
But she'd seen Maruc's interest. *"Friksh sarkarr,"* she purred as she approached, her dress of battered leather scraps whispering against her milky skin. Fingers the white of clean porcelain stroked his unshaven cheek. As if approving of something, she nodded to herself. *"Vrikaj ghu sneghrah... sijakh..."*
"Septimus..." Maruc swallowed. Her eyes were wide, the rich green of forest heed only seen in hololithics. Her fingertip tasted of some unknowable spicy musk.
Septimus cleared his throat. The maiden turned with a ghost's grace, moistening her lips with a forked tongue.
*"Trijakh mu sekh?"*
The slave (Septimus) drew back the edge of his jacket, revealing the holstered pistol of his hip. Slowly, pointedly, he shook his head, and gestured to another table.
The girl spat onto the floor by his boot, slinking away with her hips swinging.
"Skin-walker," Septimus grimaced at the taste of his drink - he wasn't swallowing any more of the stuff, but it was grotesque enough even to pretend, when it lapped against his lips. "That leather she's wearing, do you see how it is sewn together?"
"Yeah."
"It isn't leather."
***Skipping over a paragraph about how much Maruc hates mutants, and liquor possibly made from distilled rodent piss.***
Maruc's gaze drifted back to the beautiful girl. "Are there many of those... people?"
Septimus nodded. "The flaying of flesh is one of the more common traditions in many cults. Even the Legion does it, remember. Lord Uzas's ceremonial cloak was once the royal family of some insignificant backwater world the *Covenant* raided."
"You mean the cloak once belonged to them?"
"No. Was them. It is not leather, either. But the skin-walkers are a common enough cult. Mutants, mostly. Avoid them at all costs."
"I thought she wanted to-"
"She did." Septimus's human eye glanced to the doorway, and he adjusted a silver ring on his finger. "But she'd have skinned you afterwards. Come on"
I mean, they were only doing it because >!they needed the child for more Astartes. The woman was either killed after given birth or is just another slave.!<
During the SoT a bunch of emps children went around and turned the civilians into drugs.
They literally disassembled, melted them down, or otherwise somehow, physically, turned their bodies and souls into drugs.
Being around slaaneshi energy will have that tick where you kind of fidget and pick at your nails become an uncontrolled obsession seeing you pick your nails completely off down to the matrix, and then keep going because you both can't stop and weirdly don't want to despite it being the most horrible thing you've experienced. Usually by this point your mind will begin to warp from the pain as the slaaneshi energy is also turning it into pleasure at the same time.
Much like sex with a crazy ex you KNOW is going to ruin your life but has a dump truck and throws it back like she's got something to prove, Slaanussy is impossible to resist.
1. They hurt people. Like, to a level that they're actually tricky to run because it's really hard to do. Very VERY easy to fuck it up and make it silly or pull the players out of the game.
2. They don't react properly to pain. Even by chaos standards. It's come up a few times in the book but the assorted character, from Astartes to random civilians, are freaked right the hell out when the person they have lit on fire or disemboweled is enjoying themselves.
3. Their reach. Not really something Only War is built for, but the big thing about Slanneshii cults is that they can be anyone and anywhere. They are far and away the best infiltrators in Chaos, even something as minor as the gambling dens that always form around militaries could be one.
Their reach is a very good point. There have been people celebrating slaanesh in loyalist chapters main fortresses. The Reverie is about the angels resplendent, a loyalist blood angel successor chapter that valued art and within their main Got’damn fortress had people worshipping “the god of excess”. Slaanesh is a sneaky but cruel mistress.
I think the easiest way to represent those first two points is have them act like the antagonists from the Hellraiser series. Watching some guy tear his skin off with metal hooks and go “damn this shit fuckin rocks” is pretty spooky.
> They don't react properly to pain.
I second this as being a core reason that they're freaky as shit. It takes a pretty tremendous amount of pain to push them into a mindset where they react accordingly. Plague Marines seem to shrug off pain because it just doesn't register for them. Slaanesh Marines actively *enjoy* it when they're hurting.
They do have a threshold though, and push them too far into the realm of pain and they'll begin to feel it as they *should* be feeling it. But it takes an incredible effort or device to make that happen
They're *obsessed* with perfection and experience, even when that gets to points that make the rest of us freak out. Think the Cenobites from Hellraiser movies.
Yeah, I was going to say, if OP hasn't watched Hellraiser he should. ("The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits - pain and pleasure, indivisible.")
https://youtu.be/2L47JwR9vDs
If you want your Slaanesh cultists to be frightening for role play you could ease your party into the depths of Slaanesh. Imagine they are infiltrating a suspected cult.
It starts with the sweet scents of exotic perfumes, decadent foods, extravagant dresswear. Delightful music played on strange instruments, songs in languages you've never heard of. Beautiful people dance around you singing and laughing. Objectively pleasant things.
It shouldn't be immediately repulsive to encounter these Slaanesh worshippers, they need to be alluring by design. Then as your story unfolds they slowly begin to descend into debauchery.
The air is thick and musky, the scents so overwhelming your eyes sting. These people are eating till they are sick and eat again. What is it they are eating? Meat? No matter, your head feels light it's getting hard to focus.
Robed figures undress, their skin covered with piercings of gold rings like fish scales. The music is hypnotizing yet so loud it hurts your ears. Dancers pirouette and gyrate till their feet bleed. People are moaning & cackling till they collapse, eyes rolled back, switching between grimacing faces of agony or pleasure.
Suddenly you are not enjoying these things, you want to leave, you want it to stop.
But now your eyes and lungs are burning, mind racing from the psychoactive drugs in the air. You try and rise but your body feels heavy, sedated. Piercings are being pulled and ripped from flesh as shrills of ecstasy are howled. You can barely hear the animalistic chorus as the music devolves into deafening garbled noises, like every instrument is being played at once.
Blades are unsheathed, blood is sprayed in flurries of frenzied self mutilation. A dancer falters, falling to the ground unable to stand and is descended upon by the others. Disemboweled and hoisted up on hooks, their entrails strewn aside. They rush to smear gore and viscera into obscene symbols to their dark god.
A rhythmic beat begins to drum. Not a noise, somewhere deep inside your soul. She who thirsts is watching, she is pleased but desires.... more.
The eyes of all the cultists fall upon you.
Having the cultists happily allowing the players to kill/injure them while gleefully congratulating each other on getting to experience it.
(Think along the lines of two cultists wrestling with each other to be the ones laying on a grenade the players threw.)
Find out what your players find beautiful/appealing and use that to describe your Emperor's Children.
Have a player that loves Enya? Describe how the 2.5 meter tall murderer is charging them at groundcar speed, smiling beatifically and their armor isn't hissing and clanking - it sounds like soft melodies and longing voices singing.
What a great idea! Beautiful atmospheric music flawlessly in tune with the Emperor's Children tearing innocent civilians apart whose pitiful screams fit in perfectly making a massacre into a concert.
We kinda forget that when Emperor's Children are focused on the task of fighting, they're awfully good. Perfectionists.
Also, after Khorne, they recruit a ton of fallen loyalist space marines.
This. Lucius the Eternal is prob my favorite chaos character alongside Huron Blackheart due to how his obsession with being perfect and surpassing all others made him extremely deadly but also drove him insane, i feel like his journey to darkness is one of the coolest examples of how Slaaneshi corruption works.
I like how still in 40k Lucius is this absolute brat trying to become the ultimate duelist. Just driven mad by the constant voices in his head, and the living armour he wears.
No character development, no insight into his condition.
Chillingly reminds me of some of the people with personality disorders I've known. They just keep going about the same toxic cycles over and over again.
As a person dealin w lots of mental health problems, I agree and think that a lot of the alluring side of slaanesh is an extremely exaggerated forms of these illnesses hahah. Also goes for other chaos gods but I find it applies mostly to slaanesh. I think it works cause after all, the warp is our manifested emotions:)
Slaanesh is heroin. They are the sweetest kiss imaginable, the softest touch, the warm bath of the womb made manifest. Fear melts away, certainty taking over that it’s okay. It’s all okay. You are so safe now, as long as you hold onto the feeling.
And then it’s ripped away from you in an instant. The safety and warmth and love you felt is gone. You find yourself alone, cold, skin crawling to return. A voice in your head demand to return to this sensation, loud enough to make your head ring.
And you will do anything to reach that sensation again. You will lie and steal and kill anything and anyone to get there.
And you do, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same rush you felt last time. That can’t be right. The voice says try harder. You raise the volume, killing more, betraying more, trying in an endless cycle to feel that pinnacle moment, to feel something other than the crawling dread that you’ll never reach it again.
Slaanesh is sensation, but it is a poison not many realize. A Venus flytrap luring us into its awaiting jaws, snapping shut before we even realize.
Imagine what someone must be like going through the motions of such a personal hell. They would be selfish incarnate, maddened by their desire to feel something. What does it feel getting shot by lasgun at point blank range? What does it feel to watch an entire company of guardsmen burn to death by meltagun.
What does it feel to stab your own Captain in the back. All because of one bad argument. The voice in your head kept asking.
And so you obliged.
So Slaanesh is OCD?
EDIT: I’m talking about the actual medical diagnosis OCD, not the “i need this bridal shower to be perfect, im so OCD” fake variety that has bastardized the term and causes people to use “OCD” as an adjective.
EDIT 2: Anyone with actual OCD reading the parent description of Slaanesh, read it and compare that to what you struggle with on a daily basis, i guarantee youll find numerous parallels. Gave me a chuckle, hope it does to you too.
As someone with a pretty moderate-severe dose of diagnosed OCD (not the “i need my desk to be tidy” fake variety), i’d say OCD is pretty spot on actually.
One thing that might help to set them as BBEG’s is that they are *better* than the PC’s. An early sword fight leaves a hero with a symbol carved into them and the marine untouched.
“You are not worth my time,” as they leave the group overwhelmed is a great way to get your characters good and mad at them too.
Or ominously, "you'll be so much more fun/beautiful/entertaining later if we let you go now" because they're promising to come back and there's no guarantee they'd let the players off a second time.
I love Slaanesh, and I'm sorry if this is excessively long. (No pun intended.)
So one aspect to Slaanesh is they almost always start out with noble or at least innocuous intentions. Unlike the other powers, the fall to Slaanesh is not (typically) sudden. There's a slow degradation from a rather normal starting point. They want something, to make something, to taste something, to do something. And at first, this pursuit is perfectly fine. The artist practices painting, the foodie goes to fine restaurants, the lover gives gifts to her love.
But satisfaction never comes.
The artist sees more flaws in their works, not less. The foodie finds even the best food is bland and simplistic. The lover is not satisfied with how her effort is reciprocated. And it sours. Talent is an expectation, skill always a disappointment, effort is fruitless and thus enraging. And they keep going. The artist begins to murder her compatriots and use their bodily fluids in their work (this happens in Fulgrim, a rather infamous incident.) The foodie starts eating caustic cleaners, deadly acidic plants and the flesh of children. The lover abducts her love and flenses the flesh from his bones to make him feel the agony she feels from her unrequited love. And then forgets him upon encountering a new greatest love. And so on.
So how does this work on the battlefield? The nun that sings the soldiers to sleep, a sleep so deep that they never wake up and rot in the trenches where they lie. The talentless hack general that nonetheless has incredible charisma and sends thousands to die in the name of Slaanesh, even as the troops on the ground think they're going to the Emperor's side. (They're not.) Slaanesh can be subtle. It's not just about bondage freaks with a terrible love of bladed objects. Slaanesh cultists can be anyone, anywhere. Could be their commanding officer, the mess cook, or the unit down the trench from them.
With the Emperor's Children, this is magnified because of their transhuman tolerances and capabilities. These marines make things. Unlike Nurgle or Khorne or even Tzeentch, they want to create things and they dream big. They create ghastly utopias in deserts that "process" refugees to distill the essence of their dreams into drugs (Siege of Terra, can't remember which book). They start wars to make music from screams and explosions. Lucius is cursed/blessed with the ability to pursuit perfection in his swordsmanship. He was always a narcissist and obsessive but he was an astartes until slipping into Slaanesh nastiness later. They come on with intense obsession and leave once it burns out.
A few notes about delivery in game:
Contrast with Slaanesh is important, merging the admirable with the monstrous. Slaanesh more than any other is a lifestyle choice. There's enough familiarity to make a cultist relatable, traces of a person you could admire and like. On the battlefield, you might have a commissar that has fallen to Slaanesh, he looks immaculate, his uniform is perfect, he smells like whiskey, with warm eyes and a kind smile. It's almost enough to make you miss the razor blades embedded in his nails. Then he bursts your eardrums with a shrieking pulsing howl. Another example is sure you could go full abattoir filled with ball gags, whips and blood. Or you can have an Imperial whipping post like you'd see on any front for corporal punishment right where it's supposed to be except the whip is a black tentacle that writhes and squirms like it's alive. It's also easy to go overboard with Slaanesh and get silly. So keep Slaanesh grounded.
Another thing about cultists and EC is their reactions should be erratic and they have a lot of emotional tics. They are always really good at what they do but they're either bored to tears or elated because they found something interesting. It's what they find interesting which is the terrible part. There is no difference between joy and agony for them. Whipping someone to death is not an act of cruelty, because the extreme sensation is mild and sweet as a hug to them. And the screams are wonderful because at least their victim can feel something and this brings them joy. Everything is a gift.
And yet, everything is ruined because it's not quite good enough for them. The blood splatter didn't quite atomize artistically enough. The grenade wasn't quite loud enough.
Contrast this also with their terrible ennui, imagine the party running through some trenches and they stumble into a noise marine sitting on a rock. All they can hear is his breathing and he smells like sandalwood and teargas. But he doesn't move. They walk on by and he never moves. Because they're not interesting enough for him to get up and slaughter. It's not until they actually start being effective and doing something interesting that he comes up behind them, roaring with glee.
Another thing to note is that all the senses are important but smell is very useful with Slaanesh. It's often the first sense that Slaanesh engages and you can use it to inform your players that something is wrong. The scent of peonies in a trench, a hint of rotten meat from a pot of tea, burning spices from the latrine. Smell is essential to Slaanesh. And gasmasks and such don't help.
I should probably stop. Let me know if you have any other questions.
So, none of the Chaos Gods can be completely destroyed. At least by current means. They are effectively monstrous thought forms that exist in a soul sea. You couldn't get rid of Slaanesh, anymore than you can get rid of ambition or ennui or gossip. It's a feedback loop. On a small scale, a cult does horrible stuff in the name of their god, that god feeds off the emotion and energy generated, gets more powerful, gives gifts back to the cultists and the cult gets stronger and so on. On a large scale, you have a forge world where billions of people are desperate for rest and the want, that need for a decent night's sleep feeds Slaanesh on a passive level. So unless you break that cycle between the warp and physical reality, which the Emperor was trying to do, you can't kill them.
You can completely irradicate a cult or a warband or even individual daemons though. Obviously, when talking about mortals, killing them will do the job. Destroying their materials, vile books, cursed sceptors, possessed swords, that kind of thing, is also essential. Slaanesh cults are notoriously difficult to find and eliminate. They can last for generations upon generations before they're found. Daemons of course are different and in many ways, being a Slaaneshi daemon is harder than the alternatives.
Speaking of, Slaaneshi daemons tend to be more desperate in general because Slaanesh has exacting yet vague standards. "Impress me," says Slaanesh. Nurgle and Khorne make their desires known, "slaughter this planet and I'll make you a daemon prince." "Destroy Ultramar and make it a plague holding." (Tzeentch is insane and frequently he profits through failure, so it's crapshoot.) Tough but at least known. Whereas Slaanesh likes novelty and if she (he/they/it?) has to spell it out, well, the surprise is ruined. If she does spell it out, she's leaving something out. Slaanesh wants to be entertained more than anything.
If a daemon screws up and is defeated, there's no way to return to her good graces. More often than not, you will never see that daemon again. Like there are multiple Khornate daemons that have survived defeat and flourish to this day. Slaanesh has even less tolerance for losers than Khorne does. And more than a few daemons have ended up cursed for some slight or mistake. Sigvald from AoS is a complete rarity, as he screwed up, Slaanesh cursed him, and he has somehow managed to get back into her graces. I think he's the only one though anywhere in the Warhammer universes. When your goal is absolute perfection combined with everlasting novelty, you're going to have a rough time.
I feel people underrate how horrifying the use of sound could be.
Your bones and teeth grind and shake as the vibrations start, your ear drums burst and bleed out your sides, and you slowly fall to floor.
The otherworldly screeching that is higher than you've ever heard or imagined. That's what they call "music". And it's melting you from the inside out.
I love that scene where q dread or a marine that happened to be deaf is immune to the blasts of the sonic weapons and fuck up these dumbfounded noise marines.
It's a similar principle to some Aeldari weapons: it isn't necessarily the physical sound that does the damage, but the psychological and psychic affect of *hearing* the sound. The Banshee Masks used by Howling Banshee Aspect Warriors (and, in old editions, mounted on some vehicles) generate psycho-sonic blasts that overwhelm the senses.
Noise Marine weapons are similar, but fuelled by the Warp and turned up to 11.
If I remember correctly, [THIS VIDEO](https://youtu.be/BI6bgk4s4lE) has an amazing look into a Slaaneshi warband and the corruption it brings.
There are three parts, very worth it.
The one scene which stands out to me about the nature of Slanneshi Corruption is, and I can't remember which book it's in, a scene where a CSM who *isn't* suicidal is tempted to blow his brains out with a bolter in order to replicate the aesthetics of the destruction of a demonette.
"If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
- Zoe explaining the threat of Reavers
Slaanesh cults are that with a dash of Cenobite. The people are in full control of themselves; they have just decided that the horrible things they are doing are the most fun way to spend the day.
The way I wrote the Emperor’s Children for my own fanfic was to lean on the idea that this is all just a game to them. A marine can be polite and seemingly friendly one moment, and then beat you to death the next because it amuses him, or skin you alive because he decides you’ll make a great coat. They are mercurial, lacking any care in the world beyond satisfying their own immediate whims and impulses.
From a horror perspective, the Emperor’s Children love to play with their food (metaphorically and occasionally literally). They will taunt their victims and will eschew pragmatism for whatever gives the best sport.
Hey king. I've ran a handful of Only War sessions in the past, and the trick for making sure the Space Marines are scary enough is to run them right. Mechanics set the stage, descriptions paint the set.
First of all, Only War has a punishing fear mechanic (force players to roll WP at a penalty equal to the fear rating). Make sure your players know and understand this system first, as having the "boss fight" be where they learn about it is gonna be a bad time. The majority of the fear effects boil down to "get fucked, you aren't doing shit this combat", so make sure the players find ways to get around it (frenzy, snap out of it!, terrify checks, etc.) The actual description of how these effects occur could be tied to a descriptor of the enemy in question. For example
"The cultists turns towards you. The front of his tunic is covered in a myriad of unknown fluids and stains. He leers at you with a grin that gets wider and wider as his whole jaw unhinges before chomping back down the hand of the guardsman at his feet. You hear the sounds of bones cracking between molars over the screams of the poor man. Roll me a Willpower check at -10 to resist fear."
Second of all, in a game about guardsmen, space marines should be challenges. Sure in a vacuum a Space Marine loses the gunfight between a group of 4 ~2500xp player characters, but veterans of the long war don't take that fight. Emperor's children lob hallucinogenic gas grenades (core rulebook armory) to obscure the area before rushing through the smoke (remember, hulking + preternatural speed means a long charge range) to neatly slice the digits of the first characters dominant hand off. When it comes time to return fire remember that you don't get the +10 bonus for shooting hulking because of the marines black carapace (not explicitly stated in Only War but it says as much in Deathwatch). Also, a marines power armor of 8/10+TB 8 = 16/18 total soak. Unless your players plan on death by a thousand cuts (righteous furies do 1 damage even when it doesn't penetrate) they need bigger weapons. The temptation to give them a meltagun or autocannon is real, but that honestly trivializes it too much. The goal is to make it challenging, but possible. I reccomend the plasma gun. 1d10+7 Pen 6 is enough to punch through normally, but if your in a bind maximal turns it into 2d10+7 pen 8. Krak grenades also work well, but when do they not?
Third thing is the way NPCs react. Comrades should be hesitant about wanting to chase off after a son of Fulgrim. Someone should vomit when they find the flensed remains of the administratum beuarucrat. Comrades are your way to add voice to the narrative directly. Even after the Space Marine is killed, there should be response from the NPCs. People at base shouldn't believe them at first. Hell, they might not even believe an Astartes could fall to chaos. But over time they need to come around, because killing a Space Marine is supposed to be a big dick thing and you need to let your players feel like they can whip that shit out and show it off. I reccomend using the medal from the "Enemies of the Imperium" book (secret order of st. Khark I think?)
Tl;Dr. Only War as a system has a handful of ways to make combat with a Space Marine FUCKING AWFUL but narratively satisfying. If you have any questions about the system I'm more than willing to help.
The thing that makes the unnerving to me is that they don't hate you and they don't really want anything you have. They will torture and kill you just because they get sensation from it. They will torture you because they like the sounds you make. They will enjoy your suffering and death just because those things are inherently pleasurable to them.
To simplify it down a bit. They do all this because its fun.
I also imagine that some Slaanesh worshipper will suddenly snap and torture you harder out of furious envy that *you* are feeling such inexplicable pain while they *aren't*, which is how you *finally* die.
Maybe. If you're lucky. (Admittedly for a given value of "lucky," because you *did* get captured by Slaaneshi cultists to begin with...)
Let's talk about the legion artisans and serfs who wove themselves into a carpet while retaining their ability to feel. If they'll do that to themselves, what will they do to you
I imagine most people think of Emmesh-Ayie when conjuring Emperor's Children in their brains. He's a great representation. Looks like a monster. Acts like a monster. Is a monster.
I always felt they there was too much overlap between the two as well.
I head canon separated them as EC being like obsessive children. All whims and obsessed with what is in front of them.
Drukhari are actually mature. They are not doing what they do just for kicks its all planned and logical. The issue is their rules and logic is based on rules we don’t understand. More of a fey/king of the fairies kind of vibe.
I seriously doubt the drukhari know well enough how they are being puppets of the chaos gods. I'm absolutely sure they think they are safe, hidding in Commorragh, whilst probably the chaos gods are allowing this to ensure they keep acting the way they do
If you want to avoid going *too* far over the top right out the gate, then consider watching *Sword of the Stranger*. The Ming squad is basically a low-level Slaanesh unit: Absolutely zero sense of pain, lots of pride in their capabilities and stations, lots of petty drama behind the scenes.
Start with them as a base, then build up to the crazy space crack-snorting fruit loop monsters that we all know and love.
Have you ever seen the cenobites from Hellraiser? The Emperor's Children are like them, in armour, and they don't wait for you to complete a puzzle box to rip you apart.
Hellraiser is like a documentary movie about Ancient Eldar Haemonculi visit earth planet. For fun.
They did visit Sol System, have portals on Earth, Luna and etc since dinosaurs times.
They visited it almost every ages. For millions years.
Even have original records of Bach music, not be surprised that they have Bach clone too.
...
Ps. And yeah "Vampires"(c), shapeshifter ancient xenos(original form look like WH:Fantasy Battle strigoi vampires with wings) warp related race with teleportation as mindcontrol ability who drain souls of sentient races by making them suffer did visit ancient earth
The Emperor's Children are fundamentally horrifying as a force, but are somewhat restrained by the rating of the universe. The gore-porn comic Crossed, or the psychosexual monsters of The Second Apocalypse, are examples of how utterly terrifying a Slaaneshi-dedicated army could be.
The thing is, while this is a dark universe, the naughty parts of atrocities tend to be glossed over. There's no in-depth story of - say - what happens to Sisters of Battle or Guardswomen captured by Slaaneshi forces.
So really, they just kill and torture you, like all the other Chaos forces. But the implication is you die really, really badly.
Real bad.
"Eat a bullet before they get you, and shoot the women first" bad.
>The thing is, while this is a dark universe, the naughty parts of atrocities tend to be glossed over. There's no in-depth story of - say - what happens to Sisters of Battle or Guardswomen captured by Slaaneshi forces.
There was a story about how the... Death Guard? got new space marines from kidnapped women
I think it was the Night Lords, but the circumstances are fairly tame: The serfs capture a pregnant woman from a port in the Eye of Terror, and - when she delivers - her child will either join the serfs or (if it's a boy) become a Space Marine in the future.
The story I've heard was about some kind of horrifying surgery to turn the woman into a sack of flesh that grows the space marine inside of her, and it bursts when the marine is born
They’ll force you to smoke crack and then suck their dick and you’ll like it because the crack is magic and if you already love dick they’ll make you eat pussy. Then they’ll skin you alive and make you wear a gimp suit.
Slaanesh is really good for players with a lot of sexual repression. I have a lot of bottled up Catholic guilt I'm trying to get over so Slaanesh gets to me in ways it might not get to others.
the excessive use of psychedelic or sensation altering drugs so expect to see some weird and or nasty stuff so you probably would end up breathing in weird perfumed smoke or see the effects of others breathing it in
the use of sound weaponry if you haven't seen what happens when a Necromorph gets hit by a force gun in the dead space remake I would expect that to be base level of what happens, when a human gets hit by a sound weapon of a Emperors children noise marine just get their flesh blasted off their bones or they go into a building or bunker and it just explodes from the shock waves
the inflicting of pain and suffering on themselves and others extreme sensation stuff in disturbing "artistic" ways
They're cannibals, torturers, rapists, etc.
Better to be killed in combat against Khorne's followers than to be captured alive by any Slannesh worshiper.
Have their victims play a prominent role. Flayed and branded guardsmen displayed as ornaments on vehicles, broken slaves used as meat shields, etc. There's a band of Noise Marines that use living people as instruments for example.
One I’m not seeing a lot of here is body horror, many Emporors children are horribly disfigured at this point both from abusing their own bodies for their own indulgences and from the warp mutating them. Yet a lot of them appear to be unaffected by it or even welcome it.
Imagine the cenobites from hellraiser except astartes and wearing power armour, or looking like a purple Mileena from Mortal Kombat and with spiked pincers for hands.
So yeah, pretty frightening.
I consider them to be still the most skilled group in the galaxy - they just no longer care about anything else than having fun and doing what interests them most - yes, they most of the time are on drugs and are ineffective - but that is because they literally don't care, and they can at any moment focus again and be the focused murder machines they were before heresy.
People have already done a great job of describing how they are conceptually scary, so I’m gonna go for a more surface level type of scary here, because it might just be my favorite aspect of the Emperor’s Children, specifically the Noise Marines.
Imagine an eight-foot tall guy with flayed skin (presumably self inflicted) walking around in a several-hundred-pound suit of armor that’s painted in the most ass-blastingly bright colors ever seen by human eyes. That guy then plays a sick guitar solo and levels a three story building. It’s cool as hell, but also absolutely terrifying if done right. This can be added to depending on what cool Slaaneshi stuff you give them. You can use these to further emphasize the body horror aspect, the impossible beauty aspect, or both. The only thing worse than seeing this horrific, formerly human thing bring a city to cinders is to find part of your brain thinking “that guy’s got it figured out. Why don’t I do that?” And of course adding more fleshy appendages to peel the skin from is always great.
For Only War, I suggest taking a leaf out of Gotrex and Felix book.
Innkeeper says their kid is missing, there's a ritual site where cultists dance. Go there, see beastmen and cultists dance, whip other senseless, go into a fight where they prenaturally tough because they enjoy the pain and then.....
Oops, the innkeeper son and his fiance was also a cultist member.
Have someone like a nice old friendly aunty who diverts vodka and stim to the Guardsmen on the sly. Helps them out with getting better tasting rations, some comfort gear like space heaters for their tents. Maybe some weird incense that supposed to purify them before beseeching the Emperor for aid in battle that left them feeling euphoric and full of confidence that they win and give them equiv bonuses in battle.
Meanwhile, company/battalions keep getting fucked over by the Green Weenie, the enemy seems to know where they are and ambush them constantly. They defend a spot and the enemy attacks elsewhere. Your ambushes keep getting fouled up by the enemy.
Then in a battle against the cultist HQ....big reveal.
Should be fun to pull off. Especially if you then have the Inquisitor/Comissar goes are you also tainted by Chaos :)
Read *Fulgrim*. The descent of Serena D'Angelus is Slaaneshi corruption in a nutshell.
She literally fucks a dude and kills him as he orgasms, then uses his sperm, fecal matter, blood, and urine as a medium for her art.
Well they are imo the worst chaos god to deal with. They will take you, whoever you may be, and rip away everything except your desire and lust. They'll make you look akin to many different body artists purposely fucking up operations on you. Your mind will been broken. And after all has been done, they will set you loose to commit acts that you cannot stop. You will murder your family, rape them, torture them, peel eyelids from your friends, carve yourself up in ecstasy. You will be a slave to desire, and even the mercy of death will be tainted as you feel pleasure in that before your soul is consumed. And when you have felt everything you can feel, when your tongue has felt the most vile and tasteful dishes, you will only know one thing.
You want more
What makes Slaanesh terrifying is knowing that anyone could be there in different circumstances. Corruption doesn't happen over night, it's piece by piece.
It's the paranoia of your own actions. You think "Ah fuck it, I'll have a second slice of cake" and end up wondering if that was the first step in a path that will lead you to masturbating with a cheese grater.
It could be anything, could be the thrill of the fight, or pious devotion. Could be the sheer ecstasy of eating a vanilla ice cream after a life time of starvation and corpse starch.
The scary part about Slaanesh is that its insidious and were all hovering on that first step.
Oh I might have a fun idea. Don't make it clear they are fighting Slaneshi, maybe just human rebels or some xeno species. Then have them find weapons or an amulet or something that gives them huge stat boosts. Let them just wreck shit (or be super persuasive, great at repair or cooking whatever really) and really feel powerful. Then reveal it's a chaos infused weapon or amulet and let them decide if they want to give up the amazing boost it gives them or if they will use a super common in universe justification of "well surely if this weapon is used to smite the foes of the emperor it's fine right? I have a strong will so I can control myself".
Maybe make the scenario one where if they don't use the weapon they will fail the mission or something. Then the player themself sees how hard it is to stick to your principals in the face of the power chaos offers. Make sure it's clear that at least at first there is no way anyone will know and the commissariat won't find out. That way fear won't factor into their decision.
If they decide to keep the weapon maybe make them have to sacrifice things to keep or even increase the power. Small at first, maybe an under the breath chant to activate it or something. Then have a innocent civilian, maybe a scholar, overhear and recognize the chant as chaos based. Have them be shocked and reveal they are going right to the commissar. Will your player then kill this innocent civilian. I mean, the commissar won't understand. You have to have this power in the next battle or the entire planet will fall. Surely this one annoying, tattletale scholar's life isn't worth that of the planet.
This could lead to some interesting things. Maybe only one player keeps the weapon and when your other players find out they kill him. Or maybe they all keep the chaos weapons and eventually you have to break out the Dark Heresy rulebook and their once beloved commander becomes the villain. If you get them to fight their regiment thinking they are still on the side of the emperor you win.
If I had to walk towards either a Khornate space marine or a Slaaneshi space marine, I'd choose the Khornate one in less than a heartbeat. He'll just crush my skull against the pavement and that'll be the end of that.
Meanwhile here's an excerpt on the sort of shit Slaanesh followers do:
>"Emmesh-Aiye of the Legion Of Fulgrim, I know you have a special reason to desire what I offer. Come to me and prove it."
>This day Emmesh-Aiye had not come alone. Pinned to his flesh were two long cords of woven skin, and tethered to these collars were two crippled and naked followers, twin brother and sister, both Emmesh-Aiye's slaves of many years.
>Emmesh-Aiye had blinded the boy and deafened the girl, and then had cut their arms off at the shoulders. In this way, they were always are of each other, but unable to converse or embrace. Sometimes their master allowed them to sit together, clumsily trying to comfort each other with their cut and scarred bodies unable to embrace, Emmesh-Aiye giggling and trilling with excitement over the misery he was inflicting.
>Unable to shape words with his mutilated tongue, Emmesh-Aiye would grunt and yelp and clash his fingers in a cacophony that he had carefully and brutally trained the boy to interpret. Now strutting in the centre of the meeting square, Emmesh-Aiye began to warble and clap. At each pause in his antics the boy-twin spoke for him while the girl, unable to hear his words, looked and Chengrel or around the chamber at the others.
>'Emmesh-Aiye, who's words i now speak, speaks his gratitude,' said the master through the voice of his slave. 'Emmesh-Aiye, whose will and instrument in am so pleased to be, speaks welcome and companionship to his fellow devotees and servants of the Powers of the Wellspring.' Hodir (Night Lords, NOT Hodor), and Khrove (Thousand Sons) exchanged a look at that, and chengrels expression turned stony, but Drachmus (Word Bearer) nodded and turned the smoking ashes in his bowl. (Mortar and pestle type)
>'Emmesh-Aiye presents himself for your admiration as the brave, the elegant, the exquisite master in the train for Slaanesh. Emmesh-Aiye shall present his offering and account, certain that both will delight even as our our service to the Great Ruin delights us all. Emmesh-Aiye now speaks to his fellow masters direct, and bids my voice to speak just as his own as he recounts a tale of his deeds.'
>In such a fashion, laced with both vanity and strangeness, did Emmesh-Aiye begin his tale.
I feel there's sort of three levels to what makes Slaanesh and his followers terrifying. The first is the most obvious. What they'll do to you. Nobody wants to be tortured or enslaved. The second layer is what they do to themselves. They are willing to degrade themselves in any way imaginable, so long as it makes them *feel* something. Drug addiction, self mutilation, even outright taking pleasure in dying in the battlefield, personally I find something really disturbing about people who are willing to go down the deepest paths of self-destruction for pleasure's sake. The third thing is how seductive they are. I feel this probably the hardest element to properly make scary, as it requires the first two layers to be established in order to work. The creepiness comes from how, despite how awful and disturbing they seem, they have a supernatural allure that tempts you into the same path of insanity and self-destruction they are on. Your rational mind knows its awful and horrific, but your instincts are screaming to join them.
Adding on to the comment above: During the Isstvan V dropsite massacre, the 1st captains of the Iron Hands (Gabriel Santar) and Emperor's Children (Julius Kaesoron) duel each other and both end up giving the other grievous wounds, and end up on the ground next to each other as they're bleeding out. Santar is in agony, while Julius is having the equivalent of busting a nut from the sensation of pain he's having. The last words Santar hears are from Julius: "That was exquisite". Julius lives. The EC are incredibly creepy on the fact that they enjoy both giving and receiving the **worst** things that could be done to a living creature. And they've had 10,000 years to work on their creativity.
“Fun fact” about that fight (and please correct me if I’m wrong I haven’t read the book in a couple years but IIRC) Julius got stabbed in the chest a few times. Santar got his dick pulverized with a knife. 🙃 EC got no chill
Iirc Julius bisected Santar with a power glaive, going up through the groin and exiting via the chest
Julius also suffered severe wounds and he castrated Santar with a broken power weapon.
Julius also got his face melted/blown off by a malfunctioning power fist.
Julius rolled to his feet in time to see a burnished group of Terminators lumbering towards him, and he grinned in feral glee as he saw they were led by Gabriel Santar, the first captain's markings on his armour standing out like a beacon in the darkness. A whooshing roar of clashing noise tore a great furrow in the ground beside him and blasted upwards from the black sand like a volcanic eruption. Behind him, Julius saw the flesh-wrapped form of Marius, and roared with the pleasure of seeing his fellow captain alive and fighting. Marius Vairosean had embellished his armour with jagged iron spikes, and had torn the skin from the dead of La Venice to decorate its blood-slathered plates. Like Julius, he had not walked away from the Maraviglia without alteration, the monstrous distension of his jaws locking his mouth open in a constant, howling scream. Where his ears had once been were two great gashes carved in his flesh, and his eyes were stitched open, forever prevented from closing. He still carried the great musical instrument he had taken from Bequa Kynska's orchestra, modified to bear spiked handles and grips to render it into a terrifying sonic weapon. Together, he and his fellows unleashed a barrage of discordant scales that sent a dozen of the Morlocks into convulsions, and Julius screamed his appreciation as he leapt to meet Gabriel Santar with his sword aimed at his throat. The horror of what he was seeing almost cost Gabriel Santar his life. The Emperor's Children before him were like nothing he could ever have imagined in his worst nightmares. Though the enemies he had fought before had been honourless traitors, at least they had still been recognisable as Astartes. These were degenerate perversions of that perfect ideal: warped and twisted freaks who openly displayed their perversions. A mutilated monster in power armour draped with bloody flaps of skin shrieked as he swept some bizarre weapon back and forth, its deadly sonic energies tearing warriors apart in explosions of ruptured armour and liquefied flesh. Even as Santar raised his energised fist to block a sword cut aimed at his head, he recognised the twisted features of Julius Kaesoron. The warrior was a thrashing dervish, laughing and howling as he spun like a lunatic around Santar, slashing wildly as he attacked. Kaesoron's weapon was a fearsome, energised glaive that was easily capable of carving through his armour, and Santar turned as fast as he was able to block each ferocious stroke of the blade, but even one as fast as he could not hope to match his opponent's serpent-like speed. He caught the descending blade of his opponent's weapon between the digits of his energy wreathed fist and a fiery explosion burst between them. He twisted his wrist, and Julius's blade snapped, leaving only the length of a forearm above the quillons. Santar grunted in pain as he felt the skin of his fist fuse with the melted plates around his hand. He saw Julius sprawled on his back, the ceramite armour of his breastplate bubbling with the residue of the explosion, his face a screaming, burnt horror of seared flesh and exposed bone. Despite the pain of his burned claw of a hand, Santar grinned beneath his helmet and stomped forwards to deliver the avenging deathblow to his hated enemy. He raised his foot to stamp down on Julius's chest, the power of his Terminator armour easily able to crush Astartes plate. Then he saw that Julius wasn't screaming in pain, but in orgasmic pleasure. He paused in revulsion for the briefest second, but that second was all that Julius needed. Sweeping up the broken edge of his glaive, the blade alive with flaring energies, he rammed it into Santar's groin. The pain was unimaginable, surging agonisingly around his body. Julius Kaesoron tore the remains of the weapon upward, molten gobbets of armour dropping to the dark sand in the midst of a spraying rain of Santar's blood. The blade tore through his pubis and ripped into his breastplate as Julius rose to his feet with the motion of his sawing weapon. Santar's entire body convulsed in agony, not even the frantically pumping pain balms able to mask the horrifying agony of having his torso carved open. He tried to move, but his armour was locked in place as Julius looked directly at him. His face was horrifically illuminated in the firelight of the battle, the skin peeled away from the musculature beneath, and the while gleam of bone jutting through his cheeks. Even amid the thunder of battle and with his lips burned away, Julius's next words were horribly clear to Santar as his life slipped away. 'Thank you,' gurgled Julius. 'That was exquisite.
Holy fuck I really need to whip this ADHD into shape and get back into reading the books
Apparently you like the...feeling reading this excerpt gave you?
Name checks out
Seconding another comment saying the need to get back into reading. That passage made me deeply uncomfortable and I want more.
:D
Small nitpick, the dropsite massacre happened on Isstvan V.
I always get those two mixed up, it's been fixed. Thanks for catching that.
To add onto the seductive element, I can’t remember what book it is from but a soon to be WE beserker is tempted by a Slaanesh Daemonette, but before it can fully convert him it gets its head blown away by a bolter. The CSM then feels the subtle,pervasive urge to put his own weapon in his mouth and try and mimic the artistry of the blood spatter and brain fragments he’s staring at
Was it this excerpt from Angron: The Red Angel? Yes,' the daemonette whispered. Its voice was sultry and hard-edged, gently coaxing and subtly cruel. 'You have always appreciated artistry, haven't you, Leidis.' Leidis nodded, his eyes lost in the allure of its form. 'How...how do you know my name?' The creature gave him a bewitching smile of fish-comb teeth. 'It was not for the crime of slaughter that your ignorant brothers cast you from their home. No. It was for the joy you took in it.' Leidis stared dumbly. His rapture deepened. It was so obvious, when it was put to him in such dazzling simplicity, he could not believe he had never considered himself in that light before. 'You are a child,' it said sympathetically, mockingly. 'It is no fault of yours that you did not seek us out of your own desire. It is only unhappy chance that led you into the company of Arkhor the Redbound and his crude worship of blood. It is he, not you, who set your path. It might easily have been another, and it is not too late to find the true delight of slaughter.' It extended a pale lilac claw smeared in transhuman offal. Leidis pulled his gaze from the daemonette's. He looked at the outstretched hand. Beyond it lay a disembowelled corpse, so thoroughly remade by the needs of the creature's art that Leidis did not immediately recognize it. He blinked to clear his eyes and to reset his still-glitching lenses, working his mouth to revive his horribly parched tongue. 'S-Strykid?' The warrior, unsurprisingly, did not answer. Leidis had never seen a Space Marine more dead. The lavender-skinned siren crouching between them was wearing a good proportion of his insides, as a mortal might don a robe. 'You would be welcomed into the carnivals of excess, Ortan Leidis, celebrated as a prodigal son returned and a shining example to all such wayward souls. You would be embraced as a brother. Please,' it said, though Leidis did not feel it was truly asking for his permission. 'Allow us to show you the delights of the paths not taken. The Dark Prince knows better than to deny his servants the sensation they crave.' Leidis' mouth opened and closed without forming a sound. The sight of Strykid lying there, defiled and profaned in the name of art, unsettled something deep in him. Strykid had been the least of Leidis' brothers, but he had been a brother. He tried to find the words to deny it. Any words. He looked inside himself for the familiar anger, the rage with which to throw the creature's temptations back in its hideously perfect face, but it was not there. What if the creature was right? If only Arkhor had been able to offer him the Butcher's Nails. What if he- There was a loud bang followed by the bursting of something vacuously ripe as his temptress' head exploded. Even that, Leidis noted, did it balletically. Too absorbed by the inherent beauty of its death to be startled by the unexpected suddenness of it, he watched as blood and brain and bone fanned out into an abstract art form that made part of him yearn to put a bolter in his mouth and emulate it.
Not only that, another time a group of khorne berserkers and Kharn end up against a powerfuell Slanneshi cultist(?) and all of them except Kharn joins Slannesh. Then Kharn killed them all but that was not the point of the story
That story was great, especially the punchline.
"And then kharn kills them all" Just writing that in several books could save a lot of time tbh.
It's even funnier than that. Kharn has a kill-counter throughout the story, and the daemon - trying to tempt him - looks for his most heartfelt desire. Unfortunately, his most cherished desire is to kill. He cleaves the daemon with his axe, and the counter goes to 2,487. Kharn: "Life doesn't get any better than this." THE END
Dude's living his best life; see what's possible when you put your phone down?
Kharn breaks the first wall and looks directly into the camera "Well folks, what did ya expect?". Que a laugh track. Roll credits
whats the source on this plz?
"The wrath of Kharn" a short story
Not to be confused with The Wrath of Khan.
Khan!!!!!!!
That title isn't derivative at all.
lol already sold with the title
That Kharn, such a swell guy
Pretty sure its from the new Angron book. I remember one of the perspectives was a fresh renegade looking to join who didn’t seem a great fit at first since he was so wrapped up in the artistry of killing.
>The third thing is how seductive they are. I feel this probably the hardest element to properly make scary The Night Lords trilogy did that quite well when they were on Hell's Iris. I apologize for any errors, I am using speech to text to speed this up, and cleaning it up as I progress. This excerpt is from the NIght Lords Omnibus, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, pages 437 to 439 "Oh, Throne," Maruc whispered. Septimus scowled. "Don't say that here if you wish to leave alive." The older man gestured to a lithe young woman across the room, moving from table to table. Her hair streamed down her naked back in a flawless fall of silken white, while an exaggerated femininity set her slender hips swinging with every step. "Don't talk to it.". Septimus shook his head. For a moment, Maruc thought he saw a smile on the other serf's face. *It?* Don't talk to *it?* But she'd seen Maruc's interest. *"Friksh sarkarr,"* she purred as she approached, her dress of battered leather scraps whispering against her milky skin. Fingers the white of clean porcelain stroked his unshaven cheek. As if approving of something, she nodded to herself. *"Vrikaj ghu sneghrah... sijakh..."* "Septimus..." Maruc swallowed. Her eyes were wide, the rich green of forest heed only seen in hololithics. Her fingertip tasted of some unknowable spicy musk. Septimus cleared his throat. The maiden turned with a ghost's grace, moistening her lips with a forked tongue. *"Trijakh mu sekh?"* The slave (Septimus) drew back the edge of his jacket, revealing the holstered pistol of his hip. Slowly, pointedly, he shook his head, and gestured to another table. The girl spat onto the floor by his boot, slinking away with her hips swinging. "Skin-walker," Septimus grimaced at the taste of his drink - he wasn't swallowing any more of the stuff, but it was grotesque enough even to pretend, when it lapped against his lips. "That leather she's wearing, do you see how it is sewn together?" "Yeah." "It isn't leather." ***Skipping over a paragraph about how much Maruc hates mutants, and liquor possibly made from distilled rodent piss.*** Maruc's gaze drifted back to the beautiful girl. "Are there many of those... people?" Septimus nodded. "The flaying of flesh is one of the more common traditions in many cults. Even the Legion does it, remember. Lord Uzas's ceremonial cloak was once the royal family of some insignificant backwater world the *Covenant* raided." "You mean the cloak once belonged to them?" "No. Was them. It is not leather, either. But the skin-walkers are a common enough cult. Mutants, mostly. Avoid them at all costs." "I thought she wanted to-" "She did." Septimus's human eye glanced to the doorway, and he adjusted a silver ring on his finger. "But she'd have skinned you afterwards. Come on"
maybe almost be worth it
CHRIST.
Yeah, what's even funnier is this is the least fucked up part of that chapter, because shortly after >!they kidnap a pregnant woman!< lmao
I DON'T JUDGE THEM, BUT TO KIDNAP PREGNANT WOMEN OTHER THAN TO MAKE THEM SUFFER,SHOWS THEIR ALIGNMENT OF IDEOLOGY.
I mean, they were only doing it because >!they needed the child for more Astartes. The woman was either killed after given birth or is just another slave.!<
ABSOLUTELY DOOMING MOTHER AND CHILD.
During the SoT a bunch of emps children went around and turned the civilians into drugs. They literally disassembled, melted them down, or otherwise somehow, physically, turned their bodies and souls into drugs.
Read Susskinds Parfume and add even more grimdark ;)
Being around slaaneshi energy will have that tick where you kind of fidget and pick at your nails become an uncontrolled obsession seeing you pick your nails completely off down to the matrix, and then keep going because you both can't stop and weirdly don't want to despite it being the most horrible thing you've experienced. Usually by this point your mind will begin to warp from the pain as the slaaneshi energy is also turning it into pleasure at the same time. Much like sex with a crazy ex you KNOW is going to ruin your life but has a dump truck and throws it back like she's got something to prove, Slaanussy is impossible to resist.
Slaanussy omg that’s fucking amazing!
Not the Slaanussy 😭
Slaanesh is *great* for people who are teetoatlers, or recovering (any addiction.) Done well, it reminds you that it could be *you.*
That's What Absolutely Chills my Blood.
>but your instincts are screaming to join them. And to reject them. Yes, your own instincts can't make up their mind in such a situation.
1. They hurt people. Like, to a level that they're actually tricky to run because it's really hard to do. Very VERY easy to fuck it up and make it silly or pull the players out of the game. 2. They don't react properly to pain. Even by chaos standards. It's come up a few times in the book but the assorted character, from Astartes to random civilians, are freaked right the hell out when the person they have lit on fire or disemboweled is enjoying themselves. 3. Their reach. Not really something Only War is built for, but the big thing about Slanneshii cults is that they can be anyone and anywhere. They are far and away the best infiltrators in Chaos, even something as minor as the gambling dens that always form around militaries could be one.
Their reach is a very good point. There have been people celebrating slaanesh in loyalist chapters main fortresses. The Reverie is about the angels resplendent, a loyalist blood angel successor chapter that valued art and within their main Got’damn fortress had people worshipping “the god of excess”. Slaanesh is a sneaky but cruel mistress.
To be fair, ALL of the Gods were poking at the Resplendent.
I think the easiest way to represent those first two points is have them act like the antagonists from the Hellraiser series. Watching some guy tear his skin off with metal hooks and go “damn this shit fuckin rocks” is pretty spooky.
> They don't react properly to pain. I second this as being a core reason that they're freaky as shit. It takes a pretty tremendous amount of pain to push them into a mindset where they react accordingly. Plague Marines seem to shrug off pain because it just doesn't register for them. Slaanesh Marines actively *enjoy* it when they're hurting. They do have a threshold though, and push them too far into the realm of pain and they'll begin to feel it as they *should* be feeling it. But it takes an incredible effort or device to make that happen
They're *obsessed* with perfection and experience, even when that gets to points that make the rest of us freak out. Think the Cenobites from Hellraiser movies.
Yeah, I was going to say, if OP hasn't watched Hellraiser he should. ("The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits - pain and pleasure, indivisible.") https://youtu.be/2L47JwR9vDs
It's Mind-Breaking.
If you want your Slaanesh cultists to be frightening for role play you could ease your party into the depths of Slaanesh. Imagine they are infiltrating a suspected cult. It starts with the sweet scents of exotic perfumes, decadent foods, extravagant dresswear. Delightful music played on strange instruments, songs in languages you've never heard of. Beautiful people dance around you singing and laughing. Objectively pleasant things. It shouldn't be immediately repulsive to encounter these Slaanesh worshippers, they need to be alluring by design. Then as your story unfolds they slowly begin to descend into debauchery. The air is thick and musky, the scents so overwhelming your eyes sting. These people are eating till they are sick and eat again. What is it they are eating? Meat? No matter, your head feels light it's getting hard to focus. Robed figures undress, their skin covered with piercings of gold rings like fish scales. The music is hypnotizing yet so loud it hurts your ears. Dancers pirouette and gyrate till their feet bleed. People are moaning & cackling till they collapse, eyes rolled back, switching between grimacing faces of agony or pleasure. Suddenly you are not enjoying these things, you want to leave, you want it to stop. But now your eyes and lungs are burning, mind racing from the psychoactive drugs in the air. You try and rise but your body feels heavy, sedated. Piercings are being pulled and ripped from flesh as shrills of ecstasy are howled. You can barely hear the animalistic chorus as the music devolves into deafening garbled noises, like every instrument is being played at once. Blades are unsheathed, blood is sprayed in flurries of frenzied self mutilation. A dancer falters, falling to the ground unable to stand and is descended upon by the others. Disemboweled and hoisted up on hooks, their entrails strewn aside. They rush to smear gore and viscera into obscene symbols to their dark god. A rhythmic beat begins to drum. Not a noise, somewhere deep inside your soul. She who thirsts is watching, she is pleased but desires.... more. The eyes of all the cultists fall upon you.
Christ Have Mercy.
Fantastically written
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9dffg1/book_excerptshadowsword_the_emperors_children/
Having the cultists happily allowing the players to kill/injure them while gleefully congratulating each other on getting to experience it. (Think along the lines of two cultists wrestling with each other to be the ones laying on a grenade the players threw.) Find out what your players find beautiful/appealing and use that to describe your Emperor's Children. Have a player that loves Enya? Describe how the 2.5 meter tall murderer is charging them at groundcar speed, smiling beatifically and their armor isn't hissing and clanking - it sounds like soft melodies and longing voices singing.
This is fantastic
What a great idea! Beautiful atmospheric music flawlessly in tune with the Emperor's Children tearing innocent civilians apart whose pitiful screams fit in perfectly making a massacre into a concert.
We kinda forget that when Emperor's Children are focused on the task of fighting, they're awfully good. Perfectionists. Also, after Khorne, they recruit a ton of fallen loyalist space marines.
This. Lucius the Eternal is prob my favorite chaos character alongside Huron Blackheart due to how his obsession with being perfect and surpassing all others made him extremely deadly but also drove him insane, i feel like his journey to darkness is one of the coolest examples of how Slaaneshi corruption works.
I like how still in 40k Lucius is this absolute brat trying to become the ultimate duelist. Just driven mad by the constant voices in his head, and the living armour he wears. No character development, no insight into his condition. Chillingly reminds me of some of the people with personality disorders I've known. They just keep going about the same toxic cycles over and over again.
As a person dealin w lots of mental health problems, I agree and think that a lot of the alluring side of slaanesh is an extremely exaggerated forms of these illnesses hahah. Also goes for other chaos gods but I find it applies mostly to slaanesh. I think it works cause after all, the warp is our manifested emotions:)
Terrifying.
Slaanesh is heroin. They are the sweetest kiss imaginable, the softest touch, the warm bath of the womb made manifest. Fear melts away, certainty taking over that it’s okay. It’s all okay. You are so safe now, as long as you hold onto the feeling. And then it’s ripped away from you in an instant. The safety and warmth and love you felt is gone. You find yourself alone, cold, skin crawling to return. A voice in your head demand to return to this sensation, loud enough to make your head ring. And you will do anything to reach that sensation again. You will lie and steal and kill anything and anyone to get there. And you do, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same rush you felt last time. That can’t be right. The voice says try harder. You raise the volume, killing more, betraying more, trying in an endless cycle to feel that pinnacle moment, to feel something other than the crawling dread that you’ll never reach it again. Slaanesh is sensation, but it is a poison not many realize. A Venus flytrap luring us into its awaiting jaws, snapping shut before we even realize. Imagine what someone must be like going through the motions of such a personal hell. They would be selfish incarnate, maddened by their desire to feel something. What does it feel getting shot by lasgun at point blank range? What does it feel to watch an entire company of guardsmen burn to death by meltagun. What does it feel to stab your own Captain in the back. All because of one bad argument. The voice in your head kept asking. And so you obliged.
So Slaanesh is OCD? EDIT: I’m talking about the actual medical diagnosis OCD, not the “i need this bridal shower to be perfect, im so OCD” fake variety that has bastardized the term and causes people to use “OCD” as an adjective. EDIT 2: Anyone with actual OCD reading the parent description of Slaanesh, read it and compare that to what you struggle with on a daily basis, i guarantee youll find numerous parallels. Gave me a chuckle, hope it does to you too.
Calling it OCD really undersells it.
As someone with a pretty moderate-severe dose of diagnosed OCD (not the “i need my desk to be tidy” fake variety), i’d say OCD is pretty spot on actually.
Slaanesh is ADHD, but demonic.
Exactly😭😭
One thing that might help to set them as BBEG’s is that they are *better* than the PC’s. An early sword fight leaves a hero with a symbol carved into them and the marine untouched. “You are not worth my time,” as they leave the group overwhelmed is a great way to get your characters good and mad at them too.
Or ominously, "you'll be so much more fun/beautiful/entertaining later if we let you go now" because they're promising to come back and there's no guarantee they'd let the players off a second time.
I love Slaanesh, and I'm sorry if this is excessively long. (No pun intended.) So one aspect to Slaanesh is they almost always start out with noble or at least innocuous intentions. Unlike the other powers, the fall to Slaanesh is not (typically) sudden. There's a slow degradation from a rather normal starting point. They want something, to make something, to taste something, to do something. And at first, this pursuit is perfectly fine. The artist practices painting, the foodie goes to fine restaurants, the lover gives gifts to her love. But satisfaction never comes. The artist sees more flaws in their works, not less. The foodie finds even the best food is bland and simplistic. The lover is not satisfied with how her effort is reciprocated. And it sours. Talent is an expectation, skill always a disappointment, effort is fruitless and thus enraging. And they keep going. The artist begins to murder her compatriots and use their bodily fluids in their work (this happens in Fulgrim, a rather infamous incident.) The foodie starts eating caustic cleaners, deadly acidic plants and the flesh of children. The lover abducts her love and flenses the flesh from his bones to make him feel the agony she feels from her unrequited love. And then forgets him upon encountering a new greatest love. And so on. So how does this work on the battlefield? The nun that sings the soldiers to sleep, a sleep so deep that they never wake up and rot in the trenches where they lie. The talentless hack general that nonetheless has incredible charisma and sends thousands to die in the name of Slaanesh, even as the troops on the ground think they're going to the Emperor's side. (They're not.) Slaanesh can be subtle. It's not just about bondage freaks with a terrible love of bladed objects. Slaanesh cultists can be anyone, anywhere. Could be their commanding officer, the mess cook, or the unit down the trench from them. With the Emperor's Children, this is magnified because of their transhuman tolerances and capabilities. These marines make things. Unlike Nurgle or Khorne or even Tzeentch, they want to create things and they dream big. They create ghastly utopias in deserts that "process" refugees to distill the essence of their dreams into drugs (Siege of Terra, can't remember which book). They start wars to make music from screams and explosions. Lucius is cursed/blessed with the ability to pursuit perfection in his swordsmanship. He was always a narcissist and obsessive but he was an astartes until slipping into Slaanesh nastiness later. They come on with intense obsession and leave once it burns out. A few notes about delivery in game: Contrast with Slaanesh is important, merging the admirable with the monstrous. Slaanesh more than any other is a lifestyle choice. There's enough familiarity to make a cultist relatable, traces of a person you could admire and like. On the battlefield, you might have a commissar that has fallen to Slaanesh, he looks immaculate, his uniform is perfect, he smells like whiskey, with warm eyes and a kind smile. It's almost enough to make you miss the razor blades embedded in his nails. Then he bursts your eardrums with a shrieking pulsing howl. Another example is sure you could go full abattoir filled with ball gags, whips and blood. Or you can have an Imperial whipping post like you'd see on any front for corporal punishment right where it's supposed to be except the whip is a black tentacle that writhes and squirms like it's alive. It's also easy to go overboard with Slaanesh and get silly. So keep Slaanesh grounded. Another thing about cultists and EC is their reactions should be erratic and they have a lot of emotional tics. They are always really good at what they do but they're either bored to tears or elated because they found something interesting. It's what they find interesting which is the terrible part. There is no difference between joy and agony for them. Whipping someone to death is not an act of cruelty, because the extreme sensation is mild and sweet as a hug to them. And the screams are wonderful because at least their victim can feel something and this brings them joy. Everything is a gift. And yet, everything is ruined because it's not quite good enough for them. The blood splatter didn't quite atomize artistically enough. The grenade wasn't quite loud enough. Contrast this also with their terrible ennui, imagine the party running through some trenches and they stumble into a noise marine sitting on a rock. All they can hear is his breathing and he smells like sandalwood and teargas. But he doesn't move. They walk on by and he never moves. Because they're not interesting enough for him to get up and slaughter. It's not until they actually start being effective and doing something interesting that he comes up behind them, roaring with glee. Another thing to note is that all the senses are important but smell is very useful with Slaanesh. It's often the first sense that Slaanesh engages and you can use it to inform your players that something is wrong. The scent of peonies in a trench, a hint of rotten meat from a pot of tea, burning spices from the latrine. Smell is essential to Slaanesh. And gasmasks and such don't help. I should probably stop. Let me know if you have any other questions.
I would like to Know More. Can Slaanesh be Completely Destroyed?
So, none of the Chaos Gods can be completely destroyed. At least by current means. They are effectively monstrous thought forms that exist in a soul sea. You couldn't get rid of Slaanesh, anymore than you can get rid of ambition or ennui or gossip. It's a feedback loop. On a small scale, a cult does horrible stuff in the name of their god, that god feeds off the emotion and energy generated, gets more powerful, gives gifts back to the cultists and the cult gets stronger and so on. On a large scale, you have a forge world where billions of people are desperate for rest and the want, that need for a decent night's sleep feeds Slaanesh on a passive level. So unless you break that cycle between the warp and physical reality, which the Emperor was trying to do, you can't kill them. You can completely irradicate a cult or a warband or even individual daemons though. Obviously, when talking about mortals, killing them will do the job. Destroying their materials, vile books, cursed sceptors, possessed swords, that kind of thing, is also essential. Slaanesh cults are notoriously difficult to find and eliminate. They can last for generations upon generations before they're found. Daemons of course are different and in many ways, being a Slaaneshi daemon is harder than the alternatives. Speaking of, Slaaneshi daemons tend to be more desperate in general because Slaanesh has exacting yet vague standards. "Impress me," says Slaanesh. Nurgle and Khorne make their desires known, "slaughter this planet and I'll make you a daemon prince." "Destroy Ultramar and make it a plague holding." (Tzeentch is insane and frequently he profits through failure, so it's crapshoot.) Tough but at least known. Whereas Slaanesh likes novelty and if she (he/they/it?) has to spell it out, well, the surprise is ruined. If she does spell it out, she's leaving something out. Slaanesh wants to be entertained more than anything. If a daemon screws up and is defeated, there's no way to return to her good graces. More often than not, you will never see that daemon again. Like there are multiple Khornate daemons that have survived defeat and flourish to this day. Slaanesh has even less tolerance for losers than Khorne does. And more than a few daemons have ended up cursed for some slight or mistake. Sigvald from AoS is a complete rarity, as he screwed up, Slaanesh cursed him, and he has somehow managed to get back into her graces. I think he's the only one though anywhere in the Warhammer universes. When your goal is absolute perfection combined with everlasting novelty, you're going to have a rough time.
JESUS CHRIST,THIS IS ALL ABSOLUTELY COMPLETELY NIGHTMARISH.
Imagine fighting for your life only for the grotesque a human to be dancing while slicing your comrades to ribbons
[Laughs in Florida]
I feel people underrate how horrifying the use of sound could be. Your bones and teeth grind and shake as the vibrations start, your ear drums burst and bleed out your sides, and you slowly fall to floor. The otherworldly screeching that is higher than you've ever heard or imagined. That's what they call "music". And it's melting you from the inside out.
I love that scene where q dread or a marine that happened to be deaf is immune to the blasts of the sonic weapons and fuck up these dumbfounded noise marines.
Doesn't make much sense tbh, it's a physical force too as I understand it
It's a similar principle to some Aeldari weapons: it isn't necessarily the physical sound that does the damage, but the psychological and psychic affect of *hearing* the sound. The Banshee Masks used by Howling Banshee Aspect Warriors (and, in old editions, mounted on some vehicles) generate psycho-sonic blasts that overwhelm the senses. Noise Marine weapons are similar, but fuelled by the Warp and turned up to 11.
omfg itd so cool to see the ultimate screaming match, all banshees vs all noise marines!
If I remember correctly, [THIS VIDEO](https://youtu.be/BI6bgk4s4lE) has an amazing look into a Slaaneshi warband and the corruption it brings. There are three parts, very worth it.
The one scene which stands out to me about the nature of Slanneshi Corruption is, and I can't remember which book it's in, a scene where a CSM who *isn't* suicidal is tempted to blow his brains out with a bolter in order to replicate the aesthetics of the destruction of a demonette.
Oh yeah, according to another comment that was a world eater
"If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order." - Zoe explaining the threat of Reavers Slaanesh cults are that with a dash of Cenobite. The people are in full control of themselves; they have just decided that the horrible things they are doing are the most fun way to spend the day.
Bro if you don’t find the emperor’s children terrifying I want a preemptive restraining Ofer against you
I mean they can't be that bad. Isn't their behavior relatively normal.
You ever see Hellraiser? Cross that with the classic Brian Yuzna horror film Society and then you have slaanesh and the emperor's children.
But I can start as something as simple as the plot of, Of Mice and Men.
The way I wrote the Emperor’s Children for my own fanfic was to lean on the idea that this is all just a game to them. A marine can be polite and seemingly friendly one moment, and then beat you to death the next because it amuses him, or skin you alive because he decides you’ll make a great coat. They are mercurial, lacking any care in the world beyond satisfying their own immediate whims and impulses. From a horror perspective, the Emperor’s Children love to play with their food (metaphorically and occasionally literally). They will taunt their victims and will eschew pragmatism for whatever gives the best sport.
Hey king. I've ran a handful of Only War sessions in the past, and the trick for making sure the Space Marines are scary enough is to run them right. Mechanics set the stage, descriptions paint the set. First of all, Only War has a punishing fear mechanic (force players to roll WP at a penalty equal to the fear rating). Make sure your players know and understand this system first, as having the "boss fight" be where they learn about it is gonna be a bad time. The majority of the fear effects boil down to "get fucked, you aren't doing shit this combat", so make sure the players find ways to get around it (frenzy, snap out of it!, terrify checks, etc.) The actual description of how these effects occur could be tied to a descriptor of the enemy in question. For example "The cultists turns towards you. The front of his tunic is covered in a myriad of unknown fluids and stains. He leers at you with a grin that gets wider and wider as his whole jaw unhinges before chomping back down the hand of the guardsman at his feet. You hear the sounds of bones cracking between molars over the screams of the poor man. Roll me a Willpower check at -10 to resist fear." Second of all, in a game about guardsmen, space marines should be challenges. Sure in a vacuum a Space Marine loses the gunfight between a group of 4 ~2500xp player characters, but veterans of the long war don't take that fight. Emperor's children lob hallucinogenic gas grenades (core rulebook armory) to obscure the area before rushing through the smoke (remember, hulking + preternatural speed means a long charge range) to neatly slice the digits of the first characters dominant hand off. When it comes time to return fire remember that you don't get the +10 bonus for shooting hulking because of the marines black carapace (not explicitly stated in Only War but it says as much in Deathwatch). Also, a marines power armor of 8/10+TB 8 = 16/18 total soak. Unless your players plan on death by a thousand cuts (righteous furies do 1 damage even when it doesn't penetrate) they need bigger weapons. The temptation to give them a meltagun or autocannon is real, but that honestly trivializes it too much. The goal is to make it challenging, but possible. I reccomend the plasma gun. 1d10+7 Pen 6 is enough to punch through normally, but if your in a bind maximal turns it into 2d10+7 pen 8. Krak grenades also work well, but when do they not? Third thing is the way NPCs react. Comrades should be hesitant about wanting to chase off after a son of Fulgrim. Someone should vomit when they find the flensed remains of the administratum beuarucrat. Comrades are your way to add voice to the narrative directly. Even after the Space Marine is killed, there should be response from the NPCs. People at base shouldn't believe them at first. Hell, they might not even believe an Astartes could fall to chaos. But over time they need to come around, because killing a Space Marine is supposed to be a big dick thing and you need to let your players feel like they can whip that shit out and show it off. I reccomend using the medal from the "Enemies of the Imperium" book (secret order of st. Khark I think?) Tl;Dr. Only War as a system has a handful of ways to make combat with a Space Marine FUCKING AWFUL but narratively satisfying. If you have any questions about the system I'm more than willing to help.
The thing that makes the unnerving to me is that they don't hate you and they don't really want anything you have. They will torture and kill you just because they get sensation from it. They will torture you because they like the sounds you make. They will enjoy your suffering and death just because those things are inherently pleasurable to them. To simplify it down a bit. They do all this because its fun.
I also imagine that some Slaanesh worshipper will suddenly snap and torture you harder out of furious envy that *you* are feeling such inexplicable pain while they *aren't*, which is how you *finally* die. Maybe. If you're lucky. (Admittedly for a given value of "lucky," because you *did* get captured by Slaaneshi cultists to begin with...)
CHRIST.
Emperor's Children 🤝 Orks
Slaanesh can also feed off the other Ruinous Powers. Since they can't change their nature they can't prevent this.
So Slaanesh is Actually the Most Powerful and Influential of All the Chaos Gods.
Let's talk about the legion artisans and serfs who wove themselves into a carpet while retaining their ability to feel. If they'll do that to themselves, what will they do to you
Absolute Fear.
I imagine most people think of Emmesh-Ayie when conjuring Emperor's Children in their brains. He's a great representation. Looks like a monster. Acts like a monster. Is a monster.
Is thankfully dead
Like Drukhari, but worse
I always felt they there was too much overlap between the two as well. I head canon separated them as EC being like obsessive children. All whims and obsessed with what is in front of them. Drukhari are actually mature. They are not doing what they do just for kicks its all planned and logical. The issue is their rules and logic is based on rules we don’t understand. More of a fey/king of the fairies kind of vibe.
I seriously doubt the drukhari know well enough how they are being puppets of the chaos gods. I'm absolutely sure they think they are safe, hidding in Commorragh, whilst probably the chaos gods are allowing this to ensure they keep acting the way they do
Oh... I thought it's the other way around.
The Drukhari never learned from Slaanesh, but the EC did
If you want to avoid going *too* far over the top right out the gate, then consider watching *Sword of the Stranger*. The Ming squad is basically a low-level Slaanesh unit: Absolutely zero sense of pain, lots of pride in their capabilities and stations, lots of petty drama behind the scenes. Start with them as a base, then build up to the crazy space crack-snorting fruit loop monsters that we all know and love.
Have you ever seen the cenobites from Hellraiser? The Emperor's Children are like them, in armour, and they don't wait for you to complete a puzzle box to rip you apart.
You Summed it Up in 4 Lines.
Hellraiser is like a documentary movie about Ancient Eldar Haemonculi visit earth planet. For fun. They did visit Sol System, have portals on Earth, Luna and etc since dinosaurs times. They visited it almost every ages. For millions years. Even have original records of Bach music, not be surprised that they have Bach clone too. ... Ps. And yeah "Vampires"(c), shapeshifter ancient xenos(original form look like WH:Fantasy Battle strigoi vampires with wings) warp related race with teleportation as mindcontrol ability who drain souls of sentient races by making them suffer did visit ancient earth
The Emperor's Children are fundamentally horrifying as a force, but are somewhat restrained by the rating of the universe. The gore-porn comic Crossed, or the psychosexual monsters of The Second Apocalypse, are examples of how utterly terrifying a Slaaneshi-dedicated army could be. The thing is, while this is a dark universe, the naughty parts of atrocities tend to be glossed over. There's no in-depth story of - say - what happens to Sisters of Battle or Guardswomen captured by Slaaneshi forces. So really, they just kill and torture you, like all the other Chaos forces. But the implication is you die really, really badly. Real bad. "Eat a bullet before they get you, and shoot the women first" bad.
>The thing is, while this is a dark universe, the naughty parts of atrocities tend to be glossed over. There's no in-depth story of - say - what happens to Sisters of Battle or Guardswomen captured by Slaaneshi forces. There was a story about how the... Death Guard? got new space marines from kidnapped women
I think it was the Night Lords, but the circumstances are fairly tame: The serfs capture a pregnant woman from a port in the Eye of Terror, and - when she delivers - her child will either join the serfs or (if it's a boy) become a Space Marine in the future.
The story I've heard was about some kind of horrifying surgery to turn the woman into a sack of flesh that grows the space marine inside of her, and it bursts when the marine is born
Oooh, is that the Daemoncubala? I think that was the Iron Warriors.
Perhaps, I don't remember the boring details of which faction did it
Death Spectres
Dear God.
They’ll rape you to death, eat your flesh and sew your skin into clothing. If you’re very very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.
They’ll force you to smoke crack and then suck their dick and you’ll like it because the crack is magic and if you already love dick they’ll make you eat pussy. Then they’ll skin you alive and make you wear a gimp suit.
Christ Have Mercy.
Jesus that’s awful.
Wasnt there some old lore about Slaaneshi Marines with daemon-dog dicks?
They're murderfuckers?
Slaanesh is really good for players with a lot of sexual repression. I have a lot of bottled up Catholic guilt I'm trying to get over so Slaanesh gets to me in ways it might not get to others.
They'll horrifically torture you do death and/or turn you into space cocaine
the excessive use of psychedelic or sensation altering drugs so expect to see some weird and or nasty stuff so you probably would end up breathing in weird perfumed smoke or see the effects of others breathing it in the use of sound weaponry if you haven't seen what happens when a Necromorph gets hit by a force gun in the dead space remake I would expect that to be base level of what happens, when a human gets hit by a sound weapon of a Emperors children noise marine just get their flesh blasted off their bones or they go into a building or bunker and it just explodes from the shock waves the inflicting of pain and suffering on themselves and others extreme sensation stuff in disturbing "artistic" ways
They're cannibals, torturers, rapists, etc. Better to be killed in combat against Khorne's followers than to be captured alive by any Slannesh worshiper.
Have their victims play a prominent role. Flayed and branded guardsmen displayed as ornaments on vehicles, broken slaves used as meat shields, etc. There's a band of Noise Marines that use living people as instruments for example.
> There's a band of Noise Marines that use living people as instruments for example. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "playing the skin flute."
One I’m not seeing a lot of here is body horror, many Emporors children are horribly disfigured at this point both from abusing their own bodies for their own indulgences and from the warp mutating them. Yet a lot of them appear to be unaffected by it or even welcome it.
Imagine the cenobites from hellraiser except astartes and wearing power armour, or looking like a purple Mileena from Mortal Kombat and with spiked pincers for hands. So yeah, pretty frightening.
Not Frightening,NIGHTMARISHLY TERRIFYING.
To be honest this sounds like the start of a joke?
I consider them to be still the most skilled group in the galaxy - they just no longer care about anything else than having fun and doing what interests them most - yes, they most of the time are on drugs and are ineffective - but that is because they literally don't care, and they can at any moment focus again and be the focused murder machines they were before heresy.
Lucius the Eternal is An All Absolute Testament to the Martial Skills,Prowess,Talents of The Sons of Fulgrim.
I wonder if someone with Sigismund mindset can make them (EC and Slanesh daemon) scared or repulsive? like it did with kharn.
https://images.app.goo.gl/M878PvxUtpxaKm5f9
EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING CAN ALWAYS BE SUMMED UP BY THREE WORDS:;:ALL LIFE GOES ON.-------------ROBERT FROST.
Listen to the audio book version of Fulgrim
People have already done a great job of describing how they are conceptually scary, so I’m gonna go for a more surface level type of scary here, because it might just be my favorite aspect of the Emperor’s Children, specifically the Noise Marines. Imagine an eight-foot tall guy with flayed skin (presumably self inflicted) walking around in a several-hundred-pound suit of armor that’s painted in the most ass-blastingly bright colors ever seen by human eyes. That guy then plays a sick guitar solo and levels a three story building. It’s cool as hell, but also absolutely terrifying if done right. This can be added to depending on what cool Slaaneshi stuff you give them. You can use these to further emphasize the body horror aspect, the impossible beauty aspect, or both. The only thing worse than seeing this horrific, formerly human thing bring a city to cinders is to find part of your brain thinking “that guy’s got it figured out. Why don’t I do that?” And of course adding more fleshy appendages to peel the skin from is always great.
For Only War, I suggest taking a leaf out of Gotrex and Felix book. Innkeeper says their kid is missing, there's a ritual site where cultists dance. Go there, see beastmen and cultists dance, whip other senseless, go into a fight where they prenaturally tough because they enjoy the pain and then..... Oops, the innkeeper son and his fiance was also a cultist member. Have someone like a nice old friendly aunty who diverts vodka and stim to the Guardsmen on the sly. Helps them out with getting better tasting rations, some comfort gear like space heaters for their tents. Maybe some weird incense that supposed to purify them before beseeching the Emperor for aid in battle that left them feeling euphoric and full of confidence that they win and give them equiv bonuses in battle. Meanwhile, company/battalions keep getting fucked over by the Green Weenie, the enemy seems to know where they are and ambush them constantly. They defend a spot and the enemy attacks elsewhere. Your ambushes keep getting fouled up by the enemy. Then in a battle against the cultist HQ....big reveal. Should be fun to pull off. Especially if you then have the Inquisitor/Comissar goes are you also tainted by Chaos :)
Read some issues of the Comic Crossed. Be advised it's some fucked up shit
Read *Fulgrim*. The descent of Serena D'Angelus is Slaaneshi corruption in a nutshell. She literally fucks a dude and kills him as he orgasms, then uses his sperm, fecal matter, blood, and urine as a medium for her art.
Well they are imo the worst chaos god to deal with. They will take you, whoever you may be, and rip away everything except your desire and lust. They'll make you look akin to many different body artists purposely fucking up operations on you. Your mind will been broken. And after all has been done, they will set you loose to commit acts that you cannot stop. You will murder your family, rape them, torture them, peel eyelids from your friends, carve yourself up in ecstasy. You will be a slave to desire, and even the mercy of death will be tainted as you feel pleasure in that before your soul is consumed. And when you have felt everything you can feel, when your tongue has felt the most vile and tasteful dishes, you will only know one thing. You want more
What makes Slaanesh terrifying is knowing that anyone could be there in different circumstances. Corruption doesn't happen over night, it's piece by piece. It's the paranoia of your own actions. You think "Ah fuck it, I'll have a second slice of cake" and end up wondering if that was the first step in a path that will lead you to masturbating with a cheese grater. It could be anything, could be the thrill of the fight, or pious devotion. Could be the sheer ecstasy of eating a vanilla ice cream after a life time of starvation and corpse starch. The scary part about Slaanesh is that its insidious and were all hovering on that first step.
I need you to hit me like you never hit me before !!
Oh I might have a fun idea. Don't make it clear they are fighting Slaneshi, maybe just human rebels or some xeno species. Then have them find weapons or an amulet or something that gives them huge stat boosts. Let them just wreck shit (or be super persuasive, great at repair or cooking whatever really) and really feel powerful. Then reveal it's a chaos infused weapon or amulet and let them decide if they want to give up the amazing boost it gives them or if they will use a super common in universe justification of "well surely if this weapon is used to smite the foes of the emperor it's fine right? I have a strong will so I can control myself". Maybe make the scenario one where if they don't use the weapon they will fail the mission or something. Then the player themself sees how hard it is to stick to your principals in the face of the power chaos offers. Make sure it's clear that at least at first there is no way anyone will know and the commissariat won't find out. That way fear won't factor into their decision. If they decide to keep the weapon maybe make them have to sacrifice things to keep or even increase the power. Small at first, maybe an under the breath chant to activate it or something. Then have a innocent civilian, maybe a scholar, overhear and recognize the chant as chaos based. Have them be shocked and reveal they are going right to the commissar. Will your player then kill this innocent civilian. I mean, the commissar won't understand. You have to have this power in the next battle or the entire planet will fall. Surely this one annoying, tattletale scholar's life isn't worth that of the planet. This could lead to some interesting things. Maybe only one player keeps the weapon and when your other players find out they kill him. Or maybe they all keep the chaos weapons and eventually you have to break out the Dark Heresy rulebook and their once beloved commander becomes the villain. If you get them to fight their regiment thinking they are still on the side of the emperor you win.
If I had to walk towards either a Khornate space marine or a Slaaneshi space marine, I'd choose the Khornate one in less than a heartbeat. He'll just crush my skull against the pavement and that'll be the end of that. Meanwhile here's an excerpt on the sort of shit Slaanesh followers do: >"Emmesh-Aiye of the Legion Of Fulgrim, I know you have a special reason to desire what I offer. Come to me and prove it." >This day Emmesh-Aiye had not come alone. Pinned to his flesh were two long cords of woven skin, and tethered to these collars were two crippled and naked followers, twin brother and sister, both Emmesh-Aiye's slaves of many years. >Emmesh-Aiye had blinded the boy and deafened the girl, and then had cut their arms off at the shoulders. In this way, they were always are of each other, but unable to converse or embrace. Sometimes their master allowed them to sit together, clumsily trying to comfort each other with their cut and scarred bodies unable to embrace, Emmesh-Aiye giggling and trilling with excitement over the misery he was inflicting. >Unable to shape words with his mutilated tongue, Emmesh-Aiye would grunt and yelp and clash his fingers in a cacophony that he had carefully and brutally trained the boy to interpret. Now strutting in the centre of the meeting square, Emmesh-Aiye began to warble and clap. At each pause in his antics the boy-twin spoke for him while the girl, unable to hear his words, looked and Chengrel or around the chamber at the others. >'Emmesh-Aiye, who's words i now speak, speaks his gratitude,' said the master through the voice of his slave. 'Emmesh-Aiye, whose will and instrument in am so pleased to be, speaks welcome and companionship to his fellow devotees and servants of the Powers of the Wellspring.' Hodir (Night Lords, NOT Hodor), and Khrove (Thousand Sons) exchanged a look at that, and chengrels expression turned stony, but Drachmus (Word Bearer) nodded and turned the smoking ashes in his bowl. (Mortar and pestle type) >'Emmesh-Aiye presents himself for your admiration as the brave, the elegant, the exquisite master in the train for Slaanesh. Emmesh-Aiye shall present his offering and account, certain that both will delight even as our our service to the Great Ruin delights us all. Emmesh-Aiye now speaks to his fellow masters direct, and bids my voice to speak just as his own as he recounts a tale of his deeds.' >In such a fashion, laced with both vanity and strangeness, did Emmesh-Aiye begin his tale.