A treatise on divine beings

There are a number of unanswered questions about divine beings in the lore which would benefit from
being explored a little to help in progressing some of the armies.

There is a challenge in terms of the difference between a God and a daemon and how both of these interact
with the Warhammer world.

The gods of chaos are by far the most described, and they reside within the realm of chaos and have many
daemon servants. These daemons are products of magic but have independent thought – they aren’t just a
piece of the god formed into a shape.

Having an army of daemons as servants of the chaos gods coming from the realm of chaos into the
Warhammer world is straight forward and covered from the lore. There are tears in the fabric of reality that
connect the realm of chaos to the Warhammer world.

The question really is – where are the other gods? And what servants do they have. Are they in different
realms similar to the realm of chaos? Much as I hate to admit this, but the AoS lore has started to ask some
of these questions. The old ones travelled across space through huge portals but I get the feeling they were
travelling within the same dimension – just between planets as opposed to between dimensions to the lands
of the Gods.

Now if there is a dimension of other gods – or maybe multiple dimensions each having one of more gods
then can the Warhammer world connect to these dimensions to bring those servants to the Warhammer
world, and if so how? This is never really answered and I don’t think it needs to be fully, but it could be
alluded to in explaining how some units could work.
There is also the question as to whether this god inhabited dimensional worlds can interact – or only
though manifestation on a mortal world. Can the realm of the deva break into the realm of chaos and have
deva fight chaos daemon in alternate dimension? – again not sure we need to answer that.

In addition to actual daemons there are a number of models that are possessed / animated by the power of
the gods but are made of corporeal material – so not pure magic. Some of these are brought to life through
channelled magic within the Warhammer world – others are “Possessed” by a daemonic presence. It might
not necessary to make this distinction, but the more clarity we have the more options we make available to
ourselves.

Divine / Daemonic models within Warhammer:

Chaos Daemons of the 4 gods

Skaven – Vermin Lords
Chaos Dwarves – Daemons of Hashut
Fimir – they have greater daemons and lesser daemons – of the god fimul
Ulric – the children of Ulric are “Summoned” which implies a divine type being
Ind – Deva
Nippon Oni
Araby Genies

Existing possessed models

Chaos dwarf hell cannon

Albion warriors of Danu
Pirate Sons of Stromfels
Dark elf Avatars of Khaine

Existing models that we aren’t quite clear what they are:

Orc and Goblin, Rogue Idol of Gork

Bretonnian Spirits of the fey

Possible opportunities for divine daemonic / possessed models

Estalian Seraphim and cherubs

Kislev Children of Urson
Lesser Daemons of the Horned Rat
Greater Daemon of Hashut
Ogre “Daemons of the Maw”
Lesser idols of Gork / Mork
Avatar of Danu
Unaligned lesser Daemons of chaos – so a MI version of a fury

What needs to happen.

We need to go through each book and identify which gods they have and then decide (but we don’t need to
publish this) which dimension they live in. Basically we need a mapping of armies to gods to realms that
those gods come from.
Then for each army book we have to answer the question as to whether they can bring the servants of their
god(s) to the mortal Warhammer world, and if so how. It appears that only the servants of the chaos gods
can enter the Warhammer world spontaneously, so the connection between the realm of the chaos gods and
the Warhammer world is greater than to the other dimensions, and this is due to the collapse of the polar
gate. This means that all other divine intervention has to be through some manner of mortal “Request”.
These requests appear to have three levels of consequence:
 Summoning a servant of the god to manifest wholly
 Summoning the essence of this servant possess either a mortal subject or some object/machine
 Summoning the power of the divine to have an effect – so the innate bound spells of the various
priests

Now some armies seem to do this a lot, and some don’t so that needs explaining. Most if not all armies
have some religion and some have some quite clear gods. Now the question is how come some armies can
have daemons and others just bound spells.
Options for the variations are:

 The power of the god

 The focus of the god on the mortal world – are they distracted?
 The sophistication of the summoning process
 The “Distance” of the Warhammer world to the divine one
 The Whim of the god – maybe they just don’t want to intervene in that way

So now we map each of these to the god and that might then be able to be used as an explanation.

For example: Sigmar is a new god, and hence not the strongest and is attempting to fight the chaos gods so
can’t give more help than bound spells.
The elven gods are ancient and very very distant so contacting them and having them interact is very hard
The Dimension to the Ind gods is very close but they require clear summoning so they are common in Ind
but nowhere else
The priests in Estalia have created huge temples designed to support the very complex summoning rituals
required to bring seraphim into this world that do not exist in the empire – hence why Estalia can have
them and the empire doesn’t.
The Orc gods just “Prefer” to work through the greenskins, they see them as their servants already so just
empower them, or possess constructions made by them for their assistance.

This framework for Gods and Daemons then gives a bit of structure and logic to some of the rules and
background to the armies. It has some implications -for one the Ind History and religion section needs
expanding to make this clear and then there are a few holes in the army books that could be straightened
out – most notably greater Daemons of Hashut and lesser Daemons of the Horned rat. There is also some
internal conflict in the Araby book between where the genies come from and the worship of “The one” that
needs to be quietly resolved.

In terms of rules we’d have key word rules for Divine/Daemonic and for Possessed in the BRB. Then just
assign these rules to the units. This would bring Chaos Daemons and Deva into alignment for example and
mean the Daemonic rule would not need to appear in each army book.