Chaos is not one, but many. Its essence is primal and formless, yet within that maelstrom rise vast immortal entities — the Chaos Gods, embodiments of mortal vice, ambition, and despair. Each God reflects the darkest passions of sentient creatures, feeding on those emotions and rewarding their worshippers with strength, madness, or damnation. While united in opposition to the mortal world, the Ruinous Powers are eternally divided, locked in the Great Game: an endless war of rivalries, plots, and vengeance that defines the Realm of Chaos itself.
Below are the chief deities of damnation, their domains, and their followers.
Domains: Wrath, hatred, murder, war, bloodshed
Marks: The Skull Rune, weapons dripping crimson
Khorne, also called the Lord of Murder, Hunter of Souls, and the Lord of Skulls, is the mightiest of the Dark Gods. He embodies mortal rage, vengeance, and the lust for battle. Every drop of blood spilled, whether by worshipper or foe, strengthens his throne of brass and skulls.
His creed is simple: “Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it does.”
Khorne despises magic, regarding sorcery as cowardice. His hatred burns brightest for Tzeentch, whose scheming and trickery are an affront to straightforward slaughter. Yet his greatest enmity is reserved for Slaanesh, whose decadent pleasures and perversions he sees as weakness. To Khorne, rage is pure; all other emotions are indulgence.
Khorne’s champions are warriors without equal: berserkers, skull-takers, and juggernaut riders who kill not for coin or conquest, but to appease their god’s insatiable hunger for blood.
Domains: Change, sorcery, mutation, ambition, schemes
Marks: The twisting flame, the eye of fate
Known as the Architect of Fate, the Great Conspirator, and the Raven God, Tzeentch is Chaos in motion: the embodiment of change, hope, and deceit. He is the patron of sorcery, mutation, and those who hunger for forbidden knowledge.
Tzeentch feeds on mortal ambition — every dream of betterment, every scheme for power, every rebellion against fate. Yet his plots are layered upon plots, woven so deeply that even his servants rarely glimpse their true purpose.
His eternal rival is Nurgle. Where Tzeentch thrives on hope and transformation, Nurgle feeds on despair and inevitability. Their rivalry is one of destiny itself: change versus stagnation, hope versus acceptance.
His followers are magisters, schemers, and twisted mutants, who wield reality-bending sorcery and embrace the ever-shifting flesh their god bestows.
Domains: Pleasure, obsession, excess, vanity, decadence
Marks: The serpentine coil, the rune of excess
The youngest of the Ruinous Powers, Slaanesh is called the Prince of Pleasure, the Perfect Prince, and the God of Obsession. He embodies lust, pride, and the insatiable hunger for sensation. Where mortals crave beauty, indulgence, or perfection, there whispers the Dark Prince.
Slaanesh can appear as male, female, both, or neither — always as the most alluring form a mortal can imagine. Followers are drawn ever deeper into perversion: pleasures once satisfying grow dull, demanding ever greater extremes until nothing is left but ruin.
The great rival of Khorne, Slaanesh embodies all the indulgence and weakness the Blood God despises. Yet to mortals, his temptations are among the hardest to resist.
His champions are beautiful and terrible: swift, graceful, and lethal, their blades dripping with both venom and desire.
Domains: Disease, decay, death, despair, endurance, rebirth
Marks: The rotting fly, the three-ringed circle
To mortals he is the Lord of Decay, the Fly Lord, and the Master of Pestilence. To his followers, he is “Grandfather Nurgle” — a paradox of decay and affection. He embodies despair, rot, and the inevitability of death, yet offers acceptance, endurance, and a grotesque form of hope.
Nurgle is jovial, even loving, toward his followers. His plagues and poxes are “gifts,” freeing mortals from fear of death by granting them his eternal, diseased embrace. His daemons are grotesque yet playful, mirroring their master’s paradoxical cheer.
His eternal rival is Tzeentch, for where Nurgle represents acceptance of fate, Tzeentch embodies the hope to change it.
His champions are plaguebearers, bloated warlords, and shambling hosts, spreading pestilence with every breath and strike.
Domains: Ruin, strife, pestilence, hunger, ambition
Marks: The crooked rune of vermin
The Horned Rat — the Lord of the World Below and god of the Skaven — is not one of the four great Chaos Gods but a minor power clawing for supremacy. He embodies all that the ratmen are: cunning, hunger, treachery, and endless ambition.
Despised as a “godling” by the greater powers, he nevertheless dreams of overthrowing them. Through his countless Skaven worshippers, he spreads corruption across the world. His greatest temple lies in Skavenblight, home of the Black Pillar of 169 Commandments.
Where the Great Game rages above, the Horned Rat prepares his children for the “Great Ascendancy” — the day the Under-Empire will rise to claim the surface world as its own.
Domains: Fire, tyranny, greed, industry, sacrifice
Marks: The blazing bull
The dread god of the Chaos Dwarfs, Hashut is often depicted as a bull wreathed in smoke and flame. Called the Father of Darkness, he is worshipped through fire, blood, and industry. Some claim he is a minor Chaos God; others, a mighty daemon unleashed in the Great Catastrophe.
The Chaos Dwarfs of Zorn Uzkul turned to Hashut when their Ancestor Gods abandoned them. In return for blood sacrifices and endless servitude, he granted them protection from mutation, mastery of sorcery, and the secrets of daemon-forged machinery.
His priest-kings, the Sorcerer-Prophets, are both high priests and rulers, fusing dark sorcery with forgecraft to create the monstrous engines of war that define their dominion. Over centuries, the pact between dwarfs and god has become inseparable — their souls and his malice bound as one.
Not all servants of Chaos pledge to one god alone. Many revere Chaos Undivided, worshipping the pantheon as a whole or venerating Chaos as a primal force beyond individual deities. Some scholars name this totality the Great Beast, with the four powers as aspects of a single, unknowable god.
The champions of Chaos Undivided are often the most feared: warlords who unite the squabbling cults and daemonic hosts beneath a single banner. The greatest of these is the Everchosen, the mortal champion of all four gods. When such a leader rises, the fractured forces of Chaos march together — and the world trembles, as in the Great War Against Chaos and the End Times.