Why do we Fight Chaos

Introduction: This is an in-game essay on why the fight against Chaos is not in vain.  Warpstone did a somewhat similar piece, 'Fighting Chaos - why bother?' which is collected in 'Corrupting Influence.'  However that piece focuses on the problems of chaos in the setting more than it sketches out solutions.  I wanted to provide an in-character explanation that did not change the setting (like turning the law gods into equally powerful opposites of the chaos gods, which would be a bit too dualistic and Moorcockian for my tastes).

By Pretorius Fasnacht, Magister Obscurans (original master of the Grey Order)

This does not seem like an important question now, in the hour of our triumph.  Magnus has vanquished Asavar Kul, and the remnants of the chaos hordes have been burned and butchered in the Grovod Forest.  Norsca, so long under the domain of dark chieftains, turns back to Taar and Olric.  Our Empire, once divided, is one nation again.

And yet we who fight Chaos must ask this question, because we must be honest about what we are fighting.  Chaos is a vast force, more ancient than man, given form and power by man’s own dark desires and sins.  Our gods protect us, but they are human gods, not the great dark powers that are arrayed against us.  Heresy, you may say, but I have travelled the world and there are no universal gods -- the elves have theirs and we have ours and the Indians have something else.  Those who remain of the Old Faith have no gods at all, only the living, breathing world.  Our gods can protect us, but only inasmuch as we protect ourselves.*

What are we compared to the vast and alien minds of greater daemons?  We are as beasts of the field, perhaps.   Does this mean that we all puppets of The Changer of Ways?  No.  For human beings have freedom and power all their own.  I have seen daemons surprised, confounded, confused.  It was not the gods that did this, but man.  And this is logical.  For daemons see far, but no mind can know everything, particularly when there are free men walking around the world.  For the only way to know everything would be to control everything, and chaos does not control us yet.  We can still surprise it.

No power possesses universal knowledge.  Aluminas is said to be all-wise, but  this is because Aluminas exists in the unchanging and perfect knowledge of its own perfection.  Aluminas is not acted on by the world, and thus perceives nothing.  All perceiving beings perceive something that is outside of them and not in their unqualified control, and thus must needs remain ignorant or something, since they cannot perfectly know what they cannot control.

It is said by some daemonologists that even our victories are part of The Changer of Ways’ plan.  This reeks of evasion and post-hoc justification.  And yet there is some grain of truth -- Chaos is self-contradictory.  The Sigmarites scoff at turning Chaos against itself, and those who would summon daemons to fight daemons are dangerous fools indeed, but does not our magic, the very stuff of chaos, turn back the hosts of the abyss?   Do not the many plots and counterplots and competing cults and champions do much to hinder Chaos?  The very mutable vibrancy that makes Chaos so resilient to being fully stamped out (that vibrancy that lives within all men) can turn against the apocalypse almost as easily as it can aid it.

We are a young race, and in some ways a foolish one.  But we are stronger than we seem.


*Here we can distinguish gods, which are formed (if not created) by our belief and ritual, and powers, that arise independently of human worship.  This includes not just the dark powers but also the ‘gods’ of law, whose form seems more determined by their interaction with the changing world than the beliefs of their worshippers.