Revisting Khorne

It seems a bit strange to be doing a revisiting article for Khorne. Of all the chaos gods, Khorne comes across as the most realised and fleshed out in terms of how he’s depicted in the lore and on the tabletop. “Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne” is one of the most well known and widely used phrases among the community, and Age of Sigmar was launched with his faction as the primary antagonists. He has his own gang in Necromunda and was, for quite a while, the only god in 40k to get a dedicated plastic Chaos Space Marine kit for one of his units. Admittedly the Berserkers are very long in the tooth at this point and have been eclipsed by Tzeentch and Nurgle, but they were the first.

If Khorne has a problem on the table, it’s that his stuff *does* come out first, and then gets superseded by more interesting models and rules when the other gods get their due. Khorne seems so obvious, that giving a bunch of guys axes and a surfeit of skulls and plonking them in the model-o-tron (which, I assume, is the standard design process) seems relatively straightforward. But, that does mean that the range ends up feeling a little flat and monotonous, which is a shame because I think there’s a lot more to be discussed with the blood god than simply taking heads and spilling claret.

I think it’s too straightforward to say that Khorne is the god of warriors. All the chaos gods are attractive to warriors, it just depends on what exactly any given warrior is after. An individual concerned with personal martial prowess would find a place with Slaanesh, one interested in complex battle plans and manoeuvres would go to Tzeentch and even Nurgle would find his martial followers in those who seek community and brotherhood among the downtrodden. I’ve often seen these desires attributed to followers of Khorne and it doesn’t seem to fit with me. Khorne is unquestionably the God of War, but that doesn’t mean he has to be the god of warriors. Battle needs warriors, but battle is not exclusive to Khorne, all the gods engage in it. It’s literally all they do. But war, war doesn’t need warriors. War just needs bodies. Lots and lots of bodies.

The first thing we need to do here is clearly differentiate war and battle. Battle is any kind of minute-to-minute combat, where individual actions performed by individual combatants matter a great deal. Individual glory can win a battle. War, however, is more than just fighting. War is logistics. War is planning, and production, and manpower and difficult choices. Rarely, in war, do the actions of an individual matter. Khorne is the god of War because Khorne, unlike the other gods, demands a material quota. ‘Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne’ is a much more definite statement of intent than the other members of the pantheon, and it speaks to his very no-nonsense, straightforward nature. Spilled blood and severed heads are the products of grand violence, and the best way to sustain violence on the sort of level that would appease a god is through constant, industrialised warfare.

This is where we get to the crucial part. Painting Khorne as merely some kind of grand warlord is missing the point. It’s too small a designation, too narrow in its expression. A warlord can only draw on the strength of his own armies. Khorne has his own followers who commit great violence in his name, but they are only part of the plan. The other great adage attributed to the Blood God is ‘Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, so long as it flows’. All war feeds Khorne, and so it’s in his interests not just to have the fealty of the soldiers, but of the production lines, the propaganda, the populist sentiment and the politicians. Thing is, Khorne isn’t a warlord.

Khorne is a war profiteer.

Khorne is capitalism writ large.

The emotions we associate with Khorne, anger, hate, wrath, these can provoke sudden acts of violence, sure, but can also be used to foster nationalist sentiment, factionalism and deep-seated prejudice that allows conflict to brew and explode. The superlative warrior, long associated with Khorne, is the propagandists dream during wartime, a person who’s image can be used to spur soldiers on to greater heights of martial action. The idea of a good kill, an act of individual violence seemingly at odds with the impassive industrialised slaughter that I’m gesturing at here, can break an army. In many of the great battles of history it is when one army breaks and runs that the genuine wholesale killing can begin.

Khorne requires constant, exponential warfare because of the nature of the chaos gods. Khorne requires the skulls for his throne, and as he grows more powerful, so must his throne. Khorne requires skulls from martial violence, and so needs a monopoly on the nature of death. Nurgle rots and decays, fouling blood and bone. Tzeentch’s plots are too complicated and frustrate the logistics of production that one would need to prosecute total war, and what’s more, the byzantine, calculating nature of The Changer of Ways is at odds with the impulsive anger Khorne fosters in his followers. Finally, Slaanesh is too artisanal. She Who Thirsts is more interested in the art of the kill than the kill itself, the perfection of the act rather than the product of it.

This desire to control everything, to want to produce more and more, to regard people as a component in the logistical pipeline, is inherently and terminally capitalistic. It is production for the sake of production, a worldview that measures success by year-on-year increases in output. The individual is irrelevant, all that matters is profit. Khorne’s bedfellows are not Ghengis Khan, or Alexander the Great, or Napoleon. Khorne’s associates are Amazon, the fossil fuel industry, the horrifying Rigor in Friends at the Table’s COUNTER/weight series. Khorne’s violence is the violence of unconstrained industry.

So, how do we go about representing this on the tabletop? It’s tricky, as tabletop war-games simulate battles, not wars, and the crucial logistical element that defines warfare is often necessarily overlooked. The first thing to look at is the prevalence of the axe among Khorne units. The axe is for Khorne, as it is as much a tool as it is a weapon. More mass-producible than a sword, it has its roots in production and industry, and it is used in the literal job of taking heads when wielded by a headsman or executioner. This lends it a certain ritualistic symbolism, which makes it perfect for the more religiously fervent among the faithful of Khorne, but I feel like it shouldn’t be the be all and end all for his followers, especially in 40k. The axe should be the preserve of the priest class, whereas the great mass of the soldiery should be equipped with weapons of wholesale slaughter. The touchstone here should be the first world war, where industrialisation finally, conclusively met Imperial ambition. This imagery already exists in the game in the form of Forge World’s Death Korp of Krieg. The faceless, industrialised and death-obsessed soldiers of this particular branch of the Astra Militarum would be perfect as Khornate soldiers. Indeed, this idea can be seen quite clearly in the Blood Pact, one of the major antagonists of Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series. The army would use a lot of weapons of straightforward mass slaughter, machine guns, artillery and the like, resorting to brutal trench-raid style close combat when the need arises. In terms of Chaos Space Marines, the Iron Warriors serve as a better template for this industrialised warfare than Khorne’s own World Eaters. The World Eaters are a great idea for a Khornate holy order, more concerned with ritual than practicality, but the mechanised, methodical and impasionate nature of the Iron Warriors would serve khorne better in the long run. We also need to acknowledge that civilian levies and militia would only be a last resort for a Khornate force. Professional soldiers need materiel, and that materiel needs someone to produce it. Therefore, the workers would be kept back to run the factories as the soldiers were fed into the meat grinder. Let’s not forget that the workers won’t just be producing tribute in the form of arms and other materiel, but also with their own flesh and blood. Industrial accidents happen and as we all know, Khorne Cares Not. Of course, this is at the total war level, I think things like Necromunda’s Corpse Grinders are perfect at the scale they operate in, taking the idea of industrialised combat and applying it to gang warfare. They are literally using the tools of industry in Khorne’s name, even if they prefer to call him the Lord of Skin and Sinew.

Finally, it’s worth acknowledging that the mechanised, industrial nature of Khorne has a great deal of precedent. We can see it a little these days in the Khorne Lord of Skulls, and the Khorne Daemon Skull Cannon, but if we go back to the old Space Marine and Epic games, Khorne has a vast plethora of heavy daemonic machines that he uses to wage war. Having more of these specifically Khornate engines back in the game would be good, because they were a good idea to begin with, and would also spice up an otherwise quite conventional looking army. Forge World has kept up with some of these too, but it’d be nice to see them in plastic so we know they're at least here to stay for the foreseeable. While there are several non-aligned daemon engines, like the Forgefiend and Heldrake, having more specifically Khornate ones would go a long way to cementing Khorne as someone who wields industrialisation and mass-production as a tool of warfare.

I’m aware that with this revising article, I’m not really reinventing the wheel as far as Khorne goes, as I did with Slaanesh. I think that’s fine, as Khorne, as I say, is fairly well represented on the table. What I think needs more consideration is the background, of Khorne representing death-march capitalism and unsustainable production. This is essentially a mirror to the Imperium, and really drives home how deeply, terminally in trouble the Imperium is if its only survival tool merely empowers its enemies. I’ll also acknowledge that this piece is very 40k focused, but industrialisation is harder to do in fantasy. That being said, the notion of a merciless, but very professional army is definitely something you could run with in AoS. Probably lots of Khorne-aligned chaos warriors and knights, saving the Bloodbound specific units as holy warriors in the same way one might use Khorne Bersekers in a generic Chaos Space Marine army in 40k. Again, I’d love to see any projects using the ideas I’ve discussed here, even if they might not stand out as much as Slaanesh forces based on the article I did for them. Hopefully I’ll be doing Nurgle next, but I feel like next two Chaos Gods might be a little trickier. We’ll see what I can come up with.