Chaos Gods - History: In the early history of the galaxy, the powers of the Warp had yet to form into distinct, intelligent entities. At this time, the emotions of sentient mortals flowed and ebbed as water does in a stream.As the intelligent mortal species of the galaxy grew and prospered, so did the strength of their emotions. Eventually, the entities within the Warp grew to such a point where they could act independently of the general flow of emotions and thus became the Gods of Chaos.They reached into the dreams of mortals and demanded praise and servitude in order to increase their own power, as the more one emotion is exhibited (in both thought and action) by a large group of sentient beings in the physical universe, the stronger that Chaos God becomes.The Warp is the mirror of reality, a churning sea of raw psychic energy fed by the emotions of every creature of the galaxy who hopes, hates and dreams. It is a place of metaphor and madness, that can never be perceived or understood except through symbols and subjective interpretation. The strange powers of psykers of all kinds flow from the power of the Warp, the psyker's mind acting as a channel for the unreality of the Warp to affect reality.It is also the Warp that allows Mankind, and many other races, to travel the vast distances of space. Starships pass through the Warp, their courses guided by Navigators bred to perceive and read the tides of psychic energy. All this was known in the time of the Emperor's Great Crusade, but it was only half the truth.The gods whose existence was once denied by the early Imperium of Man's ruling ideology called the Imperial Truth are real. Vast formations of psychic energy, storms of dark emotion, persistent notes in the symphony of existence, all descriptions fall short of the true nature of the Powers of the Warp.Powerful beyond mortal comprehension, parasitic and malign they are the Ruinous Powers, the pantheon of lies, the Primordial Annihilator. They have countless names in countless tongues, but to those who have glimpsed even a fraction of their existence, they are best known as the Chaos Gods.These utterly alien entities hunger for the mortal realm, even though it is as fundamentally poisonous to their nature as air is to a creature of the deep ocean.They can extend their power into reality, can expend power to influence mortals, corrupt physical existence, even send portions of themselves to walk amongst mortals as the entities called "Daemons," but only for a time.To truly affect reality, they must use mortal creatures of flesh and blood. To such servants they can gift powers beyond imagining, offering the coin of the impossible in exchange for eternal slavery.To many Humans such an exchange may seem the only way to escape from the pain of life, or to achieve their heart's desire, and in the superstitions and beliefs of the past, the Chaos Gods wait for the vain, the suffering, the wrathful and the desperate.The Imperial Truth once strangled the beliefs and practises in which the Chaos Gods lurked. It hid the truth because the Emperor believed that such deliberate ignorance was the only way to protect Mankind from the predations of the Dark Gods.