The Monstrefact: Chaos Daemons of Khorne

imperium with various dark, fantasy, and medieval elements. This aggressive imperium is challenged on all sides by equally warlike alien societies, but they also face the threat of chaos. In the forty case setting, the demons of chaos exist a psychic dimension called the Warp, but they can spill over into what is called real space through various methods and exploits. So in this setting, demons are not the mere creation of religion or occultism, but an actual spiritual and physical

threat to humanity. Heretical drift on a far flung planet can mean far more than just mere rebellion. It can lead to a demonic incursion that consumes billions of souls.

There are various ways to divide up demonic factions in a created world like this, but forty K largely swits the forces of chaos into four distinct flavors, red, blue, green, and purple, representing bloodthirst, chaotic change, pestilence, and hedonism, each a major conduit of mortal emotions and mortal souls in the fictional forty first millennium, with each conduit accreting into a powerful entity known as a chaos god. They are Corn, Zinch, Nergal,

and Slanesh. There are other lesser CHAOSK gods as well, but these are the four main factions, and while they sometimes come to a working agreement with each other, they're mostly at war amongst themselves in what is referred to as the Great Game. In this episode, will start with Corn as the so called Blood God is a lot more direct. He's powered by mortal violence and war. He's all about rivers of blood and pyramids of bone. His favorite color is obviously red, and he's not big on subtlety.

His demonic hords and mortal followers dig horns and blades. They spill blood for the Blood God, so really there's not much to elaborate on here. However, in browsing through the ninth edition Chaos Demons Codex from Games Workshop, I simply couldn't let the unit known as a skull canon

pass without comment. There's a lot of talk of skull harvesting with some of the other their corn units, and this one amounts to a big honking heavy metal cannon, A couple of red demons called blood Letters crew the weapon, loading it up with the fresh remains of slain enemy soldiers. The cannon breaks everything down and then fires flaming skulls

across the battlefield, again fittingly direct. Thus far, in actual human warfare, skulls and heads have proven poor missiles, but the presentation of decapitated heads to the enemy has a long history, with plentiful examples to be found. In the classical and ancient world. The heads of enemy dead might be delivered directly to enemy lines, that might be placed

on spikes or what have you. Ruth Schuster, writing for Harets in twenty eighteen, points out that Iron Age Galls even developed a resin based embalming method to ensure the captured heads of their enemies didn't rot too fast. As Peter Franca Pant points out in his book The First Crusade, The Call from the East, the Crusades saw a lot of head taking on both sides, and there are Western accounts of crusader heads being catapulted back into their siege

camps in order to hurt morale. The same terror tactics were said to have been used by French crusader host as well. This according to the French themselves in the Old French Crusader Cycle. According to Sarah Grace Heller in twenty eleven's Terror in the Old Crusade Cycle, various other catapult age accounts described the launching of dead bodies into camps and besieged cities as a means of terror and

or biological attack. The age of the cannon presented various new ideas of how cannons might be used in one way or another to spread human remains. None of these methods use the remains as ammo against other combatants are

worth noting. Nonetheless, the execution method known as blowing from a gun often entailed the strapping of a live victim to the mouth of a cannon, resulting in partial or complete scattering of the remains on the other end of the spectrum, cremated ashes are on occasion spread by cannon fire as a desired dramatic funerary right in modern times. In a broader sense, however, the use of human remains

as weapons dates back to prehistory. Europeans were crafting human bones into weapons at least ten thousand years ago, practice that continued into recent centuries for other far flung cultures, at least for symbolic and spiritual reasons. Now, as far as the creation and veneration of artifacts made from human bones goes, this is the kind of thing that's probably lost on the chaos god Corn. All he cares about is the hacking, of the stabbing, and of course the

occasional explosively propelled pyrotechnic human skull. We'll continue through the chaos factions in this manner over the next three weeks, so tune in to the Monster Fact on Wednesdays in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast fee As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,