I've heard a lot of interesting ideas here that have definately expanded my spectrum of understanding. To flesh out where I'm coming from though, I'll share a few of my thoughts on the warp.To a human mind, any mind regardless of training, I believe that the warp presents an immense personal danger - the greatest danger seems to come to those who think themselves safe. If, as has been stated, the Warp is Chaos - Entropy - then it should completely repulse contact with the natural materium - which is why daemons are unstable. Thus a psyker drawing on any use of the warp is introducing a physical embodiment of 'wrongness' to the materium - things that could not and should not exist according to the (few) natural laws of order. I strongly approve of Jack of Tears notion that the psyker (if not every one else) should be aware of what exactly he has conjured up.

But the warp has always struck me as something fearful to the sane, even our favorite literary inquisitors - something you ought not to look directly upon, even while you manipulate it. Of those individuals seen to have 'fallen' or to be more privy to the nature of the warp, they seem to me to fall into one o two patterns of behavior due to 'over-exposure' to the warp: either a sensation of complete personal futility and irrelevance (such as you may get if you consider too long that, really, you are nothing but a walking bag of carbon-bonds that has no business possessing a sentience), or the exactly (rather Tzeentch-like) opposite - an awareness of the extreme -connectedness- of absolutely everything in the universe, how every mundane action, every fales preception of free-will, fits into an orchestrated, entropic plan - that of course, comes full circle back to futility. It really is mind-boggling. But, when one draws upon the warp, I try to invoke those notions, and the invocation is usually dark-seeming.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Yes, but it will not ALWAYS do as such, and there are plenty of races out there who do not believe the same (Orks, Eldar, Tau to name but 3, and while you can say Humans easily outnumber Eldar, it's hard to say that humans outnumber Orks). Belief DOES shape manifestation, which is why a sainted individual will manifest say (just to quote one of my favorite saint manifestations), billowing wings of green fire in the shape of the Imperial Double Eagle. Belief of the WIELDER is paramount, as no emperor blessed saint, or space marine librarian, etc, (and few inquisitors/acolytes/sanctioned pyskers etc) is purposefully drawing on something they believe is evil to do the emperor's will. Do you honestly think that a squad of Gray Knights will even remotely feel like the holy wrath they unleash with a Holocaust is tainted by darkness unless someone in their squad royally screws up and invites a perils roll? There's a reason why the conclave of Nikaia banned sorcery and not all psykers period. A sanctioned psyker, blessed by the Emperor (or office thereof, etc), I seriously doubt, would feel like the warp was out to eat their soul all the time, and the times it does, that's what perils/phenomina are for.

And before the argument comes up that, once a ship's Geller fields go pop in the warp, the ship is toast and all on board are lost, don't forget that something beautiful and wonderous can kill just as much as something horrifying and terrible. People can be stricken blind, dumb or dead by a vision of wonderous beauty as well as by something hideous.

The overall arch of humanity may be that the warp is evil, and so many negative things go into it, this is true, but remember the PC's, heck, the number of psykers not fed to the Emperor on a daily basis, is the tiniest fraction of people, and their ability to stay sane through regular use of their ability is the reason why they didn't wake up as bite 2000 of the God Emperor's daily meal.

As I understand it, the Warp (Immaterium) was a rather nice place until the Old Ones created the Eldar and other similar races to make it a tool of war. While the Eldar themselves created warp entities (gods) that were by and large not unpleasent, the effect of being used as a battlefield in a galactic war populated it with vicious predators, culminating in the four major Chaos Gods.

Chaos vs Order or Law isn't really a set of binary opposites a la Micheal Moorcock in 40k, although it certainly is inspired by that approach (original Warhammer follows that approach more closely). It's more that Chaos is the closest human term for what the Warp has become, and everyone else is just trying to hold it together.

As I understand it, the Orcs don't so much use the Warp as they generate their own version of it through the Waaaugh.

Just a note, a ship is not automatically lost the second the Gellar field malfunctions, it's just likely to be boarded by daemons or worse.

Nigh7gaun7 said:

Right, so it is most likely lost, but if you had the right crew, with the right equipment, and the right resources, able to hold their heads together .... you'd have that 13% chance .... or is it 9? Is that what all those Manifestions are? Just people like you once were trying to escape the warp, not realizing what has become of them? Make for an interesting theory.

BrotherHostower said:

Of course. I didn't say that such was always the case (you might have inferred it from my post, but that was never what I meant).

BrotherHostower said:

A non-argument, IMO. The nature of saints is debatable and disputable; they aren't simply psykers by another name.

BrotherHostower said:

It's hard to shake ten millennia of cultural inertia. Beyond that, in all those cases, it is just as likely that a given individual may well see their power as a curse, a vile thing that they use only because they must - not a gift, not a glorious thing to praise, but a tainted, dirty thing that receives only grudging tolerance even from its wielder.

BrotherHostower said:

To be honest, given what the Grey Knights know, I'd find it hard to imagine that they wouldn't at least acknowledge the vile potential of their powers. That they continue to be pure and uncorrupted by it is in spite of their power, not because of it.

BrotherHostower said:

The Emperor's judgement at Nikea was for the dissolution of every Astartes Legion's Librarius Divisions and an absolute ban on the use of psykers and psychic means with the specific exceptions of himself, Astropaths and Navigators (as per information in the various Horus Heresy books; this ban was not universally upheld, however, as both the Dark Angels and Thousand Sons retained their Librarians). We know from this that at some point after the Heresy, the edict was repealed, presumably by one of the surviving loyal Primarchs.

BrotherHostower said:

Every sanctioned psyker carries a knife (a Mercy Blade) with him with which he is expected to kill himself should the Warp threaten to consume him. Their power is dangerous, unstable and potentially destructive to both the psyker and everyone around him on spiritual, psychological and physical levels.

BrotherHostower said:

And evil (aside from being subjective) is not always something horrifying or terrible. Evil would be far less insidious were it always so obviously vile...

BrotherHostower said:

Such beings stay sane and safe in spite of their power... it's a dangerous thing to be able to tap into. The masses of humanity are told that the Warp is a hideous place full of monsters... those who can feel the Warp, reach into it and wield it know that it's a hideous, formless place full of monsters, because they're compelled by their own nature to have a naturally greater understanding of it.

As far as I'm concerned, the Warp is not, and cannot be defined as Evil. This isn't a matter of overarching morality, but simple logic - the Warp simply lacks the substance or perspective to be subject to human morals, being essentially a formless un-mass of raw unfulfilled potential. What the Warp is, however, is destructive. The very stuff of the Warp is dangerous to the very fabric of material existence, for to be subjected to the stuff of the Warp is to be subjected to the ultimate catalyst for change, substance which is anathema to the natural laws that govern reality.

You could not claim a vat of hydrochloric acid to be evil... but that doesn't mean it isn't extremely dangerous.

Nigh7gaun7 said:

That, or it's substance dissolves and mutates as the bubble of reality keeping the laws of physics intact around the ship fails, causing up to become purple, and left to become Tuesday.

Indeed, and I have attempted to maintian that sense of chaos as well. In one scene when the characters were overtaken by rampaging spirit possessions (I forget the name of the fumble) for Xd10 rnds, I didn't have them chanting evil curses and attacking one another, but merely engaging in wild actions of excess ... the sensualist Tech Priestess began seaking physical stimulation (which kind of creeped out the pcs), while the others expressed themselves in the most immediately powerful and aggressive ways they could - shy of harming their companions. (as the crit nor the situation seemed to call for that)

Later, when the reverse gravity effect was chosen, again it did not necessarily come across as evil, but rather more accurately as the amusement of a madd and capricious god who found wicked amusement in using things of flesh as mere toys. (though I didn't quite attribute so much sentience to it ... or at least, not a focused single sentience)

Any easy way to consider how one might portray the entities of the warp is to read a number of old, non bowdlerized translations of myth, faerietale, and folkore ... when they still recalled how untamed the wilds of land and man's souls were, and read up on those ... you will get a find a great deal of inspiration there.

I was thinking about how the warp is an alternate dimension and such when I came to a conclusion on how to explain with some logic. What if the creation of certain sentient species created the warp only based on the unique method of brain waves they used? It is speculated that magnetics and various other energies can interact with the dimension so how far would it really be to conclude this? This could mean that the specific patterns of brainwaves, the emotions if you would, would interact and coalesce into a unique whole. They would stand out from the background energies as well. Also what if these masses of signals formed into entities? If these entities grew in power they might be able to manipulate the forces around them and use them to influence the material realm. Yeah I know the futility of explaining an imaginary realm but sometimes it really does help to fathom it when roleplaying.

Now to explain the raw chaos of the realm, you could say that these entities are slaves to the material realms main contributers, sentient species. Being forced to change themselves over and over again would drive any intelligence insane or at least beyond rational comprehension. However as I stated, overarching patterns would exist, therefore creating the chaos gods.

Psykers could exist by having genetic traits that make their brainwaves stronger, more tuned into the warp. This would make them essentially a larger part of its total intelligence. Thus by being essentially part of it, they would be more malleable its effects. This would be corruption, as the individual in question is shaped by the warp.

Now to explain nulls, Tau, and others you just have to say they evolved differently to use non-receptive brain wave patterns. Some nulls might even have a sort of minor anti-field warp brainwaves where they create they impose their own unique brain wave pattern on the warp instead of being part of it.

So in my theory the warp already existed as an alternate dimension, much like the ones described by Hiem, so it wasn't any surprise when humans developed FTL using it. However the evolution of humanity and other species created dominate patterns which became intelligent. They then used their own link with the energies of both dimension to influence the material thus creating corruption.

How this relates to how psykers feel the warp you say? Well I might say that using the warp feels no different then thinking to regular people. The only trick however is to keep your thoughts from expressing themselves in the material universe. Also it helps to keep them from changing you. For example lets say a psyker is in a heated battle and he is very angry at his opponent. So he uses one of his powers and of course gets PotW. Rolling for corruption he gets 8. While he has now malignancies or mutations, he is changed. From then on he finds himself getting enraged more often, for slight, often petty reasons. The same thing would happen if one felt fear when corruption was gained.