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The chaos gods create, change, guide and destroy their daemons at will.

But what prevents the gods creating an infinite (or very large) number of daemons to overwhelm the physical realms?

I know from the board game Chaos in the Old World there are a limited number of power points per round per god for summoning minions and cards, but what do these represent in-universe?

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2 Answers 2

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Worshipers and worshiping, they need lots and lots of both.

GW leaves the exact mechanics vague (probably) in order to give their army of authors some leeway when writing new army books or novels / short-stories.

It differs from 40k to Fantasy too, but generally the Chaos gods need a huge amount of worshipers doing whatever it is that particular Chaos god really likes (violence, sex, being really sick, changing stuff?) for quite some time before enough energy gathers in order for open a gateway to the warp, then out come the demons.

There are literally an endless supply of demons in the warp, but the problem is, each one can only last a short time on our plane before they expire, I suppose each one has a built in battery which they use up pretty fast.

AFAIK, it's never really explained why a demon can only last X number of minutes or hours outside the warp. Our plane of existence is probably toxic or too clean for them.

Greater demons can last longer but they need constant death, sexy time, disease or change to sustain them while they're here.

It's only in a situation where the wall between our reality and the warp has been completely broken down that you'll see huge prolonged incursions. The End Times for example, or the Eye Of Terror. These situations usually require some massive cataclysm so we don't see them very often.

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Other Chaos gods.

You forgot that gods keep fighting with each other even when cooperation would bring a crushing defeat to the reality - this is simply their nature. The best example comes from the latest development in the universe: Cadia has fallen and only the return of Roboute Guilliman has prevented of the fall of Ultramar.

What Chaos did? Instead of pushing for victory

Within the Warp, wars ended even as fresh ones began. Daemonic legions were pulled away from nightmarish battlefields and hurled through breaches in the veil of reality, charged with hunting down and putting an end to the reborn Primarch. ** Yet the servants of the Dark Gods are ever opportunists, and believed that this moment of distraction could be used to strike at their respective masters' rivals amongst the Chaos pantheon.**

So Khorne invaded Tzeentch's Labyrinth an Slaanesh decided to attack the Garden of Nurgle (funny enough the animosity is usually on the Khorne-Slaanesh and Tzeentch-Nurgle lines, since Khorne is all about the quantity of killing while Slaanesh is about "quality" of it; Tzeentch represents hope while Nurgle despair).

So if one chaos god would decide to send all his armies against material world (which like @Daft pointed is not without cost), he would be obliterated by his opponents.

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  • Unless they have a super mega champion like Archaon. Hence The End Times.
    – Daft
    Oct 11, 2017 at 8:27

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