The Chaos Sacred Numbers

[Evil Hypnotist]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering what the sacred number for each of the Dark Gods is, I did a search and could only find Morkash telling someone that Khorne's number is 8. I believe Nurgle's is 7 but can't remember where I heard that. Do Tzeentch and Slaanesh have their own, are there any minor Gods with sacred numbers?

Cheers

[Iverald]

Slaanesh's os 6 and Tzeentch's is 9.

[kramplarv]

Slaanesh: 6
Nurgle: 7
Khorne: 8
Tzeentch: 9

Why Slaanesh have 6 is something that puzzles me.7,8,9 are numbers which are considered mystical and magical etc all over the world, throughout human history.
3,5,7,8,9 are most commonly the "magical/mystical" numbers, So 6 have nothing to do here. my only reasonable explanation is that GW wanted the numbers to follow each other, and then someone had to be #6

[andyg2006]

They used to be in order of ascendancy, so Tzeentch (who started everything off) got the highest number and everyone else got something less than 9.
They also used to have special rules (e.g. something like a free 'Sergeant' leader, etc) for units which were their God's favourite number (or multiples of it), so 6 was an okay number from this resepect, whereas having it as a lower number (eg 3 or 5) would mean you'd be getting the free stuff for not many standard guys.

[Axeman1n]

It's very troubling to me, as I feel that Tzeentch's true number is in fact 3. 9 is just three threes. It seems that GW's haste to make the lexicon and greed at forming units of large numbers bypassed the obvious number 4 and 3 becasue they are too small. Khorn should be 4, a number often associated with death and destruction.

[Gorbad Ironclaw]

Have it actually had any rules impact outside of the 3.5 CSM book?

[Scalebug]

They used to be in order of ascendancy, so Tzeentch (who started everything off) got the highest number and everyone else got something less than 9..

Source?

Don't think there is all that much thought to it, someone just decided on relatively low numbers that could reasonably be used as unit sizes and assigned them to the gods 25 years ago and it has stuck... any deeper numerological meaning in later works is just construction after the fact.

"Undivided" used to be 10, but it was really sparsely used... Only place I can recall seeing it was in the Space Hulk expansion with chaos marines, where you got your sacred number as members of squads... somebody should have called the game-balance police, since there was no difference between the gods in the rules, only that Undivided or Tzeench were numerically better than the others..

[mrtn]

Why Slaanesh have 6 is something that puzzles me.7,8,9 are numbers which are considered mystical and magical etc all over the world, throughout human history.
3,5,7,8,9 are most commonly the "magical/mystical" numbers, So 6 have nothing to do here. my only reasonable explanation is that GW wanted the numbers to follow each other, and then someone had to be #6

To me Slaanesh=6 is the most obvious, but then I come from a country were the word sex means both sex and six. It should be sufficiently close in English as well, I've certainly seen jokes about it before.

[Evil Hypnotist]

It's very troubling to me, as I feel that Tzeentch's true number is in fact 3. 9 is just three threes.

This seems correct to me, I was reading A Thousand Sons and near the beginning Ahriman mentions the sacred number 9 (although obviously not in terms of Tzeentch), how his chapter was 9 companies; 3x3. Considering who they align themselves with eventually I'm sure Graham McNeil put it in on purpose.

Cheers for the replies, I can think about how I should be setting up my warrior units properly now

[TheDungen]

i'm guessing since tzeench is the god of change that any multipliers and roots of 9 is also empowered by him, it seems like his kind of thinking.

[inq.serge]

To me Slaanesh=6 is the most obvious, but then I come from a country were the word sex means both sex and six. It should be sufficiently close in English as well, I've certainly seen jokes about it before.

Yeah. And I wouldn't be surprised if one of the swedish-speakers ( Maybe Isak Hedström?) would point that out to the Dev team.

[TheDungen]

i think they knew that when the made the decision.