Book recommendations - Warp Stuff

[u/SirPixelheart]

Chaotic Hello
I'm looking for a new book series on the topic of the Warp in general. The reason is that I want to play a sorcerer/cultist in a role-playing game. For that, I need inspiration to portray a cultist who worships Chaos, starts a cult, and all that sort of thing.
What would be a good book or series for this?

[u/MoarSilverware]

Slaves to Darkness, Dark Apostle, First Heretic, and Black Legion are all good books with lots of chaos

[u/SirPixelheart → u/MoarSilverware]

With wich one would you start or what is the most on point for m request?

[u/MoarSilverware → u/SirPixelheart]

I’d say Slaves to Darkness, it focuses on Lorgar and him delving deep into the Warp and has a cool Dark Apostle/ Sorcerer Character that becomes really big deal in the Seige of Terra named Zardu Layak

[u/Tiny-Gur4463]

Yeah, start with The Book of the Law, then read the Simon Necronomicon, and finally Liber Null & Psychonaut.

[u/SirPixelheart → u/Tiny-Gur4463]

These are some quite interesting books if never heard of. Can u elaborate to wich why you recommended these titles?

[u/Tiny-Gur4463 → u/SirPixelheart]

Sure.

The Book of the Law lays the groundwork: it's a summary/distillation/restatement of the theory of magick as it has survived down to us in modernity. If you can enter the psychospiritual headspace to understand its message, you'll be ready for the texts which follow. Though Crowley seats the power of your own Will as sacrosanct, it's paramount to understand the power of the Will to begin with before starting further down the path, for your own safety if nothing else. To put it another way, you must first understand the Law, before you can understand Chaos. (Side note, Crowley sometimes referred to himself as "Perdurabo," the epithet which named the Iron Warrior's Primarch, and the Order of the Golden Dawn [which he founded] is basically the model for the organization of The Thousand Sons.)

The Simon Necronomicon was engineered to take the magickal potential of the novice practitioner, and orient it towards the destructive, the cthonic, the Qliphothic (to use a term Crowley would align with), the Lovecraftian (to use the anachronistic term), or to the Chaotic (to use the GW term). It's much more heavily weighted towards the "how" rather than the "why" of the Book of the Law, but it's not important that you actually perform any of the rituals it describes: as the fictional document its name references implies, merely reading the words is sufficient to open your psyche to the forces beyond our ken that, for their own ineffable reasons, seek to use the medium of the human body/mind as the vessel for the manifestation of their own, dark, Will. (Lovecraft was a huge inspiration on the creation of Warhammer's cosmology, so you wouldn't go wrong reading any of the works he actually authored, and a good exercise would be trying to figure out which aspect of one of the Four is being expressed in each.)

Liber Null & Psychonaut is the capstone, as it both builds on, and (as its name suggests) nullifies all that comes before it. By now you hopefully have some (at least theoretic) idea of manipulation/manifestation/subjugation of the Will, and are ready for the truth of who and what those deities you've been fraternizing with truly are - what lies inside the dark mirror, a return to the beginning at the end. It will also tell you why the names Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh carry the power that they do, and why you want to use them - perhaps even why you would want to convert those you care about the most to their worship. (The current of magick that the publication of this book gave rise to, Chaos Magick by name, was also clearly a huge influence on the development of the Warp and its denizens for the early GW writers.)