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Does anyone know the history of warding in 40k? Like is it something humans discovered on their own, or did their DAOT trade and cultural encounters with Xenos, mostly the Eldar, teach them how to make them?
And what do these wards look like? Cause mostly for a fanfic of the head, I'm imagining the Eldar just before the birth of Slanesh, where there are a number of people staying on the Crone Worlds, but they're living in these giant bunker cities that have ever imaginable ward being carved into the walls*
*basing this on a story of one eldar monk who died intact on Beial IV because he was in a heavy warded temple of either Vaul or Assurian.
Likewise are their distinct differences between warding all Warp energies, Chaos, and demons (because not nearly all demons of the Warp are Chaos spawned)? Or have different effects? I'm thinking of ships whose exterior hulls are filled with a thin bulkhead of holy water that work so that if the ship does enter Warp territory, especially warp storms and the gellar fields fail, demons can still come through but the ship's interior can't morph into giant Voreing holes like I head about in the Damnation of Toreus.
Cause the question comes down to....how much of a planet can you ward? Can you ward houses? Fields? Cities? Continents? Could you ward an entire planet such that it was completely shielded from the Warp, that Tzeench could see nothing, Nurgle could inflict no plague, that no chaos taint or mind and/or body was possible....unless the Chaos Marines showed up to wreck everything?
Warding is a lot of things but primarily it's
1) A scathing indictment of Big E's approach to Chaos. Without him hushing it up it would be a vastly less fragmentary art because guess what — It looks too much like religion to practice openly with a Pol Pot level Anti-theist at the helm
2) A scathing indictment of the persistent fanon idea that the power of symbols and rituals exclusively draws from the conviction of the wielder.
Okay. Rant aside: It's from many, many, many different sources. Not least of all books used by cultists. You never get anything for free with the Warp meaning even a completely devoted servant of the dark powers will have to include warding sigils into his workings to prevent being ripped apart.
Some knowledge likely percolates out from the Black Library because while they're anal about who they let in there they're not above giving competent parties a hint now and then.
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There is a Dæmon called a Glitchling that convinces wayward crewmen to remove the wards from the Warp core so the Gellar Field can be manipulated from outside.
Seeing how Warp drives predate the great crusade you may infer that some degree of warding knowledge existed back than.
Teleportation devices also may have wards though it may be misinterpretation or superstition.
Generally: assume that your protagonists don't fully know unless it's critical.
Oh yeah. It's possible to divine stuff like a Dæmon's true name from the Warp through trial and error (that's how Grey Knights get their stash) so that's another avenue.
But ya meta analysis could definitely work. Read up on divinatory readings of the bible or other holy books. We know the Warp influenced a lot of religions and that piecing them together is how Lorgar found Chaos. So just by doing a merry Sitchin-esque deep dive you could likely pull a formula for invoking protection from Nurgle's rot from a japanese liturgical songa Nigeria prayer and catholic treatises on witches if combined the right way.