The Aeldari, an ancient, mysterious race nearly destroyed by the fallout from their ancestors' decadence and now splintered into several distinct subcultures, see all other species as inferior and work to stave off the hellish afterlife looming over them in ways that put themselves and their kin at the centre of things. The most powerful alien races are all hostile to the Imperium and other factions in one way or another. Should it fail, the worlds of humanity would essentially be stranded, and the Imperium would wither and die.Īs bad as the Imperium is, however, all the other major factions are just as bad, if not far worse. However, traversing it is incredibly dangerous due to its disregard for the laws of reality, the prospect of being ripped apart by daemons should a vessel's protections fail, and the requirement of a specific kind of mutated human to perceive both the currents of the Warp and the Astronomican, a navigation beacon controlled by the Emperor's soul. The Warp, a corrupted parallel dimension connected to the material universe, provides the Imperium's only means of Faster-Than-Light Travel. Science and technology have scarcely progressed for ten thousand years, partly because they are treated with fear, ignorance and magical superstition, and partly because the Adeptus Mechanicus, the secretive, deranged machine cult that maintains the Imperium's technological base, generally sees innovation as blasphemy against the wisdom of the ancients and rightly fears the possibility of daemonic corruption of unproven equipment. Its most extreme measures go as far as destroying entire planets, just to be sure. The Space Marines (capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Knight Templar Super Soldiers based on the genetic traits and personalities of the Emperor's clone-sons) and the Sisters of Battle (the Ecclesiarchy's private army of equally fanatical, pyromaniacal battle nuns) serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the Imperial Guard, its at least trillions-strong regular army, takes disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes.Ī futuristic Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even the slightest taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien those in its grasp can expect to be press-ganged into its service should they prove useful, and meet sure death otherwise. Since then, he has become the godhead of the Imperium, and the incomprehensibly vast Ecclesiarchy spreads the Imperial Cult and commits horrible atrocities in his name (but against his philosophy) on an almost-daily basis. Its leader, known only as the Emperor, was betrayed and laid low by his most beloved son, and for more than ten millennia has been locked up in an arcane life support mechanism that anchors his soul in his withered corpse and requires the souls of a thousand psychic humans to be consumed as fuel per day. In the waning years of the 41st millennium, the game's central faction, the Imperium of Man, is a paranoid, fascist theocratic state which spans the galaxy but is struggling mightily to maintain its grip on its territory. In the distant past, humanity held immeasurable power and glory, but no longer. Set roughly thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the most basic summation of the game's plot is that our galaxy has been twisted into an unfathomable horror where an eternal, impossibly vast conflict occurs between several absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal, and (in at least one case) omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology, and creative piece of nastiness imaginable cranked to an outlandish extreme. More than anything else, 40K stands out from other tabletop wargames because of its extreme darkness. In its beginning it drew heavily on GW's previous Warhammer Fantasy game, and was essentially " Warhammer In Space," but over time grew distinct from ( and much more popular than) its counterpart. Warhammer 40,000, known informally as "Warhammer 40K," "WH40K," or just plain "40K," is a miniatures-based tabletop war game released by Games Workshop in 1987. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.įorget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.
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