Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. It is a universe you can live in today if you dare - for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort of hope. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. Human blood and human flesh - the stuff of which the Imperium is made. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten. He is a rotting carcass writing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology.
He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. It’s been changed and altered over the years, but here are the original words from 1987:įor more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. Its earliest official work, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (written by Rick Priestly), begins with a preamble, a kind of Star Wars-style opening crawl that lays out the most basic facts that the reader needs to know. But, even early on, you’ll also find more literary call-backs, including nods to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For instance, looking back at its inception in the late ’80s, you’ll find elements from Frank Herbert’s Dune, with a God-Emperor, a hatred of AI, and the spacefaring Navigators. Warhammer 40K began as a pastiche of science fiction and fantasy tropes. We’ve created this guide with newcomers in mind, and we’ll pepper our primer with recommendations for games, books, videos, and even entire factions that you might want to learn more about. But it’s possible to engage with the 40K fandom with a running start, gathering up bits of its nearly 40-year backstory as you go along. Meanwhile, since the narrative has never been rebooted or retconned, there are few official on-ramps for new players. Fan wikis and forums can be esoteric and packed with proper nouns. Much like real history, it can be hard to piece everything together. Instead, it’s up to the reader to sift through all the dusty - and highly collectible - tomes in order to parse its primary sources.
Just like actual history, no single narrator or historian in the grim darkness of the far future is 100% reliable. Instead, Games Workshop and its publishing arm Black Library has taken the stance that everything ever written about its sprawling lore is “true” - all of it is canon, more or less since its inception in the 1980s. There has been little active curation of Warhammer 40K canon.
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