Warhammer 40K Is Cool

In the grim darkness of the far future, 40,000 years from now, an immortal corpse-Emperor sits atop his Golden Throne on Earth, watching over the trillions upon trillions of human beings scattered across the galaxy. For ten thousand years, the Emperor hasn’t spoken or moved from that Golden Throne, and those masses of humans are ruled by the Imperium of Man in the Emperor’s name. Their often short existences are spent within the Imperium’s authoritarian systems that value ignorance over knowledge and stasis over change. Human life is cheap, and the Imperium spends it freely on neverending wars with a variety of aliens and the forces of Chaos, which inhabit an alternate dimension known as the Warp. Earth—Terra—is a hellscape, a city-planet packed with so many people that an accurate count is impossible, its oceans long since boiled away and its original surface buried beneath millennia of haphazard construction. The Imperium is a creaking, ramshackle realm where cruelty, hierarchy, and suppression are facts of life. Its greatest warriors, the Space Marines, are genetically altered monstrosities, created through processes that kill more than they successfully manufacture. Technology is controlled by closed-minded zealots who fear nothing more than innovation. Of course, the Imperium has an Inquisition, which roots out heresy of all kinds, and an official church (the Ecclesiarchy) dedicated to unquestioning worship of the Emperor. The aliens—xenos, in the parlance of the universe—are no better. The Orks live only for fighting; the elf-like Aeldari care little for lesser beings; their dark elf Drukharii cousins subsist on torture and pain; the Necrons are living-metal horrors who traded mortal life for soulless immortality tens of millions of years ago; the insectoid Tyranids, controlled by a hive mind, exist solely to consume every bit of biomass in their path; and even the T’au, the newest addition to the galaxy, who value the Greater Good above all, aren’t to be trusted.

Read it at Defector ↗

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