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.

Warhammer chaos and conquest chapter 2