I know a little about Orks and their weird group psychic thing where painting their ships red to go fast really makes them faster, and their tech only works because they think it should. But then I guess Orks aren’t even in this game.
I get that it’s a violent, black-vs-grey universe. I think it’s the originator of the term grimdark? The emperor is some immortal Mr House asshole who’s worshipped as a god, which powers some of their tech and protects them from chaos via his psyker shit? And he’s kind of a fascist, but it’s that or bloody chaos?
Rogue traders seem like somewhere between a privateer and a baron, plundering tithes in their castle-ships and acting as an arm of the Imperium in backwater space?
There are more wizards than I expected. Not sure if these mechanicus dudes are pulling “Temples of Syrinx” thing, or they know how the tech works but not why so they worship it? Or if it’s actually machine spirits?
I guess it’s probably helpful to know what a rogue trader actually is. I think the game explains it somewhat, but just in case, here’s a (not so) quick rundown on some major components of the lore and game.
A lot of people think that rogue traders are just the captain of a big ship. They are not. They command nearly unimaginable power within the imperium. They have a warrant of trade sealed with the blood of the emperor from a time when he walked among men. It is both a holy relic, and a hall pass to do whatever the fuck they want mostly. They are pretty much outside the bounds of imperial law. They can recruit xenos and worse into their crew. They can befriend, dominate, subjugate, and exterminate entire systems if they wish. Not even the Inquisition can really boss them around, but Lord inquisitors are probably the only authority to actually influence a rogue trader. A rogue trader wouldn’t want to piss off a lord inquisitor and vice versa.
It is the duty of rogue traders to navigate unexplored space and claim worlds for the imperium. The world’s they claim are theirs by right of their warrant of trade, but those worlds are required to pay tithe to the larger imperium, which is non negotiable. The tithe is usually set by the high lords of terra or the administrators that work underneath them.
As for wizards/magicians, they do and don’t exist. They are called psykers, and their “magic” is derived from the warp, the nightmarish parallel reality inhabited by daemons and their respective gods. Using warp energy is extremely dangerous, and can cause the veil between realities to thin. If it thins, tears open up, and daemons can burst forth. This is usually a one way street, as anything non-daemon entering, or even seeing the warp, will pretty much instantly go insane, turn into a chaos spawn, or worse. There are very few exceptions, but they do exist. There is a lot more to the warp, I’d recommend looking into it deeper if you’re interested. Leutin09 on YouTube is a great source.
Now that we know what both rogue traders are and what psykers are, we can talk about navigators, which are a really important part of the game and lore. They are human, but mutated. They have a genetic trait that gives them a third eye on their forehead. They use this eye to see into the warp. It’s not perfect, but it can help ships travel through the warp, which is humanity’s form of faster-than-light travel. Pretty much every warp capable craft will have one. Ones that don’t take extreme risks even doing the smallest warp jumps. Without navigators, the imperium is screwed. It’s why they are one of the very few types of sanctioned abhumans.
As for the mechanicus, machines spirits, and the god they worship, it’s somewhat complex. The mechanicus at its height was technologically progressive, and significantly more advanced than the contemporary version. They understood how to create and innovate. During the age of strife, they lost much of their knowledge. Creations they once built, they have lost the knowledge to rebuild, repair, enhance, and sometimes even maintain. When dark age technology is lost, it is usually lost for good, which makes it so valuable. The current day mechanicus has stagnated, and are afraid to progress as innovation has caused problems in the past (see Age of Strife and men of iron).
The modern day mechanicus warships the omnissiah, which is essentially the avatar of the machine god, which they believe is the emperor. In a roundabout way, they do workshop the emperor, which is relatively in line with the imperial creed. The mechanics is technically separate from the imperium per the treaty of Mars that the emperor signed, which gives the mechanicus religious freedoms and rights to technological finds, such a STC fragments. I’m not going to talk about STCs here. Mechanicus likes the fragments. They struck a deal with big E, and now they are an allied faction to the imperium. For all intents and purposes, you can consider them a joint faction, but they are technically distinct.
As for machine spirits, they do exist. I think of it kind of like how orc psychic manifestions work, though, to be honest I’m foggy on the details as machine spirits did exist during humanity’s enlightened phase. Technology does have machine spirits, and the more powerful the machine, the more powerful the machine spirit. Tech priests sometimes must commune with and appease machine spirits. Angry machine spirits can cause their host machine to misfire, break down, malfunction, etc. Appeased machine spirits can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the machine they are bound to, with some spirits being so powerful they can control aspects of a machine, such as advanced targetting systems, defensive capabilities, etc.
The last thing I’ll touch on is the emperor. Some comments say he’s dead, some say he’s alive. The truth is that he is neither. He is a husk that resides on the golden throne - a dark age of technology device that is a psychic amplifier and a life support system. It maintains his decript body and allows him to remain in a state of undeath. His psychic abilities are so powerful that he cannot really die. There is a lot more to this, as the emperor is a perpetual. I can expand on this more if you want, but I’ll leave it out for now as it’s complicated. Anyway, he is so powerful a psyker that he is the focal point or source of the astronomicon. This is essentially a psychic lighthouse in the warp that navigators will use a point of reference to know which way holy Terra is. They also say the emperor wages and eternal psychic war in the warp with the chaos gods, which keeps chaos from taking over the imperium of man.
You’ve got the gist of the foundation of the lore down, so my breakdown above is a little more comprehensive. Feel free to ask any more questions or DM me. I also wrote all this at 2am in the dark so if there are typos, inconsistencies, or things that need further clarification, I apologize and in advance.
Maybe you can confirm if I have some other stuff down that you didn’t mention? I poked my head down some wiki rabbit holes, and I love a good origin story so I started looking waaay back.
So the Warp is an alternate dimension affected by the thoughts and emotions of sentient beings from this one, and also apparently a place souls do or would go before being reincarnated? As we evolved and started having more of us and more complex negative emotions, these eddies in the Warp coalesced into Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle.
Earth’s shamans (proto-psykers?) start to notice their fellows aren’t reincarnating so much anymore and figure out the chaos gods are nomming them up in the Warp when they die. They get every shaman on earth together in a council, and decide on a Jonestown Voltron plan, whereby they’ll all kill themselves at once, fuse into a mega-soul in the Warp, and give the chaos gods good wallop to send them running for awhile.
That shaman Voltron soul incarnates in 8000 BCE as the boy that will one day be the Emperor.
Emps just kind of does the Vandal Savage thing on Earth until we get a spacefaring civilization rolling. He starts leading shit, allies with the Mechanicus on Mars and founds the Imperium in the late 30th millenium.
Unrelated and around the same time, the Aeldari (hedonistic space elves) have a rave orgy so good they cause Slaanesh to form and simultaneously fuck open that hole to the Warp someone mentioned.
Yadda yadda yadda space crusade
Yadda yadda yadda Horus Heresy
Yadda yadda “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”
Is that more or less on-point? I haven’t looked into most xenos too much besides the Aeldari waking Slaanesh. I think the T’au are the galactic newbies and kinda space dwarves? And the Nekrons were far far away genetically engineering slave races while Emps was still shitting his loincloth?
You’ve pretty much got it. I’ll reiterate some points below.
The warp, or the sea of souls, is an alternate dimension in which the soul of nearly every living being goes when its corporeal form dies. It is a place that is theorized to have always existed, although for much of it’s history, was a relatively peaceful and dormant place. As sentient species, particularly humanity, spread across the galaxy, it made the warp more tumultuous. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle have probably always existed in some lesser form, but as events transpire within real-space, they begin to grow in power. The cycle of life, death and decay fuels Nurgle, while Khorne grows more powerful as wars are waged. Tzeentch feeds on betrayal, schemes, plots, and change. These themes have been around since time immemorial, and so have these warp creatures that formed into the current day chaos gods.
The outlier is Slaanesh, who, as you noted, was pretty much murder-fucked into existence. Her birth was so catastrophic that she instantly killed most Eldar and and all their gods, and ripped open the galaxy in the heart of the Aeldari empire, which is why we now have the eye of terror.
Before I talk about Eldar, I need to talk about souls real quick. All souls reflect in the warp, and nearly every living thing has a soul. A plant probably isn’t going to show up in the warp, but a human soul will, though a human soul is barely a candle flicker. A human psyker however, will be a strong flame and be much more noticeable to daemons. An Eldar soul is a bonfire, and a delicacy for Slaanesh. Since the birth of Slaanesh, she saps the Eldar of their souls over time. If an Eldar’s soul is unprotected, over time, Slaanesh will turn that Eldar into a soulless husk. Each Eldar faction has a way of handling that problem which I’ll explain below.
Now this part may be kind of dense because Aeldari get a lot of representation within Rogue Trader. They come in several flavours - 3 main factions I can think of, but I’m sure there are additional smaller ones: Eldar (Aeldari), Dark Eldar (Drukhari), and Harlequins.
Eldar
After the birth of Slaanesh, some Aeldari believed they must renounce their hedonistic ways, which are your regular Aeldari you see today. They fly around on their craftworlds and generally refrain from murder fucking. They keep soulstones on them so that if they die, their soul can be captured by the stone before it departs to the warp and inevitably consumed by She Who Thirsts. These soulstones are placed into the craftworld itself, which forms a sort of Eldar-only purgatory called the Infinity Circuit. These fallen Eldar can be called upon for council, or even for war, as they can inhabit war constructs made of wraithbone, which is a psychoactive building material that Aeldari society relies on heavily. It’s essentially condensed warp matter that Bonesingers can form into shapes. If you’re curious, a wraithlord is an example of what I’m talking about.
Dark Eldar
The twisted kin of the Eldar took a different path after Slaanesh’s birth. Instead of protecting their soul using soulstones, Dark Eldar “steal” or siphon the souls of others. They perform massive raids on sentient species from their dark city of Commorragh deep within the webway. The webway is a sort of pocket dimension. It exists outside of realspace, and also outside of the warp. Typically anything within the webway is safe from Chaos, but you’ll find there are exceptions to that. Anyway these Dark Eldar leave their city, raid a human planet, steal a bunch of humans, and take them back home. Once home, they pretty much torture the living shit out of these poor souls. In doing so, they replenish a bit of their own soul that Slaanesh has fed off of. Much of Dark Eldar society is built around torture, and so they have these massive coliseums in which thousands will gather to have their souls replenished during some fucked up gladiatorial event where captives will have to fight and be tortured. Dark Eldar also have extremely advanced technology and can essentially keep their victims alive indefinitely. They are also able to regrow themselves. Haemonculi, which are a sort of chirurgeon, are able to regrow a Dark Eldar body from a small piece. If a finger is left over, that may be enough to bring a Dark Eldar back. The time period of this is short though, as the body will need to be rebuilt before Slaanesh eats the soil. So essentially, they don’t protect their soul like Eldar, they replenish it by way of torture as Slaanesh is constantly feeding off them.
Harlequins
These are a pretty mysterious and secluded third faction. They are soothsayers, story tellers, fate weavers, and mystics. They also live in the webway, are keepers of the Black Library, and like the Aeldari, don’t partake in hedonistic acts. To protect their souls, they utterly devote themselves to the (likely) last remaining Aeldari god Cegorach. When a Harlequin dies, Cegorach snatches the soul before Slaanesh can. Not much is known about what actually happens with the soul or how Cegorach manages to protect and hide it from Slaanesh. Cegorach will try to do this for other non-harlequin Aeldari whose souls enter the warp, but it’s not guaranteed he can save their soul.
Ok that’s enough Eldar backstory, and should give a sufficient basis of knowledge in regards to the game.
The earth shaman story is the most likely theory, but it isn’t confirmed, or maybe rather it’s confirmed through an unreliable source. Anyway, there are other theories about how the emperor came into being, such as the Sigilites creating him. I won’t get into that theory here, but yes, the running theory is that a bunch of Shamans killed themselves simultaneously so their souls could coalesce and form the Emperor. I don’t think the Emperor ever gave the Chaos Gods a wallop, but he did deceive them and steal their power for his own plans, which is why we have the Primarchs. For what it’s worth, there are many references in both Warhammer Fantasy and 40k that state the Chaos gods are always playing their great game, vying for power among one another. The split seconds they look away from their great game is when calamity falls upon humanity, but a vast majority of time (not that it exists within the warp) is spent fighting each other. If the Chaos gods actually teamed up and spent more than a fraction of their power on wiping out the galaxy, they could do it. This however will never happen, as if the galaxy does not exist to feed the warp, they will cease to be as well.
Now, assuming the shaman theory is true, the Emperor guided humanity in the shadows for tens of thousands of years until he made himself known and created the imperium of man. The rest is as you say, space crusade, horus heresy, internment on the golden throne, blah blah blah. You’ve got it.
The rest of the Xenos factions don’t get a ton of representation in Rogue Trader. I won’t say what, I’ll leave you to discover it yourself, but I can quickly touch on Tau and Necros below as you mentioned them
Tau
Yep, galactic newbies, and a small empire. They are rapidly advancing, but are nowhere near anything that could be considered a threat to the imperium. They live simply due to the slow bureaucratic processes that prevent the imperium from properly mustering the miniscule amount of strength it would take to wipe the Tau off the playing field. If you take what they say at face value (which you probably shouldn’t), they might be the only faction that can be considered the “good” guys. I wouldn’t really call them space dwarves, that’s more Leagues of Votann.
Necrons
Necrons are pretty much (imo) the biggest xenos threat to the galaxy, aside from arguably Tyranids. Their technology is so advanced it is akin to magic by the imperiums understanding. They have devices that can simply delete planets from existence. Their basic gauss weapons rend organic matter down to atoms. The only reason why they haven’t dominated the galaxy at the current time is that they are still awakening after millions of years in slumber. A small fraction of the race is currently active and awake, while the vast majority still rests within their tomb worlds. In the early days, the Necrons killed their gods and turned them into batteries. I cannot emphasize how powerful this xenos faction is. To clarify your last sentence, they aren’t genetically engineering other races. They believe in racial supremacy. Necrons dominate, lesser races serve. They are the ones who were genetically engineered by their gods (the C’tan) in the early days. Once, Necrons were humanoid, made of flesh and bone. Their homeworld revolved around an irradiated sun. The Necrontyr (their name before they became robots) were highly advanced, but their lifespans were short due to their sun essentially killing them. Their goal was to seek immortality, something the Old Ones had figured out. Necrons waged war with the Old Ones in an attempt to learn these secrets, but were unsuccessful. As the Necrontyr were pushed back and driven towards extinction, they struck a deal with the C’tan. The C’tan promised immortality in exchange for alliance with the Necrontyr, as they told the Necrontyr they were also once at war with the Old Ones. This was a lie. The C’tan simply wanted something to feed on. Anyway a bunch of shit happened, the Necrontyr went through a biotransference process, ate a bunch of Necrontyr souls, and now you have Necrons. More advanced Necron forms have retained a larger portion of their soul, so your run of the mill necron warrior is essentially a soulless automaton, while overlords retain much of their former self.
I’d recommend reading the wiki on the C’tan if you want to know more. It’s quite a good read, especially if you want to learn about the earliest days of the setting. This is where I started my wiki rabbit hole.
The game does a really good job of backfilling information as you need it. Hover your mouse over any highlighted word and it’ll give you a short wiki entry. It’s a very approachable version of the setting.
The big stuff to grok right out of the gate is really just this:
The Imperium of man is explicitly fascist. They’re not the good guys, but no one else is either. There are good people within this world, but there’s no “Hero” faction. Everything you see extolling the virtues of humanity in the setting is just imperial propaganda and hagiography, and you’ll pretty quickly start to see that play out within the game.
You’ve pretty much nailed how Rogue Traders work. They basically act as the frontier of the Imperium, to the point of being allowed to colonise whole worlds, which they then own. Each Rogue Trader family is basically a noble house.
The Adeptus Mechanicus understand the how, but not so much the why. So, they know how to repair a generator, but they believe that the process involves channeling the “motive force” through the wires. Most of what they do is carefully practiced methodology wrapped up in ritual. This isn’t true across the board however; at the higher levels of the mechanicus you do get people who actually know how to do real science. They’re just very rare. It’s mostly the guys who are like 10,000 years old.
As mentioned by others, the big foundational thing is the Horus Heresy. Half of the space marine legions turned to the worship of the gods of Chaos, and tried to overthrow the emperor. It’s kind of both super important, and actually pretty irrelevant. Like, there are something like 40 fiction books detailing every moment of the heresy, but it’s impact on the setting now mostly just boils down to “This is why the emperor is a corpse on life support and why there are evil space marines.”
Because of the warp, a realm where the line between imagined and real ceases to exist, there’s a lot of “Well I guess this might as well be magic” in the setting. Gods are real. Demons are real. People with the ability to wield magical powers are real; they might be called sorcerers and witches, or they might be called “psykers” depending on who you talk to, but it’s all the same stuff; pulling power from the warp to alter reality. This “magic” underpins a lot of the setting. People with warp abilities are necessary for long range communication and FTL travel.
If you’re familiar with Dune or Foundation you’ll notice that the setting borrows liberally from both properties, which give you some solid points of reference to draw from.
This is super great and well done but I saw “something like 40” and am compelled to tell you that, for better or worse, there are still Horus Heresy novels coming out and we’re at 65 now (but technically the 64th was the end and The Scouring is a sequel series I haven’t read)
Yeah… and it can be argued he might be a God now after 10,000 years of worship and sacrifice. The only thing keeping him from fully ascending is his body.
Everyone else covered stuff pretty well. I guess I want to elaborate more on the writing style of 40K:
The reason why 40K grimdark stuff is so fascinating and not just depressing is because humanity has spread so far, to countless untold worlds being found and re-found as the warp fucks up space travel etc. that the value of a human life is essentially NOTHING.
They live in such horrible fascist, imperialist control, surrounded by countless incredible enemies and dangers that most imperialist groups just wipe out groups of people (or even planets) that seem corrupted, or straying, or whatever else.
I think understanding the level of oppression for these people is tantamount to understanding the morality and characters of rogue trader. As a rogue trader, you are one of the only wildly privileged people in the galaxy. Everyone else is so used to existing in this deeply fucked hierarchy in this deeply fucked universe, that to understand them you need to accept this is how their lives are.
Sorry if that was too vague, but it is important context, I think. This is a universe where the value of a human life is infinitesimal.
Look up the Emperor and his origins which also leads you into what the Immaterium/Warp is as well as the Astrnomicom.
From there you’ll go to the Horus Heresy to understand why things are messed up with some light reading on the various theologies that dominated the Imperium. As well this also leads into understanding what Chaos is, especially to the Imperium.
The Imperium isn’t just fascist, it’s fascist to the extreme with unending bureaucracy. Entire planets get misplaced in the archive as rounding errors. You’ll learn about Space Marines, the Imperial Guard from here.
Then look up the main Xenos factions. I recommend Orks, Eldar, and Tau as those are the current major players/antagonists to the Imperium. There’s more but those usually get more screen time so to speak.
You’ve got the important foundational elements. The other big event is the Horus Heresy, where about half of the Emperor’s sons fell to Chaos and started a huge civil war that left the Emperor in his current half-dead state, but the imperial bureaucracy keeps on chugging.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the world of Warhammer 40k has been evolving over decades of novels, tabletop games, and video games made by multiple authors. As a result, the canon is vast and occasionally self-contradictory.
As a result, the canon is vast and occasionally self-contradictory
"Record keeping is shit and we aren’t even sure what year it is any more so don’t take anything at face value " is the new canon, so the canon being a mess is canon now.
You’ll see a lot of brutal shit like servitors (lobotomized humans turned into mechanical servants). The origin for that is that AI was once very much in use, but the computers rose up and threatened humanity’s survival, so they made it very illegal. They now use “AI”, or “Abominable Intelligence”: living humans who have been turned into computers.
Another thing that’s interesting is that humanity’s been in the dark ages for so long that nobody has any idea how their shit works anymore. So they have people, called “tech priests” who dedicate their lives to learning voodoo bullshit to keep the machines running. Essentially, they believe that the machines are imbued with souls and they have to perform certain rituals to keep the machine spirits happy. All the giant military hardware they have is thousands of years old because nobody has any fucking clue how to manufacture it anymore. Same thing for most of their computer systems.
Can’t believe nobody has said why The Warp exists - or rather why it overlaps with and breaks into our reality.
Warhammer has Space Elves - the Eldar/Aeldari. Powerful psykers. Millennia ago they got so kinky and on so many drugs they fucked a hole in reality itself, a hole that promptly engulfed their homeworld and sent them on an endless exodus in their Worldships. They were such powerful psychics their sexcapades also manifested demons and the Chaos Gods from the formless energies of The Warp.
The ones that renounced their horny ways became the Eldar, the ones who didn’t became the Dark Eldar who are still really into leather and chains.
This isn’t super relevant to the story of the game, I just really like this bit of the lore. It reads like a punchline:
Why’s the universe so jacked up? Fuckin’ space elves…
The funniest part of that is psychically adept humans at the time in prehistory began to notice that souls weren’t returning (it was because they were being eaten in the Immaterium). Hence them coming together to group suicide themselves and form a mega-soul which was birthed as the person who later becomes the Emperor.
So, the birth of the Emperor is the indirect result of a bunch of horny space elves who couldn’t keep it in their pants.
They also were on their way somewhere else, and the Emperor, and the imperium at large set up the Astronomicon, which is basically a giant beacon to the bugs that screams “there’s food here!”
Were it not for the imperium, that particular version of the milky way wouldn’t be nearly as fucked as it is, but it would still be pretty fucked because Slannesh would still have been born.
I’m still new to 40k lore, but apparently a lot of players/lore fans thought the T’au didn’t fit the grimdark aesthetic, so GW made them more morally grey.
In short, there’s increasing hints that the “greater good” espoused by the Ethereals (i.e., the Tau’s mysterious leadership caste) may actually be a cover for a lot of mind control and eugenics.
I think reading the opening text on any book fully gives you a good grasp.
Often it’s abbreviated to „in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war“
All the other lines explain quite well, why humanity would be so inhumane in this scenario and why there can be only war.
Basically all factions but especially humans live in different flavors of fascism in 40k. Orks might be a bit of an outlier here.
Warhammer is a fun tabletop game and has awesome pc games and books. The lore is (or used to be) very critical and satirical on where humankind might end up in a science denying, fascist dystopia (basically the opposite of Star Trek)
Despite all criticism and satire, Warhammer itself is difficult on misogyny (e.g. only men can be space marines ™ because of genes), toxic masculinity & warrior culture, queer (with some positive exceptions) and trans topics (again, genes and also demons get mixed up here).
Sadly the lore wise intergalactic xenophobia and racism also seems to be an open door to neo-nazis who turn the hobby into their racist fantasy. (Something I didn’t grasp but quickly realized looking at some armies of other players on tabletop and them talking).
All you really need to know for rogue trader is that there is a reality parallel to our own called the warp and it’s where daemons and chaos gods live. It’s where wizards (psykers) pull their power from so they are very dangerous and you also need to travel through it to go anywhere. Most things will be explained to you by mousing over the orange text while you are playing.
If you haven’t yet, you should listen to or read (reddit link, only one I could find) an intro to the dark millenium. It’s not relevant to rouge trader but sets the scene for the universe the game takes place in very well.
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Everybody is shitty and the whole universe sucks and sometimes not even dying can save you.
Sure, but what about Warhammer?
I guess it’s probably helpful to know what a rogue trader actually is. I think the game explains it somewhat, but just in case, here’s a (not so) quick rundown on some major components of the lore and game.
A lot of people think that rogue traders are just the captain of a big ship. They are not. They command nearly unimaginable power within the imperium. They have a warrant of trade sealed with the blood of the emperor from a time when he walked among men. It is both a holy relic, and a hall pass to do whatever the fuck they want mostly. They are pretty much outside the bounds of imperial law. They can recruit xenos and worse into their crew. They can befriend, dominate, subjugate, and exterminate entire systems if they wish. Not even the Inquisition can really boss them around, but Lord inquisitors are probably the only authority to actually influence a rogue trader. A rogue trader wouldn’t want to piss off a lord inquisitor and vice versa.
It is the duty of rogue traders to navigate unexplored space and claim worlds for the imperium. The world’s they claim are theirs by right of their warrant of trade, but those worlds are required to pay tithe to the larger imperium, which is non negotiable. The tithe is usually set by the high lords of terra or the administrators that work underneath them.
As for wizards/magicians, they do and don’t exist. They are called psykers, and their “magic” is derived from the warp, the nightmarish parallel reality inhabited by daemons and their respective gods. Using warp energy is extremely dangerous, and can cause the veil between realities to thin. If it thins, tears open up, and daemons can burst forth. This is usually a one way street, as anything non-daemon entering, or even seeing the warp, will pretty much instantly go insane, turn into a chaos spawn, or worse. There are very few exceptions, but they do exist. There is a lot more to the warp, I’d recommend looking into it deeper if you’re interested. Leutin09 on YouTube is a great source.
Now that we know what both rogue traders are and what psykers are, we can talk about navigators, which are a really important part of the game and lore. They are human, but mutated. They have a genetic trait that gives them a third eye on their forehead. They use this eye to see into the warp. It’s not perfect, but it can help ships travel through the warp, which is humanity’s form of faster-than-light travel. Pretty much every warp capable craft will have one. Ones that don’t take extreme risks even doing the smallest warp jumps. Without navigators, the imperium is screwed. It’s why they are one of the very few types of sanctioned abhumans.
As for the mechanicus, machines spirits, and the god they worship, it’s somewhat complex. The mechanicus at its height was technologically progressive, and significantly more advanced than the contemporary version. They understood how to create and innovate. During the age of strife, they lost much of their knowledge. Creations they once built, they have lost the knowledge to rebuild, repair, enhance, and sometimes even maintain. When dark age technology is lost, it is usually lost for good, which makes it so valuable. The current day mechanicus has stagnated, and are afraid to progress as innovation has caused problems in the past (see Age of Strife and men of iron).
The modern day mechanicus warships the omnissiah, which is essentially the avatar of the machine god, which they believe is the emperor. In a roundabout way, they do workshop the emperor, which is relatively in line with the imperial creed. The mechanics is technically separate from the imperium per the treaty of Mars that the emperor signed, which gives the mechanicus religious freedoms and rights to technological finds, such a STC fragments. I’m not going to talk about STCs here. Mechanicus likes the fragments. They struck a deal with big E, and now they are an allied faction to the imperium. For all intents and purposes, you can consider them a joint faction, but they are technically distinct.
As for machine spirits, they do exist. I think of it kind of like how orc psychic manifestions work, though, to be honest I’m foggy on the details as machine spirits did exist during humanity’s enlightened phase. Technology does have machine spirits, and the more powerful the machine, the more powerful the machine spirit. Tech priests sometimes must commune with and appease machine spirits. Angry machine spirits can cause their host machine to misfire, break down, malfunction, etc. Appeased machine spirits can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the machine they are bound to, with some spirits being so powerful they can control aspects of a machine, such as advanced targetting systems, defensive capabilities, etc.
The last thing I’ll touch on is the emperor. Some comments say he’s dead, some say he’s alive. The truth is that he is neither. He is a husk that resides on the golden throne - a dark age of technology device that is a psychic amplifier and a life support system. It maintains his decript body and allows him to remain in a state of undeath. His psychic abilities are so powerful that he cannot really die. There is a lot more to this, as the emperor is a perpetual. I can expand on this more if you want, but I’ll leave it out for now as it’s complicated. Anyway, he is so powerful a psyker that he is the focal point or source of the astronomicon. This is essentially a psychic lighthouse in the warp that navigators will use a point of reference to know which way holy Terra is. They also say the emperor wages and eternal psychic war in the warp with the chaos gods, which keeps chaos from taking over the imperium of man.
You’ve got the gist of the foundation of the lore down, so my breakdown above is a little more comprehensive. Feel free to ask any more questions or DM me. I also wrote all this at 2am in the dark so if there are typos, inconsistencies, or things that need further clarification, I apologize and in advance.
Damn dude, that’s comprehensive as fuck.
Maybe you can confirm if I have some other stuff down that you didn’t mention? I poked my head down some wiki rabbit holes, and I love a good origin story so I started looking waaay back.
So the Warp is an alternate dimension affected by the thoughts and emotions of sentient beings from this one, and also apparently a place souls do or would go before being reincarnated? As we evolved and started having more of us and more complex negative emotions, these eddies in the Warp coalesced into Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle.
Earth’s shamans (proto-psykers?) start to notice their fellows aren’t reincarnating so much anymore and figure out the chaos gods are nomming them up in the Warp when they die. They get every shaman on earth together in a council, and decide on a Jonestown Voltron plan, whereby they’ll all kill themselves at once, fuse into a mega-soul in the Warp, and give the chaos gods good wallop to send them running for awhile.
That shaman Voltron soul incarnates in 8000 BCE as the boy that will one day be the Emperor.
Emps just kind of does the Vandal Savage thing on Earth until we get a spacefaring civilization rolling. He starts leading shit, allies with the Mechanicus on Mars and founds the Imperium in the late 30th millenium.
Unrelated and around the same time, the Aeldari (hedonistic space elves) have a rave orgy so good they cause Slaanesh to form and simultaneously fuck open that hole to the Warp someone mentioned.
Yadda yadda yadda space crusade
Yadda yadda yadda Horus Heresy
Yadda yadda “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”
Is that more or less on-point? I haven’t looked into most xenos too much besides the Aeldari waking Slaanesh. I think the T’au are the galactic newbies and kinda space dwarves? And the Nekrons were far far away genetically engineering slave races while Emps was still shitting his loincloth?
You’ve pretty much got it. I’ll reiterate some points below.
The warp, or the sea of souls, is an alternate dimension in which the soul of nearly every living being goes when its corporeal form dies. It is a place that is theorized to have always existed, although for much of it’s history, was a relatively peaceful and dormant place. As sentient species, particularly humanity, spread across the galaxy, it made the warp more tumultuous. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle have probably always existed in some lesser form, but as events transpire within real-space, they begin to grow in power. The cycle of life, death and decay fuels Nurgle, while Khorne grows more powerful as wars are waged. Tzeentch feeds on betrayal, schemes, plots, and change. These themes have been around since time immemorial, and so have these warp creatures that formed into the current day chaos gods.
The outlier is Slaanesh, who, as you noted, was pretty much murder-fucked into existence. Her birth was so catastrophic that she instantly killed most Eldar and and all their gods, and ripped open the galaxy in the heart of the Aeldari empire, which is why we now have the eye of terror.
Before I talk about Eldar, I need to talk about souls real quick. All souls reflect in the warp, and nearly every living thing has a soul. A plant probably isn’t going to show up in the warp, but a human soul will, though a human soul is barely a candle flicker. A human psyker however, will be a strong flame and be much more noticeable to daemons. An Eldar soul is a bonfire, and a delicacy for Slaanesh. Since the birth of Slaanesh, she saps the Eldar of their souls over time. If an Eldar’s soul is unprotected, over time, Slaanesh will turn that Eldar into a soulless husk. Each Eldar faction has a way of handling that problem which I’ll explain below.
Now this part may be kind of dense because Aeldari get a lot of representation within Rogue Trader. They come in several flavours - 3 main factions I can think of, but I’m sure there are additional smaller ones: Eldar (Aeldari), Dark Eldar (Drukhari), and Harlequins.
Eldar
After the birth of Slaanesh, some Aeldari believed they must renounce their hedonistic ways, which are your regular Aeldari you see today. They fly around on their craftworlds and generally refrain from murder fucking. They keep soulstones on them so that if they die, their soul can be captured by the stone before it departs to the warp and inevitably consumed by She Who Thirsts. These soulstones are placed into the craftworld itself, which forms a sort of Eldar-only purgatory called the Infinity Circuit. These fallen Eldar can be called upon for council, or even for war, as they can inhabit war constructs made of wraithbone, which is a psychoactive building material that Aeldari society relies on heavily. It’s essentially condensed warp matter that Bonesingers can form into shapes. If you’re curious, a wraithlord is an example of what I’m talking about.
Dark Eldar
The twisted kin of the Eldar took a different path after Slaanesh’s birth. Instead of protecting their soul using soulstones, Dark Eldar “steal” or siphon the souls of others. They perform massive raids on sentient species from their dark city of Commorragh deep within the webway. The webway is a sort of pocket dimension. It exists outside of realspace, and also outside of the warp. Typically anything within the webway is safe from Chaos, but you’ll find there are exceptions to that. Anyway these Dark Eldar leave their city, raid a human planet, steal a bunch of humans, and take them back home. Once home, they pretty much torture the living shit out of these poor souls. In doing so, they replenish a bit of their own soul that Slaanesh has fed off of. Much of Dark Eldar society is built around torture, and so they have these massive coliseums in which thousands will gather to have their souls replenished during some fucked up gladiatorial event where captives will have to fight and be tortured. Dark Eldar also have extremely advanced technology and can essentially keep their victims alive indefinitely. They are also able to regrow themselves. Haemonculi, which are a sort of chirurgeon, are able to regrow a Dark Eldar body from a small piece. If a finger is left over, that may be enough to bring a Dark Eldar back. The time period of this is short though, as the body will need to be rebuilt before Slaanesh eats the soil. So essentially, they don’t protect their soul like Eldar, they replenish it by way of torture as Slaanesh is constantly feeding off them.
Harlequins
These are a pretty mysterious and secluded third faction. They are soothsayers, story tellers, fate weavers, and mystics. They also live in the webway, are keepers of the Black Library, and like the Aeldari, don’t partake in hedonistic acts. To protect their souls, they utterly devote themselves to the (likely) last remaining Aeldari god Cegorach. When a Harlequin dies, Cegorach snatches the soul before Slaanesh can. Not much is known about what actually happens with the soul or how Cegorach manages to protect and hide it from Slaanesh. Cegorach will try to do this for other non-harlequin Aeldari whose souls enter the warp, but it’s not guaranteed he can save their soul.
Ok that’s enough Eldar backstory, and should give a sufficient basis of knowledge in regards to the game.
The earth shaman story is the most likely theory, but it isn’t confirmed, or maybe rather it’s confirmed through an unreliable source. Anyway, there are other theories about how the emperor came into being, such as the Sigilites creating him. I won’t get into that theory here, but yes, the running theory is that a bunch of Shamans killed themselves simultaneously so their souls could coalesce and form the Emperor. I don’t think the Emperor ever gave the Chaos Gods a wallop, but he did deceive them and steal their power for his own plans, which is why we have the Primarchs. For what it’s worth, there are many references in both Warhammer Fantasy and 40k that state the Chaos gods are always playing their great game, vying for power among one another. The split seconds they look away from their great game is when calamity falls upon humanity, but a vast majority of time (not that it exists within the warp) is spent fighting each other. If the Chaos gods actually teamed up and spent more than a fraction of their power on wiping out the galaxy, they could do it. This however will never happen, as if the galaxy does not exist to feed the warp, they will cease to be as well.
Now, assuming the shaman theory is true, the Emperor guided humanity in the shadows for tens of thousands of years until he made himself known and created the imperium of man. The rest is as you say, space crusade, horus heresy, internment on the golden throne, blah blah blah. You’ve got it.
The rest of the Xenos factions don’t get a ton of representation in Rogue Trader. I won’t say what, I’ll leave you to discover it yourself, but I can quickly touch on Tau and Necros below as you mentioned them
Tau
Yep, galactic newbies, and a small empire. They are rapidly advancing, but are nowhere near anything that could be considered a threat to the imperium. They live simply due to the slow bureaucratic processes that prevent the imperium from properly mustering the miniscule amount of strength it would take to wipe the Tau off the playing field. If you take what they say at face value (which you probably shouldn’t), they might be the only faction that can be considered the “good” guys. I wouldn’t really call them space dwarves, that’s more Leagues of Votann.
Necrons
Necrons are pretty much (imo) the biggest xenos threat to the galaxy, aside from arguably Tyranids. Their technology is so advanced it is akin to magic by the imperiums understanding. They have devices that can simply delete planets from existence. Their basic gauss weapons rend organic matter down to atoms. The only reason why they haven’t dominated the galaxy at the current time is that they are still awakening after millions of years in slumber. A small fraction of the race is currently active and awake, while the vast majority still rests within their tomb worlds. In the early days, the Necrons killed their gods and turned them into batteries. I cannot emphasize how powerful this xenos faction is. To clarify your last sentence, they aren’t genetically engineering other races. They believe in racial supremacy. Necrons dominate, lesser races serve. They are the ones who were genetically engineered by their gods (the C’tan) in the early days. Once, Necrons were humanoid, made of flesh and bone. Their homeworld revolved around an irradiated sun. The Necrontyr (their name before they became robots) were highly advanced, but their lifespans were short due to their sun essentially killing them. Their goal was to seek immortality, something the Old Ones had figured out. Necrons waged war with the Old Ones in an attempt to learn these secrets, but were unsuccessful. As the Necrontyr were pushed back and driven towards extinction, they struck a deal with the C’tan. The C’tan promised immortality in exchange for alliance with the Necrontyr, as they told the Necrontyr they were also once at war with the Old Ones. This was a lie. The C’tan simply wanted something to feed on. Anyway a bunch of shit happened, the Necrontyr went through a biotransference process, ate a bunch of Necrontyr souls, and now you have Necrons. More advanced Necron forms have retained a larger portion of their soul, so your run of the mill necron warrior is essentially a soulless automaton, while overlords retain much of their former self.
I’d recommend reading the wiki on the C’tan if you want to know more. It’s quite a good read, especially if you want to learn about the earliest days of the setting. This is where I started my wiki rabbit hole.
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/C'tan
A typo, but honestly a very fitting one
Lmao. I’m leaving that one.
The game does a really good job of backfilling information as you need it. Hover your mouse over any highlighted word and it’ll give you a short wiki entry. It’s a very approachable version of the setting.
The big stuff to grok right out of the gate is really just this:
If you’re familiar with Dune or Foundation you’ll notice that the setting borrows liberally from both properties, which give you some solid points of reference to draw from.
This is super great and well done but I saw “something like 40” and am compelled to tell you that, for better or worse, there are still Horus Heresy novels coming out and we’re at 65 now (but technically the 64th was the end and The Scouring is a sequel series I haven’t read)
The Emperor of Mankind preached the Imperial Truth: Atheism, Logic, and Humanity. There are no gods. Which is a lie because gods do exist.
Then he was betrayed, mostly killed, and enshrined on the Golden Throne where 10,000 psychics are sacrificed per day to keep him alive.
And then his empire started preaching the Imperial Creed: That he is the God Emperor. A title he tried desperately to avoid.
He tried so hard to avoid being labeled a God, that he made a public mockery of those who were the first to claim he was.
Yeah… and it can be argued he might be a God now after 10,000 years of worship and sacrifice. The only thing keeping him from fully ascending is his body.
It could also be argued that he was always a God, and his shit parenting and death were part of his master plan.
Sure, but I think that’s less interesting. More tragic that he didn’t know what was coming.
Other people have mostly covered it so I’ll just add that its foundational to the game to know that it is always funnier to have Abelard introduce you
Abelard, tell these vagrants who they have the honor of dying to today.
“Abelard, rip that man’s balls off!”
deleted by creator
Everyone else covered stuff pretty well. I guess I want to elaborate more on the writing style of 40K:
The reason why 40K grimdark stuff is so fascinating and not just depressing is because humanity has spread so far, to countless untold worlds being found and re-found as the warp fucks up space travel etc. that the value of a human life is essentially NOTHING.
They live in such horrible fascist, imperialist control, surrounded by countless incredible enemies and dangers that most imperialist groups just wipe out groups of people (or even planets) that seem corrupted, or straying, or whatever else.
I think understanding the level of oppression for these people is tantamount to understanding the morality and characters of rogue trader. As a rogue trader, you are one of the only wildly privileged people in the galaxy. Everyone else is so used to existing in this deeply fucked hierarchy in this deeply fucked universe, that to understand them you need to accept this is how their lives are.
Sorry if that was too vague, but it is important context, I think. This is a universe where the value of a human life is infinitesimal.
Look up the Emperor and his origins which also leads you into what the Immaterium/Warp is as well as the Astrnomicom.
From there you’ll go to the Horus Heresy to understand why things are messed up with some light reading on the various theologies that dominated the Imperium. As well this also leads into understanding what Chaos is, especially to the Imperium.
The Imperium isn’t just fascist, it’s fascist to the extreme with unending bureaucracy. Entire planets get misplaced in the archive as rounding errors. You’ll learn about Space Marines, the Imperial Guard from here.
Then look up the main Xenos factions. I recommend Orks, Eldar, and Tau as those are the current major players/antagonists to the Imperium. There’s more but those usually get more screen time so to speak.
You’ve got the important foundational elements. The other big event is the Horus Heresy, where about half of the Emperor’s sons fell to Chaos and started a huge civil war that left the Emperor in his current half-dead state, but the imperial bureaucracy keeps on chugging.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the world of Warhammer 40k has been evolving over decades of novels, tabletop games, and video games made by multiple authors. As a result, the canon is vast and occasionally self-contradictory.
If you want to know more, I highly recommend the Ciaphas Cain books (novels with a comedy streak) and a silly fan series called If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech device.
"Record keeping is shit and we aren’t even sure what year it is any more so don’t take anything at face value " is the new canon, so the canon being a mess is canon now.
I second reading or listening to the Ciaphas Cain books, since they bring that pinch of satire with them.
You also get to explore most races from the 40k universe quite quickly.
Quite quickly?
I would say with almost unseemly haste
As always, Cain tends to downplay the situation in his usual manner.
I really enjoyed doing a Cain novel, then a Gaunts Ghosts novel, then a Cain novel and so on.
You’ll see a lot of brutal shit like servitors (lobotomized humans turned into mechanical servants). The origin for that is that AI was once very much in use, but the computers rose up and threatened humanity’s survival, so they made it very illegal. They now use “AI”, or “Abominable Intelligence”: living humans who have been turned into computers.
Another thing that’s interesting is that humanity’s been in the dark ages for so long that nobody has any idea how their shit works anymore. So they have people, called “tech priests” who dedicate their lives to learning voodoo bullshit to keep the machines running. Essentially, they believe that the machines are imbued with souls and they have to perform certain rituals to keep the machine spirits happy. All the giant military hardware they have is thousands of years old because nobody has any fucking clue how to manufacture it anymore. Same thing for most of their computer systems.
Go down the rabbit hole on Youtube of Warhammer world lore and history. It’s pretty wild and fascinating.
Bricky on YouTube has a good series of videos talking about the lore of WH40K
https://youtu.be/zPB3Q59vjR8
https://youtu.be/xCGKPRiJp84
https://youtu.be/Y6jnsX77TCU
https://youtu.be/Ae2Beeleswc
Bricky is entertaining and laces the lore with memes. Easy entry to the lore, if a bit wrong at times - or so I’ve been told. “Close enough”, imo.
Can’t believe nobody has said why The Warp exists - or rather why it overlaps with and breaks into our reality.
Warhammer has Space Elves - the Eldar/Aeldari. Powerful psykers. Millennia ago they got so kinky and on so many drugs they fucked a hole in reality itself, a hole that promptly engulfed their homeworld and sent them on an endless exodus in their Worldships. They were such powerful psychics their sexcapades also manifested demons and the Chaos Gods from the formless energies of The Warp.
The ones that renounced their horny ways became the Eldar, the ones who didn’t became the Dark Eldar who are still really into leather and chains.
This isn’t super relevant to the story of the game, I just really like this bit of the lore. It reads like a punchline:
The funniest part of that is psychically adept humans at the time in prehistory began to notice that souls weren’t returning (it was because they were being eaten in the Immaterium). Hence them coming together to group suicide themselves and form a mega-soul which was birthed as the person who later becomes the Emperor.
So, the birth of the Emperor is the indirect result of a bunch of horny space elves who couldn’t keep it in their pants.
Or “space elves fucking”, coincidentally…
Every faction is evil
Are the Tyranids actually evil? They’re horrific from our point of view but do they even have the concept of evil? They’re just hungry.
They are at best neutral, in the way a hurricane or volcano is neutral.
They destroy all in their path in a way that seems indescriminate, but no one knows what the hive mind thinks.
They also were on their way somewhere else, and the Emperor, and the imperium at large set up the Astronomicon, which is basically a giant beacon to the bugs that screams “there’s food here!”
Were it not for the imperium, that particular version of the milky way wouldn’t be nearly as fucked as it is, but it would still be pretty fucked because Slannesh would still have been born.
Is this where we point out the tyranids are fleeing something directly below the galactic plane?
I guess this is true of the Orks too.
T’au weren’t originally, so GW scuffed them up a bit
I played Tau mega-yonks ago (for the greater good!). And they were pretty good matured then…ish.
What did they scuff up?
I’m still new to 40k lore, but apparently a lot of players/lore fans thought the T’au didn’t fit the grimdark aesthetic, so GW made them more morally grey.
Yes, I understand that.
What I’m asking is what they changed to make them more morally gray.
In short, there’s increasing hints that the “greater good” espoused by the Ethereals (i.e., the Tau’s mysterious leadership caste) may actually be a cover for a lot of mind control and eugenics.
Well that sure fits them
Thanks
I’d tell you if I gave enough of a fuck about the T’au but they’re too goody-two-shoes for me to care about
I think reading the opening text on any book fully gives you a good grasp. Often it’s abbreviated to „in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war“ All the other lines explain quite well, why humanity would be so inhumane in this scenario and why there can be only war. Basically all factions but especially humans live in different flavors of fascism in 40k. Orks might be a bit of an outlier here. Warhammer is a fun tabletop game and has awesome pc games and books. The lore is (or used to be) very critical and satirical on where humankind might end up in a science denying, fascist dystopia (basically the opposite of Star Trek)
Despite all criticism and satire, Warhammer itself is difficult on misogyny (e.g. only men can be space marines ™ because of genes), toxic masculinity & warrior culture, queer (with some positive exceptions) and trans topics (again, genes and also demons get mixed up here). Sadly the lore wise intergalactic xenophobia and racism also seems to be an open door to neo-nazis who turn the hobby into their racist fantasy. (Something I didn’t grasp but quickly realized looking at some armies of other players on tabletop and them talking).
All you really need to know for rogue trader is that there is a reality parallel to our own called the warp and it’s where daemons and chaos gods live. It’s where wizards (psykers) pull their power from so they are very dangerous and you also need to travel through it to go anywhere. Most things will be explained to you by mousing over the orange text while you are playing.
If you haven’t yet, you should listen to or read (reddit link, only one I could find) an intro to the dark millenium. It’s not relevant to rouge trader but sets the scene for the universe the game takes place in very well.