The grim darkness of the far future
Warhammer 40,000
The flagship setting — a galaxy of endless war between the Imperium of Man, the forces of Chaos, and countless Xenos races in the 41st millennium.
Imperium
Adepta SororitasThe armed nuns of the Ecclesiarchy, warrior-zealots who burn heresy from the galaxy with bolter, flame, and unshakeable faith.
Adeptus CustodesThe Emperor's golden bodyguard, ten thousand transhuman warriors sworn never to leave Terra until duty finally calls them beyond it.
Adeptus MechanicusImperiumThe Adeptus Mechanicus is the great techno-religious order that keeps the machinery of the Imperium of Man turning, a sprawling priesthood of scientists, engineers, and cybernetic zealots who worship a deity they call the Omnissiah, the Machine God incarnate. From their red-robed enclaves on distant forge worlds, the Tech-Priests hoard the surviving knowledge of humanity's golden age, tend to sacred manufactories, and treat every rivet and reactor as a vessel of holy purpose. To them, flesh is weak and corruptible while the machine is pure, and so they replace their bodies with augmetics until scarcely anything organic remains. The Mechanicus commands vast Skitarii legions, towering war engines, and the god-machines of the Titan Legions, wielding technologies few in the wider Imperium can even comprehend. Bound to the Emperor by ancient treaty yet jealously guarding their independence, they pursue a single overriding compulsion above loyalty, comfort, or life itself: the recovery of lost knowledge, the completion of the Quest for the ancient truths that fell to ruin long ago.
Astra MilitarumImperiumThe Astra Militarum is the vast standing army of the Imperium of Man, the single largest fighting force in the galaxy and the mortal shield behind which humanity endures. Where the Adeptus Astartes are surgical blades, the Astra Militarum is the crushing weight of numbers, drawn from countless worlds and hurled into the meatgrinder of endless war. Its soldiers are ordinary men and women, unmodified and mortal, yet by the billion they hold the line against horrors that would break lesser armies. Regiments raised from every corner of the Imperium fight alongside colossal tanks, thundering artillery, and armoured columns that grind across contested worlds. Discipline is enforced by commissars whose bolt pistols answer cowardice as readily as the enemy does. The Astra Militarum does not win through brilliance alone but through attrition, sacrifice, and an unbreakable refusal to yield. Every trooper knows the grim arithmetic of the 41st Millennium: that lives are ammunition, and the Emperor's wars are never finished. They are the Hammer of the Emperor, and their blows never cease to fall.
DeathwatchImperiumThe Deathwatch are the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Xenos, an elite brotherhood drawn from a hundred Space Marine Chapters and forged into humanity's premier alien-hunters. Where a Chapter wages open war, the Deathwatch strike at the hidden threat: the tyranid vanguard organism scouting a new world, the necron dynasty stirring in a buried tomb, the aeldari raiders slipping between the stars. Recruits serve a tour of duty known as the Long Watch, seconded from their parent Chapters to don the black armour and study xenobiology, alien tactics, and the ten thousand ways a species might be unmade. They fight in small, self-sufficient kill teams, each warrior a specialist, each mission a surgical strike against a foe the wider Imperium may never learn existed. Their weapons are tailored to the prey — bolt shells that burn tyranid flesh, rounds that shred necron living metal, ammunition sanctified against the warp. Secretive, disciplined, and utterly unyielding, the Deathwatch stand as a black wall between the human race and the numberless horrors of the galaxy.
Grey KnightsImperiumThe Grey Knights are the most secret and most feared Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, a brotherhood raised for a single purpose: the annihilation of daemons and the sealing of the wounds torn in reality by the Warp. Where other warriors of the Imperium wage war against flesh and steel, the Grey Knights contend with horrors that unmake the mind and corrupt the soul. Every one of their number is a psyker of formidable strength, their wills tempered like blades and their spirits bound by oaths of purity so absolute that they will die before permitting the smallest taint to touch them. They fight beneath silver armour engraved with sacred litanies, wielding force weapons that channel their inner fire into blows capable of banishing even the mightiest of the Neverborn. Their existence is denied to all but a handful of the Imperium's rulers, and the memories of those they rescue are wiped clean. They answer to no High Lord and keep to no public muster. They are the last line drawn between the mortal realm and the ravening things that hunger beyond it.
Imperial AgentsImperiumThe Imperial Agents are the hidden hand of the Emperor's dominion, a loose confederation of operatives, executioners, and null-souled warriors who serve where the massed regiments of the Astra Militarum and the mailed fist of the Adeptus Astartes cannot. Drawn from the Holy Orders of the Emperor's Inquisition, the shadowed temples of the Officio Assassinorum, and the silent ranks of the Sisters of Silence, they are the Imperium's answer to threats that must never be spoken of. Where a daemon whispers through a cardinal's dreams, where a xenos infiltrator wears a governor's face, where a psyker's forbidden potential threatens to ignite a world, these agents move unseen. They wield authority no line officer could imagine and answer only to conscience, doctrine, and the ineffable will of the Golden Throne. Ruthless, secretive, and utterly without mercy for the enemies of Mankind, the Imperial Agents embody the truth that the Imperium is defended not only by armies, but by the quiet murder of those who would see it fall.
Imperial KnightsImperiumThe Imperial Knights are towering war-engines of adamantium and ceramite, each piloted by a single scion of feudal nobility bonded to the machine's spirit through the sacred Throne Mechanicum. Descended from colonists who settled the untamed worlds of the galaxy's edge long before the Emperor's coming, the Knightly houses preserve an ancient chivalric tradition older than the Imperium itself. Their god-machines march to war in glittering heraldry, their hulls emblazoned with the honours of ten thousand years of feudal service. Sworn either to the Adeptus Mechanicus or directly to the Imperium through solemn oaths, the Knights answer distant summons to fight alongside the Astra Militarum and the Space Marines. Yet a Knight is never merely a weapon. Each is a repository of ancestral memory, the accumulated souls and triumphs of every pilot who came before, whispering counsel and demanding valour from within the machine. To pilot a Knight is to inherit both crushing responsibility and boundless honour, and to fail the Code Chivalric is to shame the dead as surely as the living.
Space MarinesAdeptus AstartesPost-human warrior-monks bred for war, the Adeptus Astartes are the Imperium's finest sons, each Chapter a fortress-brotherhood sworn to humanity's survival.
Titan LegionsThe Titan Legions are the Collegia Titanica of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the god-engines of the Imperium, colossal war-machines the size of buildings, each a walking cathedral of destruction guided by a Princeps whose mind is wedded to the Titan's ancient machine-spirit.
Chaos
Chaos DaemonsChaosThe Chaos Daemons are the living passions of a galaxy given monstrous shape, spilling out of the immaterial ocean called the warp whenever reality wears thin. They are not born and cannot truly die; each is a fragment of a god's endless hunger, conjured from rage, decay, ambition, or desire and clothed in flesh only for as long as the tides of that dimension permit. When they breach the veil between worlds they bring madness with them, dissolving stone and sanity alike, and their coming is heralded by omens no mortal can misread. Marshalled into vast legions beneath the banners of the four Ruinous Powers, they wage a war older than the stars themselves, seeking to drag the material universe wholly into the storm from which they emerged. Against them stand the fragile armies of mortals, whose very souls are both the daemons' battlefield and their prize. To face a daemonic host is to confront a nightmare that reasons, that remembers old grudges, and that will endure long after the last defender has fallen and been forgotten.
Chaos KnightsThe Chaos Knights are the Fallen Nobility of the Knight Worlds, towering god-machines whose scions renounced their oaths to the Emperor and now stride to war as engines of ruin, their war-suits scarred by daemonic pacts, apostasy and ten thousand years of bitter vengeance.
Chaos Space MarinesChaosThe Chaos Space Marines are the ruined heirs of humanity's greatest betrayal: superhuman warriors who once fought as the Emperor's finest and now wage endless war against the Imperium they helped forge. Ten thousand years ago, half the Legiones Astartes turned upon their father in the cataclysm remembered as the Horus Heresy. Cast into the raging warp-storms of the Eye of Terror after their defeat, these traitors did not die. Instead they festered, warped by the Ruinous Powers into daemon-touched killers who measure time in millennia and grudges in galaxies. Some kneel to a single Chaos God; others court all four, or none. They emerge from the Eye in raiding warbands and vast crusading hosts alike, sowing corruption, harvesting slaves and slaughtering worlds. Bitter, immortal and utterly without mercy, they call their ceaseless campaign the Long War, and they intend to end it only when the Imperial Palace burns and the Corpse-God upon the Golden Throne is finally cast down into ash.
Death GuardChaosThe Death Guard are among the oldest and most steadfast of the Traitor Legions, a host of plague-ridden warriors sworn body and soul to Nurgle, the Chaos God of decay, disease, and morbid renewal. Once the Dusk Raiders, then the pride-hardened sons of the Primarch Mortarion, they betrayed the Imperium during the great civil war and were remade in a crucible of pestilence, their armour split by boils and their lungs filled with corruption. Where other Chaos warbands prize speed or savagery, the Death Guard endure. They advance with the patience of the grave, all but impossible to kill and utterly unmoved by fear, pain, or the horrors they inflict. Every Plague Marine is a living reliquary of contagion, a walking laboratory of the diseases their god has gifted them. From their fortress-worlds in the corrupted heart of the galaxy they sally forth to spread rot across the stars, believing themselves not destroyers but gardeners tending a sickened cosmos toward its inevitable, teeming decay. They march slowly. They always arrive.
Emperor's ChildrenChaosThe Emperor's Children were once the proudest of the Emperor's Legions, a brotherhood devoted with unwavering intensity to the ideal of perfection in all things. Under their primarch Fulgrim, they honed themselves into paragons of martial artistry, seeking to make each act of war a flawless masterwork. That very hunger became their ruin. When perfection proved forever beyond their grasp, they turned to ever more extreme means of stimulation and achievement, and Fulgrim's slow seduction delivered them wholesale into the arms of Slaanesh, the Dark Prince of pleasure and excess. Now they are amethyst-armoured hedonists and torturers who wage war as an art form and a sensual rite. Every scream is music, every wound a brushstroke, every battle an opera of agony staged for their own jaded delight. They pursue sensation past the point where mortal minds shatter, their nerves flayed raw so that only the most exquisite extremes can still move them. In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, the Emperor's Children are among the most decadent and cruel warriors in the galaxy.
Thousand SonsChaosThe Thousand Sons are the sorcerer-legion of Chaos, scholars and psykers damned by the very gift that once set them apart. Sons of the crimson primarch Magnus the Red, they raised on the shining world of Prospero a civilisation of learning unmatched in the Imperium, delving into forbidden knowledge in the belief that understanding could be no sin. That certainty destroyed them. When their pursuit of the warp brought ruin upon their brotherhood, Magnus struck a desperate bargain with Tzeentch, the Architect of Fate, and the price was catastrophe. The infamous Rubric of Ahriman, cast to save the legion from a spreading mutation, instead hollowed out the unwitting masses of its warriors, sealing their souls within suits of dust-filled armour. Now the Thousand Sons wage a cold and patient war of vengeance and revelation. Their sorcerer-lords command legions of automaton Rubricae, weave devastating psychic assaults, and pursue schemes that span centuries, forever seeking the arcane secrets that might undo their curse or remake the galaxy in the image of their god.
World EatersChaosThe World Eaters are the most feared shock-assault Legion to ever turn traitor, a brotherhood of Chaos Space Marines who have surrendered every higher faculty to the pursuit of slaughter. Once celebrated as the War Hounds and later reforged around their gene-sire Angron, they were remade into living instruments of butchery by the surgical horror known as the Butcher's Nails, cortical implants that flood the brain with rage and starve it of everything else. When the Horus Heresy tore the Imperium apart, the Legion pledged itself wholly to Khorne, the Blood God, and has spent the ten thousand years since as his favoured executioners. They do not scheme, negotiate, or hold ground; they exist to close the distance and kill. Fielding chainaxe-wielding Berzerkers, daemon-fused Eightbound, and howling packs of mortal thralls, the World Eaters descend on worlds without warning and drown them in blood. To fight them is to face warriors who feel nothing but the need to end you, and who count their own destruction a fair price for the kill.
Xenos
AeldariThe Aeldari are an ancient and dwindling elder race, once masters of a galaxy-spanning dominion and now scattered survivors of a self-inflicted apocalypse. In the days of their supremacy they possessed powers of mind and craft that no younger species has ever equalled, shaping stars and sculpting reality itself with a casual arrogance that would ultimately doom them. Their unchecked indulgence in every pleasure and cruelty birthed a new god of the warp, and in a single cataclysm the heart of their civilization was consumed. Those who endured are haunted survivors who feel every emotion with an intensity that risks their very souls, forced to discipline their psyches along rigid Paths lest they fall to the same ruin that destroyed their forebears. Aloof, coldly beautiful, and possessed of a strategic genius honed over millennia, they wage war with elegant precision from hidden vessels and forgotten webway roads, fighting always for the survival of a species that history has already begun to forget.
DrukhariAeldariThe Drukhari are the corsair princes of a dead empire, exiles who fled the psychic cataclysm that birthed the Great Enemy and made their home in the hidden city of Commorragh, folded away in the labyrinth dimension between the material universe and the warp. There they escaped the doom that hunts their kind, but they did not escape the hunger. Every Drukhari soul is slowly, endlessly devoured, and only the fresh anguish of others can hold that erosion at bay. So they raid. Descending on the galaxy in silent skimmers and screaming jetbikes, they seize captives by the thousand and drag them back to Commorragh, where torment is refined into an art form and pain is the currency that keeps immortality in credit. Beautiful, cruel, and impossibly swift, the Drukhari are predators who have made suffering the foundation of their entire civilization. They wage war not for territory or ideology but for the raw sustenance of misery, and they have perfected the craft of inflicting it across untold millennia of practiced malice.
Genestealer CultsGenestealer Cults are the hidden cancers that fester within the Imperium of Man, secret societies of mutant hybrids bound together by a shared bloodline and a shared, poisonous faith. Each cult begins with a single lurking horror, the purestrain genestealer, whose infectious embrace corrupts an unsuspecting host and seeds a lineage of ever more human-seeming offspring. Over generations these broods burrow into the underhive gangs, mining collectives, and manufactorum labor pools of a world, worshipping their gene-sire and dreaming of the Star Children who will one day descend from the void. To the outside eye they are merely another downtrodden congregation, another band of malcontents muttering of deliverance. In truth they are a coiled weapon, waiting. When the appointed hour arrives, the cult erupts in a frenzy of insurrection, seizing weapons long hoarded in secret, drowning garrisons in a tide of fanatics and clawed monsters. Yet their uprising is not liberation but summons, a psychic beacon that calls a Tyranid hive fleet to devour everything they have prepared. The cult is the parasite that ripens a planet for slaughter.
HarlequinsThe Harlequins are the dancer-warriors of the Aeldari, servants of the Laughing God Cegorach who travel the webway as living players of the Dance Without End, guarding the Black Library's forbidden lore and waging a war of grace and slaughter against the servants of Chaos.
Leagues of VotannVotannThe Leagues of Votann are the scattered stellar holdings of the Kin, a squat and long-lived humanoid species descended from colonists who fled the collapse of humanity's earliest golden age of exploration. Sheltering in the mineral-rich dark of the galactic core and the deep void beyond the fringes, the Kin endured the long night of Old Night not through faith or fury but through cold pragmatism, ancestral memory, and an engineering tradition older than the Imperium itself. Each League is governed by a Votann, a colossal ancestor-core computer that stores the genetic and cultural inheritance of its people and renders judgement in matters of law, trade, and war. Bound by oaths, ledgers, and a hunger for rare resources, the Kin regard the wider galaxy as a claim to be worked rather than a stage for conquest. Their armies are compact, disciplined, and lavishly equipped, favouring heavy armour, void-hardened weaponry, and overwhelming firepower delivered by soldiers who expect, above all else, to survive.
NecronsAn empire of undying metal warriors, ancient beyond memory, waking from millions of years of slumber to reclaim a galaxy that was theirs first.
OrksA galaxy-spanning fungal warrior race that lives for combat, growing stronger and more numerous with every war it starts.
T'au EmpireA young, rapidly expanding alien civilization uniting castes and conquered species under the doctrine of the Greater Good.
TyranidsA trans-galactic swarm of bio-engineered predators that consumes entire worlds to fuel its endless, evolving hunger.
The Horus Heresy
Warhammer 40,000 sub-setting
Alpha LegionLegiones AstartesMasters of deception and the hidden blade, the Alpha Legion wage the Horus Heresy through subterfuge and misdirection, their true allegiance known only to their twin primarchs.
Blood AngelsLegiones AstartesThe most beautiful and beloved of the Legions, the Blood Angels followed the winged Sanguinius from the irradiated wastes of Baal to the daemon-haunted trap of Signus, carrying a hidden thirst no perfection could wholly conceal.
Dark AngelsLegiones AstartesThe secretive First Legion, sons of Lion El'Jonson, wielded terror weapons and the six wings of the Hexagrammaton as they held to their loyalty through the Heresy's long shadow.
Death GuardLegiones AstartesGrim survivors turned instruments of plague, the Death Guard followed Mortarion from the Great Crusade's attritional wars into betrayal at Istvaan III and Nurgle's rotten, deathless embrace.
Emperor's ChildrenLegiones AstartesThe most admired of Legions, sons of Fulgrim, whose flawless pursuit of perfection curdled into the boundless excess of Slaanesh and open betrayal.
Imperial FistsLegiones AstartesUnyielding masters of siegecraft and fortification, the Imperial Fists held the Emperor's Palace itself against the Warmaster's onslaught, embodying a doctrine of stubborn, immovable defiance.
Iron HandsLegiones AstartesGrim masters of iron and augmetic who held flesh itself to be a weakness to be cut away, the Iron Hands were shattered into a leaderless brotherhood of vengeance when their primarch Ferrus Manus was beheaded at Isstvan V.
Iron WarriorsLegiones AstartesThe Imperium's unrivalled masters of the siege, sons of Perturabo, whose grim endurance and unhealed resentment carried them from thankless labour into open treachery.
Legio CustodesTalons of the EmperorThe Legio Custodes are the Emperor's own golden praetorians, ten thousand individually wrought demigod-warriors who guard Terra and the person of the Master of Mankind against every threat the cosmos can turn against Him.
Legio TitanicusCollegia TitanicaThe Titan Legions of the Collegia Titanica were the Imperium's god-engines, walking war-machines whose Princeps merged with their Titans and who split loyalist and traitor when the Heresy came.
MechanicumMechanicum TaghmataThe Mechanicum is the ancient priesthood of Mars before it became the Adeptus Mechanicus, a machine-worshipping empire of tech-priests and battle-automata whose forge-hosts armed the Great Crusade and tore themselves apart in the Heresy.
Night LordsLegiones AstartesBorn of a lightless world and a broken primarch, the Night Lords wage war as terror made method, breaking the will of the living long before they trouble to take their lives.
Questoris KnightsQuestoris FamiliaThe Knight Households of the Great Crusade were a martial aristocracy of towering war-suits, piloted by noble scions sworn to Terra or turned traitor when the Heresy shattered their ancient oaths.
Raven GuardLegiones AstartesSilent masters of the lightning raid and the liberation of the oppressed, the Raven Guard are all but annihilated at Isstvan V and left to rebuild from shadow.
SalamandersLegiones AstartesMaster artificers and champions of the innocent, the Salamanders of Nocturne wield fire and forge-craft in the Emperor's name until the Drop Site Massacre burns their Legion to embers.
Sisters of SilenceTalons of the EmperorThe Sisters of Silence are the Emperor's blank-souled Null-Maidens, a martial sisterhood of pariahs bound by a vow of silence whose very presence strangles sorcery and unmakes the witch.
Solar AuxiliaImperialis AuxiliaThe void-hardened elite of the Imperialis Auxilia, the Solar Auxilia were the finest mortal soldiery of the Great Crusade, the disciplined human spearhead that marched beside the Legions to conquer the stars.
Sons of HorusLegiones AstartesOnce the Emperor's finest sons, the Sons of Horus followed their primarch into damnation, becoming the first and most feared instrument of the Warmaster's galaxy-splitting rebellion.
Space WolvesLegiones AstartesThe Emperor's executioners, the Space Wolves are the leash and the blade of the Imperium, a savage brotherhood of storm and fang loosed upon whatever their master decrees must die.
Thousand SonsLegiones AstartesThe XV Legion turned the pursuit of forbidden knowledge into an art of war, and were damned for it, cast down at Prospero by the very Emperor they sought to warn.
UltramarinesLegiones AstartesThe XIII Legion forged the greatest civilisation of the Great Crusade in the five hundred worlds of Ultramar, only to be gutted at Calth by the treachery of a brother Legion.
White ScarsLegiones AstartesStorm-born horsemen of the stars, the White Scars ride the void as they once rode the plains of Chogoris, striking without warning and vanishing before the wound is felt.
Word BearersLegiones AstartesThe XVII Legion answered the Emperor's rebuke of their faith by finding gods who wanted worship, becoming the first and most deliberate architects of the Horus Heresy.
World EatersLegiones AstartesEnslaved gladiators reforged into living weapons, the World Eaters marched behind the rage-maddened primarch Angron and his Butcher's Nails down a red road that led, inexorably, to the blood-drenched altar of Khorne.
Characters
Abaddon the DespoilerThe DespoilerAbaddon the Despoiler is the greatest champion of Chaos in the galaxy, Warmaster of the traitor hosts and lord of the Black Legion. Once the foremost captain of Horus himself, he rose from the ruin of the Heresy to unite the fractured legions and lead the Long War against the Imperium. Wielding the daemon sword Drach'nyen and the lightning-wreathed Talon of Horus, he has launched crusade after crusade against Terra, and it was his hand that finally broke the Cadian Gate and split the galaxy in two.
Adrax AgatoneNocturne's HammerCaptain of the Pyroclasts and Master of the Arsenal, Adrax Agatone forges his own weapons and wields them with grim resolve, a smith and warrior in the truest Salamanders tradition.
Agapito NevThe TalonFiery commander of the Talons, the Legion's assault echelons, whose ardour drove the Raven Guard's swiftest strikes and, after Isstvan V, its vengeance.
AhrimanThe Chief LibrarianMagnus's foremost sorcerer and Chief Librarian, a warrior whose brilliance and pride made him the natural heir to the Legion's deepest arts.
Ahzek AhrimanThe ExileAhzek Ahriman is the greatest sorcerer of the Thousand Sons after Magnus himself, and the most tragic and reviled figure of his Legion. Once its Chief Librarian, he worked the great spell called the Rubric in a desperate bid to save his brothers from mutation, only to reduce the many thousands of them to soulless dust. Cast out in disgrace and haunted by his failure, Ahriman has wandered the galaxy for ten thousand years, forever seeking the arcane knowledge that might undo the catastrophe his own hand unleashed.
Aldric VyroniiThe OathkeeperThe storm-born baron of House Vyronii, a lord whose unbending fidelity to his oaths held his house loyal to Terra at a ruinous price.
Aldrik VoldusThe Chapter's Mightiest PsykerGrand Master of the Wardmakers and the most powerful psyker the Grey Knights have known in centuries, wielder of the Malleus Argyrum.
AlphariusThe Last FoundThe last and most enigmatic of the primarchs, master of espionage and misdirection, who hid even his own twin behind the coils of the hydra.
Lore & Guides
The Legiones AstartesThe eighteen Space Marine Legions were the Emperor's mightiest weapon: transhuman armies grown from the primarchs to conquer the galaxy, until half of them turned traitor and plunged it into civil war.
The Knight Households of the HeresyThe Questoris Knight Households were noble scions in towering war-suits, feudal lords bound by oath to Terra or turned traitor, riding heirloom god-machines to war across the age of the Horus Heresy.
The Mechanicum of MarsBefore the Adeptus Mechanicus there was the Mechanicum of Mars: an ancient priesthood of the Machine God whose forge worlds armed the Great Crusade, until the Heresy split it into loyal and Dark Mechanicum.
