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Warhammer 40,000
aka: Warhammer 40 K
Warhammer 40,000

Theories involving crossovers with non-Games-Workshop franchises should go here.

Due to size, this page has been split.

Orkish really is cockney accent english
Since 40k is so far into the future languages would of change dramatically. English in it original form was a dialect of proto-germanic which would be pretty much extremely difficult if not impossible to be understood by any modern day English speaker. And that is a mere difference of 2000 years, in the 40k verse languages would change alot and it would not be totally unreasonable for the English langauge to have gone extinct like Khitan, Roman-latin, Nesite or (ironcilly) real life Gothic (the language spoken by the Gothic Tribes that eventually brought down the Western Roman Empire). Any modern English speaker would probably sound rather almost bestial to someone from the Imperium. Since 40k take place in the far future, this means that modern tv broadcasts would of already traveled almost halfway across the galaxy making it extremely like for a group of of Orkz would randomly picked up these TV single a long time ago and were amazed at these actual langauges (Orkz at the time probably didn't have a proper language at the time) and would experimented with trying to find a suitable one that was easy enough for them to learn yet fitted their warring nature and just so found English (specifically Cockney accented) English to be the best one.

The Tyrant Star's prophecy does not refer to humanity being overcome by Chaos. It refers to the Imperium descent into superstition and cruelty
The prophecy's signs may already be occurring and may refer to the Imperium's current state of events or a progression of it.

There are C'Tan-loyalist Necrons
The new depiction of Necrons as independent and largely opposed to their old star-gods gives them a lot more variety and character, but doesn't fit the many appearances in the fiction of creepy, single-minded Mecha-Mooks to the C'Tan, including speaking Lords who express veneration towards them. Given the division between Lords that has been introduced in the newest codex, it's entirely reasonable that some of the Necrons never rebelled, or reverted to loyalism when Szarekh relinquished his control as the race began to enter suspended animation. They secretly aided in combining some of the C'Tan Shards into more powerful and aware beings(although greatly reduced from their past selves) before entering the Great Sleep. Those greater shards, on awakening, were able to assert control over some fraction of the Necron Overlords, producing the forces seen in earlier editions and appearing as the Special Character versions of the Nightbringer and Deceiver. Also, these are the Necrons interested in cutting off the Warp from the Materium, and in harvesting limited quantities of sentient life for enslavement.
  • Alternatively, the rest of this is true, but there are no loyalist Overlords—the tomb-world Lords awoke first as per another WMG somewhere on the site, and many, without contact with their superiors, reverted to earlier patterns. Some of these remain loyally C'tan-ist due to contact with the greater shards or just centuries of independence.
  • Implied to be true. Transcendent C'tans regain their intelligence and personality and should be capable of acquiring a Necron Tombworld via subtle means or sheer might. There is also a certain Phaeron who is rumored to be a disguised C'tan shard since 5th edition.

The Necron tendency to destroy everything down to the microbe is a sign of damage to their programming
Since their "gods" are trying to harvest sentient life as a tasty treat, it doesn't make sense to make the worlds completely unlivable, instead of doing what the Wraith do, leave survivors that can't defend themselves to repopulate. Since they have lifespans in the eons, it's not like they couldn't leave a few hundred or thousand worlds within their grasp to feed their gods, viciously defend them to the point where only the very stupid would go within 100 light years of them, and consume them at their leisure. They could expand the menu every so often (the Pariah project indicates they have the capacity for meddling).
  • Glitch, or rebellion? Necrons might be fighting back against their oppressors the only way they can.
    • Exactly. Their programming certainly doesn't cover sparing something which in millions of years could have developed into something sentient, so in the long run, the Necrons could be denying the C'Tan all future sources of food once they've expended the current galaxy's sentient population.
  • Or maybe they just realize that the galaxy is a big-ass place. Having a large empty sector around your base of operations will strain the supply lines of any attackers while you can just rush out with your faster ships and harvest at will. There are stories of ships harvesting and not killing entire planets and taking them away, so it's possible that there are "farm worlds" full of captured beings being bred for harvest. We just haven't seen them because the systems around those worlds are full of necrons on barren planets, thus making it so no one wants to go any farther if they survive the experience.
    • There's a quote that says the Necrons will enslave after they kill enough people.

The Old Ones Are Just Hiding and will return to save the day...
...for themselves, of course, since this is Warhammer 40k. They'll come back and decide that if they want a livable galaxy, everything's going to need to go. Yet another front is added to the war and the status quo remains more or less exactly the same, aside from shuffling around of who owns what planet.

It will get better, then worse, just give it 14,000 years
Specifically, 14,000 years after the end of the year 40,999.

It gets better because: All the Chaos gods except Tzeentch will die, and the Tyranids will enter the warp forever to feed off the energy, waging an eternal war with the Daemon hordes of the three dead chaos gods. This will eliminate these threats. Then, the Golden throne will finally fail, but the Emperor will resurrect. He will take command and slacken the Imperium's xenophobic, anti-innovation policy. The Imperium will form an alliance with the Tau, and then Tzeentch, the "good" chaos god, will join them, and the Emperor will redeem all traitors under him. The fallen Primarchs, Horus included, will be redeemed or resurrected. The Eldar will already have been wiped out by the dark Eldar, who in turn become extinct. The Necrons as they are now will be exterminated by the Imperium-Tau-chaos alliance, and their remaining tobworlds will need millenia to wake up. Many Orks will join the Imperium under "Warboss Emprah". The ones who don't get wiped out from too much fighting with the alliance and each other, until the last independent warboss has a prophetic dream and takes his WAAAGH! off on a crazy quest out the galaxy. They never come back.

It then gets worse because: The factions and species of the alliance trade technology to build new weapons, and get ready for the arrival of whatever the Tyranids are running from. It arrives in the 56th millennium. Fortunately "Warboss Emprah" just achieved something resebling enuff dakka. The setting gets Grimdark again because of this war between the new arrivals, the now-fully awakened Necrons and the alliance. Cue Warhammer 55,000.
  • May I ask, why that specific year? Is there something in the lore that states 14,000 years? If they want to make a sequel series (set thousands of years after to get more money) why not Warhammer 50,000? 55 is just an odd number to use.
    • Because the Orks become able to counter any Evil Plan within the Imperium with their cockney football jargon, and an ancient truth is realized: all Sisters of Battle are descended from Buffy Summers. So there.

There is one thing the Ruinous Powers fear more than the Emperor. Death
Obviously everyone fears death, but the Chaotic powers, for all their power and immortality, fear it more than anything in the universe because it is the ultimate order. And I'm not just talking about physical death, but complete death of both the body and soul. No change. No plans. No unpredictability. Simply the yawning void of potential unending non-existence. It's why they fear and despise Blanks. Blanks have no souls, thus no presence in the warp. They are like an invisible force they cannot see or even properly perceive. Like a black hole, they bend and suck the powers of the Warp until it ceases to exist. They are to Daemons as the undead are to humans. Even Nurgle, the embodiment of the living's fear of inevitable death and disease, fears true death because he is like an infernal version of the fourth and fifth stages of the Kubler-Ross model of the five stages of grief. He may relish in his acceptance of death and decay, but he still has no real idea what it is like to experience the true cessation of existence. He is merely a representation of mortals reactions to death, but he is not death. The same applies to the other three gods as well. When Horus had his soul eradicated by the Emperor, it sent a shock wave through the Warp that felled numerous chaos legions and sent Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Titans into absolute panic. Remember, for all his power and accomplishments, Horus was only one man with one one soul and his death was enough to save the Imperium of Man from near certain destruction by the daemonic powers. Imagine if that was done with a whole world of people? The warp would be sent into, well, chaos!

The Space Marines are actually hybrids of sorts
And many implants are from different alien races:
  • The Ossumodula (Bone growth), Preomner (poison prevention), Oolitic Kidney (again, prevents poison), and Biscopea (Muscle growth) are taken from Orks.
  • Betcher's Gland (Acid Spit), Progenoids (Geneseed collection), and Omnophagea (Learning from Eating) from Tyranids.
  • Black Carapace (Greater armor interface) from Necrons.
However, the Emperor's power kept them from going berserk.
  • The Tyranids are just now showing up, 10,000 years after the Emperor created the Space Marines. For that matter, Emps had been isolated on Terra for 10,000 years and didn't have access to any aliens to take bits from.

The victory of Chaos is hollow and empty
It's heavily implied that chaos has already won the battle over the Imperium, with the latter being a slowly dying shell staving off the inevitable. Yet it is also a hollow victory, because with no more meaningful enemies to fight against, chaos will ultimately turn against itself. There is no true unity in chaos, such things are simply the ramblings of Chaos cultists too deluded to see the obvious. Even when the Ruinous powers ban together to rid themselves of a common enemy, they will immediately go back to their bickering and civil wars when the mission is over (or even when it's not fully complete). And despite their power, it's unlikely that the Chaos gods have complete control over their Chaotic legions. Emotions are constantly changing, so who knows if some other power rises up and takes their place. Heck, who knows if they will remain the same as they did before in the next millennium? As their emblem shows, Chaos goes in many different directions, yet they all ultimately lead to nowhere.

There is no Emperor never was, never will be
I'm basing this WMG on fluff from the earliest concept version of the WH 40 K canon known as Laser Burn it was a basic ruleset for playing with 15mm miniatures. Basically it states that while there was an Imperium which was ruled by the High Lords of Terra, the Emperor himself isn't mentioned not even ONCE.

To boot the Imperial Council of Terra is portrayed as horrifically racist, openly planning the genoside of most of Earths racial minorities (predominatly Blacks, Asians, and those of middle eastern decent). The near overwhelming majority of seemingly exiled minorities live on off world colonies termed by the game itself as "Dark Worlds".

Basically imagine if our current Warhammer game had lines like "Kill the Ni**er, Purge the Chink! Games Workshop would have a far smaller fanbase. GW must have realized that either by intention or accident they had made Klu Klux Klan 40k and promptly never made another version of the game. Although oddly enough both miniatures and original rule books are still sold on a seperate website.

However if you include this backstory (which I'm calling 40k 0th edition) into current Warhammer canon it shows that in reality the great Emperor of Man never really existed and was only a monumental piece of propaganda created by the High Lords of Terra either to terrify or inspire the common Imperium citizenry into a fanatical devotion to the racist lords of Terra and to the common ideal of "Imperialism" itself.

However this also does not completely mean that the Emperor did not exist. There are only 3 possible scenarios of how the Emperor could exist in within current canon which are...

1. The "Emperor" is only some poor fanatical bastard who willingly sacrificed himself to be plugged into the golden throne to be used as a symbolic effigy for future generations or...

2. He was some even poorer bastard who was murdered by Terran High Lord order then placed against his will in the Golden Throne as a braindead vegetable for over 10,000 years. This would mean that everything from Rogue Trader to now is complete Imperium bullshite. The Horus Heresy, Warp chaos, traitor marines, Chaos gods all Never Happened. And finally...

3. The "Emperor" was either one of the lords of Terra or an unseen Imperium noble whom literally had both extreme delusions of godhood and enough Ax craziness to start his own "Great Crusade" to overthrow the original lords of Terra and place himself as"Emperor" of all mankind.

He creates 20 genetically modified near clones of himself whom he calls his "sons" and for paranoid reasons that his "enemies" were out to get him scatters them across across the galaxy. Meanwhile the "Emperor" goes about creating a North Korea like Orwellian society along with a religious cult of personality with his most fanatical followers declaring him "God Emperor".

After several years later the now "God Emperor" retrieves his sons and orders them to be given massive amounts of possibly crippling enhancement surgery in order to become newer upgraded versions of space marines. 2 of the "Emperor's" sons die in the process. The newly created space marines lead the imperial armada across the galaxy for the second stage of his "Great Crusade" burning Xenos worlds and purging human colonies who don't align themselves with the new "Emperor"

However as was stated above this Emperor is Super Robot Hitler levels of racist. With every new triumph the "Emperor's" madness and lust for power grows by the minute. With every success he demands more minority purging and more alien genocide and more godlike devotion to him. Finally one of the "Emperors" sons have had enough of his fathers and the Imperiums insanity

Horus leads nine space marine legions against the "Emperor" and the imperial fleet. This war is known originally as the "Horus Mutiny" or Rebellion (millennia later this changed into the more religious version of "Heresy"). Horus allies himself with 4 native Warp space alien species originally targeted for exterminatus they are later termed by the Inquisition as "Deamons" and "Chaos"

Horus is ultimately defeated but he somehow manages to allow the survivIng marines to escape into warp space. He also manages to nearly kill the "Emperor", However the Emperor has a final ace up his blood covered sleeve.

Years previously the Emperor becoming increasingly obsessed with immortality due to his self believed godhood had secretly ordered the creation of a life support system never before seen as it would keep its occupant alive indefinitely. As the imperial madman plugged himself into his "Golden Throne" he made a silent vow to destroy all his enemies and finish what he started.

And so the mad emperor sits on his throne keeping him in a state of slow physical decay leaving him a living corpse for 10,000 years possibly within a state of unimaginable insanity that possibly could rip the very universe apart. While the seeming death of the "Emperor" should have ended his mad reign his deathless sleep only appeared to reenforce it. The Imperium went on a slow decay of technological, social, and mental collapse.

Tzeentch is NOT the God of Hope
What Games Workshop wrongly called Hope is more accurately called Ambition, and considering how the Chaos Gods are gods of Selfishness, and ambitious people are easily corruptible to becoming arrogant Machiavellian manipulators, it best describes Tzeentch most accurately. Because in the grim darkness of the far future, actual selfless Hope should be for all intents and purposes dead, and if Tzeentch really was the Hope God he should be weaker than even Slaanesh. Then who is the true God of Hope then? The local Messianic Archetype of the setting, the God-Emperor of Mankind. He once brought Hope to Humanity but in the 41st millennium that God of Hope is now a rotting carcass.
  • there just a problem, Tzeentch is the God of change, think when you have hope to the future, it's because you want something to change, like if you lived in a crapsack world, you hope for the future being you want change...THIS IS THE PROBLEM...
  • ...gods of selfishness? It says everywhere that isn't Imperial propaganda that the Chaos gods have benevolent aspects, and besides, ambition is morally neutral. It's what your ambition is for that can be good or evil.
  • Yet the Emperor Himself is a God of Hope, and he is now a rotting corpse...

The God-Emperor of Mankind cannot escape his fate to become Chaos Undivided
Look at the God-Emperor and you have characteristics of almost all the four major Chaos Gods. Khorne? Well during the Great Crusade instead of diplomacy the Emperor chose to exterminatus all Xenos to the last. Slaanesh? The Emperor loved to build all kinds of golden monuments and palaces to his vanity, and he is often depicted by remebrancers to be human perfection. Tzeentch? Lots. Psyker? Genius? Ambitious, Manipulated Mankind for millennia? Brought Hope and Change? Of course. Nurgle? He's now a rotting corpse. In other words, the Emperor now exemplifies traits of Chaos, and if he is ever allowed to die the universe is F*cked.

Khorne was the Abrahamic God.
Note that this isn't expressing my opinions on Abrahamic religions, but rather the canon of Warhammer40000. Khorne came into existence during humanity's Middle Ages, from Terra. What are the most famous wars and conflicts fought about back then? Religious differences. The Crusades, the Inquisition, both Christianity and Islam wholeheartedly believing that Sex Is Evil...the darkest aspects of fanatic and zealous warfare germinated into what would eventually become Khorne, easily the opposite of the sensual god Slaanesh. The Imperium, easily the most warmongering factions, is basically a Catholic dictatorship turned to its darkest extreme. Yahweh started off as the Caananite War God and retains that position even today, but Khorne has lost the traits which make Him admirable, with the exception of a sense of honour. Or if you believe God Is Evil, He may just have become Ax-Crazy. Also, who do you usually think of as a bastardization or evil counter to God? Satan. And what are the things associated with Satan? Sex and temptation, both aspects of Slaanesh and therefore anathema to Khorne.
  • Pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that it was the Mongols, not the Christians, whose actions caused the giant mass of psychic rage and aggression to form into Khorne... Also sure Games Workshop has implied that the Abramahic Religions where all made by the Emperor, in attempts to unite humanity through laws then love and finally discipline.

Farsight's Dawn Blade
So, the planet Arthas Moloch, where Farsight finds his epic magical sword, is a dead world. There exist ruins, mostly unadorned, that contain small geometric figures that repel daemons and Warp phenomena in their vicinity. The blade itself is composed of "chronophagic alloys" which steal the victim's lifespan with each stroke, adding it to the wielder's. It has an elegant, simple aesthetic that is nonetheless alien to the Tau, inscribed with a symbol that looks like a half-circle that radiates rays in all directions.

Farsight has looted a Necron tomb world. It's probably best that he doesn't find out.

Tzeentch is Games Workshop's least favorite of the Chaos Gods
Lore related to him gets the least attention, his units tend to be the least useful, and even pyskic powers, which are supposed to his area of expertise, Slaanesh tends to do better than him.

The Tyranid are Nurgle.
They are called the Great Devourer....

The the missing Primarchs are missing due to the Thunder Warriors.
Either because they found out about them and rebelled against the Emperor for his callous disposal of them (possibly because they believed the same would happen to them once the galaxy was united) or because they performed illegal gene-seed experiments with them, either way, this interaction required their immediate removal. Unlike with the Traitor Primarchs, knowledge of their existence wasn't widespread, so it wouldn't have been an impossible undertaking to delete them from the records.
WarhammerWMG/Tabletop GamesThe World of Darkness

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