Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop wargame made by Games Workshop, a doujin circle from Nottingham, England who take after the eponymous sheriff from the Robin Hood legend by robbing everyone blindly and abusing shop owners.
Why the 40K? The game of Warhammer 40K is actually a spin off a fantasy gameline known simply as Warhammer or Warhammer Fantasy. It had superior tactics due to its pre-modern, rank and file units and flexible magical support. But it didn’t have Space Marines, so it was detonated in a series of beautifully bound reset buttons and replaced with a game called Age of Sigmar, which now has Space Marines and no rules. Fantasy also had an TRPG called Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, exclusively played by genius-level Polish sociopaths in prison. 40K originated from a tongue in cheek sci-fi what-if future for the fantasy setting, known as Rogue Trader. As it is a snake eating its own tail, there are many other things named after Rogue Trader, including the Fantasy Flight RPG Rogue Trader.
So what is the thing that it is? Warhammer 40,000 is set in a science fantasy universe where events are now in a logarithmic state of acceleration. Nothing happened between now and 30,000, when everything happened. And now at the end of the 41st millennium, there is a major galactic calamity every 10 seconds because it’s hard to progress your timeline when the date is the title. So the protagonists are The Imperium of Man, which is basically the empire from Dune, except instead of a plotting, psychic, sterile sandworm/man hybrid as the God-Emperor, the 40K version is a bad father.
His shitty kids are the Primarchs, the founders of the Space Marine legions. Space Marines are superhuman warriors, the elites of mankind’s forces, and get taller and taller every year due to the writer Dan Abnett’s gigantism fetish.
These Space Marine legions were basically the Roman legions in space, highly autonymous armies with distinct tactical philosophies, rich martial traditions, livery, ancient histories, and no emotional intelligence. One of these Primarchs, Horus (not the one in charge of the Egyptian-themed legion; that’s Magnus the Red, who isn’t in charge of the Space Vikings) got a tummy ache in a sweat lodge. Demons then crawled into his butt, and he joined up with the shittiest/stupidest of his brothers and led a rebellion against his dad. 300 novels later, he mortally wounds his dad, dad vaporizes him with mind bullets, dad is put on life support, and his shitty sons flee into the Eye of Terror. Then the loyal space marines broke apart into smaller units called chapters, which are too numerous to outline here.
What is the Eye of Terror? The eye of Terror is a hole into the Warp, which is hyperspace. And also Hell. It’s the locus of Chaos. Chaos is basically a nebulous force of malevolence, filled with demons, evil space marines, and various lumpy, fucked up people.
Chaos is dominated by four gods of chaos called the Chaos Gods. They are Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh. People will tell you that they are complicated beings possessing many contradictory natures, but they are liars. Khorne is bloodthirsty sociopathy, Nurgle is about coming to terms with your dick rotting off, Tzeentch is Loki if he were a rainbow sorbet, and Slaanesh is how the English view people who have sex. They are basically the 4 Tezcatlipocas of Aztec myth mixed with various versions of the Christian Devil, if you also plagiarized Michael Moorcock.
So the Imperium of Man and Chaos …what are the other factions? Warhammer 40K does technically contain other, non-space marine factions. For example, there is the Astra Militarum, which everyone calls the Imperial Guard, which is what happens when you put a WWI army in a future with aliens monsters and laughing gods. They spend decades fighting and dying to secure a hill on a god-forsaken world so that the space marines can drop in and have a superpowered penis fight. The Imperium is supported by a Martian cargo cult called the Adeptus Mechanicus, which is basically what happens when boomers take over an entire interstellar empire’s tech support. There are also technically a group of a women called the Sisters of Battle, who feature in guro scenes.
Aliens? Yes, there are technically aliens, but some of them are just fantasy races. Games Workshop begrudgingly supports them.
The Orks are orcs, with a K and a general ramshackle deiselpunk aesthetic. They are basically the same as the humans of the setting, which is kind of the joke - incredibly violent, ignorant of their own technology, and prone to going on massive crusades called WAAAGH!s. They speak in cockney accents and act like football hooligans due to British classism. Despite the fluff that their technology only works because of their racial psychic influence, ork technology is generally the only tech that actually looks like you could built it today.
The Aeldari are the Eldar, or the Elves. While most settings’ elves are dying off because they don’t want to fuck their incredibly hot immortal chicks for some reason, the Eldar are a fallen people because they became so decadent that they birthed the chaos god Slaanesh. Someone made a dildo out of bees and the Eldar homeworld prolapsed into the Eye of Terror. The surviving eldar are still bound to Slaanesh, and must make precautions to prevent the god from eating their souls upon death. The High Elves are the Craftworld Eldar, repressed monomaniacs that live on massive spaceships. The Dark Elves are the Dark Eldar, who also have some new stupid name only Feds use. They are pirates who live in an extradimensional city made of sex dungeons. They saw that their races’ depravity gave birth to a terrifying god, and decided that they could totally be worse. Like holy shit, dude
The T’au are a minor power of upcoming aliens unified into an empire. They are very sleek looking, practical (though they do use mecha), and stand out in the setting as having notions of progress and diplomacy. They are also mind controlled by their leaders. And still probably the most morally upright faction. They used to be known as the Tau, but the apostrophe was added to make them more legally distinct from Greek letters. The fandom calls them communists, but they’re actually more akin to the authoritarian, drug-suppressed state with a rigid, genetically-enforced caste system found in Brave New World. Still almost the good guys.
The Tyranids are the aliens from Aliens and the bugs from Starship Troopers and also shiny Scyther. Do you know what the Zerg are? They are the Zerg. They came first, though, but looked way stupider when Starcraft came out. Their most important action in the fluff was fucking up the Mary Sue Space Marine chapter known as the Ultramarines. This makes them the true heroes of the setting.
The Necrons were a mechanical race of ancient alien precursors that kind of stole that role from the Eldar. They used to be mindless terminators harvesting the living with a vaguely Egyptian-theme and the setting’s second quartet of evil gods, but now they’re wacky, senile space pharaohs who turned their gods into Pokemon and fly in croissants. They’re still treated as menacing in the lore, but they aren’t.
How Do You Play? You find a board. You put your army on the table, a set up process that takes two hours. Then you roll dice for six hours, drinking beer. You then stop to watch Deadpool 2. You are now drunk. You then realize that you forgot to deepstrike a unit of terminators, and lose the game.
