I have been pondering upon how to start writing about this particular subject. And probably overcomplicating it. Yes, definitely overcomplicating it. Before I start reviewing books I wanted to give some kind of an intro to anyone stumbling upon this blog and not knowing anything about the world of Warhammer. My initial idea was to actually skip that and introduce the world by reviewing various books. Then, while reviewing the books, I planned to talk about the specific subjects from the lore. However, once I started working on the first review I realised that explaining the world would take more space than what I wanted to say about the book I was reviewing.

So, I took a step back and after some days (weeks) of drafting various texts in my head I have decided to write a ridiculously condensed introduction to the world of Warhammer(s). I will try to keep this as light as possible and just give some broad brush strokes as to what is what and who is who. I will link to external resources if you want to explore further and some of the details will get their proper treatment in due course through the reviews I will be writing.

With that said, let’s get hammering.

The many hammers of war

It may sound strange, but fantasy and SF were not always as present in popular culture as they are today. There was a time when not that many took these genres seriously or as something of value. My generation (millennials) has grown up with them embedded in our psyche. However, talk to the generation of my parents and you will notice that most of them think that fantasy is something for little children and something that has no value. O tempora, o mores, I guess.

So, to understand the development of Warhammer we need to switch our mindset to a different one. The one in which fantasy is not a serious thing. We should travel to the 1970-ties when 3 crucial things happened that changed this worldview. It was in 1975. that a company called TSR released a game called Dungeons & Dragons. Just two years later, in 1977. a film was released - called Star Wars and two years later another film called Alien. These three events have made large cracks in the stigma surrounding fantasy and SF. They have generated enough interest, and above all, money that things started to change. Of course, it was not an overnight change. It took many decades before we got where we are now.

Anyway, back to Warhammer.

There is a good chance that you have never heard of Warhammer. Don’t worry. If the deal between Games Workshop and Amazon goes according to plan, which we will know by the end of this year, you and everyone you hold dear will know about Warhammer.

Let’s start with the definition of what it is. Warhammer is a tabletop miniature wargame. What in the world is that, I hear you ask? Plastic toy soldiers and monsters fighting each other on a table covered with miniature buildings. Nerd stuff. Wargaming itself descends from a game called Kriegspiel, a war game in German, which was developed in the XIX century by the Prussian Army to teach and train battlefield tactics to its officers.

So, as you may notice, the nerdy game played today has its roots in serious war planning of the XIX century. War gaming has taken many paths since then but it was all but popular until the late seventies and early eighties of the XX century.

It was at that time that an English company called Games Workshop[GW] was founded(1975.). Initially, the company was manufacturing wooden boards for various games. They then moved onto distributing TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons. To fully explore this part of the company’s history I highly recommend reading “Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop”. The story of the company is less dramatic than that of the TSR, but it’s still worth reading.

Games Workshop even explored the idea of merging with TSR at one point, but luckily for them, and us, that never happened. Instead, the company decided to focus on its own products. It was in 1983. that they published Warhammer Fantasy Battle or just Warhammer Fantasy. Little did they know how big it was going to be. The game was a brainchild of three amazing men: Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell, and Rick Priestley (and one more). I highly recommend listening to interviews with some of these men at Jordan Sorcery Jordan has done an amazing job at digging through the history of Warhammer and his channel and podcast are invaluable contribution to the gaming history.

It was four years later that GW published a science fiction version of the game called Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

What distinguished these two wargames from other contemporary wargames were proprietary models. Up until then you could use any models for your wargames. However, people at GW were die hard fantasy and SF fans and I believe that this made them understand the value of the lore and world building in games. It allows people to go beyond replicating some historical battles.

Both Warhammer Fantasy and Warhamemr 40000 have developed an enormous and detailed world and lore. One could spend years exploring each of them and still find something new. There have been hundreds if not thousands of books written, many editions of the game rules bringing various lore changes and updates, dozens of video games…

Then in 2014. GW decided to kill off the world of Warhammer Fantasy and the game as a whole due to low sales. Warhammer 40K became their main product but the old stuff simply did not sell so well. It was at that point that they decided to move to a new fantasy game that has deep roots in Warhammer Fantasy - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. The release of that game did not go well, as the game was far from being ready for a release. The game received its third edition a few months ago and so far the reception seems to be good.

In the meantime all those children that used to play Warhammer Fantasy grew up and now had extra money at their disposal. So, GW did what any good business does, they reached our into the Bag of Nostalgia and pulled out Warhammer: The Old World. Which is basically Warhammer Fantasy with slightly updated rules and a lot of new miniatures. From what I hear, The Old World seems to be hitting some very high sales levels since it was released.

The company has had ups and downs in the last 40 years, but it has managed to sail through the storms and report £445.4 million of revenue in 2023. Remember, this is a company selling plastic toy soldiers.

The grimdark

Huh. We are now leaving dry history and dates behind and moving onto some more interesting things.

Canoness Veridyan leads her Sisters of Battle on behalf of the Ecclesiarchy into battle.(Copyright Games Workshop)

When I was listing the names of people who came up with Warhammer I said “and one more”. That one more is for me the most important person - John Blanche. He used to be the art director at Games Workshop for many years. His art has defined every single game of Warhammer that GW has produced. He is in a way the reason Warhammer(s) look and feel the way they do. If the other three men have defined the game and its rules, John has defined what it all looks like.

He defined Warhammer worlds as “grimdark”. Though there is not really a consensus whether grimdark makes a genre of its own or just a subgenre. However, there is an agreement that it depicts “pervasively gritty, bleak, pessimistic, or nihilistic view of the world” and it is in a way an anti-Tolkien approach to fantasy. It depicts a world in which there is no hope and no happy ending.

The grimdark of Warhammer 40000

“It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”

This quote can be found as the first page of pretty much every book published by the Black Library, the publishing branch of Games Workshop.

This essay will focus only on the Warhammer 40000 lore. While I really love the Old World lore, used in Warhammer Fantasy, this text would become too long if I were to also talk about that. Once I start reviewing some of the Old World books I will take a look at that world too.

One thing that you should keep in mind at all times - Warhammer lore, be it fantasy or 40000 is a mixture of things from the real world, fantasy books, history and everything in between. If you have the time to listen to the interviews of the people who made this world, you will notice that in a lot of cases they added things not because there is some deep or hidden meaning but because it was simply cool. It is always the rule of cool.

The millions of worlds and beyond

And now we come to the core of this essay. Something that I could not find a perfect solution to without writing hundreds of pages. So, instead of overcomplicating further let’s just run through the timeline of humankind according to the lore of Warhammer.

Some important things to keep in mind:

• The years in the lore are usually marked with millenia mark - M. So you will see the stories being put into 41M or 30M and so on;
• Warhammer in general, but human faction in particular, are very much inspired by the Ancient Rome and Roman Catholic Church, thus a lot of visual representation and language are affected by those sources;
• The formal language of humans in this world is called High Gothic, which is classic Latin. I find it very funny that they call it Gothic given the relationship the Romans had with the Goths;
• Warhammer world may at moments seem like it’s making a comment on some contemporary or historical events, some even claim it to be a caricature of certain events in modern UK history. Many authors and people working at GW have always denied that. Make of this what you will;
• The whole world and its lore have been built with unreliability at its core - we can’t trust the records we are reading fully, which gives GW a lot of room to work and retcon things;
• I don’t think that anyone has expected the whole thing to live this long and to become such a big product, thus a lot of discrepancies are present throughout the history, GW has worked to fix some of them but a lot still remain;
• This whole thing was built so that GW can sell toy soldiers so that people can have fun. Expect that a lot of “but why?” questions will get “why not, it’s fun” answers;

Age of Terra and the Stellar Exodus (M1-M15)

This is a very poorly understood period of human history. What we do know is that humankind advanced and excelled to the level that they started leaving Terra(latin for Earth) and settling on other planets. It is sometimes referred to as the Stellar Exodus. Human’s understanding of advanced technology and interstellar traveling was limited and as such made leaving the Milky Way not possible.

Age of Technology (M15-M25)

It was during this period that humankind comes to learn that there is another realm of existence called the Immaterium or the Warp. It is a dangerous place inhabited by demons and other creatures that would rip humans apart the moment they would go into their realm. The realm is also inhabited by the gods of Chaos. However, using this realm humans managed to achieve faster-than-light travel, allowing them to go beyond the Milky Way. During this period humans reached the furthest places and faced unimaginable enemies.

Age of Strife (“Old Night”) (M25-M30)

At the climax of the previous age human kind has faced its own creation - the AI. Look at this as something like the Skynet event from the Terminator franchise. The results were catastrophic for mankind. Though we won this war in the end, the price was high.

One of many alien species the humans have encountered were the Eldari (space elves), a civilization much more advanced than humankind. They were considered the most advanced humanoid civilization at that point in time. However, that was not to last. Their fall was such a dramatic and terrible event that resulted in two important things. One was the birth of the fourth god of Chaos - Slaneesh, the god of overdoing things, though initially a BDSM god of sexy times. :) and an opening of a rift between the realm of immaterial and the real space - the Eye of Terror.

The Eye of Terror - Image taken from https://warhammer40k.fandom.com

This, as you may assume, was not a good thing. At about this time humanity started having psychers, humans with abnormal psychic powers. The results were catastrophic, little to say. Humans started waging wars against each other, whole worlds were completely destroyed… the great human empire descended into chaos and anarchy.

Terra was no better. The use of advanced weapons and psychic powers resulted in bringing the ecosystem to the brink of death. The world that we know became something like the world of Mad Max. Humanity returned to a more primitive existence.

The Emperor of Mankind

The central figure of Warhammer 40000 lore is an individual called the Emperor or the Emperor of Mankind. His origin is unknown at this point, though I must say that I enjoy the old lore about him that you can read here. Though this is no longer considered canon, I like it. How he came to be is not really relevant. What is important is what he did. And what he did was the unification of Terra. He managed to break all the warlords of old Terra and bring the whole planet under his rule using “might and magic” to this end. What is important to know is that his worldview was an atheistic one. He fought viciously against religion and AI, two things he thought to be the reason for the fall of mankind before his time.

Great Crusade (ca. 798.M30-005.M31)

The Emperor of Mankind managed to break any and all opposition to his rule on Terra using strength and his psychic powers. He is considered the most powerful human psycher to have ever existed. However, he went beyond just mere magic and psychic abilities. He combined those with bioengineering to develop super soldiers - Thunder Warriors, the predecessors of the well known Space Marines. These soldiers helped him conquer the Earth. Once the work was done he realised that his Thunder Warriors were not the most stable breed so he improved upon them creating the first generation of Space Marines. And here you might ask what happened to the Thunder Warriors? Well… he annihilated them. The Emperor of Mankind is a ruthless ruler with a plan that mankind should rule all of the known universe and that any and all other species should be annihilated. Let that settle in. There are no good guys in this story. Most people vouch for the Emperor and mankind only because we are them. It doesn’t take much to see how bad they are though.

Anyway, the Emperor used his advanced knowledge not only to build his Space Marine legions but to also produce his 18(20) sons - the Primarchs. Each one of them being given special abilities, each one of them having a piece of Emperor’s powers and personality in him. Knowing that you are a very careful reader, I know that you have noticed that I have written 18(20) as the number of sons. That is because though he initially created 20 of them, 2 were removed from knowledge and history. Those who knew about them were either violently silenced or their memories were erased. Yes, that’s how things go in the Imperium of Mankind. Why? No one knows, obviously. However, it leaves a lot of material for potential stories. That is how GW operates.

Just to make this soap opera more complicated, his sons were taken away from him (either by the meddling of the gods of Chaos from the Warp or by his wife Erda (earth in the Old Germanic)). Either way, the Emperor temporarily lost his sons, but his plan was not going to stop because of that.

He began the Great Crusade to reconquest and bring into the Imperium of Man all those worlds that Terra lost touch with during the dark ages. Some of them were forever lost due to destruction but some thrived on their own.

One such was Mars where humanity went down the road of machine integration and became what we call the Mechanicum. They worshiped a god or entity they called the Omnissiah and when the Emperor showed up at their door those farseeing among them realised that it is better to make a deal with this guy in golden armour that is followed by legions of killing machines in the form of Space Marines. So, the Mechanicum decided that the Emperor is an avatar of the Omnissiah and that they will join him. In return for getting all the mighty technology that the Mechanicum has been reclaiming while the Terra was going through its Mad Max period, he granted them a rather wide independence and the right to continue with their techno-mechanic religion.

Another lucky thing happened during this reconquest. You see, the Emperor had a problem creating new Space Marines, the process was slow as he didn’t have the access to the genetic material he needed - his sons. The idea was to use their gene seed to create new Space Marines. However, they were gone. It was during the conquest of a world called Cthonia that he managed to find his son Horus, for example. And from here on, he started finding his other sons too. This in return made it possible to speed up the process of creating new Space Marines, which is a painful procedure where a human male is taken, genetically altered so that he goes from being a regular human being to being a walking killing machine with enhanced powers. We’ll cover that too while reviewing some of the novels, don’t you worry.

Things were looking great for the Emperor.

Until they weren’t.

Horus Heresy (ca. 005-014.M31)

One of the things the Emperor has been working hard to achieve is to hide the existence of the Chaos gods and their demons from wider humanity. Not a great plan, you could say. And it is thanks to this that things went very bad very fast.

One of his sons, Lorgar who had a very religious approach to spreading the Imperium fell under the influence of the Dark gods because his daddy Emperor didn’t treat him nicely. From there the heresy slowly spread like poison. But it was not until his son Horus, the Warmaster of his whole armada fell under the power of the Chaos - all 4 of the gods put their influence into him.

The results were… devastating. And that is an understatement. What followed was the period called the Horus Heresy. The Imperium split in two, those loyal to the Emperor and those loyal to Warmaster Horus. Many bloody battles were fought and many brothers were killed. Worlds disappeared in flames for supporting one or the other side. The galaxy was in flames.

The whole thing ended up as a very bloody victory for the Emperor and his troops. He slayed Horus but was mortally wounded himself. A lot of his sons died in those 9 years of the Heresy and the Imperium was scarred forever.

Great Scouring (ca. 014-Unknown Date.M31)

It is not necessary to say that once Horus was killed and his side lost that the victors were seriously angry and hungry for blood. So the great scouring began where the loyalist forces chased the broken army of Warmaster left and right. Many worlds were lost again, this time for siding with the losers. Most of the heretic legions and their followers fled into the Eye of Terror where they were changed forever.

The Emperor, wounded, was taken to his golden throne at the top of what today are the Himalayas (Terra is not a great place in M41). There he sits like a corpse, using his psychic power to create a beacon that is used to travel the Warp kind of safely. He is also doing some other more sinister things, but those are just rumours, you see. Asking questions about those is heresy and we all know what the punishment for heresy is, don’t we?

Most of his sons were gone at this point. Those loyal were either slain or were chasing their own agendas - mostly wanting to kill the heretics. Those who sided with Horus became demon princes of their respective Chaos gods.

All in all, there was no happy ending to this period.

Age of the Imperium (M31 - Present)

And thus we come to the present time of the Imperium of Mankind. The Emperor is sealed on his throne, the Primarchs are gone (kind of), the Chaos is always present and spreading… things are very grim and very dark.

The novels that I will be reviewing are happening between M31 and M41. That is 10000 years. I think that GW played it very smart with such big time spans. There is so much room to fit in whatever they want. There is also a lot of room to just declare something forgotten and lost.

A lot has happened since the end of the Great Scouring. First of all, humanity became a truly clerico-fascist civilisation. The Emperor was declared a god or God Emperor of Mankind. The church was built around his cult - the Ecclesiarchy and, of course, they have a lot of power. Terra is governed by the High Lords of Terra. Most of humanity lives in a squalid environment and they are all dedicated to building the war machinery for the Imperial army. The army itself consists of billions upon billions of soldiers who are a little more than cannon food. And there are still Space Marines, but all the Primarch are gone (kind of, GW is bringing them back) and the marines were reorganised after the Heresy so that they pose less threat to regular humans. Humanity understands very little of the technology it is using, superstition is widely spread. And then there is Chaos from the Warp.

Things are not looking great for humankind. And that should be one thing you should keep in mind. No matter what happens things never look good for mankind. The whole setting is constantly walking on the edge of destruction. Yet, nothing really changes that much. Because in the end, the story moves just enough so that GW can make and sell new miniatures.

Post-mortem

There are many factions. There are many worlds. There are many species. And they all have their miniatures, because let’s not forget that Warhammer is first and foremost a tabletop wargame. However, the value of the IP has become such that we will soon see some of these stories and factions on our TV screens and in cinemas.

Warhammer rule books always try to remind us that the hobby called Warhammer attracts various groups of people. There are those that are here just for the game. Then there are those that just like painting miniatures. And those that like the lore and the books. Those that play video games. There is enough in Warhammer to satisfy various needs and interests.

I fall into a few of those groups, but this blog will mostly focus on one - books and the lore they are creating.

… for in the grim dark future there is only war…

P.S.

If you wish to further explore the lore and Warhammer in general, while waiting for the next text, I can highly recommend the following:

• Warhammer 40000 Wiki
• Jordan Sorcery
• Luetin09
• Baldermort’s Guide to Warhammer
• The Black Library
• The Warhammer Community
• Warhammer website