Hail His name, the Master of Mankind

This post is just a small nod of appreciation to the milieu created by Rick Priestley in 1988 for the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop battle game. For me, the image below is the one that best evokes this milieu.

This is not a future of bright sophistication and civilised committee meetings. This is brute force and ignorance. If a computer doesn't work, you do not open the case and carefully replace the components whilst wearing a surgical mask. You hit it as hard as you can. If that doesn't work, you call a tech priest who murmurs a litany over it. And for some reason, it works. Technology so advanced that it responds to ritual and percussion.

The weapons. Orbital bombardments, power fists, powered armour, plasma cannons, chainswords, storm bolters, frag grenades, melta-guns, melta-bombs, the manufactories on Mars, the Inquisition, Exterminatus, the bodies of a hundred youthful psykers sacrificed each day to preserve the last spark of life in the dessicated skeletal husk of the Emperor.

Brute force and ignorance. A regime of such brutality serving as humanity's final defence against damnation at the hands of the chaos gods.

Now... playing this game has never held much interest for me so I wouldn't call myself a fan of that. What I am a fan of though, is the incredibly detailed and grim universe that the Games Workshop team invented as background information to the game.

As the years since 1988 passed, a story began to emerge. I'll try to summarise what I recall of the story without looking too much up online. This is what I have in my head.

I think the main dramatic elements begin 30,000 years in the future in M31... or to use the WH40K date system, something like 1 397 452.M31, with the Horus Heresy.