The Eldar, an ancient, mysterious race nearly destroyed by the fallout from their ancestors' decadence, work to stave off the hellish afterlife looming over them in ways that put themselves and their kin at the centre of things. The Warp, a corrupted parallel dimension connected to the material universe, provides the Imperium's only means of Faster-Than-Light Travel, but traversing it is incredibly dangerous due to its disregard for the laws of reality, the prospect of being ripped apart by Daemons should a vessel's protections fail, and the requirement of a specific kind of mutated human to perceive both the currents of the Warp and the Astronomican, a navigation beacon controlled by the Emperor's soul should it fail, the worlds of humanity would essentially be stranded, and the Imperium would wither and die.Īs bad as the Imperium is, however, all the other major factions are just as bad, if not far worse. Science and technology have scarcely progressed for ten thousand years, partly because they are treated with fear, ignorance and magical superstition, and partly because the Adeptus Mechanicus, the secretive, deranged machine cult that maintains the Imperium's technological base, generally sees innovation as blasphemy against the wisdom of the ancients and rightly fears the possibility of daemonic corruption of unproven equipment. A futuristic Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even the slightest taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, even going as far as destroying entire planets, just to be sure. The Space Marines (capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Knight Templar Super Soldiers) and the Sisters of Battle (equally fanatical, pyromaniacal battle nuns) serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the Imperial Guard, its at least trillions-strong regular army, takes disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes. Since then, he has become the godhead of the Imperium, and the incomprehensibly vast Ecclesiarchy spreads the Imperial Cult and commits horrible atrocities in his name (but against his philosophy) on an almost-daily basis. Its leader, known only as the Emperor, was betrayed and laid low by his most beloved son, and for more than ten millennia has been locked up in an arcane life support mechanism that anchors his soul in his withered corpse and requires the souls of psychic humans to be consumed in the thousands per day as fuel. In the waning years of the 41st millennium, the game's central faction, the Imperium of Man, is a paranoid, fascist theocratic state which spans the galaxy but is struggling mightily to maintain its grip on its territory.

In the distant past, humanity held immeasurable power and glory, but no longer.

Warhammer 40k dark heresy vox