Introduction
There is plenty of speech and writing about what the lore of the Warhammer 40k universe is, but that just makes me sad. Let’s think about what it could be, and what it perhaps should be. And when discussing ‘should’, we must explain why, because such artistic choices are rarely objectively better: we must argue the case and explain how a choice benefits the setting or creates evocative story and gaming possibilities.
First of all I want to recite the core features of the setting. It relies on a grim, gloomy, gothic aesthetic. Humanity has spread across the galaxy but is in a sort of sci-fi dark age. Violence is everywhere, religious fanatics rule and the threats they fear are real. There is no utopia, and if there were it would not last long: it would be conquered or destroyed by forces far more focussed on war. The answer to war can never be to one-sidedly choose peace: one must fight back or lose.
A comedian once said “I can imagine a beautiful world of prosperity and peace without need or suffering. And I can imagine us conquering that world because they’d never expect it”. This is how Warhammer 40k thinks too. Human nature has a violent side to it, a love of faith and war that some would argue is more than merely a side. To achieve the enlightened prosperity of some futuristic settings one needs power: the power to create such prosperity, and the power easily to protect it. Stargate sort-of showed this with some of the alien cultures humans encountered: the ones portrayed as enlightened and peaceful had the technology and power not to be bothered by the more violent forces that were the main antagonists.
However, humans have a dark side too. The chaos gods, the main evil of the setting, are accretions of the worse aspects of life as a sentient being, emotions made manifest in the psychic realm and then able to project their power into the material world. Khorne is a god of anger, murder and war; Tzeentch a god of deceit, lies, manipulation and scheming; Nurgle a god of disease and decay, brought into being by fear and desperation more than deliberate indulgence; and Slaanesh a god of excess and obsession. Humans are at constant war with their baser natures, and in the Warhammer settings this war is made real, with daemonic corruption of people and then whole worlds a distinct possibility.
Thus the setting captures an eternal truth about humanity, and it is this depiction of an abstract truth as a physical as well as spiritual threat that gives the setting some of its appeal. Sci-fi and fantasy settings are great for this: they can explore aspects of morality or humanity that are hard to create stories around in real-life settings.
The constant warfare of Warhammer 40k is a key feature: it is a setting developed for a wargame, after all. But the constant threat and uncertainty is important. There is no safety, no way to ensure that things are alright for anyone. The decisions that the fascist theocracy of The Empire of Man makes are awful, but necessary. Fascism thrives on militarisation and purity against a threat, but in 40k the unholy threat is real. This is not a far-right wet dream, except for the horrifically stupid. It’s a dystopia: it is only the genuine horrors of what is inhuman (and fictional) that justify the genuine horrors of conformist devotion to a militarised theocracy.
Alongside this grimdark (a term coined by Warhammer’s tagline of ‘in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war’) setting there is a horror element. The cold vastness of space is not traversed in an instant with hyperlanes or Star-Trek-style warp travel. People, and information, take time to move. You can be lost amongst billions, a tiny speck whirling in the eddies of fate, or lost alone in the void. There are unknown horrors everywhere, lost species, tribes, technologies, tainted artefacts, daemonic outposts or worshippers alongside banal criminality.
Why is this important? For all the same reasons that horror settings are evocative: the unknown holds an appeal for us, both for exploration and then overcoming it. Our own internal demons are boring. Novel encounters are exciting.
Similarly, technology functioning as magic is more exciting than a setting which has carefully defined what can and cannot be done. Some technology is ancient and irreplaceable because the knowledge to build it is lost; only basic maintenance, treated as holy ritual without understanding, remains. Other technology is understood enough to build it but one cannot allow too much education and knowledge to co-exist with the fanatical religion that underpins humanity’s safety. Technology is therefore treated with uncomprehending reverence by most, part of the worship of the Emperor. Religion and secular knowledge are immiscible; they will naturally separate out. This is another fundamental observation about our real world taken to extremes in this fictional one. There is a tension between worship and obeisance to another force, godlike or not; and rational independent thought.
In this setting there are the basic human troops, bravely fighting enemies which must be spectacular to them, and human super-soldiers, the space marines, the genetically-engineered heroes of most depictions. However, it is a grim setting. These space marines must have the ‘gene-seed’ implanted at a young age for it to work, and then be trained and indoctrinated, as the genetics are only part of what makes a great soldier. These are child soldiers with little worldly knowledge or wisdom. They fight all their lives and die in battle: there is no retirement, and rest only for travel. They are the iron fist of a military dictatorship, and could be regarded as we do militants of the worst dictatorships but with the devotion of terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives.
Of course, those who live do have long lives, and travel is slow, giving them time to contemplate. Some are wise and thoughtful, and the organisation of space marines into semi-autonomous chapters gives them some independence from the religious fundamentalism of the rest of the Imperium. Even the use of the word ‘chapter’ conjures up an idea of crusader-monks. Most do not use this independence, maintaining their honour through devotion to the cause they have been created to serve, much as monks are typically the most devoted to their god in the real world.
This is enough background to list a few rules of the setting: laws that any story or invention should follow to maintain the setting’s integrity and not change it into something else.
1. There is always another threat. Peace is a hard-won lull, not a lasting change.
2. Religious devotion has some protective effect, and heresy is therefore dangerous because the weak will succumb to corruption.
3. Malicious forces of evil are ever-present in the parallel realm of ‘the warp’, where souls and psychic power are everything. Nowhere and no-one is out of reach.
4. Technology is poorly understood and because of the risk of evil corruption religious devotion is more important than technology.
5. Information about events or other worlds travels slowly. Knowledge and ancient lore are scarce: the audience knows more than the characters. There are no universities.
That was a very long introduction, but it’s important to know the ground rules. Rules can be broken, but carefully and with a lot of effort to ensure that the character of the setting is maintained. For example, we might create a character who understands technology very well, entirely rationally, but this person will necessarily not be religious, and will therefore not have the protection of the faith and the God-Emperor. He will be subject to nightmares, temptations, possibly even daemonic manifestations, and his works likewise might develop worrying faults that seem much like hostile intelligence rather than misfortune… possibly even when they are adopted by someone who gives them proper religious maintenance with the proper chants and prayers.
Protagonists can also break setting rules more than most people in the setting. This is what sets them apart and makes them worthy of a story. But they will stand out and part of the story will be their conflict with the rules and culture. And a wise author will always be very careful, as breaking the rules for a protagonist can still break a setting.
With the setting established, we can start to contemplate other things. This is a setting primarily for games, although I can only hope that it will become a cinematic and televisual universe, as well-curated as early Marvel. That is part of the reason for this essay.
Games benefit from a wide diversity of roughly balanced factions to play, and for every faction to be playable against every other. In a whole galaxy of worlds even factions that are usually allies can sometimes be in conflict. Our human Imperial Guard should be able to fight the superhuman space marines: the evil chaos marines of Khorne should be viable opponents for the glorious chaos marines of Slaanesh and so on.
Each faction must have a flaw, though. We have already established that there is no utopia or safety in this galaxy. Let’s discuss them one by one and consider their balance and what the flaw is. I’m not an expert in 40k lore: I enjoyed the setting immensely and typically remember more background detail than many bother with, but I haven’t read any of the novels nor all the codices, nor any of the last 20 years of White Dwarf magazines etc. In my defence, I will point out that one does not need to know the detailed physiology of a unicorn to know that it does not exist. Likewise if the most salient features of a faction’s background don’t fit the setting then the faction doesn’t fit, no matter what the fine detail of those features is.
As well as a faction’s unique character, we should consider what unique type of threat an evil faction poses, or what unique weakness a ‘good’ faction suffers. There isn’t an inherent need for a rich and well-populated galaxy to have only one instance of any particular type of threat or weakness, but until we’ve covered a good range of possibilities it’s simply more boring and uninteresting to duplicate them, and will lead to power creep as one will displace the others like it unless we consciously find reasons that they all are important.
1. The necrons are soulless machines, their free will lost when they turned themselves into machines, their souls consumed by a fading god in exchange for immortality they did not yet understand. They are a dead, fading race, aeons old but with dormant power in their buried tomb worlds. Technology taken to its apotheosis.
Their flaw, of having no soul or free will, is massive. They’re a sci-fi version of shambling undead, hard-to-kill because of their technologically advanced self-repairing robot bodies, but not anything one would aspire to be. Their leaders have retained independent intelligence, but losing their souls has driven most of them mad, helped along by deterioration over millions of years of dormancy.
The necrons therefore fit the setting and have a distinct character. They are tough shamblers, dependent on their leaders for orders. They still aspire to galactic domination, and individual tomb worlds might be very powerful once awoken, but they also need to find a way to regain souls and perhaps become biological beings again.
2. The Aeldari are space elves, elegant, intelligent and very soulful, the opposite of the necrons. They are fugitives and refugees of a collapsed civilisation (that defeated the necrons all those aeons ago). Their souls are a tempting and juicy target for the daemons of the immaterium: their civilisation’s collapse was a horror of excess, leisure and pleasure combined that birthed a new chaos god, Slaanesh, and ripped billions of them from existence in a moment. They have technology and even prosperity of a sort, but little power. They rely on speed and stealth now, treasuring those worlds that are intact relics of their past, but unable to defend them against the powers that will sweep them aside.
Their flaw, of being vulnerable and hunted, means that life as a space elf is also not enjoyable. As lives go, the Eldar/Aeldari (depending on how recently you’ve engaged with Games Workshop’s writing) aren’t too badly off, but as weak remnants of a faded race they live in constant peril. The biggest evils of the galaxy, Chaos, necrons and the tyranids, all find them and their precious maiden worlds very juicily tempting targets. The necrons because they are an old enemy, the tyranids because fertile but lightly-defended worlds are easy biomass, and chaos because elf souls are the best to eat. If on death their souls are not captured in soulstones that they wear at all times then they will definitely be consumed by Slaanesh, constantly sniffing them out for a nice snack. Those souls are stored in spirit networks on their craftworlds and maiden worlds, making protecting their homes not merely a matter of ease but a necessity to save potentially millions of souls.
This is a characterful translation of elves into a sci-fi setting: the overwhelming motivation of protecting their fragile safety contrasting with their lack of sturdiness and inability to defend a static position.
3. The Drukhari are space dark elves, elegant, intelligent and deeply sadistic. When their civilisation collapsed they were either travelling in the myriad webway tunnels that the Aeldari held open between real-space portals for travel, or were the nobility and wealthy who could afford to command the construction of their very own pocket realms in the immaterium. As part of the great soul-sundering, Slaanesh laid claim to their souls, but they were already ‘in’ the immaterium and therefore did not die. However, their souls continually drain away to Slaanesh’s claim unless that can supplant the claim with someone else’s.
They therefore raid for slaves to sacrifice and torture (for feeding on psychic suffering relieves the thirst they feel to replenish their own souls). After centuries of such behaviour, maybe Slaanesh’s corruption has spread, or maybe they naturally enjoy it. Many of these rich and powerful were the pioneers of the hedonism and depravity that sank the once-great Asuryani civilisation, unlike the surviving Aeldari, who were the few who took measures to set themselves apart.
Their culture is scheming, manipulative and backstabbing. There is no law: there is only power and the force it can exert. Even those at the top must be alert for betrayal. There is no peace in such a culture: only brief moments of pleasure that must be seized as the only relief from a cruel existence. The resentment and hatred of that existence is reflected back outwards by their own cruelty to those over whom they have power. It is a capitalist corporation or a boys’ school stripped of any external controls.
All evil factions are hard to put oneself in, and although this one is perhaps more relatable because it is so human, it’s still horrific. They are evil in a rational, Nietzschean way, shorn of faith or worship, unlike much of the rest of the setting (religion is fertile ground for dystopia). No further flaws are needed: the Drukhari live terrible lives and face a terrible outcome of being eaten by a daemon god when they die or even if they stop torturing others. The threat they pose is one of ingenious scheming and slave-taking piracy, as they can appear through webway portals throughout the galaxy. They are fast, clever and nigh-impossible to pin down.
4. The orks are brutal, a group of races that lives for fighting. They simply enjoy it, personally and culturally. They are humans with bigger muscles and with the self-control imposed by civilisation stripped away. They care about dominance and whacking others round the ‘ead. The biggest, baddest ork is leader not because he’s clever, but because he’s biggest and no-one will argue with him. Their belief can make things happen, powering their jerry-rigged technology and their weirdboyz’ psychic abilities: a more direct psychic power than that of humans, whose sentience is too evolved to commit their psychic presence to believing in nonsense. The orcs are a bit of comic relief of the setting because of their general stupidity, but only mildly. They still kill, plague worlds, overrun them and cause havoc. They are also far more numerous than the previous races.
A mob of orcs might be stupid, but in a horde of thousands or more, there will be some cunning minds. Orcs are not well-organised, but they come in such numbers that they do not need to be.
As a ‘bad’ race the flaw is obvious: they kill and destroy civilisation, rather than building and enjoying one. Any individual ork is meat for the grinder, their society a horrifying world of constant violence, in which beating someone up or killing him is proof of your right to do so. The only ‘nice’ life, and still one of watchfulness for backstabbing, is for the immensely strong and powerful warbosses. But even bosses of such a system are more riding the wave than directing it, and if it heads in a dangerous direction redirecting a horde can be difficult. If you’re going to take the chance that you’ll be powerful if placed in the setting, it’d be better to be powerful in some other faction.
There is a lot of backstory to the orks, but they can just as easily be a race whose history is lost because they don’t have historians and don’t care. But in the ancient wars of the past the Orks were created by the ancient gods as soldiers, and they were created well. They grow from complex fungal spores that can create a whole genetically-encoded race with some basic genetic knowledge of how to build and operate crude weaponry. Their numbers therefore replenish over time even without peace. They are in some ways as inevitable as the tyranids, except that they don’t raze everything: they merely bog it down in warfare, which they are genetically encoded to love.
I find this similarity to the tyranids frustrating: if one compelling source of horror is used repeatedly then it becomes less horrifying. It would be better if orks could be practically eliminated from worlds, a threat that can seed and grow anywhere, but not one that ensures that something is permanently lost. The orks are a constant threat anywhere, and are hugely numerous. That’s enough of a threat. I would write some sort of planetary treatment that could eliminate their spores completely, given some time of peace and no new spores. It could be awkward and costly to mobilise, perhaps unable to cope with the massive numbers across the galaxy, but a valuable way to reclaim important places.
5. The tyranids are the greatest threat to the galaxy. They are an unknowable hive mind, each massive invasion fleet just a tiny tentacle of an unknown whole. No-one knows what is outside the galaxy: have the tyranids consumed many galaxies, ours just a tiny crumb in an intergalactic meal? Do they have enemies?
The tyranids are a swarm of monsters that kill defenders so that a planet is rendered defenseless for the tyranids to eat: the swarm consumes all biomass, leaving barren rocks behind that will take billions of years to redevelop life. The tyranids evolve within wars, the types of monsters varying depending on what seems to be most effective against the enemies they face.
Some lore has them incorporating aspects of the life they have encountered and eaten, but I think that this lessens the horror. They are already a perfect set of invasive species, of entirely alien biology. The core idea is that they are an unstoppable swarm that cannot be reasoned with, knows no mercy and destroys completely. Being unknowable, alien and monstrous is part of this, and compatible biology is not so alien after all. That idea (of incorporating enemies’ strengths into their own) might as well be saved for another faction in this galaxy of horrors.
The tyranids have been over-written. A few prongs of a potentially galaxy-scale invasion force is ominous enough, but they have been given other advantages too. Where they were a close combat force of monsters, using their massive numbers to overrun enemies before re-consuming the biomass of their dead to keep their war effort going, they have acquired ever more ranged abilities, satisfying the usual player demand of “My faction has a weakness and it’s inconvenient, so why can’t I have what other factions have?” The answer is of course that this is part of the character of any setting: factions have weaknesses and strengths, and the challenge in a game is to use your strengths to mask your weaknesses.
Likewise, they have ‘the shadow in the warp’, a weird psychic field that cuts off all psychic communication in the proximity of their hive fleets and inflicts a sense of dread on those who remain. I think that this was originally created to allow the idea of mysteriously empty outposts, signal just suddenly lost, as in more atmospheric horror stories. But the galaxy has plenty of isolated worlds and systems without regular communications. I appreciate the intent to allow for more horror scenarios, but I think that the tyranids have moved away from this idea. They’re not a strange unknown force on the edges of the galaxy: their hive fleets have penetrated throughout the galaxy, they are well-known, and it is their monstrous inevitability, a tidal wave of force that might be attritioned away over many soon-to-be-dead worlds, but never firmly repulsed at once, that makes them horrific.
The unknown raiders of suddenly disappeared outposts is an idea that needs a home, but the tyranids are not it. The genestealers, a subtype of them with their own army, might be. It could be worth separating the two a little: the genestealers might be the original tyranid form, a parasite or maybe biological invention, that could take the best of what it encountered, warp the bodies and minds of the native species, create a sense of identification with each other and against the prevailing forces that manifests as doomsday cults in sentient species.
When they encountered very psychic species this evolved into an actual hive mind that still uses the excellently dangerous genestealer body form, but which no longer wants to infect other biology and corrupt it into feeling affinity for only the genestealer hybrids that are the result. Such an approach would naturally resist the hive mind and its swarm of non-hybrid forms. The hive mind is instead still guided by the resentment of and antagonism towards all order and structure that was built into it at the start (or evolved in it). It destroys where the genestealers destabilise, because it gained enough power to do so.
Tyranids and genestealers could therefore be similar, but with different goals and methods, allowing for the variety of horror scenarios with different enemies.
6. The T’au are a fledgling union of systems who develop technology without religion and rely on their powerful gun lines, being mostly weaker species. They also have big battlesuits, gundam-style, yet another character of army.
Their flaw is that they believe in the greater good, but as has often been pointed out by thinkers, this is a troublesome doctrine. They also have a caste system, with the top caste being all one race of the major species. They decide what the greater good is, and although there is no publicised corruption, there is also no clarity about the decision-making. Joining the T’au means becoming a junior caste member, directed by others.
However, they have been written as broadly benevolent. Humans under their empire live materially better lives than is typical within the Imperium of mankind. They get leisure time, prosperity and respect as part of the whole. The T’au are inventive, and although they can’t manage warp travel and therefore interstellar travel is very slow, their technology already rivals the Imperium’s.
It is a slight variation of the less tightly controlled federation of millions of worlds of the Imperium of man. The Imperium is ruled for the greater good, individuals working on agricultural or forge planets to produce goods used far away by people they’ll never see, whole armies or even planets sacrificed as diversions in wars waged on a massive scale. The survival of humanity is a greater good, and the worship of the Emperor the cult that demands devotion in place of the concept of the ‘greater good’. However, the Imperium has a vast variety of cultures, with scope for individuals to engage in free markets, have leisure and payment in some worlds etc. There is no oppressive, pervasive demand that every activity furthers the good, in a civil law style of commandment.
The T’au seem to have been introduced to appeal to the far-Eastern market, Japanese, in particular, being a gundam army with a more collectivist approach to society. But they ruin the setting: they are simply not bad enough. The weakness of being collectivist isn’t extreme enough. I have seen some people argue that 40k represents the circularity of history, with faded remnants of old empires such as the Eldar and necrons, a failing current empire of the Imperium, and the new empire that will soon have its turn in the T’au. I think that this is a distortion of the appeal of the setting: the point is that no-one is better, that every solution to the hostile setting has flaws. There is horror all around and no obvious right answer. It’s a horror setting but also freeing: different approaches have different costs and benefits.
The T’au were written by someone who didn’t understand what the Imperium already was. All the sacrifice of worlds to create a firebreak in a multi-system conflict? Sacrifice for the greater good. Killing a few conscripts to motivate the rest, and hopefully save everyone’s soul? For the greater good. The Imperium is humanity, but it’s not simply us in the future. It’s already a fascist state invoking the greater good to explain the sacrifice and oppression of untold billions of humans.
The T’au, now that they do exist, should be a more oppressive, controlling version of this. In their smaller empire, with a race that might have pheromonal control of others, every movement should be monitored. Every individual is merely a cog in the machine, expected to sacrifice and be sacrificed for the greater good. Pursuit of personal leisure or goals is minimal, especially for non-T’au species. Your life is micro-managed by tyrants who claim to be furthering the cause of the fledgling T’au empire, but who for you are tyrants nonetheless, tyrants who demand your willing and devoted obedience. Maybe it is more efficient than the Imperium’s model of tithes and sacrificing you when things go wrong, but the people on those tithed worlds get to live according to their own culture.
The T’au command economy should be horrific, like everything else in the setting, a lesson in taking things too far. Mysterious disappearances of civilians who might have become a bit too unruly, but no-one knows for sure. Some people so happily, gaily positive that mind-control seems the only explanation, but information is too tightly controlled for anyone to know. The little hints that writers dropped about pheromonal control and mass surveillance should be confirmed, universal features of the empire (to us, the readers, but not the in-setting inhabitants).
Finally, the T’au, like the squats (oh, sorry, the space dwarves are the ‘Leagues of Votann’), have been written as having little psychic imprint in the immaterium. This explains their lack of warp travel, but this seems to be a strength. We need to make clear that being a more psychic race isn’t some sort of untrammelled weakness. Having more soul equates to more free will, more personal intelligence, or maybe more ‘luck’, the ork-like, sisters-of-battle-like ability for intense desire or belief occasionally to manifest physically. It is part of being a whole, realised being, or some other strength, or both, but it also comes with the weakness of inviting the interest of the daemonic denizens of the immaterium.
The forces of chaos exist in the galaxy. A race without psychic abilities might be a less tempting target, but should be more defenceless against chaos. They should be paper walls resisting a wrecking ball whilst humans are the brick walls: definitely vulnerable, but not as much.
The master T’au, as the controllers of the fledgling empire, might have more soul, and be especially vulnerable to chaos without the support of an empire of beings that can help resist. Their material technology is good, but they want to investigate psychic phenomena, maybe after one of them was attacked or even possessed by a daemon. They kidnap humans and try to mind-control them, but humans are less malleable than normal T’au (as depicted in The Matrix, they naturally rebel).
Imagine what one daemon could do if it could corrupt the mind that itself controls millions of others… the T’au might be a horrible accident waiting to happen, especially if their thoughts and feelings feed chaos even while their resistance is much lower.
This should be the horror of the T’au: an oppressive, overly-collectivist culture, with individuals resistant to chaos but only because of the fragility of the whole political system. While those in control truly achieve the greatest good, it might be worth the loss of freedom, but what if they do not?
In the Imperium every human is asked to resist for him- or herself, trained to have faith in the Emperor, to fight heresy individually. This is the alternative: to tell everyone what the greater good is and then when one commander is corrupt it makes less difference. But it’s inflexible and still monolithic. Once those minds have been told what is heresy you can’t suddenly make it ok even if that would be expedient.
7. The Leagues of Votann
The squats are the space dwarves. Abhuman miners from the galactic core, where conditions are extreme, communication and travel difficult, but the rewards also immense for those who can brave the dangers to collect the energy and materials formed there. They are clones, produced by supercomputers that store their knowledge when elders die. Originally created by genetically engineering human pioneers they are now a race and small federation entirely separate from the Imperium.
The squats were introduced by someone trying to fit traditional dwarf stereotypes into a sci-fi setting, not this sci-fi setting. As a clone race they rely on mass-produced nutrients contained in a thick drink called ‘brew’ which each league treasures as the delicious and nutritious taste of home. Despite their sturdier and shorter frames they still rely heavily on armoured suits to survive the harsh conditions where they work. They are expert craftsmen using their exotic materials to devise impressive new technologies and make established ones better.
Although each clone is an individual who can develop his own character, they are nevertheless clones, and have, again, a minor presence in the immaterium. They resist chaos, being stubbornly devoted to their kin: the squats are very kin-oriented, and revere their ancestors in the form of the supercomputers that retain the memories of the most important kin to have lived and which govern each ‘league’.
This is an elegant port of dwarfish tropes into a sci-fi setting, but it fails to be 40k sci-fi: the squats need some serious weakness to go with being sturdy, technologically advanced and a bit collectivist and isolationist.
Firstly, as with the T’au, their lack of psychic presence should be a weakness. They lack human luck. Everything they find they have to earn. Perhaps this is a slightly different manifestation of their lack than in the T’au, and contributes to the squats’ materialistic culture. They find, develop and earn rewards despite a complete lack of serendipity. Maybe the extreme conditions of the galactic core has a presence in the warp, making it a difficult area for chaos to invade reliably, a whirling maestrom of forces that can only manifest as a general malevolence, rather than focussed schemes. The squats’ bad luck is usually the best the daemons can generate, but they try anyway. Bad luck would also produce the stoic, grumpy character that is stereotypically dwarfen.
Should the squats venture outside the galactic core for trade, exploration or empire building they will be as vulnerable as the T’au to chaos. Their advanced material technology struggles against warp manifestations and although maybe they are hard to corrupt internally because of their bull-headedness, their lack of psychic presence gives them little way to fight back against daemonic manifestations.
The squats would then have the weakness of being trapped in a doubly-unwelcoming environment: hostile material conditions with malevolent bad luck, a nasty prison that hard work can render tolerable, with constant risk facing them nonetheless. But when they escape it they find themselves a minor race peculiarly vulnerable to some of the major forces eager to steal and repurpose their lovingly-developed technology. And if a somehow-corrupted squat came home and that corruption were transferred to the ancestor core supercomputer? That would be a disaster.
8. Adeptus Mechanicus
The Adeptus Mechanicus was once just an administrative branch of the Imperium of man, the engineering corps devoted to machinery in a setting where machines are poorly understood and religion has infected everything. Machines are incarnations of divine will, maintenance is religious ritual and factory production a holy act. The Mechanicus was slightly obscure: guardians of the religious rituals of maintenance, gatekeepers of technology but shrouded in mystery as obscurantist religions can be. This creates uncertainty and tension, as humans need this branch of humanity, but do not know enough about them to trust them. Can we be sure that we are really working for the same goals? Does anyone really know how the technology works?
This was a nice addition to the horror setting. Having doubts even about people on the same side, wondering if they value the weapon you carry more than they value you and the cause in whose name you wield it, is scary.
However, the Adeptus Mechanicus burgeoned into its own faction, semi-independent of the Imperium despite supplying all arms and armour through its domination of all technology. It understands technology, worships the ‘Omnissiah’, the mystical union of sentient being and machine (but not a sentient machine, which is heresy), and serves the Imperium only because of the doctrinal declaration that the Emperor is the Omnissiah. Tech-priests gradually convert themselves into mechanised beings, multi-armed and processor-driven. They are supported by cybernetic auxiliary troops and robot power in their own armies.
Although the Mechanicus is a cult, it’s a cult of knowledge that believes that knowledge is holy and embodied knowledge, in either objects or beings, is therefore partly divine too. Believing that knowledge is good isn’t such a weird or terrible belief and definitely does not count as a serious weakness or source of grim darkness.
Likewise, the tech-priests’ commitment to replacing flesh with machine is a bit off for those of us who like our bodies, but many of us wouldn’t mind cybernetic augmentation, especially given that it actually functions and is indeed an improvement. Plenty of tech bros in the real world dream of replacing our bodies with robots or downloading our consciousnesses into machines; and plenty of physically disabled or ill people would love a more reliable machine replacement for their troublesome biology.
Meanwhile the Adeptus Mechanicus gets extensive independence from the rest of the Imperium, ruling its own worlds and even planetary systems, exempt from the Imperial cult and the ecclesiarchy; and freedom to investigate rumours of unusual artefacts or technology, or study things to acquire new holy knowledge. It’s normal curiosity and interest in progress with a little religious dressing, and that’s simply not good enough (or should I write ‘bad enough’?) for the setting.
Firstly, as already exists in the background created for the setting, the cult of the Cult Mechanicus should be emphasised. These are not knowledgeable scientists as we understand it: they are religious zealots of another religion. And this religion might hold knowledge as holy, but it is a twisted form of pseudo-knowledge, couched in doctrine and ritual. Just as people develop their own little rituals before a sports match, believing that touching a lucky charm or touching the ground achieves the result, so should tech-priests be weighed down by lengthy chants and rituals that seem inordinate to the task at hand. The life of a tech-priest should be one of endless rituals, doctrinally enforced through cultish devotion. Nothing happens fast, nothing decided by personal judgement. Religion and insight are not compatible.
Where situations call for swift decisions these exceptions will be doctrinally-mandated: making swift judgements outside of the allowed circumstances is unthinkable heresy. When commanding a battlefield this will not be relevant, because that will be an exception for every schism of the cult, but in other aspects of life it would be very tedious for normal people.
Placating the machine spirits is sometimes depicted as somewhat reasonable: ancient technology has almost lifelike subroutines of its own that, in concert with the tech-priests, developed a need for the extensive rituals as a sort of password to allow use. This is fine, but I think the setting should steer away from tech-priests cracking these codes like hackers analysing a firewall. The rituals work but no-one knows why, and the tech-priests are more depositories of memory of various rituals that are likely to work for the technologies they regularly work with than they are analysers and understanders of the problem.
Secondly, the Cult is not one cult: it schisms with great ease and frequency. Tech-priests of one area will have slightly different doctrines, rules and even rituals from those of elsewhere, and like computers running code, reject outright even minor deviations from what is acceptable. There is no compromise, no tolerance and no rubbing along nicely: at least, not without the authority of the Imperium to command it, as what authority they accept from the Imperium overrides their personal wars about the Cult Mechanicum. But often with bad grace, insofar as tech-priests have grace at all.
Individual planets often have branches of the Adeptus Mechanicus that other branches regard as heretical.
This explains how the independent empire-within-an-empire that controls all technology cannot actually unite itself or exert its influence. Although nominally one branch and one religion, as soon as adepts meet there is a significant chance that they will refuse to work together until one converts completely to the other’s doctrine, ritual formats and modes of worship. Occasionally pieces of ritual or doctrine spread: if one branch has lost some technology, then should it ever be reintroduced the new maintenance rituals will be imported as well. Or perhaps on a large Imperial fleet gathered from disparate worlds some rituals self-evidently work and tech-priests do grudgingly accept changes to their rules.
Thus the Adeptus Mechanicus, although it has what when simply described is a noble goal, also has deep flaws. Life as an adept is one of stultifying conformity to ritual, with knowledge always codified in religious ossification. Nonconformity is inferiority: a flawed machine. And yet the Cult has so many incompatible doctrines that nonconformity with others is inevitable, and being regarded as a flawed, inferior machine therefore also inevitable. And from there it is one step to being regarded as dangerously heretical and purged. Which might be the only solution, because tech-priests gradually remove their humanity, becoming more and more machine as they ‘augment’ themselves. With their humanity goes their free will: their psychic presence. We have already seen with the T’au and Leagues of Votann one downside of this, but perhaps the tech-priests dig their own graves, losing their ability to change their minds even while exalting knowledge as holy.
This would explain how forces of chaos and the traitor legions have and maintain advanced technology: they rely on branches of tech-priests who have embraced the heretical, not deliberately, but gradually, through believing that their interpretation of the Cult is the righteous one.
Life on worlds ruled by the tech-priests is also bad. They
regard biological machines as inferior, and happily experiment on them to
create their skitarii soldiers, whose implants range from organ replacement and
inbuilt weaponry through to complete decerebration and enslavement to orders.
When knowledge and technology is holy, and knowledge is acquired through
becoming a tech-priest, normal humans are very unholy, to be sacrificed for the
sake of the machines just as the wider Imperium cares little for its untold
masses.
to be continued: Imperium of Man, space marines, returning primarchs, chaos and business model
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