Op here. Was also wondering why there is a severe lack of Tau in DH, I assume it's because the Calixis sector is pretty far away from Tau controlled space, but I'm not sure if I'm right about that.

>>6073282
That's exactly the reason.

Read the Eisenhorn trilogy, Double Eagle and the Gaunt's Ghosts novels by Dan Abnett for a readable introduction to the Imperium and Chaos.

Try to think of it as a horror/weird-fantasy setting which happens to be set in the far future rather than sci-fi.

>>6073303

Thanks! I was planning on picking up a book today, but wasn't sure as to which one to get.

The best thing you can do to learn about the setting is to read the 40K rulebook's fluff bits. I'm sure there's a download of the full thing somwhere.

The thing is, there is a metric asstonne of 40K fluff, and by the way the fluff works, it's only wrong if it's actively been superceded, not if it's just contradictory. I've been playing the game since 2nd started and kept up with the fluff the entire time, and there are probably still a few things I don't know about it.

The best thing you can do is make sure you get the most important bits of the setting right. The rulebook has all of those.Also, the tone. Grimdark. No Noblegrim, or Neutraldark, grimdark. The tone of the setting is its most distinct feature. It is so grimdark that it gave birth to the notion of the 40K horizon, that is, the moment your work is more grim or dark than 40K it can no longer be treated as a serious work.

>>6073358

OP here, the setting is what I have the most trouble with. I freakin love what fluff I've found so far, and want desperately to keep my mindset in it, but unfortunately I have a really hard time. When push comes to shove I always revert back to my "dnd, white knight" mentality. (i.e. I'm a nice-guy gm). Even when I played, I tried to be such a nice guy, I killed a party member because he killed an eldar who helped us stop a demon summoning. (don't know how grimdark that is...)

Truth be told I also lean more toward the "radical" side of inquisition mentality.

>>6073397
>Even when I played, I tried to be such a nice guy, I killed a party member because he killed an eldar who helped us stop a demon summoning.
>Truth be told I also lean more toward the "radical" side of inquisition mentality.

Hellooooooo there, comrade!

We even had an IG pilot we "enlisted" after a quick escape from a crumbling station... I miss Stephen... best damn NPC pilot I've ever seen...

Anyway, thanks for all the help guys, I'm off to run some errands and get me a novel or two. Best of luck elegen/tg/entlemen.

My advice to be a better DH GM is to research the middle ages. Not the idealized fantasy version but the real middle ages where crusades ruled the day, and plauge and strife were everywhere. The medieval mindset really fits the 41st millenium like a glove.

>>6073397

Grimdark consists of two components.

One, grim. This is the nature of the people of the world. In 40K, most peopel are desperate for survival. They're netural in the same way a squat city in Mumbai is neutral; they will do whatever it takes to survive another day in a raging shithole. Most of the people in power are either psychotic, sociopathic, megalomaniacal, or greedy beyond sanity. Oftentimes, more than one. The more powerful they are, the more massive their character flaws and the collateral damage of their mistakes. Guilliman, a Primarch and hence one of the twelve most powerful personalities ever to exist, would have caused the death of the Imperium and the extinction of humanity rather than not get his way about things, and he is regarded as a great hero. The Good people are antiheroes at best, where the ends almost justify the means, and the villains are horrific beyond belief.

Dark is how much the world itself sucks, and here it is very much suck. The universe is a cold and uncaring place that is so hostile to life it is insane that it even exists let alone thrives, and it will grind you into oblivion without ever noticing you were there. If you do manage to get the attention fo the world, it will only crush you much harder, slower, and more painfully.

Grimdark settings have small heroes who achieve little, vast villains who are often genuinely unstoppable and who always win in the end, and no matter how hard or how well you fight, the uncaring galaxy will never know your name or record your deeds. The greatets good you can accomplish will be undone in days, and often leave things worse than had you tried to do your worst, and when you do your wirst, the consequences are cruel beyond belief and very nearly permanent.

Grimdark isn't about winning. You can't win. Ever. Grimdark is about how well you lose. Humanity is a dying race in a sea of eternal foes, and there is nothing it can do to survive the coming night. All you can do is fight, fight with your every last ounce of strength, and keep on fighting as you are torn to pieces. You will die, but you will gouge a bloody scar upon the face of the galaxy itself, and take as many of your foes with you as you can.

You may say that Grimdark is pointless; that you can't be a hero. That is wrong. The light shines brightest in the darkness. In a noblebright world a spark is a point of lesser light, but in a world of grimdark, that spark is unto a supernova.

Hey, I'll find some of the 40K stuff I wrote about the setting for you. Some might help.

This sort of stuf isn't neccesarily the way you'll present 40K, because it's deliberately an interpretative setting. However, it might help you get a feel for the tone, and all the fluff points in it are accurate, at the least. It's copypasta from word files so don't be surprised that it seems like an answer to a question you didn't ask.

The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-fall. Mars is a fucking anarchic nightmare shithole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometres of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is fucked. The databases are fragmented over the entire fucking surface, to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit.

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape the mind. Then came the fucking Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet int he Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on earth, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the fucking time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you. If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn’t, it’s probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The fucking Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seeking to kill you.

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it does exist. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go fucking rogue and annihilate the manufactorum before they can be killed.


This is why they do not like ANYONE fucking with technology, because it is so fucking rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to fuck with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall fucked everything up. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up.

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire fucking military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

This is also why the Adeptus Mechanicus insists on cargo cultism. It's because when you are dealing with things you barely understand because everything you knew about them was fucking destroyed it is the safest and most reliable option. The rituals do not exists for mysticism, they exist because they are the most practical means of building, repairing and maintaining the equipment they have with the knowledge surviving. You don't understand why pressing that button makes it go, because the manual tried to take over your brain and the copies are all unreadable and the research base that would let you reverse-engineer it does not exist and cannot be built.

Why are the Tau doing so well with their technology? Because they had peace. Eight thousand fucking years unmolested by any enemy and they were helped the entire fucking time by the most advanced biological race in the galaxy. Give the Imperium eight thousand years of peace and I fucking guarantee you it will be harder than it was during the Great Crusade.

You need an analogy, here.

Build a library, fill it with all human knowledge. You take it elsewhere, but only in temporary storage because you know where the rest is if you need it.

Now that fucking library goes rogue and the maintenance machinery starts killing everyone any-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck did they all come from, you swear to god there weren't this many, and there weren't because they're using the library's information to fight their war. The government fights a battle that destroys the planet against these robots and is destroyed in the process. The library is leveld, cast into flames, every book burned and every computer virus-laden.

Then comes a man who worked there. He talks to the few surviving library workers, assembles their information, and starts rebuilding a city around the library and expanding it as the librarians find little scraps of paper and fragmented bits of files that stuck together just right read something. They rebuild a library from scrap on the ashes of the old.

Then the city turns on itself, kills its master, and the librarians turn to rage. Half of them kill the other half and destroy the remnants of the library because where they're going they won't need science or technology. Everything burns, and the city is left to a scattered few survivors, walls open to the world, with the hungry predators circling.

The Adpetus Mechanicus is the sole surviving librarian, desperately scrabbling through the ashes of paper and splinters of hard drives for anything to help him and the city he needs to survive just a second longer.

The Imperium isn't grim because things suck by choice and could be fine if a sensible person came along. That sensible person wouldn't survive fifty seconds of the reality. The Imperium is grim because every single shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit life in the worst conditions imaginable, is the absolute fucking best that can be done. It is a study of the worst happening to everyone and what part of your humanity must be sacrificed today just to stand a chance of survival, and all it asks is whether or not it would have perhaps been better to die.

Ah, here's somethign a bit more applicable to your specific Chaosery. If you pla ywith Chaos, the Heresy will feature very heavily.

The Emperor's plan would have worked, and could have worked, if he hadn't fallen. He was crushing the religious views of the galaxy in favour of secularism. This weakened the sheer might of the Chaos gods, but opened the door up for incredible opportunity.

In a world where religions are politely disdained, they can spread. They can grow. They can cross worlds. They can go through all the empires of Man.

And this is exactly what they did.

How do you think the Heresy became so large and well-organised? Because of the Primarchs? Hardly. Six men, powerful nonetheless, can no more organise a pan-galactic rebellion than a collection of champion boxers can bring about an economic revolution.

The Emperor's disdain of religion led to the people's disdain of religion, and what people look down on they underestimate without fail. The Chaos cults spread clear across the Imperium, influencing trillions upon trillions, worming its way into the minds of countless men from the lowest mutant of the Underhives to the Lord Commanders of entire segmenta. The apple was rotten from the inside to the point that only the clean shell remained.

This alone would not have saved the Chaos gods. Having the influence to start a war does not give them the power to win it. They would still, had the Emperor survived, eventually starved to the point where He could use the Webway portal He built to enter the warp powers intact and forcibly unite them, cleansing the warp of malice, wrath, pettiness, and heedless destruction, and in so doing, cleansing the psyche of all the races in the galaxy in some way touched by the warp.

No, they could not survive so long as the Emperor lived, and he was mightier than any army, more subtle than any assassin, more patient than any poisoner. There was, quite literally, no foe in the galaxy they could levy against him that could slay him.

So, they chose the one man he would never see as an enemy.

His own son, the subject of the most determined manipulations of Chaos, falls in a puzzle that tests the powers of Chaos United, the limits of Slaanesh's sweet seductions, the strengths of Khorne's passion, the eons of Nurgle's patience, and even Tzeentch's capacity for manipulation. In their greatest challenge and greatest triumph, they seized the one man who could possibly hope slay the man-god who opposed them, and they send him forth.

He is armed with the mightiest powers Chaos can offer, and suffused with every last skein of warp potency the Chaos gods can wring forth, as well as their own nigh-indefinite talents for destruction. This, poured forth into the man most like the Emperor, his second in every regard, the one who had the closest strength to his of all mankind together, with the body and soul he could not dare to strike.

It was the corruption of his greatest strength that brought the Emperor to his living death. The might of his armies, turned against him. The fruits of his intellect, shattered to dust. The potency of his strike, rendered as harmless. And, greatest and most tragic of all, his limitless love for all mankind and his son above all turned against him, leaving him the bitter and hopeless choice of who must he kill: The empire he built to save his people, cast into the warp as the god's plaything, or his own son, slain by his father's hand.

It was at this, the greatest and most momentous moment in the history of mankind itself, that the Emperor's strength of will, for the first and final time, did falter. He could not abandon his people, but nor could he strike down his beloved son and heir. His indecision and the agony of choice led him to allow his corrupted son to make the choice for him. He left his guard down, and let Horus the Noble, Horus the Benevolent, and Horus the Lord of All Traitors, choose whether he should let fall his empire or his favoured son.

He chose both.

Horus attacked, and the Emperor at last knew his son was beyond redemption. At last he unleashed his full powers, and let forth the full force of his mind for the only time of his life. A blast so powerful the powers of Chaos United fled from its wrath, and so destructive it erased Horus mind, body, and soul. The greatest traitor ever to live had fallen, the last thought in his mind as the twisted influences of the Chaos gods fled his body sorrow, not for his own demise, but for what he had wrought.

For though he had slain Horus, the Emperor had waited in indecision too long. Horus's dark talons had pierced his chest, leaving a wound so grave as to be mortal, even to a man-god. He had tried to choose both, and now had nothing.

Lying there, bleeding to death in the arms of Dorn, his most obedient son who had, in the hour of greatest need, failed his father for the first time, he saw the ruination of his empire. He had pushed far, and fast, and the Imperium had been pushed to the limits of his strength to expand further. But that strength was gone, half of it traitor, the remainder annihilated, the means to rebuild it utterly wiped out. There was now only one choice for man, only one way for it to be saved. He would have to fight the Chaos gods on their own ground.

And so, he told Dorn of the plans for the greatest of his creations, a massive throne to keep his shattered body alive, to feed him psychic potency every day. He would feed off those he loved and those he saw as the future of man, in the hopes that by sacrificing countless billions, countless trillions could be saved. The Golden Throne rose up, the Emperor sat in it, and the minds of the Imperium's psykers were thrown screaming into his own, to be consumed, their powers absorbed. This flux of power feeding him, strength he must have if he is to challenge the Chaos gods in a time when their power has never been greater, so vast that its overspill lights the Imperium end to end, so bright it shines radiant in the Warp clear from Cadia to Atilla. There he waits, gathering strength of mind and soul as his body withers. His influence over the affairs of the Imperium grows weaker day by day, not for lack of power but the conserving of it. For he knows that the day soon comes when the Imperium must make its last stand, to fight a final and glorious battle they cannot win and in doing so burn their name into the history of the galaxy so they shall never be forgotten. The day, too, soon comes when his power is sufficient, when he can cast off the mortal form at last and ascend to the warp, challenge and cast down the Chaos gods, unite them harmoniously, and join them himself. For the sake of man's survival in the face of ever more certain extinction and annihilation, he must make of himself that which he never wanted to be; a god.

And on that day, he hopes, there shall still be a mankind to save.

So, yeah, It's a bit hard to get your head around the feel of 40K, but once you do, it works. It's more about what 40K is than what is inside 40K.

Manly tears, Baron. Manly tears.

Twatswatting dicksucking badgercunts on a ice burg of menstrual blood... this thread is win. ARCHIVE!

Wow, for a second there I actually gave a shit about W40k. Good job.

>>6073705

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>>6073748
And you could do the same instead of trolling.

Wow Baron. Thank you, deeply. This is OP, and I just got out of the shower and wanted to check up. May I say sir, that you have inspired me. Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

<sheds a single manly tear>