Bad news! Warhammer 40K’s grimdark setting is now even worse!
Everything in the setting of Warhammer 40,000 is bad. That — along with the political satire — has always been the point; this is a galaxy that’s just a merry-go-round of diametrically opposed factions taking turns doing war crimes, blowing planets up, and generally enduring horrors from beyond the stars feasting on innocent folk. But the current state of the galaxy post-Dark Imperium novels, combined with the recent events in the Arks of Omen books for the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game, make things even worse — in the most ridiculous, over-the-top, metal way imaginable. Angron, the Emperor’s angriest son, is on the loose — and his most recent battle was of such scope and scale that it wouldn’t look out of place in Dragon Ball Z.
In 40K, humanity is led by the Emperor of Mankind, a nameless legend who, 10,000 years ago, actually walked among his people. To become the very best warlord, however, he went and created approximately 20 perfect boys called the primarchs to serve as his sons and generals, each serving over their own legion of superhuman Space Marines — Roboute Guilliman and the Ultramarines, Sanguinius and the Blood Angels, and Lion El’Jonson and the Dark Angels, to name a few.
Unfortunately, the Emperor was also an abusive asshole, and the malicious, extradimensional forces of Chaos took advantage of the primarchs’ rough upbringings — first by scattering them across the universe, and then by getting inside their heads. Eventually half of the primarchs split from the Imperium in a massive war called the Horus Heresy (which makes up the bulk of the Black Library, incidentally). Humanity technically won the ensuing civil war, but the Emperor is now a corpse upon a golden throne, keeping the lights on with his
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