Warhammer 40K’s grimdark setting besieged by terrifying bugs
Warhammer 40,000 is heading into its 10th edition, with streamlined new rules and tons of new models for players to paint and deploy. But it’s one thing to look at all of these Space Marines, Terminators, and Carnifexes and think they’re pretty cool, and another thing altogether to understand the lore surrounding why all of these minis are assembled for some grimdark combat.
The announcement trailer for 10th edition is narrated by Roboute Guilliman, the guy in charge of running the Imperium of Man. Guilliman is a son of the Emperor of Mankind, one of the 20 Primarchs who were created in a lab over 10,000 years ago to help their father conquer the stars. Guilliman was the first loyalist Primarch to re-join the setting in 40K, and he’s been depresso espresso as he’s tried to haul the crumbling corpse of the Imperium, a parody of his father’s vision, away from the brink of extinction. As the trailer suggests, he’s not optimistic about the current state of things.
He’s right to worry. In recent lore, the Imperium of Man’s biggest concern has been heretical, corrupted Space Marines and the extra-dimensional forces of Chaos. But there’s a new bad boy on the block: the Tyranids. The Tyranids are some of the scariest enemies in 40K because, unlike Abbadon the Despoiler or a deadly Drukhari, Tyranids have no sense of humanity, communication, or emotion. They want one thing: to eat all of your bio-mass and to use it to make more Tyranids.
Tyranids have been played up as a big threat for some time, with the lore stating that the forces that originally arrived in the Milky Way were just a vanguard of a larger fleet. That larger fleet has finally arrived, and it’s hitting the western side of the galaxy. The hive fleets on the
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