as required by the laws of youtube i now have a pink light [Music] hi gang so during lockdown my games club started a sci-fi and fantasy book club and one of the books we read was zenos by dan abner often cited as being one of the best introductions to the 40k universe after completing it my friend mira who had never read any 40k before asked this question what's the name for the universe of warhammer cue a lengthy discussion about how the world of 40k is well our world just really really far in the future i said that i'd write a short summary of the background for her and when that went exactly as well as you might expect we joked that i should start a youtube channel and turn it into a video pink light so here we are a brief ish summary of how 40k got to be 40k if you're relatively new to the 40k background and all this is seeming a bit of a jumble hopefully this will be useful i'm recording in 2021 and we're currently at the start of the third millennium ce this is the dating system we use throughout the one we're used to i also want people before we start to bear in mind the scale of what we're talking about most sci-fi franchises are set a few hundred years into the future warmer forty thousand is called that because that's when it's set almost forty thousand years in the future and that's a deliberate choice it means they could come out with something really diverse and different so we're in the third millennium m3 from the perspective of 40k this is the age of terror which is their word for earth from now until around m15 humanity spreads out from earth slowly at first using conventional sublight spacecraft and generation ships progress is slow and the new colonies have to survive as independent units isolated from the mother world by up to 10 generations of travel mars is the first planet to be terraformed to sustain life and then others follow i'm gonna reiterate that the next big change comes in m15 12 000 years in our future that's five times as far in the future as ancient rome is in our past in 40k practically nothing from the age of terror survives it's fair to assume that everything we'd recognize cultures nations political systems are all ancient history by this point between m15 and m18 humanity moves into the age of technology but from the point of 40k it's often known as the dark age of technology because so few records survive in this time a few of the central concepts of the 40k universe are discovered the first discovery is the warp the warp in 40k is a parallel dimension roughly mapped onto our own but instead of physical matter the warp is composed of emotional energy this energy comes from the mind of every sentient creature in the universe each of which is like a tiny candle flame in the warp these seas of emotional energy don't conform to the laws of physics and so the warp can be a dangerous place to be looking upon it will send people mad and exposure to it will twist and mutate physical forms in addition things live in the war beings composed of emotional energy that would try and devour any traveler and are constantly trying to break into real space the warp is where a lot of the horror element of 40k comes from however there are stable currents through the warp and since time and space don't mean the same thing there a ship wrapped in a protective bubble of real space called a geller field could ride those currents and achieve faster than light travel at first only short jumps were possible skimming the surface of the warp but the humans of the age of technology eventually developed navigators a controlled mutation resulting in a human bloodlines with a third warp eye that can perceive the rolling currents of the warp and charter course through them with navigators humanity can spread across the galaxy and become wildly diverse and divergent trade routes are established space nations and star empires exist humans encounter alien races for the first time and the first alien wars are thought aliens in 40k called zenos are always worryingly horribly other humanity's technology is seemingly capable of anything one big development is the stc the standard template construct an stc is a machine or a program or a small factory it's unclear that can manufacture a single device out of whatever local materials at a hand stc systems are sent out as planets are colonized making sure that the new planet can make vehicles or life support or weapons out of whatever resources happen to be around they are the sum total of human technical knowledge in a form that allows any lay person to benefit from it without needing to understand it that's foreshadowing the other development in this age is that of true artificial intelligence eventually this leads to a great universe-wide war as the artificial intelligences inevitably revolt known to legend as the war between the men of stone and the men of iron the men of iron the robots were defeated and from then on thinking machines were outlawed any thinking must have a human mind at its core this means that the robot servants that other sci-fi franchises have are replaced in 40k by servitors humans usually clones or criminals whose minds have been wiped and replaced by simple programming computers have that grown biological tissue at their core and sometimes rudimentary personalities because of it with the dark age of technology at its height by the end of the 22nd millennium humanity starts to suffer a great collapse as the warp becomes turbulent great warp storms re-route or shut off stable currents and slowly interstellar travel becomes impossible empires and galactic communities become slowly isolated from each other many unable to get the resources they need at the same time instances of psychic power in humans start to increase in 40k a psyche is a sentient being whose presence in the warp is not a candle but a great bright flame they are a conduit for the war able to use the power of the warp to achieve things that look like magic in real space psyches have always been a part of humanity and in 40k that's where we get our myths of magic and shaman and witches from but psyches can be dangerous letting the warp into real space through your mind runs the risk of letting one of the things that live there in two and without great strength of mind a psyche possessed by a warp entity could damn an entire world to mutation and corruption as they become a gateway to those that inhabit the war possession damnation you'll notice a lot of religious language starts to creep in here in 40k there aren't really actual gods but there are certainly things so powerful and alien that they might as well be we said that the warp was formed of emotion and those emotions flow together as the number of sentient beings in the galaxy explodes the greatest of those emotions fear anger deceit desire become so huge and concentrated in the warp that they start to possess a great intelligence and compete with one another to influence the real world these chaos powers are often called gods but they're more like great unknowable lovecraftian entities still dedicating acts to them in real space can draw their attention and grant great power so worship becomes the word used the entities that serve them can be summoned and possess people so demon ends up being the term used great strength of mind can repel them so faith ends up being the term used there aren't gods like we would understand them but because of the warp religion and worship are real and powerful things in the setting as the warp storms grow and humanity falls into isolated pockets whole worlds are consumed by the actions of rogue psyches or cults worshiping the chaos powers or simply starve for one of resources or are picked off by aliens by the 25th millennium humanity descends into 5 000 years of stagnation and decline known as the age of strife ancient earth by this point known as terror has long used up its resources and descends into warring nation states facing hordes of technobarbarian warriors using the remnants of past technologies every tool in mankind's millennia-long arsenal is used in conflicts from atomics to genetic engineering to psychic powers some organized states hold out but for most of the period terra's permanently in a state of war over minute natural resources it's into this world around the 30th millennium that the emperor emerges nobody knows where he came from but he's a psycher of staggering power and a scientist of unparalleled genius an immortal who claims to have been with humanity since the start of civilization guiding us in the background that's the official line there are other theories especially amongst contemporary characters in the novels from this point we get into stuff that's known though restricted history in the 40k world so we start to get a lot more detail also background and novels are still being written that expand on this stuff so it could change i'll put this asterisk on screen whenever things get particularly contentious as humanity on terror starts to consume itself the emperor begins a slow conquest of the planet at the head of armies of genetically engineered warriors genetic engineering is kind of the emperor's hobby first of these are the legio custodes his bodyguards each taken as a toddler and genetically rewritten into a loyal thoughtful immortal philosopher soldier in a long and costly process but there aren't initially enough of them to conquer a planet so alongside the regular human armies at his disposal march 20 legions of thunder warriors adult soldiers genetically engineered to be incredibly large tough and aggressive with the thunder legions the emperor sweeps across earth and either defeats the various warring factions or brings them into his imperium under threat of destruction yeah it's called an imperium not an empire don't know why as a psycher of staggering power the emperor knows why the warp has grown so stormy over the last few millennia an alien race the eldar were at the very height of their power during humanity's expansion so technologically advanced that their lives were spent in indulgence and leisure however the eldar race are extremely psychic and as their society grew more and more decadent the emotional energy that was building up in the warp was slowly coalescing into a new chaos power when that power woke up the warp storms would be cleared and the emperor wanted to be ready for that as the conquest of earth reaches its height the emperor starts work on the next stage of his plan humanity was scattered across the galaxy under threat from xenos predators and ever more vulnerable to the warp as it slowly evolved into a psychic species the emperor had conquered earth but the thunder warriors were too unstable and erratic to conquer an entire galaxy he needed autonomous reliable armies that he could send out to all corners of the galaxy to unite humanity he stole a measure of power from the warp and used it to create 20 primarks giant superhuman generals and from their genetic structure he created another army of genetically engineered super soldiers the legionnaires estates or space marines though individually less powerful than a custodes or a thunder warrior the process by which they were made by implanting gene seed into adolescent boys and the stabilization offered by their primark's genetic structure allowed each legion of a star test to be practically self-sufficient they could continue to replenish their numbers as they went so that's the plan and as the infant primarks grow in their capsules and the vaults of terror and as the first estates were being tested from their genetic material the powers of chaos managed to breach the emperor's laboratory and scatter the 20 primarks across the galaxy this was late in the process so there was still enough genetic material around to create the 20 legions though the lack of nearby primarks meant that various genetic issues arose within the legions when the fourth chaos power slaanesh was finally born at the start of the 31st millennium with a psychic shriek that almost destroyed the eldar species the warped storms were blown away and the emperor launched his great crusade at the head of innumerable regular armies and 20 legions of astates the crusade had a few main aims to unite the disparate surviving strands of humanity by force if necessary to kill all xenos found so that humanity has no competition to impose the imperial truth a secular denial of all religion the idea is to deny chaos a source of human worship and to regulate capture and train any human psyches but at this point there's already a spanner in the works arguably the plan have been for the primarks and the legions to lead this crusade while the emperor worked on another big project breaking into the webway the webway is a subspace network of transit tunnels in between real space and the warp built by an ancient alien race if humanity could use the way then it wouldn't have to rely on the warp for interstellar travel and if this the regulation of psyches and the denial of worship could all happen quickly while the chaos powers were still reeling from the birth of slaanesh then chaos would be denied a power source in humanity and humanity would be safe from it however the loss of the primark screwed all that up the emperor had to lead the great crusade himself so the great crusade sets out from terror after 5 000 years of isolation and stagnation the first planet encountered is mars ruled by the mechanicum a culture that revere technology as holy knowledge the tech priests concentrate on rediscovering great secrets from humanity's past like the stc systems without truly understanding them in fact innovation is considered an affront to their god the omniscient thankfully an awful lot of tech priests think that the emperor is the incarnation of the omnissire so the imperial truth is conveniently waived for mars and the mechanicum ally with the imperium the expeditionary fleets discover various lost pockets of humanity over the course of 100 years of crusading some are advanced societies who have weathered the age of strife with their technological secrets intact but most have devolved into primitive societies some resist compliance or have fallen to the worship of chaos or have been enslaved or mutated and these are all destroyed by the legions slowly as the great crusade expands all the original 20 primarks are found scattered on various human planets and they are given command of their legions eventually with the primarks rediscovered in the great crusade nearing completion the emperor raises one of the primarks horus of the 16th legion to warmaster horus is to lead the conclusion of the crusade while the emperor returns to terror to work on the webway project but by this point things have got a bit desperate the primarks are all great leaders but they're not really the perfect imperial generals the emperor was aiming for they've all been raised in different human cultures with very different ideas of how to fight a war very different ideas of what the imperium should be and very different ideas about the emperor some see him as a great leader others as a tyrant others as a god many see him as a father figure and feel abandoned when he places horus in charge and disappears off to spend the rest of the crusade in a laboratory many of them worry what their place will be when the crusade is over after all when the thunder warriors stopped being useful the emperor just straight up killed them and since they've obviously been stolen away by chaos at some point the emperor never the most human and caring of beings is quite closed about revealing his full plans to them games workshop's also quite close about revealing its full plans i'm piecing this together from a lot of different books eventually using some of these feelings of betrayal chaos manages to turn horus and half the primarks against the emperor and a galactic civil war rages between the nine loyalist legions and the nine traitor legions two primarks disappear mysteriously during the crusade this war is called the horus heresy and there's a 50 book novel series about it but in short the emperor spends most of it in his lab trying to finish the web weight project a few primarks die horus lays siege to the imperial palace on terror before the emperor emerges and kills him but is mortally wounded in return the emperor catatonic is placed on the life support device known as the golden throne and the traitor legions retreat to the eye of terror a massive area of the galaxy where the warp and real space cross over in the 10 millennia after the horus heresy the imperium kind of devolves it stays together ruled by a council called the high lords of terror and a huge bureaucracy called the administratum one by one the loyalist primarks disappear or are killed in battles against aliens the great estates legions are considered way too much of a concentration of power so they're split up into thousands of autonomous chapters of around a thousand marines spread across the galaxy and tasked with protecting specific areas or worlds because of the gene seed system each chapter is largely self-sufficient and because they were created by the emperor and the primarks they're also outside the direct control of the highlords after the emperor is placed on the golden throne a religious movement starts venerating him as a god who has ascended resisted at first this eventually becomes the state religion of the imperium run by an organization called the ecclesiarchy and is brutally enforced across the galaxy crusades or holy wars because of differences in scripture become quite a commonplace thing as the imperium becomes more concerned with heresy and the threat of chaos and zenos the imperial inquisition is formed to hunt out traitors and heretics within by the 41st millennium the imperium is a galaxy spanning authoritarian fascist religious fundamentalist oppressive state fighting to stay together against the threats of chaos and various xenos species it encompasses worlds so remote and backwards that they largely exist as medieval farming communities whose only contact with the imperium proper is a tithe of soldiers every few decades and teeming hive worlds with populations in the billions where everyone's a factory drone the imperium has no particular opinion on what form of government or social structure a planet might have so long as it sticks to imperial law and delivers its tithe which means a lot of planets are ruled by autocrats dictators or a sort of noble caste any knowledge of chaos or the horus heresy is ruthlessly suppressed and most people have no idea of anything in history beyond the propaganda they consume the vast majority of humans never leave their home planet the emperor has been a catatonic husk for 10 000 years but psyches are still hunted down and returned to terror where they're sacrificed to fuel the emperor's golden throne or to power a giant navigational beacon called the astronomican the lucky ones might become astro telepaths the only reliable way of communicating between star systems harboring psyches dealing with zenos or contact with chaos are considered capital crimes and if a planet is deemed too far gone then it might suffer the fate of exterminatus scoured clean of life just as a precaution the colossal inefficient bureaucracy of the imperium is intended as a satire as the famous quote goes whole sectors of space are lost or abandoned due to rounding errors in administrative tax returns it's not a fun place to live and it's against this background that almost all of modern 40k is set that's the world that zenos is set in and the world that the 40k stories have been written in for 30 years now it's so huge and expansive that many authors have cut out their own little sectors to concentrate on abner's eisenhorn stories and the sequels to those happen in just one sub-sector of the imperium recently games workshop decided to actually move the plot forward the first time they've done that since the 80s the planets holding back the eye of terror fall and a great warp rift spreads across the galaxy splitting the imperium and setting loose huge chaos armies one of the loyalist primarks reappears and forces a load of imperial forces back to the front line as well as making huge improvements to the adeptus astartes all that is currently unfolding within the game so i'm not really going to go any further with it in this video 40k borrows a lot from other sources the colossal scale outlawing of ai on use of religion as a tool is straight from june the concept of chaos powers is borrowed from michael morcock but the way chaos cults and the chaos powers function is more lovecraft and the daily over-the-topness and satire is very heavily influenced by 2000 ad and judge dredd the scale paranoia and ridiculous inefficiency of the imperium is also really useful when you're writing this background for a game where any player might want to play any other player there are tons of reasons why one imperial faction might fight another imperial faction it's almost more common than fighting aliens finally i should say that this is really only the history of humanity within 40k i mean they're the main protagonists and cover most of the factions but similar videos could be made about the history of some of the alien factions those are definitely videos for another time thanks for watching if you are new to the 40k background and you found that either useful or really confusing let me know below it'd be good to know if these things are actually working see you next time [Music] foreign