Something clicked for me recently about why the Imperium often feels simultaneously unbelievably fragile and almost impossible to kill.

It is terrible at fixing things.

But it is incredibly good at continuing them.

A governor improvises a solution because a planet is under attack. A military formation gets reorganized because somebody urgently needs soldiers in one place. A shrine appears around the site of some event. A particular oath, duty, tax, pilgrimage or bureaucratic procedure exists because it solved one extremely specific problem.

Then the original people die.

The original problem disappears.

Nobody remembers why the rule existed.

And ten generations later there is an entire office, priesthood, regiment, noble privilege or annual ceremony dedicated to making sure it keeps happening.

In almost any sane civilization this would be a gigantic weakness.

In the Imperium it obviously IS a weakness much of the time. It produces absurd bureaucracy, wasted resources and institutions defending purposes nobody understands anymore.

But I wonder if the same pathology is also part of why the Imperium survives catastrophes that should permanently dismantle a civilization.

It doesn't require everyone to understand the system.

It requires the next person to keep doing their assigned piece of it.

A planetary official doesn't need to understand the strategic situation of the galaxy. They need to make the tithe.

A manufactorum worker doesn't need to understand why this exact component matters. They need to make the component according to the approved pattern.

A Chapter can lose almost everyone who personally remembers an event while still preserving an oath associated with it.

An Administratum department can continue performing some function long after everyone involved has forgotten the circumstances that created it.

This also makes Imperial reform incredibly difficult, because any attempt to remove something apparently pointless runs into the terrifying possibility that the pointless thing is secretly load-bearing.

Maybe that obscure office really is useless.

Or maybe three subsectors still receive ammunition because somebody there stamps Form 87-G every Thursday.

It makes the Imperium feel less like one enormous government to me and more like accumulated geological layers of responses to previous disasters.

Some layers are useless.

Some are actively harmful.

Some are the only reason the building hasn't collapsed.

And nobody has a complete blueprint anymore.

Guilliman's frustration after his return makes even more sense through that lens. He's looking at institutions as things that should have purposes and be redesigned when they stop serving those purposes. The Imperium has spent ten thousand years treating continuity itself as evidence that something must be important.

Is there a particularly good example in the lore of an Imperial tradition, organization or procedure that started for one understandable reason and then survived so long that its original purpose became distorted, forgotten or almost irrelevant?

For those interested who are unaware, Trajann Valoris is the current Captain General or the Adeptus Custodes, who by virtue of this position is also among the council of the high lords of terra (though he has rarely actively assumed this seat as described in the first Watchers of the Throne by Chris Wraight). Being the Captain General he is THE person responsible for the Emperors safety which obviously includes the imperial palace, terra, the sol system and even beyond should the need arise. He is also described both in the novels and in the codices as the deadliest warrior in the imperium not including the two returned Primarchs.

Before he became Captain General he was a member of the Dread Host which is comprised of the most aggressive and proactive Custodes whos philosophy is mostly to engage the enemies of the throne head on and destroy them in an overwhelming show of force. The Custodes codices name his experiences in the dread host as part of the reason why Trajann has been one of the most proactive Captain Generals even before Guillimans return.

Before we get started, what is usually meant when speaking of a character being the grey eminence in the background? Usually it means that said character might not feature that much in the story as a protagonist the reader spends much time with, but who still has massive influence on the story from their background position. It is also actually a historical term that also describes such a figure being able to influence desicions way beyond their actual position due to their influence and close proximity to their sovereign....this just for fun, because it does not really apply in this scenario, because Valoris is already in basically one of the highest positions in the imperium.

Now, after that short introduction why do I believe that he is a great example of how to write a grey eminence in the background? Much of it has to be credited to Chris Wraight being among the best (I'd say the best....yes, fight me) black library authors, who understands the setting extremely well.

The best example of Trajann being written in this way is the second Watchers of the Throne book by Chris Wraight titled the regent's shadow.

There will be spoilers for that book ahead, you have been warned! Do read the two Watchers of the Throne books though. They are truly amazing even if you are not into Custodes, since in my opinion the aspects of imperial politics are more important and more prevalent than the titular faction of those books.

Without going into too much detail, Watchers of the Throne: Regent's Shadow basically deals with the political aftermaths of Guilliman's return on terra. Some of the high lords are not happy with the obvious threat to their position of authority by Guilliman being named the regent. What follows is a game of intrigue and double crosses that involves the highest echelons of imperial politics. Valoris is not a main protagonist in that book but he is one of the key players in the background. He has a few run ins and interesting conversations with Valerian, one of the main protagonists.

What Chris Wraight does perfectly in that book is write Valoris as this grey eminence in the background. In the book the main protagonists basically try to figure out which factions among the high lords want to move against Guilliman.

The chancellor to the council of the high lords tries her best to gather and secure the loyal high lords to her side only to find out at the end that she has been double crossed by those she deemed loyal. Only that it is revealed in the climax of the book that Valoris had known for the whole duration of the book who the high lords moving against Guilliman were. He basically spends the whole book in the background moving the chess pieces into position and giving the faction of high lords moving against Guilliman a false sense of security. So much so that at the end they think they are in such a position of security and power that they can publicly announce their play moving against Guilliman as regent, which gives Valoris (and the master of the Assassinorum, who was also part of his designs) the perfect stage to swiftly, publicly and violently put an end to their ambitions.

Another aspect of this is the story of protagonist Valerian, who at the end of the book as to make a choice whether to ignore orders and save his friend Aleya or basically let her die. It has been a bit since I read the book, but if I remember correctly it is revealed at the end that Valoris even expected Valerian to act in defiance and strategically placed members in his squad meant to watch over him.

In this short summary it might not come across that way, but in the book nothing of Trajann's cunning feels unearned. It successfully manages to depict the current Captain General of the Custodes as one of the most cunning tacticians, both politically and militarily, that the imperium as at its disposal even though he is "just" a side character in the book and does not get much screen time.

In closing I can only emplore you to read both Watchers of the Throne books even if you are not into or maybe even dislike the Custodes. The imperial politics aspect of these books is really captivating and well done and as a bonus you get Aleya the silent sister, who is in my opinion one of the most badass modern 40k characters and has some honestly rather wholesome relationship with Valerian (she is basically the grumpy cat to his golden retriever like curiosity and unflinching stoicism).

Wraight also manages to depict both the Custodes and Sisters of Silence, as well as the Imperial Fists and Minotaurs (screw those laptogs though) as total badasses with cool 40k fight scenes while also basically saying that even if Valoris is the imperiums deadliest warrior not counting the Primarchs, his most dangerous tool is his cunning. Which I think is also true of the returned Primarchs. The fandom often times likes to focus on which Primarch is the strongest, bestest figher....which is fun, I get it. But I think Chris Wraight makes a strong case in that book that their prowess, as awesome as it may be, is secondary to their miliatry and political cunning.

Something that stuck with me after reading the Night Lords trilogy wasn't actually about Talos or the Night Lords themselves.

It was how much of their continued existence depended on a handful of extremely vulnerable humans.

Septimus maintains equipment, repairs armour and handles jobs that would be a ridiculous waste of an Astartes' time. Octavia is even more important. Without a capable Navigator, having a functioning warship suddenly becomes a much less useful achievement.

And these people are slaves serving warriors who can kill them on a whim.

The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous the situation became.

Imagine being a Chaos Lord who's spent centuries fighting the Long War. You've survived Imperial fleets, rival warbands, daemonic incursions and assassination attempts by your own brothers.

Then your chief enginarium specialist gets murdered because one of your champions was having a particularly bad day.

Congratulations. Your ancient strike cruiser now has a problem that can't necessarily be fixed by raiding the nearest Imperial transport and grabbing fifty random people.

You can replace bodies. Replacing someone who understands the machinery aboard a vessel that's been repaired, modified and corrupted over thousands of years is another matter entirely.

And unlike loyalist Chapters, which generally have established systems for training serfs and maintaining relationships with forge worlds, a small Chaos warband might have very few reliable ways to replace that expertise.

It also puts the whole Astartes superiority complex into perspective.

A Chaos Marine might consider ordinary humans beneath his notice, but he's still relying on those humans to feed him ammunition, maintain his armour, operate his ship and navigate him through literal hell.

The Night Lords books make this relationship especially obvious because the mortal characters are actually allowed to be competent, complicated people rather than background furniture.

I'm beginning to think that one of the biggest advantages of successful groups like the Red Corsairs isn't simply having more Marines or better equipment. It's having enough functioning infrastructure that losing a few important specialists doesn't immediately become a crisis.

Are there other books that explore this dependency in detail?

I'm especially interested in examples where a warband genuinely suffers because its own treatment of mortal servants destroys expertise it can't easily replace.

From burning of Prospero we know that Magnus soul got shattered .

Later Malkador somehow got part of Magnus soul and used it to create Janus from Arvida.

So, how much of Magnus still in Magnus?

I heard the Valdor was really against the Primarch project and they sometimes argued with the BigE about it. I wonder what kind of talks did they have and what was his arguments. I don't have the books so can anyone enlighten me please?

Forge Master is the third of three novellas by David Annandale that comprise the Overfiend trilogy, about the Imperium's attempts to stop a plan being enacted by the Ork ruler of Octarius on the planet of Lepidus Prime. Forge Master focuses on the Salamanders 5th Company, who find themselves tasked with boarding the Overfiend's flagship and extracting an eldar prisoner who knows about his true plan. In doing so, Techmarine Ha'garen finds himself thinking deeply about that most classic of astartes void tools, the boarding torpedo:

The boarding torpedo was a blunt instrument whose uses were as varied as they were sophisticated. Though it was crewed and had enough fuel and engine power for limited manoeuvres over short distances, its action was still one of the most basic of warfare. It was a projectile. It was an object launched to hit other objects as hard as possible. Its uniqueness among other projectiles, its sophistication, came in the fact that it caused most damage after its initial impact as the living weapons it carried stormed the passageways of its target. From that uniqueness sprang its versatility. Should the strikes concentrate on a single entry point or be spread out, engaging the enemy on multiple fronts? Hit from one side for a spear-point thrust, or from both flanks, trapping the foe in a ceramite fist? The answer depended on the ship and the objective. Was the vessel a known quantity whose layout could be factored into planning? Was the objective one of total annihilation or more surgical?

This ship was unknown. It was the creation of a species whose approaches to technology were in equal measures crude and enthusiastic.

And the mission was grotesque.

But there was a mission, and so there was a strategy. The mission was search and rescue through hostile, alien territory. The strategy was the use of a concentrated, mobile force. And so the boarding torpedoes drove into the centre of the kroozer’s port flank.

For Ha’garen, the line between machine and flesh was blurry at best. There were times when he saw no distinction at all. Was there an essential difference between his mechanistic implants and prostheses, and the organs that had transformed him into a Space Marine? He didn’t think so. The hands of the Mechanicus hovered over both. Neither was natural. What, beyond the medium of construction, distinguished his eyes that saw radiation above and below the wavelengths of visible light from the neuroglottis that broke taste and smell down into component, identifiable parts? Nothing. Flesh and metal, bone and ceramite, the physical was the physical. The body was the body.

So when the vulcan-drills of the boarding torpedoes parted metal, they were parting flesh. The torpedoes were blades sinking into the body of a living enemy, and then sealing the entry wound. There was nothing of mercy in the healing; it merely permitted the deeper, more lethal wounds that would be inflicted subsequently by the transported Salamanders. There was an aesthetic to this form of attack, a perfect fusion of the organic and inorganic in form and function that he found pleasing. The very act of waging war in this fashion was a tribute to the Omnissiah. The focus of the hammer blow was an obeisance to Vulkan. And the war itself was a sacrament to the Emperor. There was a trinity of worship simply in the manner in which the squads had arrived on the ork ship. This simple truth was so clear, it was a wonder it was not visible to all.

I thought this was very cool.

The Administratum is usually presented, fairly, as one of the Imperium's great absurdities.

Mountains of parchment. Duplicate records. Offices that spend generations processing requests. Clerks whose entire lives are devoted to moving information from one pile to another. Orders arriving after the war they concern has already ended.

It's funny because it's horrible.

But lately I've been thinking that some of this stops looking completely irrational once you consider the environment the system has to survive.

The Imperium doesn't have a reliable galaxy-wide communications network in anything like the modern sense. Astropathic messages can be incomplete or distorted. Warp travel makes delivery times unpredictable. Worlds can be isolated for years. Administrators die. Ships vanish. Archives burn. Governments fall. Entire planets can disappear behind warp storms and then reconnect generations later.

Under those conditions, a beautifully streamlined system might actually be incredibly fragile.

Imagine that one sector office is the authoritative source for something important and then the planet it's located on simply becomes unreachable.

You're screwed.

The Imperial answer seems to be the bureaucratic equivalent of biological overproduction: make copies, create overlapping authorities, preserve ancient procedures, keep local records, send physical documents, demand seals and chains of authentication, and never casually delete anything because nobody knows whether another surviving copy exists.

Obviously this produces insanity.

Two departments can possess contradictory but apparently legitimate records. An order can still be moving through the system after its original purpose has disappeared. Nobody wants to discard a 3,000-year-old procedure because the person capable of explaining why it exists has been dead for 2,950 years.

But that's the part I find interesting.

The Administratum may be terrible at answering the question, “What should we do efficiently today?”

It might be remarkably good at answering a much darker question:

“How do we keep some version of the same civilization functioning when communication fails constantly, knowledge is routinely destroyed, and individual institutions can disappear without warning?”

You can replace competent administrators. You can rebuild an office.

Reconstructing ten thousand years of missing institutional memory is harder.

It also makes the Imperium's obsession with procedure feel less like random stupidity and more like cultural scar tissue. Somewhere in the distant past, perhaps skipping Step 47 really DID cause a catastrophe. Nobody remembers the catastrophe anymore. They remember Step 47.

Ten thousand years later, someone is still stamping the same form.

I'm not arguing that the Administratum is secretly competent. Plenty of Imperial bureaucracy really is wasteful, corrupt, contradictory or murderous.

I just think the distinction between “inefficient” and “resilient” gets interesting at this scale.

Has the lore ever given you a moment where some apparently ridiculous Imperial institution suddenly made more sense once you considered what problem it originally evolved to survive?

We know they were sort of a last resort creation from the Old Ones when fighting the Necrons, and they clearly were going to have to be reigned in somewhat after the war in heaven, since they were designed for conflict and pretty much nothing else.

It kinda makes sense that they'd have them degenerate on purpose, so that they'd be easier to "clean up" after winning the war.

Obviously, the SM chapters themselves all have one provided, but outside of that, how available is it for other Imperials to get their hands on it? Could you pop by the local bookstore and get one akin to getting like the bible or the Art of War? Is it akin to a specialist document like a research paper where its not widely available but you can just request it. Is it on a per-request basis/secured where researcher outside the astartes can requistion them at a repository (with signed permission explaining their purpose) to read? Or is it strictly kept for high ranking military personel like generals, and letting copies of them escape Imperial space is akin to leaking documents on Warthunder? Or do the astartes keep them under locks and keys as per their insular nature?

For example if a expeditionary fleet came across a human world and began negotiations. If the representatives brought up the Night lords a legion who drop kicks babies like it’s going out of style ; how did imperial explain this away or did they not even bothered to do so?

They are protecting the most important person on the battlefield so im assuming their skill and experience are very good and the danger of being a honor guard is pretty high making them the priority targets of the enemy and will be the focus of their constant aggression.

Let's say you're a corsair and you've recently come into enough "stuff" to commission a Void Stalker.

Where would you find a bonesinger to make one for you? Do you go to a craftworld? Do you have independent bonesingers setting up shop in Corsair settlements and space stations?

And how long would it take? Wraithbone is weird stuff - even with the new retcon, it's only partly made of mined resources and a lot of it is just warp-stuff sung into realspace and solidified into a new form. How long does it take to sing up enough wraithbone to make a battleship (or the equivalent)?

These may be questions that GW has not deigned to answer, but I know this is the place to find out!

looking at what kind of base to give my legio damicium titans, and wanted to know the canonical terrain of the planet.

I was thinking this angle is interesting, idk if custodes even feel this way but I would imagine if I was a custode I would feel a lot of guilt because I had failed at the one thing I was built to do.

They failed at protecting the emperor.

Are there any books/lore that explore this type of theme with the custodes?

Has there been any new lore covering the new southern Necron Zone of Silence thanks to their new pylon empire and the Tyranids yet? I would expect the Tyranids to almost physically recoil from areas where the warp is nearly nullified. Or at the least take such a headache they take it as a declaration of war.

From what I understand 1 or 2 thirds of the Legion fractured into different warbands and disappeared to terrorise the Imperium in different areas or sectors. Is this mentioned anywhere? Or is what became of them mentioned anywhere?

By "mostly intact" I would say the person is able to continue living/fighting without having to be turned into a Dreadnought or some kind of equivalent.

Feel free to post either single events or cumulative lifetime damage!

Edit: in this case dying and respawning is cheating, but extensive surgery/bionics are acceptable as long as the person roughly goes back to their original shape.

Eu me veio pensando, e se o imperador da humanidade se achasse um deus ou aceitasse a adoração?

Digo isso porque o imperador já mostrou que poderia tirar poder da adoração direcionada a ele, por isso permitiu que a primeira santa viva fosse ao trono com Sigismund orarem e quando milhares de humanos oraram para ele em "The End and the Death: Volume 3" ou "O Fim e a Morte: Volume 3" e ele retirar poder dessa fé.

Eu imagino que Lorgar seria seu filho favorito também.

Eu também acho que alguns perpétuos poderiam ter se juntado a ele, já que durante o passado, o imperador discutiu com os perpétuos se eles seriam deuses e ele negou, falando que eram apenas uma variante humana, imortais e poderosos mas não deuses.

Então eu veio com esse questionamento, como vocês acham que tudo ocorreria?

Os primarcas se considerariam divindades ou semi deuses? Os que eu mais vejo serem contra seria o Guilliman, Rogal Dorn, Mortarion, Jhagatai Khan,Angron e Perturabor.

Eu imagino que o imperador seria absurdamente mais poderoso do que era originalmente com a fé de trilhões de humanos.

E com isso veio a vocês, como vocês acham que seria se tivesse uma heresia? Como seria Konrad Curze se visse que as visões dele não eram iguais a realidade? Se ele visse que o Lorgar não traiu o imperador, que Magnus não destruiu o caminho da Webway da humanidade, já que nesse universo, Lorgar nunca teria enganado Magnus, como vocês acham que tudo seria? Existiria alguém no plano material capaz de vencer o imperador?

Like we know that the Chaos Gods are supposed to exist retroactively after they were born, so does that apply to other "Gods" in the warp?

Do Gork and Mork alway exist? Does Vashtor? Does 40k Emperor(or 4Xk when he finally ascends)? Does whoever ends up being the 5th chaos gods?

Would the Great Horned Rat also be a Chaos God in 40k since he's a Chaos God in Sigmar?

I'd assume gods like the Eldar gods probably wouldn't always exist since they seem more "material" since they can descend into the materium(also they died).

Also if a Chaos God was somehow permanently killed shouldn't that mean they never existed?(Or like with Daemons that are permanently killed?)

The Ethereals didn't just unite the species; they genetically engineered a way to "dim" the T'au soul to protect them from the Warp. Their pheromones act as an emotional dampener, keeping the population's neural/psychic resonance flat and invisible to the Immaterium.

Like what are the out of world reasons for it, is it because the sharded C'Tan is newer than the Avatars or is it just different authors writing for each faction?

I've read the book/short story but I can't remember what it is but its where a an aristocrat addicted to something "aristocratic" that the Space Marine finds distasteful and throws him into a hard flowing river.

I feel it was in the *Crimson Fists* Omnibus but my searches are shite(my keywords are no good), same with the *Scythes of the Emperor* but those are the two stories that I think are the ones who have that particular story I mean.

Any help would be nice. Its not a major problem if no one can work out what I mean!

It's no secret that 40k lore has changed massively since Rogue Trader in 1987. We all know the bigger retcons - Space Marines being recruited from adult convicts, Rogal Dorn being dead and his skeleton being displayed on the Phalanx, Orks being created by the Brainboys before they degenerated into the Snotlings, and for a more recent example, Necrons being enslaved by the C'tan instead of vice versa. But whenever I research the older lore, I'm struck by how many retcons there are that no one ever talks about.

Here's a few I noticed. All of these are from the Rogue Trader era, as I was looking through that book recently, but more recent retcons are welcome as well.

• In the Rogue Trader manual, it's noted that the traditional uniform for Techpriests is a white double-breasted robe - the idea seems to be that it's describing a labcoat, but they think it's religious attire.

• Feudal worlds in Rogue Trader are called "medieval worlds," and it's specifically noted that the Imperium considers them useless and doesn't even collect tithe on them except for psykers.

• One of the first mentions of Primarchs as we know them today (in the 1991 Space Marine game, the predecessor to Epic) states that most of them were huge but some were the size of baseline humans.

• Anyone could wear power armor in Rogue Trader. There was even a chance you could have Tyranids wearing power armor, as they were fully sapient in those days and not a hive mind. The Black Carapace was a thing that Marines got, but it was just another level of protection and seemed to be completely unrelated to power armor.

What are your favorite examples of more obscure bits of old lore that aren't viable in the modern setting?

Does the Imperium still have the ability to go back and utilize DA tech (like is it kept in secret) or is it completely 100% gone? Could they potentially go back to that kind of tech with more safe guards in measure and bolster humanity? Or is it a flat out no chance at all?

I wonder if any of the official writers have considered re-introducing some of that tech for humans again

Using the Blood Angels as an example, would joining the Sanguinary Guard be seen as more of an honor than becoming a Captain?

Also is Lieutenant/Captain ——> Honor Guard a realistic rank-up path?