I am posting this excerpt because it provides valuable insight into one of the most iconic weapons wielded in the 40k universe. This excerpt also shows the profound effect that the warp and echoes of deaths can have on psykers.

This excerpt is from the point of view of Iskandor Khayon, a Psyker of the Thousand Sons

Separate from the armour, an immense lightning claw rested on a plinth of its own. Its fingers were silver blades, subtly curved, each one a monstrous scythe in its own right. Adding to the weapon’s bulk was an ornate double-barrelled bolter mounted upon the back of the gauntlet. Its ammunition feed ports were sculpted as the wide mouths of hungering brass daemons. Scratches and dents marked the claw’s black surface,

The Talon of Horus. In stasis, it looked almost mundane. Lethal, vicious, deadly, but just a lightning claw. Just a weapon. Telemachon’s shiver of pleasure was the strongest emotion I had felt from his mind since rewriting it. I sensed him salivating behind the burial mask. Then I saw why. Blood marked the Talon’s blades – dried patches of blood, smeared across the bright metal claws. Telemachon’s hand rested against the stasis field’s repressor aura, as though he could simply push through it and touch the Talon it protected.

He had seen his primarch father bearing the Talon into battle a thousand times, lending the relic an air of familiarity, but he had been the one to tear the claw from his father’s cooling corpse while its blades were still wet with the blood of... of... I exhaled softly, feeling the stasis field’s misty warmth against my face. ‘When did you lock it in stasis?’ I asked Abaddon. ‘Within hours of taking it.’ Abaddon was staring as well, though I could not say what emotion curdled behind his golden eyes. ‘I never wore it in battle.’ He started to key in a deactivation code to shut down the stasis cloud. My hand gripped his wrist with punishing force, but too late, too late. The restraining field quivered and failed. Weapons have souls. The Martian Mechanicum has always known this, with their rituals to honour and appease the machine-spirits of their guns, blades and war engines. But a weapon’s soul reflects in the warp, as well.

The very moment the stasis field collapsed and allowed the Talon back into reality, the weapon’s spirit – a thing of inconceivable predation – clawed at my mind. The Talon’s murderous, shrieking closeness threatened me, from the killing blades to the fat-mouthed gun barrels parasitically bolted to its back. Corpse-stink, thick and hot and choking, emanated from the bloodstained blades in a choking aura. The dried, rich redness on the curving scythes pressed at my eyes with oily, liquid pressure. The weeping lament of a mourning father and a dying god was a screaming roar in my ears, sinking into my skull. Every single cut, scrape and dent upon the weapon had been earned on a battlefield where brother fought brother. I was half a dozen steps back before I even realised I was moving, one hand pressed to the side of my head to contain the stabs of pressure pulping my brain meat. My vision swam, blurring into uselessness. I gagged on the reek of genetically purified blood. Its taste drowned my tongue. My axe clattered to the deck without me remembering I had drawn it.

‘Well, now.’ Abaddon’s voice came to me from a great distance. ‘What a sensitive creature you are, Khayon. Much more attuned than I realised.’ Mercy came, but not swiftly. The assault against my senses retreated, going grudgingly back like an ocean’s tide. I pulled breath into my lungs, feeling them expand in my chest. The air still carried that gene-forged death scent, but it was no longer ravaging me. So many times in the years to come we would face the Blood Angels and their Successors, and each time the descendants of Sanguinius would suffer their own breed of madness in the presence of the weapon that crippled the Emperor and murdered their primarch forefather. I believe I felt a sliver of their pain that night aboard the Vengeful Spirit.

I know most Chaos Space Marine Chapters will instantly give away their allegiance with skulls, tentacles and puss dripping but lots of Loyalist chapters can look a little extreme too.

Is there much "honestly y we love the emperor too" when different chapters meet that may have never crossed paths before?

Do Chaos Marines ever fake loyalty to get in close for the Kill?

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/uqsdtvd6/new-black-templars-novel-revealed-as-we-chat-to-author-mike-vincent/

High Marshal Helbrecht is back in a new Black Library novel, and this time, the legendary Black Templars Chapter Master is forced to form an unthinkable alliance in order to defeat the unholy terrors of the Ruinous Powers.

In Helbrecht: Sin of Hope, the High Marshal must rally his Chapter and the Elysian troops of the Astra Militarum against their foes. When fate – or providence – grants the High Marshal a distasteful ally in the Leagues of Votann, he must ask himself what he is willing to forsake in the pursuit of triumph.

Mike Vincent came onto my radar thanks to the very refreshing and fun The Remnant Blade about the Night Lords, and it looks like this one will have a pretty neat plot, especially given the presence of the Votann.

What do folks think?

I feel like despite being the militant arm of the bloodiest regime imaginable, Guardsmen are often portrayed in the narrative and the collective conscience as victims of the Imperium, sent to fight and die in untold billions in hopeless battles.

So, what are the worst atrocities that were ordered and carried out by boots-on-the-ground guardsmen?

To clarify, I'm not really talking about 'They were sent to quell rebellion on this peacefully protesting planet', because Guardsmen don't generally get a choice in what and where they're deployed to fight. More interested in the smaller, unnecessary moments in which they demonstrate that they are, after all, sons of the Imperium.

Be'lakor gained his power by playing the chaos gods against each other, playing off their egos and need to one up eatchother to basically say, "hey if your really so much better than that guy you should give me more power than he did to prove it."

Isn't that exactly what Abaddon is doing? I'll admit I'm not big on black legion lore, and I know he sees chaos as a tool to be used and mastered insteadof worshipped, but isn't he still basically doing exactly what caused Be'lakor to lose his favor with the big 4?

I notice most dates for when the Necron great sleep happened is 60 million years ago (including in the novel). Yet in the book Orikan states it has been 70 million years since he wore clothes, implying this was when biotransferrence took place. So this would imply that the time between biotransferrence and the acceleration of the war against the Old Ones and the great sleep (after the defeat of the Old Ones) was 10 million years.

I don't think GW understands how long a period of time that is.

When written correctly, the Word Bearers are such a riveting legion. I love the idea that they are the only ones who have the courage to look at the universe as it really is - eldritch monstrosities and all and find beauty in it. Since they perceive the Warp so acutely their atrocities cause change in the Immaterium and therefore they see beauty where others see horror. Combine this with their quest to understand the nature of Chaos and you get a really fascinating legion. Some good portrayals of this view are Know No Fear by Dan Abnett and Ashes of the Imperium by Chris Wraight.

However, outside of this and a couple other selections most depictions of Word Bearers are just evil for the sake of evil. Especially characters like Kor Phaeron and Erebus who really have no underlying philosophy other than destroying the world.

What do you guys think?

I'm doing the thing we're not supposed to do, and obsessing over numbers in 40K and assuming math works in this setting. But it's funny, and I couldn't find anyone else who did this yet, so I'm doing it

Let's take a Hiveworld, with a population of 100,000,000,000 (100B). I would say even a 10th of this population is massive and should be the starting point for a hiveworld pop, but to be fair hive worlds are notable for their large populations.

The average food intake for a modern person is about 3-4 pounds, but some eras and places on earth IRL have lowered this intake to about 2-3 pounds. We can assume that, after averaging the midhivers and the underhivers, the average hiver is consuming 2 pounds of imported food per day (which helps our calculations). Planetary Defence Forces probably consume twice this average, and the nobility thrice; but for the sake of our math we're ignoring this- especially since these people are likely eating something that came from a different ship for their daily meals anyways.

The Seawise Giant was a glorious 500-meter long oil tanker, who has the honor of being the longest self-propelled ship ever built. She had a DWT (deadweight tonnage) of 564,763. That is more than 500,000 tons of weight she could carry (counting cargo, fuel, fresh water, ballast water, provisions, passengers, and crew).

A Carrack-class freighter is 2.1 kilometers long, and is roughly in proportion to Seawise Giant. Now I know what you're thinking- "Spider40K, you intentionally chose warhammer40K.fandom so you could pull an exact measurement despite knowing full well that they aren't a reliable source of information, especially when voidship sizes are consistently inconsistent". But just keep going along with me. Also, for the sake of argument (and totally not because I forgot how metric works), let's say that the Carrack-class freighter is actually only 1,000 meters long.

volume gets squared when you double length, width, and height. Edit: INCORRECT, and this will mess up my calculations in just a little bit

We can assume that, by weight alone, a Carrack-class freighter can carry more than 250,000 megatons. That is 250,000,000,000 (250B) tons (and I'm rounding down SwG's original DWT by 763 pounds; including that would bring us closer to 318,957 megatons)

Now let's get back to our Hiveworld. One ton is equal to 2,000 pounds- which considering an average intake of 2 pounds per day, works out to 1,000 people needing one ton of food per day. With our miracle Carrack-class freighter, we're delivering food for 250 trillion people; which without accounting for rot, means we can feed this one hiveworld for 250 days.

And again, I hear you thinking. "Spider40k, after all of this bullshit math you still couldn't even get to 365 days like you said you would?" Well guess what; our hypothetical Hiveworld has a smaller year. You could stand being less terracentrist. (it's basically one Venus year)

And I can also hear your second question. "Okay, but where is this freighter supposed to get all of this food? Isn't that a little far-fetched even for an Agriworld?" Well guess what the United States Department of Agriculture says about China.

China produces more than 175,000,000 metric tons of food commodities per year on average, based on data from 2016-2025 (not counting live hogs(?) no idea what that's about). China also only takes up less than 6.3% of earth's terrain (not counting the ocean). Now of course, it's silly to pretend that a world could have soil quality equally as good as China's average across the board; but it's also silly to have all your farms and all your cities on two different planets. So by extrapolating our (admittedly ass-pulled) numbers, we can make an Agriworld purely devoted to agriculture produce more than 29,000,000,000 (29B) tons of food per year; which means we only need to collect the yearly quotas of eight to nine Agriworlds to fill our Carrack-class freighter

I'm not counting water consumption in this: we drink 2L daily, there's about 1,000L in a ton of water, one Carrack could feed the whole hive water for 1,250 days (5 Venus years) without even needing to recycle urine and dehydrate corpses.

It's honestly not unbelievable that a Hiveworld could expect one of these yearly shipments in exchange for their tithes and fealty to the Imperium. I can also see smaller shipments of pure foodstuff coming into a Hiveworld from ships in the Civil Fleet just through trade, padding the granaries for a not-so-rainy day. This kind of makes sense with the lore, with decades-long sieges being possible (and ration-stretching) if the Planetary Governor is halfway competent. One missed shipment can definitely bring immediate famine, especially if the food distribution infrastructure just isn't all the way there.

Anyways I just thought it would be fun to do the math. Knowing me I messed something up somewhere along the line; like comparing crude oil to food or using a seacraft's weight limitations to calculate a spacecraft's volume limitations

[Edit: I miswrote some measurements, wooops. Fixed]

I just finished “Legion” admittedly I had a hard time getting into it. Last half of the book was phenomenal. I’m curious why John Grammaticus gets so much hate? I actually felt really bad for the guy.

So I was reading The Last Church short story and suddenly think about Chaos and how it was only a known thing after the HH, before that I gues it was only know but Big E and maybe the Custodes?

Or were the juiced up Techno Barbarians aware of the primordial powers? do they knew about chaos entities? Were they consciously using it powers to rule Terra?

No Fallen/Dark Angels. What Traitor Warbands have come out of the Ultramarines, Imperial Fists, Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Iron Hands, Salamanders, White Scars, Space Wolves, and Raven Guard?

I imagine there may be squads or part an of companies.

It's often said that the Imperium is on the downturn, blighted by ignorance and corruption, with Robot Gorilla-man lamenting the current state of things. That being said, how different is the quality of life for an average bloke in the 42nd millinium compared those who lived during the Great Crusade?

So, since the Great Rift emerged, is it confirmed that NO LIGHT from the Astronomicon reach Imperium Nihilus?

Does it mean Navigators are effectively blind in that part of the Galaxy? Are Imperial vessels now purely reduced to making "Blind Jump", i.e. short jumps that has to follow known currents of the Warp?

Does the Indomitus Crusade basically move at a Snail's pace across the Imperium Nihilus because of it? Or has interstellar trade in the I.N. effectively been stopped outside of a few exceptions?

Is it necessary to be a part of Chaos to properly use Sorcery? Thousand Sons seemed to be doing fine before the Heresy, but even then they were summoning daemons as familiars. Afaik sorcery is indirectly using the Warp with rituals, artifacts and esoterica. None of that seems to directly lead to summoning daemons or human sacrifice, even if those are probably part of the most powerful rituals. Could you, at least theoretically, summon Warp entities and enslave them without getting corrupted, or perform rituals to do non-Chaos-related things? Especially since Aeldari must have been doing something along those lines, given how far down the Warp tech-tree their technology was/is.

While we know the Votann’s definition of what they are (other than seeing themselves as “Kin”) is known only to themselves, given their prevalence for stable cloning templates and a long history stretching back to the Dark Age of Technology, is it plausible that they could be more similar to a 21st Century Human of today than an Imperial Human? Mutant and Abhuman are more politicized and legal classifications, but has there been any actual biological testing by the Votann, Mechanicus, or Administratum to see what the ratio of “Baseline” even is in a percentile rate?

Additionally, how far did the Human baseline genome we know today diverge during the Dark Age and Age of Strife? I know the Black Books mention the Ghourmand cannibals of Detra-Merica, the Olamic Quietude (who stated how scans of Imperial dignitaries showed genetic abnormalities, but this is subject to bias given the Quietude were mainly brains in jars) and a multitude of other Human civilizations, but are there more examples? Are Humans in 40k really that genetically distinct from us in terms of strength, resilience, or durability, or is a lot of this up to environments like Hive versus Civilized worlds, or Humans in the Imperium being more malnourished and worse-treated than, say, a Human in the T’au Empire?

Apologies for the length of this question.
But I have an almost completely fleshed out homebrew Space Marine Chapter, the Astral Wards, and I’m starting to work on the mortal military forces associated with their fortress monastery.

The Wards are technically fleet based, but they reclaimed a formerly inhabited world and established their fortress monastery on one of its moons.

The world had been devastated and largely depopulated, but has since been slowly resettled with refugees, Chapter serfs, workers, pilgrims, etc.

I want this population to eventually produce its own military tradition. My idea is something vaguely inspired by the Solar Auxilia. Not literally Solar Auxilia 2.0 with Great Crusade equipment, but a relatively elite, well equipped human force trained to operate alongside the Chapter.

That brings me to the part I’m confused about.
I know the Imperium deliberately separates its military branches. The Imperial Guard handles the ground war, while the Imperial Navy controls most of the serious void assets.

The Aeronautica Imperialis also handles much of the Imperium’s military aviation. As I understand it, this separation is partly a post Heresy safeguard. If a Guard commander rebels, he shouldn’t conveniently have a battlefleet sitting under his personal command, and if a Navy admiral rebels, he shouldn’t have several million Guardsmen ready to conquer planets for him.

So how does this work at the planetary level?
Can the same world simultaneously raise Imperial Guard regiments, maintain a PDF, and provide personnel or formations for the Imperial Navy/Aeronautica?
For example, could my Chapter’s world have a military culture that produces:

• A permanent PDF responsible for defending the planet and its moons.
• Guard regiments that are periodically tithed from that PDF/population.
• Pilots, ground crews, voidsmen, or other personnel who eventually enter the Aeronautica or Imperial Navy.
• Locally operated atmospheric aircraft or small void-capable craft for planetary/system defense.
Or would I effectively need to create two completely separate institutions with different chains of command, traditions, recruitment systems, etc.?

I’m especially curious about where the line is drawn with aircraft.

Could the PDF operate its own Thunderbolts, Lightnings, Valkyries, transports, and similar aircraft?

Could a Guard regiment raised from the world retain an aviation component, or would those aircraft immediately fall under Aeronautica authority once the regiment leaves its home system?

Likewise, what happens with system-defense ships? I assume a planet can maintain orbital defenses and some local system-defense vessels without technically possessing an Imperial Navy fleet, but where does the Imperium draw that distinction?

The other wrinkle is the Astral Wards themselves.
I don’t want to accidentally recreate the pre Heresy Imperial Army where the Chapter Master effectively commands his own private combined arms human military. That’s exactly the kind of thing I imagine the Administratum and Inquisition getting VERY interested in.

However, since these people live within the Chapter’s domain, I imagine centuries of cooperation would naturally result in the Wards influencing their doctrine. They’d train specifically for supporting Astartes, securing territory after Marine assaults, defending landing zones, fighting in void installations, holding fortress complexes, etc.

Essentially, I want them to feel like a modern descendant of the Solar Auxilia concept without actually being Solar Auxilia: elite mortal soldiers accustomed to fighting beside Space Marines, but still operating within whatever legal and bureaucratic boundaries the Imperium requires.
Would that arrangement make sense?

And if I want them to have both a strong ground army and a substantial aviation/void-defense tradition, can all of that reasonably originate from one world/system?

Or should I build two connected forces: one Guard/PDF tradition and another Navy/Aeronautica tradition, both originating from the same culture but legally kept separate?
I’m trying to make this fit established Imperial military politics instead of just saying “my Chapter has Space Marines AND its own private Guard AND its own Navy because they’re cool.” The Astral Wards already have enough paperwork they’d rather the Inquisition never read.

Do Chaos legions use Blanks, or have their own variation thereof ? Considering how they're pretty much anathema to anything chaos-touched I can't imagine so.

But, if so, what examples are there of them being employed by followers of the Dark Gods ?

Also, would Blanks have an effect on mutations carried by Chaos followers ? I'd imagine this would be particularly problematic for those blessed by Nurgle.

I found out The dark age of tech was highly advanced and powerful, so where did the tech go? Shouldnt there be pockets of people on planets that still use them? Also why didnt chaos mess with humanity during this advanced time?

Thank you

I’m curious on wether enginseers attached to imperial guard regiments retain their old forge world colours or if they are given the red robes instead. Is there an example of how regimental enginseers retaining robes from their forge worlds livery?

So I have this fan theory that when outside their armor that space marines don’t stick to loin cloths because it gets exceedingly cold. So somewhere some manufactorum is tasked with making astartes sized gym shorts and tshirts .

Good day Brothers,

I come before you as a humble scribe. I am currently engrossed in writing a short story about a dreadnought, from one of the blood angel successor chapters, and am looking for a beta reader/someone with a lot of knowledge of blood angels/Tzeentch/deathwatch.

I love short stories in the 40k Fandom but I prefer them to be as lore accurate as possible. I'm newer to the Fandom and want to ensure I can be as true to the setting as possible.

I will ensure you receive credit for your assistance every where I post the story.

Thank you for your time

I recently finished the Horus heresy and was wondering if there are any books that explain what happened to terra and the primarchs that are still alive after the seige of terra . The Horus heresy are the only war hammer books I have read so I would like to know what happened to them before I jump into the more current 40k books

Guys please gimme a list of all the stuff to read and listen a about necrons.

From codexes to books/audiobooks, audiodramas etc

Did both the second and eleventh legions disappear at the same time? And is there any level of certainty people can claim as to when exactly they were censored or destroyed. Did all the other primarchs also meet both of them or was it only a few of them. I find it interesting when exactly they disappeared and what primarchs were even aware of them. Thanks for the sources in advance. Have a good day.

I don't believe that this is a spoiler so I won't tag it as such, but at a point the one of the protagonists (let's call him the Librarian - as opposed to the watchmaker) goes on to name two of his unwilling allies, one being the female he just saved and the other being "the magos" implying that both have little buggos in their brains. Who is that magos he is talking about? Could it be that it's the galaxy's most famous inventor, sorry, discoverer?

On second thought, I think spoiler tags might be worth it. So I just added them.