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2%% When adding examples for rules and other information specific to a limited number of editions rather than the game/setting as a whole,
3%% please note which edition is being referred to.
4%%
5%% Please do not list the Big Bad trope for the entire setting (Gaiden Games without their own page are fine) in the entries for
6%% individual characters. Warhammer 40,000 has a Big Bad Ensemble and the trope was decided to be moved to the main page as opposed
7%% to being on the character ones
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9[[WMG:[[center: [- ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' '''[[Characters/Warhammer40000 Main Character Index]]'''\
10'''[[Characters/Warhammer40000Imperium Imperium of Man]]: Founders''', [[Characters/Warhammer40000Primarchs The Primarchs]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000Astartes Adeptus Astartes]] ([[Characters/Warhammer40000AstartesChaptersFirstFounding First Founding Chapters]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000AstartesChapters Other Chapters]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000AstartesCharacters Characters]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000PrimarisSpaceMarines Primaris Marines]]), [[Characters/Warhammer40000ImperialGuard Astra Militarum]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000Sororitas Adepta Sororitas]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000Inquisition Inquisition]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000Mechanicus Mechanicus]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000CurrentImperialFactions Other factions]]\
11'''[[Characters/Warhammer40000ForcesOfChaos Forces of Chaos]]:''' [[Characters/Warhammer40000ChaosGods Chaos Gods]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000ChaosPrimarchs Chaos Primarchs]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000ChaosMarines Chaos Marines]]\
12'''[[Characters/Warhammer40000XenoRaces Xeno Races]]:''' [[Characters/Warhammer40000Aeldari Aeldari]] ([[Characters/Warhammer40000Asuryani Asuryani]], [[Characters/Warhammer40000Drukhari Drukhari]]) | [[Characters/Warhammer40000LeaguesOfVotann Leagues of Votann]] | [[Characters/Warhammer40000Necrons Necrons]] | [[Characters/Warhammer40000Orks Orks]] ([[Characters/Warhammer40000OrksCharacters Characters]]) | [[Characters/Warhammer40000TauEmpire T'au Empire]] | [[Characters/Warhammer40000Tyranids Tyranids]] ([[Characters/Warhammer40000GenestealerCults Genestealer Cults]])]]-]]]
13----
14->''"The universe has many horrors yet to throw at us. This is not the end of our struggle. This is just the beginning of our crusade to save Humanity. Be faithful! Be strong! Be vigilant!"''
15-->--'''The Divine God-Emperor of Mankind'''
16
17In ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'', the prehistory of the Imperium of Man is best noted by the following figures.
18
19See ''Literature/HorusHeresy'' for tropes applying to that series, and the ''Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness'' GaidenGame, which isn't mentioned in the main tabletop game.
20----
21[[foldercontrol]]
22
23[[folder:The God-Emperor of Mankind]]
24[[quoteright:335:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_emperor.jpg]]
25'''[[caption-width-right:335:[[BadassCreed THE EMPEROR PROTECTS]]]]'''
26%%
27->''The Emperor was a brilliant scientist, a powerful warrior, and great psyker, but he was a ''terrible'' father''.
28-->-- '''Roboute Guilliman''', Primarch of the Ultramarines, and the Emperor's son
29
30At the center of the Imperium of Man is a figure known only as the Emperor of Mankind, now worshiped as the God-Emperor by the great masses of humanity. An immortal being of incredible scientific knowledge, psychic might, military prowess and charisma, the Emperor watched humanity's development over the course of human history, at times guiding it from the shadows, at other moments taking a more active role and serving as a prophet, general or sage as needed.\
31
32When galactic civilization collapsed following the Age of Strife, the Emperor fully revealed himself. With an army of gene-modded soldiers he won the Unification Wars for Terra, brokered an alliance with the Mechanicum of Mars, and led a Great Crusade to reconquer and reunite the galaxy. In this he was aided by the twenty Primarchs, his clone-sons, and the Space Marine Legions formed from their genetic templates. When humanity's triumph seemed inevitable, the Emperor retired to Terra to continue his next great work, leaving the Great Crusade in the hands of his favorite son Horus.\
33
34However, the Warmaster betrayed his father, falling to the whispered seductions of the Chaos Gods and leading half of his brother Primarchs in a cataclysmic civil war known as the Literature/HorusHeresy. The Emperor was forced to kill Horus but was mortally wounded in the battle, and his last acts were to give instructions to complete the Golden Throne. Eleven thousand two hundred years later, this life-support system sustains the Emperor's ruined body, while his psychic might guides the Imperium even as it shudders closer to collapse.
35
36----
37* AgeWithoutYouth: The Golden Throne has kept the Emperor alive for ten thousand years, but he's gone from a mortally wounded man to a shriveled, mummified husk.
38* AndIMustScream: The Emperor is trapped mere inches from death, and has been that way for ten thousand years, his once-glorious physique withering into nothing more than a skeletal carcass intricately intermeshed in a mountainous machine-throne, his psyche locked within his skull and unable to communicate with the outside world (except for very rare one-on-one conversations). His current state and constant battles with the forces of Chaos trying to invade Terra are said to leave him in perpetual agony. He is said to be shedding microscopic tears for each man who dies in his service. The Custodes collect them in tiny vials.
39* AntiHero: What point on the scale depends on the individual, but the Emperor was equal parts wonderfully heroic and terribly flawed.
40* AntiMagic: Daemons call him "anathema" for very good reason as his powers are the very bane of their existence. This was demonstrated during [[spoiler: the Plague Wars when a girl, who the Emperor was heavily implied to be possessing, caused nearly every Daemon on the battlefield to spontaneously combust]].
41* AppearanceIsInTheEyeOfTheBeholder: His appearance and even his way of speaking differs depending on who is interacting with him. When a Magos of the Mechanicum saw him he saw an all-knowing scientist, and when the Sisters of Silence look at him they see just a man (though that is probably also due to their nature as Blanks). When interacting with the Custodes he would refer to the Primarchs by their numbers (likely because the Custodes see them as just tools he created) while other characters heard him refer to them by name, because that they themselves think of the Primarchs as actual individuals. This keeps how the Emperor actually thinks of them ambiguous. To most people, the Emperor appears to be a gigantic man in glorious powered armor. However, there are hints that this itself is just a projection into the minds of those looking upon him. Blanks, who are immune to psychic effects, are not impacted by this and see a much smaller physical form underneath, like a normal human being.
42* TheArchmage: While he is more well-known for his status as the GodEmperor of Mankind, he is ''the'' most powerful Psyker humanity ever produced. Even after 40,000 years later, no other human or even Primarch could rival him in psychic mastery.
43* AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: [[DependingOnTheWriter Depending on the edition and depiction]], the Emperor has either already ascended, has partially ascended, will ascend when he finally dies or will never ascend. [[ZigZaggedTrope This ambiguity has been written into some background material]] with various organisations, sects and philosophies within the Imperial Cult and Inquisition each holding one or more of these beliefs.
44* AsskickingLeadsToLeadership: The Emperor became Emperor because he had the mightiest armies, and he acquired many of those armies as a result of his own incredible physical and psychic strength.
45* BackInTheSaddle: [[spoiler:By the end of ''Godblight'', the Emperor has clearly gotten some strength back, as he's able to not only possess and resurrect Guilliman, but even destroy a good chunk of Nurgle's Garden. It's implied by a Saint of the Ecclesiarchy that the Great Rift is empowering the Emperor's psychic might just as much as it's empowering Chaos, and that he may be ''stirring on the Golden Throne''.]]
46* BadassBoast: Many, but the creation of the Space Marines deserves a mention.
47-->''They shall be my finest warriors, these men who give themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them and in the furnace of war I shall forge them. They will be of iron will and steely muscle. In great armour shall I clad them and with the mightiest gun shall they be armed. They will be untouched by plague or disease, no sickness will blight them. They will have tactics, strategies and machines such that no foe will best them in battle. They are my bulwark against the terror. They are the defenders of Humanity. They are my Space Marines... and they shall know no fear.''
48* BadassCape: In his prime he often wore a huge, red cloak along with his elaborate, shiny armour.
49* BarrierMaiden: Ever since his internment to the Golden Throne, he's been keeping the Astronomican running, which is so vital that if it ever goes offline, the Imperium would essentially implode on itself within a short time[[note]]Navigators rely on it to help them guide ships through the Warp, and thus no Astronomican means no interstellar travel[[/note]]. Many [[UltimateShowdownOfUltimateDestiny "Who Would Win?"]] discussions agree that most of the Imperium's opponents' only chance is to rush Terra and take out the Astronomican, [[KeystoneArmy underlining its importance]].
50* BeenThereShapedHistory: For most of human history, the Emperor worked in the background, using his psychic power to take a variety of identities, only occasionally acting to direct human history as he felt needed. Some of his most active guises included [[Myth/SaintGeorge Saint George]] and [[UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat Alexander the Great]].
51* BeliefMakesYouStupid: [[InvokedTrope The Emperor believed this]], in part because he believed that all gods were ultimately tied to Chaos, and ruthlessly pushed a secular worldview on the budding Imperium in hopes that it would starve the Chaos Gods. This did not work, because the Chaos Gods are empowered by emotions as well as belief, and humanity isn't the only game in town. Also he might have created a god of atheism, though that's probably not canon. We don't know for sure.
52* BlingOfWar: All images of the Emperor in battle show him wearing PoweredArmour of shining gold (or bronze, depending on the book), decorated with intricate double-headed eagle designs and studded with precious gems.
53* BodyguardingABadass: He is far more powerful than his guards. Though they're not so much bodyguards as companions (similar to Alexander the Great's companion cavalry), an elite cadre that can be committed at a critical time and place.
54* BreakTheHaughty: There's a quote about the formation of the Grey Knights attributed to him which heavily implies that seeing the Imperium put to the torch by his own sons, led by his favorite of all, cast into stark relief what terrible mistakes he made and the horrific consequences they ultimately had for humanity.
55-->''One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness\
56One last blade forged in defiance of fate\
57Let them be my legacy to the galaxy I conquered\
58And my final gift to the species I failed.''
59* BrokenAce: The Emperor was a peerless warrior and general, the mightiest human psyker who ever lived, and a scientist brilliant beyond compare. He was also an arrogant man who permitted no dissent, a bloody-handed despot who unified most of humanity at a tremendous cost in innocent lives, a father with questionable parenting skills (though, the Primarchs were all grown men by the time he found them with strongly held beliefs and ideals, so trying to parent them all would have been incredibly difficult to say the least) and ultimately failed to protect the human race during the Horus Heresy, only managing to preserve them at the cost of being trapped in the rotting ruins of his corpse.
60* BrokenAngel: The horror of his current existence is even greater because of the stark contrast to his former state: From golden-armored superhuman to a rotting living corpse.
61* BrokenPedestal: He became this to many of the original Chaos Space Marines, and disillusionment with him or the Imperium as a whole is a common cause of defection to the other side. It's common for Chaos Marines to call him the False Emperor to show their contempt for him. As of ''Dark Imperium'', he has also become this to none other than ''Roboute Guilliman'', though unlike the Chaos Space Marines and Traitor Primarchs, he still remains loyal to the Imperium and the ideals that he fought for during the Great Crusade.
62* CameBackStrong: [[spoiler:Implied by the end of ''Godblight'' that this is what's beginning to happen to him thanks to the Great Rift which, [[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve coupled with around ten-thousand years of endless worship from mankind]], might have actually transformed into an actual nascent God-in-the-making rather than the demigod he was before he was entombed on the Golden Throne. At the very least, he's showing signs of stirring after millennia of being unable to so much as acknowledge the world around him physically. However...]]
63* CameBackWrong: [[spoiler:It is also implied by Gulliman that the beginnings of his reawakening and revival might not be entirely a good thing for the Imperium if he is ''truly'' becoming a God, [[JerkassGods knowing the nature of such beings in this universe]], and there also implications that he is ''not'' returning as the same man he was in personality but it's unclear to what degree the dangers of this pose to the setting.]]
64* CombatPragmatist: When the stakes are high enough, he has no compunctions against using every trick in his considerable arsenal to defeat an opponent. During his fight with Horus, he [[spoiler: combats Horus' superior power with a vast array of feints and tricks. He siphon's Horus' power with what the monster thinks is a "caring touch", distracts Horus with painful memories, seemingly channels an aspect of Slaanesh to tempt Horus into letting down his guard, feigns death, impersonates Horus' favorite son, and finally talks Horus into giving up his power momentarily to "prove to himself" that he is in control of his fate.]]
65* CanonDiscontinuity:
66** The original Chaos sourcebooks for ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' and ''40K'', ''Slaves to Darkness'' and ''The Lost and the Damned'', gave the Emperor an origin as the gestalt embodiment of a thousand powerful human psykers who had existed before the coming of the Chaos Gods, who realised that the dawning gods were consuming or corrupting all of their fellow Shamans and so ritually sacrificed themselves to create a single mighty Warp entity in human flesh that would be able to protect against and eventually defeat the Chaos Gods. This has been subtly {{Retcon}}ned out with the passing of the editions, most notably the recent emphasis that Chaos came into existence during the war between the C'tan and the Old Ones, making all of the Gods (bar Slaanesh) older by far than the human race. It's been fully retconned away by the ''Horus Heresy'' series, which reveals that the Emperor is actually a mutant [[ResurrectiveImmortality Perpetual]].
67** The same sourcebooks also introduced the concept of the Star Child -- in essence a nascent God created when the Emperor was struck down by Horus and comprised of his positive attributes: compassion, love, tolerance, understanding, etc. Closely interlinked with this were the Illuminati, a secret cabal of daemonhosts who had been freed from their possession but retained incredible psychic powers and an immunity to all subsequent daemonic possession, and the Sensei, mutant offspring fathered unknowingly by the Emperor during his years amongst humanity, who were immortal, sterile, untouchable by Chaos and invisible to their father. The Illuminati were gathering the Sensei together, planning to sacrifice them in order to fuel the birth of the Star Child into a fully-fledged God to lead humanity to safety and glory once again. In the third edition corebook, the Star Child and its attendant Illuminati and Sensei was stricken from the setting, InUniverse, by noting that the "Star Child Cult" was a minor Tzeentchian cult that was hunted down and destroyed utterly by the Inquisition. The concept of the Sensei as ultra-pure anti-Chaos warriors with a bond to the Emperor even stronger than that possessed by the Space Marines may, however, have eventually inspired the creation of the Grey Knights as an Imperial sub-faction in later editions.
68* ConsummateLiar: The Emperor hides the truth of his feelings and intentions behind layers of meticulously planned deceptions and half-truths. Even his appearance is hidden by his psychic glamour. Not even his closest advisors really know if he's telling them the truth at a given moment as several of them have given contradictory accounts of his "real" plans for the Imperium and humanity.
69* ControlFreak: For most of his existence, the being who would become the Emperor was content to watch humanity from the sidelines, only influencing them when necessary. That all changed in the horrors of the Age of Strife. After seeing mankind regress into barbarism, he declared himself the ruler all mankind and demanded that the entire species follow his plans for the future, regardless of who he had to kill to get it. More than one human civilization encountered in the Great Crusade was a model of the future he envisioned, but were still destroyed for refusing to submit to his authority. While he was attempting to save humanity from itself and Chaos, his former Perpetual companions were disgusted by his tyrannical behavior and abandoned him one after another until Malcador was the only one left by his side.
70* CelestialDeadline: Later books in the ''Horus Heresy'' series imply that the Emperor was in such a rush to complete the Great Crusade because he knew that the Chaos Gods would come to collect on their bargain or exact their revenge on him and humanity all too soon. His haste and the innumerable shortsighted moral and ethical shortcuts he took in his efforts to prepare humanity only served to create the opportunity the Chaos Gods needed to doom the galaxy.
71* CosmicKeystone: Even in his barely-alive state, the Emperor performs two tasks vital for the Imperium: powering the Astornomican's beacon and holding the warp rift caused by the destruction of his Webway gate closed. If he were to ever truly die, both Terra would be consumed by Chaos and interstellar travel would become all but impossible. Either outcome would spell doom for the Imperium, but both at once would doom humanity as a whole.
72* CreateYourOwnVillain: The Emperor's cruel and arrogant treatment of several of the Primarchs (especially Lorgar, Angron, and Magnus) is what pushed them to turn to Chaos.
73* CrystalDragonJesus: He even looks a little like a combination of a roid-raging Jesus and a Native American, though he was allegedly born in central Anatolia around 8000 BC, so he's probably a member of one of the extremely ancient ethnic groups from that area (one of which built [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatalhöyük Çatalhöyük]], an incredibly advanced society for its time).
74* CulturedBadass: The Emperor wasn't just out to save the human race, but also its historical and technological achievements (to an extent). The Imperial Palace had a massive museum dedicated to housing various bits of historically important machinery and artifacts, ranging from ancient pottery to parts of the first Warp-capable engine. That said, in ''The Last Church'', while he appreciates the beautiful religious iconography in the church, [[SubvertedTrope he orders it burned]] because the faith it represents offends him.
75* DaddyHadAGoodReasonForAbandoningYou: The first time was because the Chaos Gods had the Primarchs scattered to the stars when they were infants. The second time was when he left the Great Crusade to begin working on an Imperial Webway. If he had bothered to tell the Primarchs this, he might have avoided (or at least delayed) the Literature/HorusHeresy.
76* DarkLordOnLifeSupport: Though he's [[BlackAndGreyMorality a force for good]], he's stuck in the Golden Throne, a life support machine that is [[PoweredByAForsakenChild fed the souls of a thousand psykers every day]], so that he may never truly die...and it's developing problems the Mechanicus has no idea how to fix.
77* DarkMessiah: For all his good intentions, even during the Great Crusade, the Emperor racked up a greater body count then every one of Earth's dictators combined and multiplied by several thousand, at the very least.
78* DealWithTheDevil: In Graham Macneill's story ''Vengeful Spirit'', the Emperor is revealed to have gone through a Warp Gate on the Knight World of Molech, made a bargain with the dark gods and came back with new powers (including the ability to create the Primarchs). Horus's actions on Molech is just following his "father"'s footsteps. However, Alivia Sureka, a Perpetual and the Emperor's comrade, reveals that he actually stole these powers and left her to guard the entrance to the Warp on Molech.
79* DeityOfHumanOrigin: He himself stated AGodIAmNot, but after he "ascended" to the Golden Throne, he wound up being worshiped by trillions for ten thousand years. [[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve Given the nature of the Warp...]]
80* {{Determinator}}: Whatever else can be said about the Emperor, his willpower is unquestionable. Even in his undead state, he's been fighting off the power of Chaos to seal the Webway portal on Terra and power the Astronomincan for more than ten thousand years.
81* TheDreaded:
82** The Chaos Gods themselves refer to him as "the Anathema". To them obviously, but they also claim that he is anathema to their vision of humanity. Even by the time of the forty-second millennium, ten thousand years after his near-death and interment, mighty daemons like Ku'gath quail at the mere prospect of facing his power.
83--->"Not only [[FlamingSword the sword]], but the Anathema Himself? [[ThisCannotBe It cannot be!]] We cannot face that sort of foe and live."
84** Case in point: ''Godblight'' shows him [[spoiler:through possessing a wounded Guilliman no less, managing to nearly OneHitKO '''''Nurgle''''' and his entire Garden realm as a warning to all of the other Gods that [[YourDaysAreNumbered their days are numbered]] as he prepares for his return, and Nurgle can only look in horror from inside his domain as he cannot do anything to try and stop him]].
85* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: In ''Rogue Trader'', the first edition of the game, concepts like the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy hadn't been invented yet. Originally, nobody knew anything about the Emperor's past aside from propaganda fables spread by the Ecclesiarchy. All that was known about him was that he was an immortal hero with powerful psychic abilities who was fatally wounded during some "long forgotten war" and now powered the Astronomicon from the life-sustaining Golden Throne, which resembled a Cronenberg-like device rather than an ornate seat.
86* TheEmpath: The Emperor's psychic powers gave him a far-reaching and comprehensive awareness of the universe around him. Lion El'Jonson gets a taste of it when he attains the Emperor's Shield in ''The Lion: Son of the Forest'', experiencing a wartime memory of his father where he feels deeply connected to not only his soldiers, but the planet's flora, fauna, and even the xenos they're fighting under a night sky; and he knows the names of all its stars.
87* TheEmperor: He's the supreme ruler of mankind with an empire spanning over an untold number of planets, most gained through conquest.
88* EmperorScientist: Was a genius, as the creation of the Primarchs, Space Marines, Astronomican, the Webway project, and other things can attest. The Adeptus Mechanicus reveres him as the mortal avatar of the Omnissiah and publicly worships him for show for the greater Imperium. When the Adeptus Mechanicus explored one of the Emperor's labs, they were astounded by the sheer scale and depth of his research and understanding, especially the science involved in the creation of the Primarchs. Magos who had spent their entire lives studying biology and genetics admit that much of the Emperor's discoveries would take years just to reverse engineer, and even Cawl--a Magos alive since before the Heresy--needed millennia with the Emperor's data and notes to engineer improvements on the Astartes.
89* EthnicityMonarch: He expected every human in the galaxy to show fealty to him, regardless of whether they're part of a star-spanning state in their own right or eking out a tribal existence on a forgotten backwater, and did not take no for an answer. His desire for human unity under himself led to the Great Crusade, a galaxy-spanning military campaign in which his legions located and claimed every human-settled planet they could find, whether through diplomacy or force of arms.
90* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: Well, morally-ambiguous godlike autocrats, anyway. The Emperor's ability to empathize was mostly pretty suspect, but he regardless had extreme capacity for positive emotions beyond what is rational, with him having been mortally-injured in his fight with Horus from holding back due to failing to understand how far Horus was gone until it was too late (to say nothing of how Horus was long [[ParentalFavoritism completely beloved by him]]) and forfeited his pride to throw his larger Salamander into a lava flow to save Vulkan's life, losing the contest for it (especially considering the Emperor's usual immense arrogance).
91* {{Expy}}: He's more or less a {{Jerkass}}-y rehash of [[TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}} Sigmar]], playing the same role as human hero-turned-ruler-turned-god of the Empire/Imperium of Man.
92* TheExtremistWasRight: Zigzagged as time goes on and new information on the universe is revealed. While initially the Emperor and the Imperium seemed to be very needed after the Age of Strife, the numbers of alternative and stable human civilizations such as the Interex, the Diasporex, the Auretian Technocracy, the Dulanian, the Olamic Quietude, and the Leagues of Votann does undermine the Emperor's claims of being necessary for the survival of humanity. On the other hand, it's unclear whether or not the absence of the Emperor would have actually saved Humanity from Chaos or if the lack of unity among Humanity would have seen each of these civilizations ground down by other threats.
93* FantasticRacism: The Emperor absolutely despised alien races for their actions during the Age of Strife, stating many Xenos preying upon the weakened human race, enslaving or killing billions of people and entire colonies.
94* FatalFlaw: The Emperor's near-divine nature led him to be immensely arrogant and convinced of the rightness of his actions, with an outright [[TautologicalTemplar inability to consider that his personal opinions might be mistaken]]. He never felt the need to explain himself and assumed that no one would betray or disobey him regardless of what he did. He couldn't comprehend people's seeming need to believe in a higher power, and thus never believed that his own anti-religious actions would eventually lead to his people worshiping him, as the priest in ''The Last Church'' rightly observed. For example, had he fully explained to his sons the dangers of the Warp and the Chaos Gods, and told them of his plan to protect humanity from these threats via the Imperial Webway project, Magnus's accidental destruction of the Imperial Webway (forcing the Emperor onto the Golden Throne permanently) and even the Horus Heresy itself might have been averted.
95** His own farsightedness was his undoing. He was so obsessed with reaching the glorious future for humanity that he envisioned that he ignored the effects his decisions in the moment were having on those around him, let alone explain his decisions to anyone but Malcador. All the problems his citizens and sons had with him were left to fester until the Chaos Gods were ready to give the house of cards the Emperor built the last nudge it needed to collapse into civil war.
96** Continuing off of that, his tendency to go for the [[EvilIsEasy most expedient route available]]. Notably, during the Great Crusade, he's shown to willingly allow clearly dangerous and unstable individuals such as Perturabo, Angron, and Konrad Curze to have control over Space Marine legions, (and in the case of Angron, directly contributes to the conditions that lead to him becoming that way), fosters an atmosphere of blind, fanatical devotion towards himself, and insists on total capitulation or annihilation for those who aren't already aligned with him, thus destroying many potential allies, simply because it was the quickest option for getting results. [[spoiler:The final few novels in the ''Literature/HorusHeresy'' even show that he would have ''ascended to become the fifth God of Chaos'' if not for the intervention of Ollanius because he saw it as the most expedient way to defeat the other four]].
97* FateWorseThanDeath: His current state leaves him in perpetual agony as his body withered into a skeleton while his soul battles Chaos forces constantly trying to enter Terra. All the while, he remains aware enough to watch as his dream decays into a mockery of all he stood for and humanity exists as little more than cattle to feed the Chaos Gods for eternity.
98* AFatherToHisMen:
99** Subverted with the Thunder Warriors, the forebears of the later Adeptus Astartes Legions and the very soldiers the Emperor created in order to aid him in his unification of Earth. Despite their great strength and abilities, the Thunder Warriors were a bunch of psychopaths, murderers and hardened criminals even before the augmentation surgeries that decreased their already low [[MurderIsTheBestSolution moral inhibitions]] and increased their [[HairTriggerTemper aggression levels]], the Emperor decided that their violent tendencies and bloody past made rendered them unfit to be the Paragons of Humanity that he desired his warriors to be. Thus, he had all of them slaughtered to a man, aside from a few survivors who have managed to work around the quick expiration date.
100** Also subverted with Guilliman and the other Primarchs -- when he meets with his father on Terra, he noted that the Emperor treated him less like his son and more like a favorite tool.
101** More or less played straight with the rest of the rest of Humanity, or at least the ones who are still loyal to him. Although it's less about unconditional love and more about loving the idea of what Humanity could become; he sure doesn't flinch at ordering people to their deaths.
102* FaustianRebellion: It's been all but stated that the Emperor got the power and knowledge needed to create the Primarchs, and by extension the Space Marines, by making a deal with the Chaos Gods. It's unknown what he promised them in return, only that he immediately reneged on his side of the bargain.
103* FinalBattle: According to the older editions, the Emperor is prophesied to rise up once again and lead humanity in one last great Ragnarok scenario ending with him stalemating all four Chaos Gods and leaving humanity finally free from the threat of Chaos and xenos races forever.
104* FisherKing: For better or worse, the Imperium of Man matches the state of its ruler. When the Emperor was alive, it was a thriving power on its way to dominating the galaxy. When he died in the Heresy, the dream of the Imperium's future died with him. Ten thousand years later, both the Emperor and the Imperium are rotten husks kept barely alive only by constantly consuming the lives of mass numbers of innocent citizens. Sacrifices that grow in scale and diminish in effectiveness daily. Those in power are too fearful of facing a new era to end their suffering, so both are doomed to a slow, agonizing death.
105** In ''Lion: Son of the Forest'' (a book filled to the brim with Arthurian references) the Emperor is depicted ''literally'' as the Fisher King in Lion's visions: an elderly, insensate king, eternally bleeding from an invisible wound, sitting in a fragile rowboat on a trecherous river that could capsize at any moment, with great shadows under the water constantly waiting for just that to happen.
106* FlamingSword: Shown as having one in the Horus Heresy artwork he appears in, though it may be a force sword he's powering with his psychic powers. ''The Gathering Storm'' reveals he had more than one. The ''Plague Wars'' series also reveals that besides looking cool, it can permanently kill daemons. As of his return, now Roboute Guilliman has it.
107* FounderOfTheKingdom: Which is why the Emperor is the single most important human to have ever lived.
108* FourStarBadass: He didn't just win his battles by overwhelming force.
109* FreudianExcuse:
110** Allied alien races betrayed Mankind during the [[DarkestHour Age of Strife]], conquering, enslaving, destroying and killing entire human planets when the Golden Age of Technology collapsed because of revolt of the Iron Men. The Emperor remembers this all too well and is willing to exterminate entire species in his quest to make the galaxy safe for Mankind once more.
111** He saw his [[CainAndAbel uncle kill his father]] at a very young age. He quickly became obsessed with law and order.
112* TheFundamentalist: A rare non-religious example: despite his militant, genocidal hatred of religion, the Emperor in life still possessed an incredibly dogmatic, absolutionist view of the universe, and ruthlessly persecuted anyone who didn’t conform to what he believed was the "only path" for humanity. Namely, that humanity itself was the destined dominant species, that all other sapient races are abominations, and that any human who didn’t conform to those ideals was a traitor to the species and deserving only of death, and demanded blind faith in these ideals from all his subjects. It took remarkably little effort for the Ecclesiarchy to repurpose those beliefs into the theocratic religion it would become.
113* GalacticConqueror: He viewed himself as an AntiHero version of this but in truth was closer to an AntiVillain. His Great Crusade sought to unite all of humanity throughout the Milky Way Galaxy under one banner to give humanity a chance to survive in an incredibly hostile universe (At least according to the Emperor himself).
114* GeniusBruiser: An insanely powerful warrior who was also a technological and scientific genius. He led a team of scientists that experimented with genetic engineering, resulting in the creation of the Primarchs and the Adeptus Astartes.
115* GodEmperor: Tried to deny this during the Great Crusade, but cults deifying him were constantly springing up during that time. After the Horus Heresy, the Imperium became a theocracy with him as its god-figure.
116* AGodIAmNot: The Emperor insisted that he was not a deity, only the pinnacle of what mankind could achieve. He spread militant atheism throughout the budding Imperium during the Great Crusade as a way to potentially starve out the Chaos Gods by depriving them of worship, and censured anyone who actively worshipped him. This didn't stop the spread of people believing he was a god, however, and after being confined to the Golden Throne, the worship of the GodEmperor grew to such an extent that he religion became one of the major powers within the Imperium. Nor did it help that his CultOfPersonality was wildly out of control even among citizens who believed in the Imperial Truth.
117* GodIsGood: To an extent. While he was still alive, his goal was to keep humanity from destroying itself in the same way that the Eldar empire did. His methods were what was morally questionable. He's still at least much more benevolent than the Chaos Gods, though generally weaker in most ways.
118* GodOfHumanOrigin:
119** While god''like'' in his power and immortality and being a truly ancient posthuman, the Emperor in his days of the Great Crusade very much insisted that he was not a god. Despite this, the Imperial Cult started up with Lorgar and flourished long after Lorgar renounced it.
120** After his ascension to the Golden Throne, the people of the Imperium looked to the Emperor for answers and hope in the form of faith. The Imperial Cult only grew and institutionalized, and even became a backbone of Imperial authority. The faith of uncounted trillions placed in him eventually did cause the Emperor to [[{{Irony}} metamorphose into a pseudo-deity]]. It's established that the Emperor is the God of the Imperium, but only to so long as his physical body survives; the elephant in the room being that nobody knows what will happen if and when his physical remains die. Some suspect that he'll regenerate into a living being once more and lead his empire in person but at terrible cost to the Imperium, others think he will truly transcend the physical realm and become a true deity capable of challenging Chaos on its own turf, others think that his soul, exhausted and dependent on psychic human sacrifices, will cease to exist in any meaningful term and that he would truly die.
121* GoodIsNotNice: The Emperor was/is probably the closest thing to a BigGood in the setting (from a human perspective), considering his lofty goals. However, he sought to create a utopia entirely on his own terms and would not hesitate to crush anyone who stood in the way of his plans, whether they were evil or not.
122* GreaterScopeParagon: From the perspective of the Imperium of Man. He spent centuries influencing humanity before revealing himself following the Age of Strife, but is currently stuck on the Golden Throne [[PoweredByAForsakenChild using the souls of sacrificed psykers to stay alive]], after he was mortally wounded by his rebellious son Horus.
123* HeelRealization: As the Horus Heresy tore the galaxy apart the Emperor acknowledged that the catastrophic effects of the civil war and the broken Webway project were the direct result of his arrogance, refusal to listen to others and the terrible mistakes he made including the treatment of many of the Primarchs who rebelled. The creation of the Grey Knights and his decision to take his place on the Golden Throne were his effort to [[TheAtoner make amends]] and salvage some sort of future for humanity, which he had ultimately wanted the best for despite [[TautologicalTemplar his methods.]]
124* HeroicSacrifice: According to ''[[Literature/HorusHeresy The Outcast Dead]]'', the Emperor went into the duel with Horus well aware that he was going to die.
125* HeroicWillpower: The Emperor's body is all but dead, and he's more than ready to die. The only thing keeping him alive? His own determination and love of humanity... and being fed one thousand psykers a day from his life support chair. Mostly the thousand psykers and chair, but the willpower helps. Before being interred on the Throne, he [[spoiler: survives an absolutely brutal string of losses against Horus, virtually willing himself back from the dead several times in a row between heavy fighting against a far more powerful opponent.]]
126* HiddenHeartOfGold: The Primarch Vulkan was, among his fellow Primarchs, a representation of the Emperor's compassion for humanity. This fact is... just about the only way that aspect has been portrayed.
127* HoistByHisOwnPetard: Nearly all of the events that led to the start of the Horus Heresy were directly or indirectly the result of his own actions.
128** His public humiliation of Lorgar and the Word Bearers for spreading the idea that he is a god deserving of worship led to Lorgar having a crisis of faith and seeking out gods that actually wanted to be worshipped, causing the Word Bearers to be he first to fall to Chaos.
129** His staunch policy of hiding all knowledge of Chaos (as sentient god-like beings), led to his forces (especially the Primarchs) being woefully unprepared to deal with their influence. This led to half his forces being corrupted and turning against him.
130** His refusal to explain to his sons why he left command of the Great Crusade to Horus (he left to finish his Webway project), eventually led to Horus turning against him, and Magnus unknowingly destroying said Webway project (then being attacked by the Space Wolves, forcing him to rebel as well).
131** His mistreatment of Perturabo, one of his most capable and loyal sons, eventually led to Perturabo turning against his father.
132** He refused to let Angron fight (and possibly die) alongside the slave rebellion upon Angron's homeworld, essentially kidnapping him and making him break the oaths of loyalty that Angron had made. This, alone with the Butcher's Nails in his brain, led to Angron being one of the first to turn against the Emperor. The fact that he did absolutely nothing to save Angron's rebellion only makes things a million times worse.
133** His refusal to let the Mechanicum open the vault of Moravec, without explaining precisely why, basically did nothing but pique the interest of Mechanicum's leader, Kalbor Hal. This allowed him to be easily tricked and corrupted by Horus and created the Dark Mechanicum, greatly harming the Imperium's manufacturing/supply capabilities by roughly half, as well as losing them half of their Titan legions and ensuring a Traitor stronghold was within easy striking distance of Terra.
134** His stipulation in the Treaty of Mars that the Mechanicum was forbidden from pursuing certain lines of research eventually evolved into the later Adeptus Mechanicus distrusting to outright being hostile against almost any advancement or research, causing the Imperium's technology to stagnate at best, and slowly start to decline at worst.
135** His decree against the use of psychic powers (to protect the developing Webway gate on Terra) led to the Inquisition deciding that any unsanctioned psykers should be rounded up and executed or sacrificed to power the Golden Throne. This continues to severely hinder humanity's evolution into a truly psychic race on par with the Eldar, one of the Emperor's original main goals.
136* HorribleJudgeOfCharacter: While the Emperor sometimes provided most of a push towards it, ultimately, he was perfectly willing to recruit and fight alongside many individuals who not only went on to sell themselves to Chaos, but were such utter psychopaths that the Dark Gods made them immortal in reward for being so insane.
137* HumansAreSpecial: A big believer of this. Although it's less about the current condition of Humanity being special so much as the potential for what Humanity could become.
138* HumanoidAbomination:
139** Even in his flesh and blood days, the Emperor was "human" only in the vaguest sense of the term. John Grammaticus once made psychic contact with the Emperor and had a panic attack just thinking about the experience two centuries later.
140** For all that his physical appearance once highly resembled a human (and, later, loosely resembled a human, and post-Heresy vaguely evokes a human if you kinda look at it sideways). He's a living violation of physics so powerful and blatant that he serves as a navigation beacon in the warp... which doesn't have directions through which one can navigate. Figure that one out. Expanded by the ''Horus Heresy'' series. Not everybody sees the same thing when you look at the Emperor. Lorgar sees a tall, black-haired man with a ponytail. Argus sees a ten foot tall demigod surrounded by burning wheels of eyes. Horus sees an aging man with glowing eyes. Fascinatingly, Corax sees more than one thing: first he sees the glowing demigod, then he sees the black-haired man. Only blanks, people who are immune to psychic powers because they have no presence in the Warp (such as the Sisters of Silence), can see his true appearance as a normal man whose appearance is [[TheNondescript remarkably unremarkable]]. His divine appearance is nothing but a {{Glamour}}. It's implied that this effect even continues with his appearance 10,000 years after the Heresy, with the Emperor's appearance on the Golden Throne varying depending on the eye of the beholder.
141* HorrifyingTheHorror: The Emperor is one of the few beings that the forces of Chaos are genuinely afraid of. This is best demonstrated in ''Dark Imperium Plague War'', where its shown that Greater Daemons are afraid to even mention his name and are horrified at the thought that after 10,000 years [[spoiler: he may once again be aiding the forces of the Imperium]].
142* {{Hypocrite}}:
143** He condemned alien races for attacking and conquering human worlds. His Great Crusade was a campaign where he and his forces enacted genocidal purges on all aliens, regardless of if they had anything to do with the attacks on humanity during the Age of Strife. This included any human civilizations that didn't bend the knee to him, had any form of alliance with Xenos, had information or technology he deemed forbidden, or simply didn't surrender quickly enough to keep the Crusade on its arbitrary schedule.
144** The Imperial Truth is itself a religion in all but name, especially in its talk about the exceptionalism of humanity and its UsefulNotes/ManifestDestiny to exterminate all other sapient life (even those who think, look, and act similarly to humans). The only difference is that it dogmatically ascribes supreme spiritual importance to an arbitrarily specific number of protein chains (to the point of only considering beings with those arbitrary combinations to be worthy of life), rather than to philosophical or supernatural concepts.
145** For all his disdain for the harm of humanity relying on the belief in gods, he didn't seem to notice or care that he embodied all the qualities of a god that he preached against. He was an immortal, unquestionable authority figure of incredible power and unknowable motives. He accepted nothing short of total obedience from all of humanity and brutally punished anyone who dared deviate from his commands. He demanded that unknowable scores of people sacrifice themselves in his name and deliberately stifled any information that could show him in less than ideal light, justifying anything he did as him "knowing better" or being for a vague "greater good".
146** He spoke of human scientific and technological advancement, but deliberately stifled knowledge and research whenever he deemed it convenient. During the Great Crusade, his forces destroy most of the technology of human or Xeno civilizations they encountered rather than make any attempt to have it studied and reverse-engineered.
147** The Cult Mechanicum embodied the worst practices of human religions. They slowed efficiency with superstitious rituals, limited technological progress for arbitrary reasons, practiced self-mutilation to add cybernetics until they were barely recognizable as humans, and turned mass numbers of lower class humans into [[CyberneticsEatYourSoul mindless servitor slaves]] to do their grunt work. Despite destroying any other religious group he came across for far lesser offenses, the Emperor sponsored and empowered them so he could gain access to their services and technology for the Crusade. He even let them openly deify him as an avatar of their Machine God to ensure their blind loyalty.
148* IDidWhatIHadToDo: His general justification for some of his more questionable actions.
149* IdiotBall: Many of the Emperor's decisions were so obviously wrong it's hard to imagine how a sensible human being could have made them, never mind a supposedly perfect being. Take, as a perfect example, the situation with the rescue of Angron, Primarch of the World Eaters Legion. The Emperor discovers Angron in the final stages of a Film/{{Spartacus}} scenario, poised to be wiped out by a vastly superior number of forces. Having approached Angron in secret, Angron refuses to abandon his comrades and is willing to die with them. The Emperor's options include summoning his own forces to reinforce Angron's, whisking all of Angron's army aboard his massive spaceships, or unleashing an orbital barrage to at least devastate the enemy army so that Angron's force can win. Instead, as Roboute Guilliman had already brought the other side into the Imperium, he chooses to whisk Angron away from the battlefield at the last moment and leave Angron's friends and followers to be utterly wiped out, leaving Angron bitter, resentful, hating the Emperor, and full of rage -- in other words, a perfect candidate to swear allegiance to Khorne in order to take revenge. Some of these decisions are explained as a result of his inability to empathize with others and his total focus on achieving his dream for humanity's future, but others can't.
150* IHaveManyNames: While his birth name is unknown, he is variously known as the Master of Mankind, the Outlander to the Salamanders and people of Nocturne, and the [[Myth/NorseMythology Allfather]] to the [[Literature/SpaceWolf people of Fenris]]. The Mechanicus occasionally calls him the Omnissiah, at least officially. Followers of Chaos refer to him as the False Emperor and the Corpse-God, while Daemons call him the Anathema. In addition it's implied that he was several notable historical figures from our time, [[Myth/SaintGeorge St. George]], though his 'dragon' was the [[EldritchAbomination Void Dragon]].
151* {{Immortality}}: In life, the Emperor was a very rare being called a Perpetual. Perpetuals were [[TheAgeless unaging]] and [[ResurrectiveImmortality came back after being killed]] by external means, though very rare means of inflicting [[OutOfContinues True Death]] did exist. Now, the Emperor lives as a quasi-undead, a lifeless skeleton where his soul was never allowed to leave his body in a form of [[{{Magitek}} techno-magical]] life extension. After this he became a deity of sorts, but he can only "survive" this way through the [[LifeDrinker sacrifice of psychic humans being psychically fed to the Golden Throne]]. It's quite possible that allowing himself to be interred in the Golden Throne, though necessary for human survival, will turn out to be one of the ways that could kill him should it fail. Another way might be having his soul obliterated by being overwhelmed by Chaotic force, specifically a powerful proto-daemon that is prophecied to finally kill him...
152* ImmortalGenius: Before he actually claimed the title of Emperor, he served as an advisor to kings, a CourtMage, and a scientist. Over the course of unifying humanity under his own banner, he [[EmperorScientist continued to demonstrate his impressive scientific credentials]] by genetically engineering armies of {{Super Soldier}}s and creating the near-godlike Primarchs that would lead them. Unfortunately, the Emperor demonstrated a critical gap in his knowledge when it came to things like [[LackOfEmpathy psychology or compassion]], [[FatalFlaw a problem that was to be his undoing]]...
153* IntelligenceEqualsIsolation: Despite the Emperor's charisma making him, well, the Emperor of Mankind, there's very little said about him actually having ''friends''. He was so absurdly intelligent and old that there wasn't anyone able to relate to him. The only two characters that have been stated to be close friends with the Emperor are the closest things he had to peers outside of the Primarchs in Malcador the Sigillite and Constantin Valdor...and his frequently shown LackOfEmpathy casts doubt on whether his relationship with those two resembled exactly what a regular person would expect of a friendship.
154* {{Irony}}: Installed state atheism... and wound up being treated as a living god by countless cultures, the largest of which is a hardcore, prayer-heavy, fundamentalist pseudo-Catholic empire.
155** He created legions of super soldiers and twenty transhuman generals to lead his legions in a desperate rush to unite humanity to combat the coming of Chaos. His many poor decisions and haste let Chaos corrupt half of his creations into the weapons that would [[SelfFulfillingProphecy cause the very catastrophe he was trying to prevent]].
156* {{Jerkass}}: The Emperor was not always the nicest of people. To be blunt, many of the Primarchs who turned to Chaos did so because the Emperor had done considerable wrongs to them in the first place, which is hinted at in the game canon and usually shown in a more detailed fashion in the ''Literature/HorusHeresy'' novels.
157* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Admittedly, for all atrocities he caused, the Emperor did everything for the good of mankind. Trying to act diplomatically to some of the xenos races helps too, though never to the point of outright tolerance.
158* KickTheDog: Abducting Angron by teleporting him away against his will right before his fellow gladiators were about to begin their LastStand is kind of a dick move.
159* KingOnHisDeathbed: The state of the Emperor for the last ten thousand years is basically in a state mere seconds (maybe microseconds) away from death, still technically alive, only "surviving" (in a liberal use of the term) by the Golden Throne. Since 5th edition it has been established that the Golden Throne is developing problems that the Adeptus Mechanicus has no knowledge of how to fix, so the Emperor could fully die sometime in the 42nd millennium. As of ''Dark Imperium'', [[spoiler:it appears that he's fine for the time being. Not only is the Emperor still alive, he is also fully capable of communication]].
160* LackOfEmpathy: Noted both in and out of universe. While the Emperor was certainly brilliant in terms of intelligence, he was rather lacking in his ability to empathize with others, even his own Primarchs. His sheer power and the weight of all the history he had witnessed all but deadened his ability to relate to anyone else. Some of his worst decisions were made out of his inability to understand why others would find his reasoning objectionable or carry a grudge for something he views as insignificant in the big picture. Many of the problems he had with his sons and other figures of the Imperium likely could have been solved or at least mitigated had he actually took the time out of his day to just listen to their issues and put himself in their shoes.
161* LargeAndInCharge: In his heyday, the Emperor was about two or three times the size of a human being, and almost as broad across the shoulders as he was tall. Bear in mind, we've usually only seen him in Terminator armor.
162* LightIsGood: His light is like the rays of the sun to humanity, warm and life giving. He single-handedly saved Mankind, united them, developed a lasting empire, and rediscovered many of Humanity's lost sciences. His power can purge the taint of the Dark Gods and is one of the only known ways to truly destroy daemons.
163* LightIsNotGood: His light is like the rays of the sun to xenos and chaos-worshipers, leaving them scorched earth. He killed billions (if not trillions) of people (humans and aliens) in the name of the defense of humanity.
164* ManInTheMachine: The Emperor was entombed in an incredibly elaborate life-support system known as the Golden Throne after he became mortally wounded slaying Horus, which has kept his soul anchored in the Materium ever since. This allows him to stay connected to the Warp and thus power the Astronomican and close off the Warp rift created by his failed Webway project. However, the Throne has not maintained his body perfectly for 10,000 years, and thus he has slowly decayed into the skeletal husk he's known as in the current setting.
165* MercyKill: Part of the reason The Emperor made Horus DeaderThanDead was to make sure that his favorite son would be permanently put out of his mind-controlled misery.
166* MergerOfSouls: He is sometimes said to be the reincarnation of thousands of prehistoric shamans' souls, merged into a singular being.
167* MoralMyopia: He railed against aliens enslaving humans, but during his Great Crusade he sometimes forced other races to accept humanity as their overlords, when he wasn't wiping them out wholesale. Also see {{Hypocrite}} above.
168* MortalityGreyArea: His entombment in the Golden Throne keeps him from fully dying, but his body has decayed to the point that he's more of a [[ArtificialZombie cyborg]] [[OurLichesAreDifferent lich]] than a man. It's ambiguous if he counts as living anymore.
169* MultipleChoicePast: There are several possible stories of the Emperor's origin; none have been confirmed as canon, although at least one has been decisively stamped out in the fluff.
170* {{Mutants}}: In his earliest appearance in ''Rogue Trader'', his now-retconned origin was simply that he's a mutant with two main powers--an almost endless amount of psychic power (at a time when the 40K psychic power list was just the ''TabletopGame/WarhammerFantasy'' spell list with tweaks) and he was extremely LongLived (but not eternally young; he was put on life support for age rather than injury--a picture in the book showed an old hooded man between a pair of Space Marines propping him up). His mission in life was that humans were evolving into a psychic race but vulnerable to threats from the Warp, so he was trying to shepherd humanity to the next step.
171* NayTheist: While he attempted to build a FlatEarthAtheist empire, he knew full well that the Chaos Gods were real. The Emperor just didn't believe that psychic warp constructs embodying much of everything wrong with mortals deserved to be treated as gods (and apparently didn't believe in any other gods). He pushed atheism in the belief that depriving the "gods" of worship would kill them or at least weaken to the point that they could no longer affect the material universe.
172* NecessarilyEvil: [[IDidWhatIHadToDo He claimed that a number of his more morally ambiguous actions]] were these. Which ones were and how necessary they were is up to the reader/player to decide.
173* NiceJobBreakingItHero:
174** Several Traitor Primarchs got their StartOfDarkness because the Emperor was such a {{Jerkass}} to them. One of the more significant examples: the Word Bearers became the first Legion to turn to Chaos, and thus were significantly involved in corrupting the rest, because the Emperor was furious that Lorgar had created and was spreading a faith dedicated to Emperor worship while ensuring that every last of the hundreds of the planets they conquered was practicing said faith, actions that ran directly contrary to the atheistic and scientific empire he was trying to create. In response the Emperor had the Ultramarines raze Monarchia, the capital city of a world dear to the Word Bearers and a location they considered the perfect city. Then publicly reprimanded all of them for their failures to him and the Great Crusade, while [[KneelBeforeZod using his immense power to force them all to kneel before him]]. The result? Lorgar ends up in a CrisisOfFaith and then eagerly turns to gods that accept they are gods and expect worship -- the Dark Gods of Chaos.
175** For that matter, his idea of handling Chaos in the first place was somewhat limited in hindsight. The Emperor strove to keep his followers as ignorant of the realities of Warp-space as possible, including that there really are beings out there that feed on human worship but have no benevolent intentions for humanity. (Though the people that knew and he informed about the dangers of the Warp such as Magnus proceeded to ignore his warnings and damned themselves). Result? Half of the Primarchs are corrupted, many of them unwillingly, and they took their Legions with them. The first Horus Heresy novel implicitly contrasts this to an empire called the Interex, who are open about the existence and dangers of Chaos (though they spell it Kaos) and strive to educate their populace about its dangers, making them enemies of Chaos because they know what it is and what it wants... which resulted in them getting wiped out by the Imperium when the Chaos-tainted Erebus manipulated both sides to war.
176*** Not to mention how the "remove religion to starve Chaos" plan backfired because abolishing the existing religions (which were starving the Chaos Gods) opened up a window of opportunity for the Chaos Gods (not to mention the Emperor's violent means of abolishing religion would've been right up the Chaos God Khorne's alley).
177** His foreign policy on aliens, what with planning to build his empire with {{Absolute Xenophob|e}}ia as a cornerstone. While there was some justification in him not wanting to let humanity be enslaved or betrayed by aliens again, he took it way too far in the opposite direction and let the actions of a few nonhuman species define his view of all of them, failing to appreciate the benefits of interspecies alliances and the insights nonhuman cultures might have to offer (notably he ignored Eldrad Ulthuan's warning about Horus merely because he was an Eldar). He made it standard policy to kill most alien races they came across, including those who had not achieved space flight and posed no threat to humanity, while the more useful ones were enslaved, setting the tone for Human-Nonhuman relations for the next 10,000 years. In doing this, he not only ensured that damn near everyone in the Imperium would hate anything not human beyond reason, but also that aliens in turn would hate and fear humanity and not want to cooperate with them precisely because they were so racist and because of what they did to other species.
178* NoNameGiven: The Emperor's true name has been lost to time. It's said that the only person who knew was Malcador the Sigilite.
179* NotHelpingYourCase: He hated religion with a passion and refused to be worshiped as a deity. Despite this, he happily positioned himself as the central figure of the Imperium and declared himself savior of humanity. He also initiated a campaign of violent and murderous suppression of any culture or belief that didn't align with his Imperial Truth, something that was no different from the religious extremists he hated so much. He also chose to maintain an appearance of a glowing giant in golden armor who wielded a sword made out of fire and flew around in a battleship designed to look like a golden cathedral. That he deliberately adopted religious terminology like "heresy" and "crusade" to describe Imperial policies didn't improve matters.
180* NotQuiteDead: So close to it that if you didn't know his soul was still around, you'd think he'd been gone for millennia.
181* OmniscientMoralityLicense: Sure acted like he had one. In his eyes, there was no amount of death and suffering that wasn't worth securing an eternal GoldenAge for humanity.
182* OurGodsAreDifferent: Specifically for the Imperium, our God is on life support, [[AGodIAmNot insisted that he was never a god]], and may in fact [[GodIsDead be dead]], but he's still greater.
183* ParentalFavoritism: After Horus, the Emperor's favorite Primarchs were (in no particular order) Sanguinius, Rogal Dorn, Roboute Guilliman, Leman Russ and Lion El'Jonson. He dismissed or outright ignored the problems of many of the less well-adjusted Primarchs, many of whom went on to turn traitor. It's deconstructed in that the whole reason Horus was able to do so much damage to the Emperor is because He didn't want to hurt His favourite son. It was only after seeing how far Horus was gone that He decided to blow Horus to pieces, which He did very quickly. Later lore showed that the Emperor trusted Vulkan with the power to have Terra as a whole destroyed.
184* ParentsAsPeople: He most definitely could have served as a better authority figure to the Primarchs and tried to remove some of their primitive, conflicting and disruptive ideology. He is also directly to blame for putting several of them on the path to darkness because of his seeming inability to treat them as people rather than tools. While many things about the Emperor are hotly debated, one thing most fans agree upon is that he was a great leader, but a lousy father.
185* ThePatriarch: The Imperium portrays the Emperor as the spiritual father of humanity, as he rather invoked this image during the Great Crusade.
186* PetTheDog: The Emperor recruited Vulkan by entering a series of contest against Vulkan where the winner would swear to serve the other. The two were tied for the final event of killing the largest Salamander they could and returning with its corpse. Vulkan taking his kill back was interrupted by the mountain he was standing on turning out to be a volcano about to erupt, causing him to stuck in a LiteralCliffhanger over a lava flow, holding his Salamander with one hand preventing him from climbing back up. The Emperor found Vulkan and threw his (larger) Salamander into the lava flow as a bridge for Vulkan to walk on. The Emperor was declared the loser with nothing to show for the contest, but Vulkan swore fealty to the Emperor anyway, considering a man who favored protecting life over his own pride worthy of service.
187** For all his callousness and terrible parenting, it is implied that on some level, he truly does care for the Primarchs. When he possesses Guilliman to confront the now-Daemonic Mortarion, he tells his wayward son that he is as much of a victim as he is a monster and claims that he may yet be redeemed. Then he banishes him back to Nurgle rather than destroy him as he could any other daemon.
188** When he went to face Horus for the final battle of the Heresy, his main thought was to use the power he had stolen from the Chaos Gods to burn the corruption from his favored son.
189* PhysicalGod: The Emperor's psychic power was unmatched, and he had truly god-like abilities as a result.
190* PowerAtAPrice: Whatever he did with the Chaos Gods to gain enhanced power and knowledge cost him dearly. People who knew him before he entered the portal on Molech claimed that he came out fundamentally changed and somehow less "human". He became increasingly cold and detached from that point onward until his near-death at the hands of Horus.
191* PiecesOfGod: The Emperor's psyche is split into innumerable fragments in the Warp, each one embodying a different aspect of him and independently acting across the galaxy as needed. It takes immense effort on his part to unite enough of himself to focus his power on a given task, including something as simple as communication.
192* PlayingWithFire: The Emperor's psychic power tends to manifest as unearthly fire that can [[FirePurifies cleanse Chaos corruption]] and [[DeaderThanDead destroy daemons]].
193* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: From a RealLife perspective[[note]]he is more of a Politically Incorrect VillainProtagonist or PoliticallyIncorrectHero in-universe depending on a player's faction[[/note]], the Emperor's AbsoluteXenophobe creed and his attempt to kill {{Eldritch Abomination}}s that [[GodsNeedPrayerBadly feed on belief and emotion]] through violently enforced state atheism make him a bigoted monster, even though he had no known intolerance towards gender, sexuality and human race issues.
194* PoorCommunicationKills: One of the Emperor's greatest failings was his unwillingness to explain his decisions to others. He wanted to starve the Chaos Gods of worshippers, so he tried to push everyone to a secular worldview of "there are no gods" instead of saying "what you think of as gods and demons are actually psychic-energy-creatures that want to eat your soul so DON'T DEAL WITH THEM", so people dealt with them anyway because (sometimes at least) they didn't know better. He wanted to return to Terra to finish work on establishing a permanent link to the Webway, and thus free humanity from terribly dangerous Warp travel. Unfortunately, he said nothing of this to any of his Primarch sons, simply leaving the Crusade after placing Horus in charge for seemingly no reason. This planted seeds of doubt in the minds of the Primarchs that the Chaos Gods were able to manipulate to shatter their already-strained bonds with the Emperor and tempt half of them into rebelling, culminating in the Horus Heresy.
195* PossessionBurnout: The Emperor has shown the ability to possess certain individuals in order to carry out his will from across the galaxy. Unfortunately, there are few individuals who can withstand his immense psychic powers for very long, meaning that these hosts burn out fairly quickly.
196* PoweredByAForsakenChild: In order to keep the Emperor "alive", exactly one thousand psykers (those deemed unfit to be trained to resist DemonicPossession and made otherwise useful) are fed to the Golden Throne daily, being sacrificed so that their souls can power its psychic connection with the Astronomican, the warp-beacon that allows Imperial ships to navigate galaxy-spanning distances through the otherwise shrouded and swirling Empyrean. Should this connection ever go down, long-range interstellar travel would become impossible for humanity and the Imperium would fall apart in the same way that human civilization did during the Age of Strife. Terra itself would then be consumed by the Warp rift caused by the destruction of the Webway portal that is currently only being kept sealed thanks to the Emperor's power.
197* ProHumanTranshuman: He's a peerless genius and warrior, whose many creations and accomplishments would take millions or billions of years if normal humans tried replicating them. He's also one of the mightiest psykers to ever exist, to the point where he's regarded by many as a godlike being; even the Chaos Gods and their daemonic minions, champions, and Princes feared facing his power should he get motivated to fight them directly. But he's also wholly dedicated to the protection and success of humanity, and is willing to do anything for them. It's ultimately deconstructed as his transhuman nature meant that he had trouble relating to not just ordinary humans but the near-godlike Primarchs, and his focus on pro-human specifically led to his attempts to support humanity manifesting as a genocidal war waged against nearly every alien race his forces encountered.
198* PsychicPowers: The most powerful psyker in human history, to the extent that even the Eldar and the Daemons of Chaos were afraid of what he might do if he got... motivated.
199* PyrrhicVictory: His Great Crusade and Horus Heresy ended this way. His forces managed to unify nearly all of humanity and create one of the most powerful empires in galactic history, but in the process caused untold death and destruction while leaving his empire leaderless and beset on all sides by the innumerable enemies it made. Chaos claimed half of his creations and spent the next ten thousand years feeding off the misery and pain of the people he dedicated himself to protecting. All while he was forced to watch in agony as the Chaos Gods wait to devour him the moment his strength gives out.
200* ReallySevenHundredYearsOld: During the Horus Heresy, he was [[MultipleChoicePast between 400 and 40,000 years old]], depending on your interpretation of his SelfProclaimedLiar status[[note]]the Emperor made a lot of lies in an attempt to kill the very concept of religion, and later admitted to lying, but it's impossible to tell if his recount of his own backstory was among those lies[[/note]], but merely looked as if he was in his mid- to late forties. His modern incarnation [[AgeWithoutYouth definitely looks 50,000 years old, though.]]
201* RiddleForTheAges:
202** The topic of the God-Emperor of Mankind actually being, well, a GodEmperor. Prior to the Horus Heresy, he insisted he wasn't a god and was just the pinnacle of human potential. While the majority of the Space Marines continue with this stance, a variety of powerful human psykers also give the stance some credence, and that hundreds of psykers must be used (and eventually wither away) to help the Emperor power the Astronomicon imply he has limitations that must be treated with something resembling sustenance like a mortal, the vast majority of the Imperium now actively worships him, and the fact he's survived and has performed unmatched psychic deeds for centuries without any explanation to why he can unlike his Primarchs and Space Marines who were created by being based off of him practically makes whatever stance you have on the topic of the Emperor's divinity irrelevant as he is clearly nonetheless godlike. Occasional hints in the fluff that he was in fact [[BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy some sort of historical or religious figure in earlier human history]] still don't clear up the matter concretely.
203** Most scenes involving him are shown from another person's perspective, meaning one can only speculate his rationale for the many seemingly shortsighted decisions he made.
204** The few times someone in the lore is granted an audience before the Golden Throne, their meeting with the Emperor is never detailed for the reader. Alicia Dominica, leader of the Brides of the Emperor and Goge Vandire's biggest supporter, refused to believe she was fighting for evil until she was invited to the meet with the Emperor. What took place at the meeting is unknown, only that Alicia exited angry and ashamed at her actions and immediately executed Vandire as a traitor.
205* RoyalsWhoActuallyDoSomething: Personally led the Great Crusade for centuries. His departure and retirement to the Imperial Palace actually caused a great deal of discontent.
206* SelectiveObliviousness:
207** He seemingly chose to ignore the obvious flaws and instabilities in the Primarchs, particularly Curze, Angron, Lorgar and Perturabo, believing that advantages of having the Primarchs outweighed their negative aspects.
208** He knew that Lorgar and his followers were worshiping him and telling people he was a god a full century before shutting them down with extreme prejudice and chose to not keep a close eye on them afterwards to make sure that they didn't turn against him.
209* ShadowDictator: The forces of Chaos insist that the Emperor is long dead, that the various functions he fulfills are purely mechanical, and that he can do nothing to help the people of the Imperium, say, enjoy an afterlife. On the other hand, they're [[UnreliableNarrator not very reliable]] and want people to lose faith in the God Emperor and the Imperium.
210* SociopathicHero: He genuinely wanted humanity to succeed, flourish and become the dominant race in the galaxy. However, he was also a detached egotist who was seemingly incapable of caring about humanity on an individual level, unable to understand the emotional needs of others and unable understand the negative consequences of his actions and behavior. He also cared little for ethics and morality, willing to commit or condone countless atrocities across human and xenos worlds in order to finish the Great Crusade as quickly and efficently as possible.
211* SorcerousOverlord: Half of his rule can be attributed to his military skill, statesmanship, and leadership. The other half, to his undisputed status as the most powerful Psyker in human history, along with his scientific genius.
212* StopWorshippingMe: And he enforced that decree, with extreme prejudice. This is indirectly the cause of the Horus Heresy, also, since those worshippers (Lorgar and the Word Bearers) decided they'd turn their worship to gods who accepted it and just so happened to want the Imperium a smouldering husk.
213-->'''Bjorn the Fell-Handed:''' ''God-Emperor?'' Calling him a god was how all this mess started.
214** Note that only actual worship was the problem. He didn't object to, for example, people ritualistically calling him "the Emperor, beloved by all", to the point where you can make a DrinkingGame out of it in the Literature/HorusHeresy series. He also expected people to give up all their hopes, dreams and deeply held beliefs in favor doing whatever he wanted because he wanted it. It was just that he didn't want prayers, he wanted people to build weapons and kill xenos.
215* StrongAndSkilled: One of the most extreme examples of this trope in fiction. Despite having spent tens of thousands of years as the most powerful being in the known physical universe, he is ''extraordinarily'' skilled at leveraging his many kinds of power to fullest rather than needing to crush enemies with brute force. During the climactic fight between Horus and the Emperor, the fallen son repeatedly thinks variations of the line "It is not your father's power, it is what He does with it." many times, for good reason.
216* StrongEmpireShriveledEmperor: He is the leader of the Imperium, which controls the majority of the galaxy and commands armies and navies of staggering size, but he has spent the past ten millennia on life support while his body has decayed to a skeleton, and though he has immense psychic power, most of it is used on maintaining humanity's FTLTravel.
217* SuperIntelligence: His intelligence was inconceivable among any organic beings. It took other scientists thousands of years to understand his work enough to make a mild improvement on one of his designs. Unfortunately, his intelligence didn't prevent him from making innumerable bad decisions. Particularly involving dealing with emotional issues.
218* SympathyForTheDevil: When speaking to Mortarion through Guilliman, he calls his renegade son as much of a victim as villain, and says that he might one day be redeemed. This in spite of the fact that Mortarion is a literal daemon at that point.
219* TakeUpMySword: He more or less does this to Guilliman after the latter is resurrected. Quite literally, since Guilliman now wields his father's sword.
220* TautologicalTemplar: His thinking is that no matter what happens, the decisions he makes are automatically good because they're ultimately for the betterment of humanity. Anyone who says otherwise are wrong because they just can't see the scope that he can. When he was ultimately proven wrong, the sheer weight of the mistakes he made in his hubris sent humanity into a dark age that they have little to no hope of ever escaping.
221* TimeAbyss: Sources indicate that the Emperor was born in 8,000 B.C., making him nearly fifty thousand years and more by the time of the game's setting. Compare him to Ollanius Pius who was born in 15,000 B.C. in the city of Nineveh and who kept his faith in the Catholic/Catheric religion and acts like a normal, albeit scared, veteran. It shows in his actions, with Logar being a serious example. He told Lorgar to stop worshiping him once and assumed he would listen. Lorgar assumed that the Emperor was just being modest. Lorgar continued and then suddenly the Emperor attacks him without further warning a century later. This trope is discussed by a few of the rank-and-file Word Bearers.
222* TimeDissonance: According to Malcador, the Emperor's extremely long life made his view of time nearly alien to anyone else. Many of his seemingly-inexplicable decisions, like his response to Monarchia after nearly a century of silence, are explained as his previous warnings to Lorgar being, from the Emperor's perspective, only a brief time ago. To him, a century felt as impactful as a week or month to a normal human. This fundamental disconnect from others is part why, despite his psychic abilities, he was unable to truly understand and empathize with others and how he could justify the atrocities of his campaigns: to him, all the slaughter of the Great Crusade was just a temporary bit of unpleasantness when compared to golden future he intended to build.
223* TotalitarianUtilitarian: The Emperor dreams of a future where humanity is safe, dominant, enlightened, and free from the horrors of Chaos. He's willing to justify any number of atrocities and spill oceans of blood as long as it gets humanity closer to that point.
224* TragicHero: [[BlackAndGrayMorality By the setting's standard]], he did a lot of good for humanity [[WellIntentionedExtremist at great moral cost]]. The result of his efforts included him coming to overestimate his wisdom, rely too much on his divination skills and failing to rein in the Primarchs. The result is half their numbers falling to Chaos and him interned upon the Golden Throne, helpless to intervene as humanity and [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans everything he strived for]] becomes slowly corrupted and decays into everything he wished to prevent.
225* TragicMistake: While he made many errors that the stage beforehand, what really made the Imperium's downfall inevitable was the Emperor appointing Horus as Warmaster and retreating to Holy Terra to attend to his Webway Project without explaining why.
226* TranshumanAbomination: It's not clear if the Emperor could ever have really been considered a true human, but after all his time being worshipped on the Golden Throne, he's become something far beyond anything resembling a mere man in thought or ability. Guiliman's "conversation" with him after his return shows that even the superhuman Primarchs are unable to comprehend his thoughts enough to so much as communicate with him anymore.
227* TrulySingleParent: The Primarchs were genetically engineered, based at least partially on the Emperor's own genetic template. [[spoiler:The ''Horus Heresy'' series subverts the matter with a major retcon: serious genetic engineering went into the Primarchs, but they did have a gene mother, another perpetual named Erda.]]
228* {{Ubermensch}}: Deconstruction. The Emperor was willed into existence and, in a period of strife, established himself as the sole source of objective morality in the universe, and went about radically changing society through his inborn talents and iron will. Completely free of any fear from a divine creator's judgment. His vision to unite all of humanity under one peaceful society also reflects the Übermensch's role in rejecting the [[CosmicHorrorStory existential terror]] that the Chaos Gods embodies, instead providing humanity goals to strive towards–aiming to basically replace the fundamental forces of the universe with his own moral code. However, for all his post-human ideals, The Emperor simply couldn't relate to anyone on an individual level (save for a few exceptions) and saw humanity as a whole as an extension of himself. He also demanded total undying loyalty from his followers rather than encouraging them to pursue their own ambitions, and his untimely un-death allowed his teachings to be misinterpreted by his followers, engendering a slave morality (both things Nietzsche would've despised). This LackOfEmpathy and ingrained [[{{Narcissist}} Narcissism]] and [[{{Hypocrite}} hypocrisy]] proved to be his FatalFlaw that would doom him and drag humanity into ruin with him.
229* TheUndead: After his internment in the Golden Throne, the Emperor is physically somewhere between dead and artificially alive through life support. His body is a mummified husk, but his soul is still anchored to his physical remains with the Astropathic Choir "feeding" him their psychic might to sustain him.
230* UnreliableNarrator: Anyone who communicates with him is this. The Emperor does not "speak" like regular people do, rather he "thinks" at them and their brains translate his thoughts and message into something they can comprehend. This means, in part, they hear what they want to hear/already assume (one custodes heard him call the Primarchs by their names, another by their numbers). Given that we never see anything from his personal perspective (with one exception, and the only thing he said/thought was "Magnus"), this keeps his actual thoughts and feelings on things (like whether the Primarchs were sons to him or mere tools) ambiguous.
231* WellIntentionedExtremist: Oh yes. In a setting where the "[[BlackAndGrayMorality good guys]]" are almost always [=WIEs=], the Emperor goes up a notch for both values of "well-intentioned" and "extremist", taking both far beyond any scale of those measures that had come before or has come since. Though others in his time believed that he was after lordship of the galaxy, the ''Horus Heresy'' books have shown that the what the Emperor does, he is doing because he believes they are necessary for the continued survival, safety and eventual betterment of the Human race.
232* WorfHadTheFlu:
233** For most of the Great Crusade, the Emperor would psychically power and operate the Astronomican remotely. While this allowed him to leave Terra and actively take part in his armies' various campaigns, the psychic strain of doing so over greater and greater distances began to diminish the Emperor's abilities and power. By the time of the Ullanor campaign, the Emperor was stretched so thin that it led to the infamous incident where he was almost strangled to death by an Ork Warlord that he normally could have killed easily. This near-miss seems to have influenced his decision to formally hand off leading the Crusade to Horus and return to Terra.
234** His battle with Horus should have been a decisive victory for the Emperor, even with the Chaos Gods enhancing Horus' strength. However, the Emperor was severely drained by months of defending Terra from invading daemon and Traitor forces on top of forcing the rift opened by the collapse of his Webway Gate closed. However, the biggest handicap of all was that, despite everything he had done, the Emperor couldn't bring himself to unleash his full strength on the monster that was once his favored son. He had to shear off a portion of his very soul and a good chunk of his power to remove the parts of his being that wouldn't be capable of killing Horus. This allowed Horus to mortally wound him before he could use what remained of his power to destroy his wayward son and end the fight.
235* WorldsStrongestMan: Depending on how you define [[HumanoidAbomination man]], the Emperor was and remains the most powerful human psyker to have ever existed. Even after ten thousand years since his interment to the golden throne, no other human psyker has come close to rivaling his immense power, Primarch or otherwise.
236* YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm: [[DependingOnTheWriter In some depictions]], mortals could not gaze upon the Emperor without going blind at the sight of his full glory. Even those beings who could--Space Marines, Primarchs, or humans with a particularly strong will--couldn't truly understand what they were seeing and, as a result, his features seemed to shift and change even while they were staring at him. Possibly meant as a HandWave to explain [[DependingOnTheArtist differing visual depictions]] of the Emperor. A few Horus Heresy stories show his true form as a normal man whose appearance is [[TheNondescript remarkably unremarkable]]. His divine appearance is nothing but a {{Glamour}}.
237* YourDaysAreNumbered: Despite the [[PoweredByAForsakenChild desperate measures]] undertaken to keep him technically alive, the Golden Throne is slowly breaking down without proper maintenance. As it is [[ImportedAlienPhlebotinum lost, possibly alien technology]], there is no one alive who knows how to repair or replace it. When it inevitably fails completely, it will take the Emperor, all of Terra, and possibly the Imperium with it. [[spoiler:As of the 42nd Millennium, the Golden Throne has entered its final days. Estimates on the time it has left range from as much as a century to as little as a decade... Or perhaps not, as from ''Dark Imperium'' onwards, the Great Rift has managed to help empower the Emperor to the point where he appears to be steadily healing.]]
238* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: The Emperor will use anyone as long as they're useful to his plans then disregard them the moment they are not. If they threaten his goals in any way, he'll have them actively and ruthlessly eliminated without a moment's hesitation. Just look at what happened with the Thunder Warriors. The Primarchs and some Space Marines were worried that they would eventually end up on the chopping block themselves after they complete the Great Crusade. [[spoiler:Given that he had the [[DepopulationBomb Terminus Decree]] prepared in case they went rogue, their worries were fairly justified.]]
239[[/folder]]
240
241[[folder:Malcador the Sigillite]]
242[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_the_sigillite_clean_1168.jpg]]
243[[caption-width-right:300:Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.]]
244%%
245Serving the Emperor at the civilian level was Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra and first Master of the Administratum, Grand Master of Assassins, and First Lord of the Council of Terra. Affecting the simple robes of a regular Terran Administrator, Malcador was the Emperor's right hand man. While the Emperor managed the military and technological innovation that made the Imperium, Malcador crafted the bureaucracy that would one day be the Adeptus Terra. A powerful psyker, Malcador was also the founder of the Inquisition and the Grey Knights. During the Siege of Terra, Malcador took the Emperor's place on the Golden Throne, but the strain of the effort wore him out, causing him to turn to dust as soon as he was disconnected.\
246
247Malcador was first mentioned in early background materials, but has become a major character in the Literature/HorusHeresy series, appearing across multiple books.
248----
249* AlmightyJanitor: Even after becoming the Emperor's right-hand confidant, he still wears the simple robes of a Terran Administrator. He was also able to force-choke Horus and would have killed him if the primarch had continued in his errant ways.
250* AncientConspiracy: It's suggested in the lore that he belonged to a secret order that has tried to guide humanity over the millennia, probably the Illuminati.
251* BadassBureaucrat: He may be the founder of the Administratum, but he himself worked to get things moving along well enough, and was powerful enough to knock out [[TheBerserker Angron]] [[FingerPokeOfDoom with a touch.]]
252* CassandraTruth: He tried to convince the Emperor that the larger-than-life public persona he was using would inevitably lead to worship, which the Emperor dismissed.
253* TheChessmaster: Malcador plotted on a level that would make [[Literature/{{Discworld}} Lord Vetinari]] jealous.
254* CollectorOfTheStrange: His most treasured possessions were the ''Mona Lisa'' and ''Sunflowers''. He funded archaeologists when he could.
255* CoolOldGuy: [[AlmightyJanitor You]] [[BadassBureaucrat can]] [[TheGoodChancellor see]] [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure why]].
256* ConsummateLiar: He's almost as good as the Emperor himself at obscuring the truth with his words. That's assuming he doesn't use his incredible psychic ability to manually change what you believe to suit his needs.
257* TheCreon: The right-hand man to the Emperor himself, and managed the entirety of the Administratum, the Office of Assassins and the Knights Errant, the forerunners of the daemon hunting Grey Knights. He also had considerable psychic powers and a very intelligent mind. However, he was content with his position, and remained loyal to the Emperor until he perished.
258* ElderlyImmortal: He's thousands of years old, but unlike other Perpetuals, he physically aged into an old man.
259* FanOfThePast: Related to the above, it's hinted at that he was a very avid fan of history, and was far more knowledgeable of the past than many of his own contemporaries, if his comments on Shakespeare were anything to go by.
260* FirstNameBasis: With the Primarchs. Both Space Marines and regular Adepts were somewhat surprised by the informality between them.
261* TheGoodChancellor: He was the Emperor's chief advisor, his regent, made most of the institutions that govern the Imperium in 40k, was one of the few people who could keep the primarchs in control and was willing and able to make grand sacrifices for the good of all.
262* HeroicSacrifice: Taking up the reins of the Golden Throne, which allowed the Emperor to go and confront Horus, but ultimately killed him. Even then, he still kept a small sliver of psychic strength and gave it to the Emperor, allowing him to speak again before permanently falling silent.
263* HonestAdvisor: He didn't mince words or hesitate to comment on (and criticize) the Emperor's actions. Not only did he get away with it, but the Emperor appreciated it; it is implied this stems from the events described in ''The Last Church'', where a humble old Christian preacher deconstructed the Emperor's galactic ambitions with a TheReasonYouSuckSpeech and he promptly dropped the SmugSuper attitude and to listen to the words of the ordinary humans he was supposedly ruling in the interests of.
264* HonoraryUncle: How he comes across to several Primarchs, especially Leman Russ and Sanguinius. Sanguinius even calls him this.
265* InTheHood: A non-villainous example.
266* InexplicablyAwesome: He is second only to the Emperor (and later Magnus) in psychic power, and was already the Emperor's trusted advisor and administrator when he first began the unification of Terra before falling at the end of the Heresy centuries later. He has been given no explanation or backstory whatsoever.
267* TheMagnificent: The Sigillite ("bearer of the seal"). After taking on the Golden Throne, the Emperor decreed he would be known as Malcador the Hero.
268* ManipulativeBastard: Malcador chooses his every word and action very carefully to get whatever he needs from who he's talking to.
269* TheMentor: [[spoiler:To Alpharius. He was the first Primarch found and he spent extensive amounts of time as Malcador's apprentice. Hence his skills in subterfuge.]]
270* MysteriousPast: His origins and history are only slightly less mysterious than those of his liege, the Master of Mankind.
271* NoBodyLeftBehind: The strain of powering the Golden Throne for several hours and transferring the last of his life force to the dying Emperor was so great that Malcador's body turned to dust after being disconnected from the Throne.
272* NumberTwo: As the Emperor's oldest and most trusted companion Malcador was second in authority only to the Master of Mankind himself and did much to develop the government of the Imperium.
273* OldRetainer: He had been the Emperor's chief assistant and only confidant for centuries when the Great Crusade began.
274* OnlyFriend: The Emperor knew and was worshipped by innumerable people over his lifetime, but Malcador was the only being he ever truly considered a friend.
275* PsychicPowers: Third most powerful psyker in the Imperium, surpassed only by the Emperor and Magnus. So powerful, in fact, that he nearly killed Horus by himself when he tried to mention the name of one of the Missing Primarchs.
276* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: He did a pretty fine job keeping the Imperium in working order. He also got away with criticizing the Emperor if there was any need to.
277* TheSpymaster: Malcador ran the Imperium's espionage and assassination operations. He was the one who founded both the Inquisition and Officio Assassinorum.
278* StaffOfAuthority: And it's [[IncendiaryExponent on fire]]. Why? [[RuleOfCool It looks cool]] [[spoiler:AND IT SHOOTS NUCLEAR FIRE!]]
279* StrongerThanTheyLook: In addition to his vast psychic powers, Malcador has been shown to have some superhuman physical abilities such as when the Primarchs were scattered and he was able to outrun the explosion accompanying the event at a speed that matched Valdor's. Then there was the time he was backhanded by Lorgar and ''didn't'' explode from the impact. True, he was sent [[PunchedAcrossTheRoom flying]] and was nearly knocked unconscious, but for a frame of reference, if a Primarch were to strike the likes of an Astartes, even in armor, that Astartes probably wouldn't be getting back up again.
280* UndyingLoyalty: Malcador was possibly the only being who stood by the Emperor without any need for deception or coercion. While all the other Perpetuals slowly abandoned the Emperor after growing disgusted with his actions, Malcador stood with him. He simply believed in his friend and their dream for humanity.
281* TheUnfettered: Malcador wasn't as coldly ruthless as the Emperor, but he was willing to go to extremes to aid humanity and his liege. Many of the darkest policies and organizations of the Imperium originated from him.
282* WellIntentionedExtremist: He shared the Emperor's dream for humanity and was responsible for many of the atrocities that were undertaken in the process of reaching that "golden path" the Emperor foresaw. This weighed on him much more heavily than it did the Emperor, but he still felt it had to be done.
283[[/folder]]
284
285[[folder:The Thunder Warriors]]
286[[quoteright:168:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thunder_warrior.png]]
287
288The ''Legiones Cataegis'', or Thunder Warriors, were the first true army of {{Super Soldier}}s created by the Emperor. Born and raised in the endless wars between the techno-barbarian polities that dominated the ruins of Terra after the Age of Strife, many of the strongest and most resilient veterans were chosen by the Emperor to join him in his quest to unify Terra under his banner. Surgically and genetically modified beyond any human limitations, the Thunder Warriors were even more powerful than the Space Marines that would succeed them, capable of providing a challenge to the Custodes in combat. However, their rushed modifications led to them becoming physically unstable and psychologically damaged beyond any recovery. Knowing that they could never function in a stable society, after Terra's unification was completed, the Emperor had them phased out in favor of the first Astartes Legions.
289----
290* FlawedPrototype: The Thunder Warriors were the first mass produced superhuman army the Emperor made. While they were stronger than the Astartes and vastly easier to produce than the Custodes, they were fraught with physical and psychological defects that made them barely controllable monsters useful only for destruction. They were so haphazardly built that they were likely to drop dead from organ failure or go on a rampage at a moment's notice. When the Emperor neared the end of his unification of Terra, the Thunder Warriors simply couldn't be kept around or naturally used like the Astartes can, leading him to kill them all.
291* {{Foil}}: They were developed at around the same time as the Custodes, but couldn't be more opposed. Unlike the highly treasured and refined Custodes, the Thunder Warriors were hastily elevated barbarians given whatever weapons he could have pumped out and expected to smash the Emperor's enemies before keeling over from their shoddy enhancements.
292* ForceAndFinesse: They were the crude blunt instrument to the Custodes' finely honed blade during the conquest of Terra.
293* MightyGlacier: The Thunder Warriors were equipped with the Mk 1 power armor. These suits provided enhanced strength and durability, but were so crudely designed that they didn't include motors in the lower body. Without power to the legs, the wearer had to constantly fight against the weight of their own armor to so much as walk. Even with their great strength, this severely limited the speed and mobility a Thunder Warrior could have compared to their Astartes successors' improved Mk 2 and beyond armors.
294* PsychoPrototype: For the Space Marines -- their enhancements were experimental and unstable, making them much more prone to sudden mood swings, violent urges and abject insanity than their successors.
295* SociopathicSoldier: The Thunder Warriors were recruited from some of the most savage and experienced of the various warring techno-barbarian tribes of Terra left from the Age of Strife. They were already hardened veterans of terrible conflicts and their enhancements only made them worse. They were so brutal, unhinged and obsessed with violent dominance over others that they were useless as anything but being blunt instruments of war. The Emperor had them all destroyed when they finished conquering Terra for him as they were far too unruly and psychotically violent to function in anything resembling a civilized society.
296* SuperPrototype: Thunder Warriors were stronger and better than Space Marines in most physical respects -- they grew larger, were stronger and more durable than even the superhuman Astartes. In much the same vein as a Marine can kill a human with a hard punch, a Thunder Warrior could cave in a Marine's skull with a headbutt. The reason why the Emperor toned things down with the Astartes, in addition to the mental and physical instabilities of the Thunder Warriors model, was that making entire armies of such powerful and over-engineered soldiers was too expensive to be viable for the scale he needed to work at after Terra's unification.
297* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: The Thunder Warriors were crucial in unifying Terra, but had no place in the vision the Emperor had for humanity afterwards. There's a great deal of ambiguity in what happened when their role was over, but it's speculated that he either sent them to their doom in the last battle on Terra or just eradicated them when the wars were done. The official story is they died heroically to the last man in the final battle on Terra. [[spoiler: A few managed to live even until the days of the Horus Heresy, some three hundred years later at least.]]
298* YourDaysAreNumbered: The Thunder Warriors enhancements were so unstable that they would inevitably lead to death from any number of catastrophic physical or psychological failures. The time until these effects caught up with a Thunder Warrior varied wildly between individuals, but all of them would eventually be claimed by any of the numerous flaws of their enhanced physiology. This severely limited lifespan is one of many reasons why they would be replaced by the Astartes as they simply wouldn't live long enough to enact the Great Crusade.
299[[/folder]]
300
301[[folder:The Primarchs]]
302The Emperor's twenty clone-sons, scattered across the Galaxy by the Chaos Gods and slowly recovered by the Emperor during the Great Crusade.
303
304For more information, see [[Characters/Warhammer40000Primarchs their page]].
305[[/folder]]
306

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