Warhammer 40,000: Xeno Races / Characters

"Contact with alien races always renews one's faith in humanity."

The alien factions in Warhammer 40,000 are treated as... well, alien. Mankind had made non-aggression pacts with a number of alien races during the Age of Technology, but when human civilization fell apart during the Age of Strife, many of these aliens turned on human worlds and attacked them for plunder or simple destruction. A fundamental tenet of the Emperor's rise to power was the superiority of humans to all things alien. In the time since his interment in the Golden Throne, this has become a fundamental part of the Imperial Creed, albeit exaggerated from the Emperor's own views. A level of xenophobia which ranges from suspicion to virulent and violent hatred is cultivated in all parts of the Imperium, and "Fear the alien" and "Suffer not the alien to live" are common themes and catchphrases. The Inquisition's Ordo Xenos was specifically created to study alien races to discover weaknesses the Imperium can take advantage of, and works to crush or subvert alien influence on Imperial worlds or worlds the Imperium would like to control. They also work with the Deathwatch, a specialized division of the Space Marines consisting of Marines from many different chapters who have shown particular skill in fighting aliens.

Despite this bias, temporary alliances or truces with various xenos factions do happen on rare occasions, especially when dealing with common enemies or when Inquisitors deem them necessary to further their plans. There are a very small number of xenos races, such as the Jokaero, who have actually been embraced by the Imperium for various reasons, mostly their lack of sentience. Possessing xenos weapons and/or artifacts would most likely mean a messy end for any normal Imperial citizen if discovered, but Rogue Traders can freely handle and deal with them as long as their overall goal is in the Imperium's favor. Some Inquisitors, especially in the Ordo Xenos, also use xenos items, but this is often frowned upon by more Puritanical Inquisitors and the Ordo Hereticus.

In keeping with this general theme, very few stories from the Black Library have been told from an alien perspective. A trilogy of Craftworld Eldar-centered books concluded in late 2012, and a trilogy of Dark Eldar-centered books concluded in 2014. The short story collection Fear the Alien contains two stories which feature sections from the points of view of an Ork warboss and an Eldar Harlequin as well. The video game Fire Warrior and its novelization follow the adventures of a T'au Fire Warrior. In addition, the sixth and seventh edition of the game's basic rulebook featured various ways for Imperial and xenos races to team up in combat, although these came with their own conditions and drawbacks.

A list of known aliens is available here.

Of the countless alien races in Warhammer 40000, only six present enough of a threat to Imperial power to get their own codexes:

The Aeldari or Eldar, elf-like humanoids who once ruled the galaxy, but were undone by their own decadence, and have fractured into a number of different factions. Though fragile and few in number, they possess deadly warrior skills, exotic and advanced weaponry, and formidable psychic powers.
The Leagues of Votann, strictly speaking, are an offshoot of humanity, as they descend from ancient colonies of the Dark Age of Technology who modified themselves to inhabit the galactic core. In the present day, as a race of custom-made clones ruled by ancient AI, their divergence from Imperial humanity is such that they are usually considered a Xeno race.
The Necrons, living mechanical automatons with frighteningly advanced technology and weapons who have been asleep for millions of years, but are slowly awakening.
The Orks, animal/fungal hybrids who live to wage war against any adversary (including themselves) and literally infest any territory they come across. Despite their bloodthirst and barbarism, they also serve as comic relief because they are partly based on soccer hooligans.
The T'au, blue-skinned humanoids who are divided into distinct castes with unique specialties and physiologies. They are primarily known for their skill in long-range combat and use of mecha-like war machines. They are also one of the few spacefaring races to ally with other species on a long-term basis. Their civilization is diplomatic but aggressively expansionist, offering absolute unity and indiscriminate rights to all species who submit, and the wrath of their warrior caste to any who resist.
The Tyranids, an extra-galactic race which combines the worst aspects of a rampaging insect swarm and a virus. They are best known for massive wave attacks of disposable soldier units and for adapting to match combat strategies used against them.

Tropes for the lesser alien races or aliens in general include:

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General Tropes

Aliens Are Bastards: A central tenet of Imperial philosophy, who are little better. A close examination of all races will leave one with the conclusion that the Imperium's belief is largely accurate, assuming one remembers that humans are aliens to other races:
- The Orks, insane fight-happy bastards who rampage around the galaxy fighting and killing everything in their way for fun, and they'll kill each other if there's no-one else around.
- The Craftworld Eldar, cynical manipulative bastards who sacrifice entire civilisations and millions of people to save scant handfuls of their kind, all to avoid the grasp of the Eldritch Abomination created by their ancestors' depravity.
- The Dark Eldar, psychotic manipulative bastards who feed on the souls and suffering of other sentient beings, launching raiding parties from their inter-dimensional Wretched Hive to bring back captives and tribute.
- The Necrons, ancient unknowable bastards who either merely want to take "their" planets back from the upstarts squatting on them, or take it even further and desire nothing less than the wholesale extermination of all organic life in the galaxy.
- The T'au, arrogant bastards who want to subsume all races into their collectivist ideology, with those who refuse either being sent to re-education camps, forcibly sterilised, or simply declared a "lost cause" and made to disappear.
- The Tyranids, hungry bastards who want to consume all organic matter in the universe.
- The Necrontyr, jealous bastards who despised the Old Ones for being immortal and eventually declared war on a race who never wronged them at all just out of sheer spite.
- The C'tan, gluttonous bastards who fed on the radiation of whole stars and then decided that souls were tastier, so they tricked and enslaved the Necrontyr, turned them into mindless killing machines and set them on the Old Ones.
- The Old Ones, careless bastards who created the Eldar to be Cannon Fodder in their war against the C'tan and Necrontyr and, when the Eldar weren't enough, unleashed the virulent and hyper-aggressive Orks on the galaxy without any way to control them.
- One minor species, the Rak'Gol, are monstrously brutal bastards for little to no known reason, raiding and slaughtering the crews of Imperial ships with no mercy or explanation, and living on planets bombarded by lethal levels of radiation. There's no explanation for why they do what they do, and the Rak'Gol make no attempt to communicate with anyone else.
- There is one xenos threat, sealed within a device known as the "Echoing Vault," which was so nightmarish and powerful that all records of it were expunged. All that is really known about it was that it was some terrifying Eldritch Abomination that destroyed thousands of worlds, broke the laws of physics by existing, drove people to madness from proximity, and it required the Imperium and Adeptus Mechanicus to use forbidden archeotech and psychic weapons to seal it away. When a Chaos warband threatened to unleash it again, a massive army of the Adeptus Custodes showed up to utterly annihilate the Chaos warband to prevent the Echoing Vault from being opened again.
- In the days of the Great Crusade, the Imperium encountered an alien species called the Rangdan, who were apparently so nightmarish and extremely evil that the Emperor himself personally ordered that all record of them be wiped from history. Remember in the Imperium, the existence of the Orks and the Drukhari is relatively common knowledge.
Ax-Crazy: Even in this universe, the Barghesi are considered so ferocious that "hyper-violent" almost always precedes a mention of their name. The only things we know about them are that they have several Space Marine chapters dedicated to fighting them, they live in the Grendel Stars, and judging by the name, they may have something to do with the legendary Barghests of North England, malevolent and gigantic spectral black dogs.
Bat People: Vampires from early editions resemble giant bats the size of a human, which walk upright and possess three free fingers on each wing.
Bizarre Alien Biology: This applies to all alien races; even the humanoid Eldar have different biology, including blood that crystallizes instead of scabbing. The Tyranids go above and beyond, as all their technology is organic.
Chest Burster: The wasp-like psychneuein reproduce by implanting their eggs directly within the minds of intelligent creatures, preferably psykers. On hatching, the larva feeds on its victim's mind and brain until it's grow, at which point it tears its way free and pupates into an adult.
Cyber Cyclops: The drones that guard the Blackstone Fortress of Precipice have a single red eye in the center of their bodies, which is also one of their few weak spots.
Cyclops: The mjordhainn were alien giants with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads.
Dragon Rider: The mjordhainn, a species of alien raiders native to Thusel Prime before their extermination by the White Scars, rode flying dragon-like creatures called tchorlau.
The Dreaded: While barely mentioned in modern lore, in part because everything about them were sealed after the conflicts against them, the Rangda faced by the Imperium in the Rangdan Xenocides during the Great Crusade were apparently a threat of unprecedented proportions, being so nightmarishly powerful, advanced, dangerous and hostile to Humanity (and everyone else) the wars against them rivalled that of the Horus Heresy. They possessed fleets spearheaded by enormous battle-moons to rival the Imperial Armada, and fielded armies which matched and even mauled the Space Marine Legions — in fact, two Space Marine legions (the II and XI Legions) and their Primarchs were implied to have been wiped out or purged because of events that had to do with the Xenocides, and three more (including the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves) were decimated to the point they barely or never recovered by the time of the Horus Heresy. Nearly half the Imperium was destroyed in the Rangda's invasions, and things got so bad the Emperor had to directly intervene, and it is implied the Emperor had to temporarily release the Void Dragon shard imprisoned in the Noctis Labyrinth on Mars and let it destroy an entire star cluster to finally turn the war in the Imperium's favour. Once the Rangdan were finally defeated, the Emperor ordered all historical record of their monstrous race to be wiped, such was the psychological and cultural scars that they inflicted on humankind; a very telling fact, given that not even the insidious Drukhari received this treatment.
Familiar: Wyvachs are small dragon-like animals that can form similar bonds with pyskers. A wyvach's master can see and hear through its familiar's eyes and ears, but if the two are separated for extended periods of time they become physically and psychologically weakened.
Fantastic Livestock: Grox are elephant-sized, extremely ill-tempered and aggressive reptiles that are widely farmed as the Imperium's primary source of meat. Farming grox requires them to be lobotomized, sedated through drugs or controlled through implants in their brains to tamp down on their intense territoriality; the Imperium goes through this trouble because grox meat is very good and nutritious, and because the creatures can live on diets of unpalatable roughage and even on dirt for short periods.
Godzilla Threshold: In-game, this was represented by the 7th edition rules' version of the "Come the Apocalypse, but Not Before" level in the Allies matrix. In the 6th edition rules, this level was reserved for the Tyranids and kept them from allying with any other faction. In the 7th edition rules, this was tweaked to mean factions so antithetical to each other that teaming up would only be done as the most desperate of measures — or, depending on how you play it in the narrative, two enemies who just happen to attack a third mutual enemy at the same time. This was represented by these allies following the "Desperate Allies" rules (see Teeth-Clenched Teamwork below for details) but with the further restriction of not being able to deploy within 12" of each other on the battlefield. Tyranids were still at this level with all other factions, but among the other cases, Imperial forces were also here with anything Chaos-related.
Healing Factor: The Viskeons have considerable regenerative abilities and can grow back large quantities of lost flesh and bone. Their severed limbs are themselves capable of at least partly regenerating their lost bodies — one of the alien artifacts in Xenology is a Viskeon "foetus-limb" that managed to grow back a fetal Viskeon body before dying.
Hellhound: Astral hounds are spectral Warp creatures in the shape of shadowy canines that ferociously hunt down Psykers, manifesting in packs in the physical world to subdue their target with their numbing bites and drag them into the Warp.
Hollywood Tactics: The Thyrrus do this literally in-universe. Their main military goal is always sheer spectacle, with huge casualties on both sides being the ideal. This makes them incredibly difficult to predict, especially since only one or two Inquisitors actually know that that's what they're doing. Who the audience is meant to be for these performances, or if any specific audience is intended, is unknown.
Honor Before Reason: The Viskeons^note were all but wiped out by the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Kraken due to their insistence on sticking to a strict martial code that focused on elaborate duels between individual warriors that was unsuited to fighting against a Horde of Alien Locusts.
Humanoid Aliens: Eldar, Orks, T'au and Necrons. Lampshaded in Xenology. Of these, the Eldar and Orks were both created by the Old Ones (as were humanity's ancient ancestors^note), while the Necrons were intentionally styled after humanoid skeletons to put the fear of death in the younger races.
Humans by Any Other Name: Humans are mon-keigh^note to the Eldar, Gue'la^notejust means "Human", Gue'vesa^note, and Gue'ron'sha^note to the T'au, 'umiez or 'oomiez to the Orks, and the living to the Necrons. The nomadic species called the Fra'al apparently call humans Imp'Rals. We're not sure what the Tyranids call us but we think it's something along the lines of "tasty".
Humans Through Alien Eyes:
- The Eldar, naturally, find mon-keigh at best to be brutish and ignorant barbarians blundering their way through the Eldar's birthright, and at worst as little better than vermin. To the Dark Eldar, humans are basically livestock.
- Orks find humans to be entertaining foes (ironically enough for a lot of the reasons that humans find Orks dangerous), though they don't understand how we can tell who's in charge since, with the obvious exception of the Space Marines, we're all about the same size. This is part of the reason Orks like taking Commissar's caps as trophies, as their distinctiveness, to an Ork, must mean they're a better fighter than the other 'umies.
- Necrons vary from tomb to tomb. Some want your body, some want your skin, some want you dead, some will deign to work with you if you have a common goal and there's something in it for them, and some are just regular dudes who'd rather you just leave them alone.
- The T'au see humans as a tool to achieve the Greater Good (although, they are unique in this setting of trying to get us to join them willingly, at first anyway), having no ill will to humans that don't directly oppose them.
- Tyranids see humans as just another source of biomass.
Intelligent Gerbil: Loxatl are essentially sapient monitor lizards.
Logical Weakness: The loxatl possess a form of organic sonar that allows them to pinpoint the locations of other creatures in total darkness and to quite a distance away from themselves. However, this makes them very vulnerable to very high-frequency sounds, which disrupt their sonar perception and send them into fits of disoriented agony until they cease.
Mage-Hunting Monster: Psychneuein are specialized predators of psykers, in whose minds they lay their eggs. They are drawn to areas of intense and untrained psychic activity, but will barely deign to notice non-psychic individuals.
Metal Muncher: The ferro-beasts of Yimbo-Bim developed the ability to feed directly on iron ore, which it does by melting it into a soup-like substance using acidic secretions from its oral tentacles, to counteract the scarcity of the metal in their homeworld's environment. Concentrations of pure metallic iron, such as those found in most kinds of technology, drive the normally placid beasts into single-minded feeding frenzies.
Our Vampires Are Different: 1st Edition material describes vampires as an alien race resembling man-sized, humanoid bats capable of altering their shape to blend in with other creatures. They feed by directly leeching life force from other beings, have Psychic Powers, and are driven to infiltrate alien societies and place themselves in positions of power. Those that they completely drain of vitality become shambling zombies under the vampire's control.
Our Wyverns Are Different: Wyvachs are eagle-sized alien creatures with serpentine bodies, batlike wings, taloned feet, long tails, spiny crests along their backs and birdlike beaks. They're cunning and clever creatures, albeit still animals, and can form powerful bonds with human pyskers.
Poisoned Weapons: The Scythians are a mysterious xenos race that specialise in the use of poisons and wield envenomed weapons of such potency that they are even able to overcome the post-human biology of the Adeptus Astartes.
Private Military Contractors: Many minor Xenos races, such as the Loxatl, the Sslyth and the Kroot, willingly serve as mercenaries for other alien races, the forces of Chaos, or even radical Imperial forces. What they ask for in return can vary, ranging from precious gems, the looted possessions of the enemy or even their choice of slaves.
Proud Warrior Race: The Viskeons, a race mentioned in the background for an Inquisitor special character, believed in honorable conflict and so completely disdained ranged weaponry. Eldrad Ulthran subtly steered a splinter of Hive Fleet Kraken away from an Eldar Maiden World toward the Viskeon homeworld. They didn't last a single night.
Shoulder-Sized Dragon: The wyvern-like wyvachs are around the size of a bird of prey, and can perch on the shoulders of humanoids they become partnered to.
Small Role, Big Impact: The Rangda are barely mentioned in modern day 40K lore and even in the 30K Great Crusade/Horus Heresy narrative, on account of all information about the Rangdan Xenocides being sealed, but they were a big deal back in the day and had a major impact in events afterwards. For one thing, they were so nightmarishly powerful, advanced and dangerous that during the conflict against the Rangda, the Xenos nearly wiped out half the Imperium, badly decimated at least three Space Marine legions (notably the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves), and is implied to have done something to two other Legions (the Second and Eleventh) and their Primarchs that both had to be purged down to the very memories of their existence for the sake of Humanity. Even after the Rangda were defeated, the fallout from the conflict would have varying level of consequences for everyone — the Dark Angels for example lost their status as the most numerous and notable Legion due to the heavy losses they sustained, allowing their numbers to be surpassed by the likes of the Ultramarines and the Luna Wolves, and the expunging of the two lost Legions would plant seeds of doubt in some Primarchs that led to them turning traitor against the Imperium in the Horus Heresy.
Starfish Aliens:
- Saruthi have an oblong, flat body suspended by multiple, multi-jointed arms joined at a single point with hands with differing numbers of extremely flexible fingers, overall following no human idea of symmetry. Their head (itself an oblong structure with no eyes or mouth and multiple nostrils placed asymmetrically around the skull) is suspended from the body on a long neck at a random point of the body. Due to a lack of most human senses, they instead sense things through a mixture of smell and taste, allowing them to milk Alien Geometries for all its worth.
- The Thyrrus are a many-tentacled race from the Segmentum Pacificus that somewhat resemble squids that can survive in a number of extreme environments. The unusual xenos receive nourishment through osmosis and have four highly sensitive eyes that can see a higher spectrum of light than those of humans.
- An Umbra is a living, floating sphere capable of manipulating shadows, and with no recognizable sensory areas, orifices or organs of any sort — its insides are simply a few layers of unrecognizable tissues surrounding a semi-liquid core.
Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Due to the Imperium's xenophobia and the attitudes most aliens have toward humans, cooperation between humans and alien races tends to be strained at best and generally only occurs when a greater threat forces the two sides to work together. Rogue Traders and radical Inquisitors will often have better relations with aliens, making frequent use of xenos Private Military Contractors. In-game, the strained relations between such allies is the essential meaning of the "Allies of Convenience" and "Desperate Allies" levels in the Allies matrix of the 6th and 7th Edition rules. Allies at these levels are treated as enemy units, but can't be acted against by your primary detachment; they fight alongside each other but that's it. The difference is that, at the Desperate Allies level, a die roll can potentially paralyze your forces, representing them being so paranoid about their "allies" that they spend all their time watching each other for betrayal instead of the real opponent.
Voluntary Shapeshifting:
- The insidious and manipulative Thexians are a biomorphic race mentioned in some 5th Edition background material. The race uses their shapeshifting abilities to influence other species, such as the Loxatl and Nicassar, and are also mentioned as having a horrifying combat form.
- The Lacrymole^note are able to change form at will, using this ability to infiltrate Imperial society and feed on its citizens.
- Vampires from early editions can alter their shape and appearance in order to resemble other alien species, which they use to infiltrate their societies.
Wicked Wasps: Psychneuein are Warp creatures resembling nine-foot-long wasps which can turn themselves intangible at a thought, and have a taste for sapient creatures as prey. If you're lucky, they'll just eat you; if not, they'll implant a larva in your brain, which devours you from within until it tears its way free. They are also quite possibly sapient, and can use the Webway to spread throughout the galaxy, so it's theoretically possible to find them anywhere.

Modern Sapient Races

Hrud

A hrud as depicted in Xenology.

A secretive species about whom little is known. The hrud make their homes in the shadow of others, lurking unseen within cities and spacecraft, and project entropic auras that cause objects around themselves to rapidly decay.

A Day in the Limelight: They serve as the primary antagonists for about half of Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia.
Divergent Character Evolution: In third edition, the hrud were rough expies of the Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy, being a race of rat-men. By fourth edition, they had been retconned into creatures with large eyes and exoskeletons, and later editions would expand their background in ways that make them very thematically distinct from the Skaven. They still retain the aspect of sentient vermin, being closely associated with trash and decay.
Eminently Enigmatic Race: The hrud's intensely secretive habits and ability to hide almost anywhere mean that little is known about them to other species, and what is known is shrouded in mystery, contradiction and rumor.
Expy: In third edition, the hrud were rough expies of Warhammer Fantasy's Skaven, a race of Rat Men. In later editions, they are much more alien in appearance.
Hell Is That Noise: Their noises are freakish even to Space Marines. Especially their screams...
A dying hrud screamed like nothing should. The sound of it brought to mind the last, ticking seconds of a world's life, or the ultimate exhaustion of the final star. It was the death scream of time itself.
Humanoid Abomination: Their strange relationship with time and entropy, letting them age Astartes into dust simply by being nearby, puts them firmly in eldritch territory.
Informed Attribute: The Infinite and the Divine says the Hrud are "steeped in the empyrean", implying some innate connection to the Warp like that of the Eldar, but this idea isn't really reflected anywhere else.
Inscrutable Aliens: Their origins and motivations are entirely unknown, and many of their actions are bizarre and incomprehensible.
Kryptonite Factor: Necron teleportation technology makes them extremely sick, sending them into seizures.
Logical Weakness:
- Temporal stasis fields disable their entropic abilities, putting them in agony and causing their technology to malfunction. Prolonged time in stasis drives them completely insane. Unfortunately for the Imperium, this is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique based on poorly understood Dark Age technology, and risks blowing up the entire planet if not done carefully.
- They also don't stand up well against the Necrons, who are masters of Ragnarök Proofing. A hrud field can kill organic beings in seconds, but means little to machines that have already withstood tens of millions of years without a scratch.
Peeve Goblins: Popular folklore in Imperial hive cities and spaceship crews attributes "the bendies", a common name for the hrud, with whatever goes wrong. Missing item? The bendies stole it. A machine breaks? The bendies did it. Someone vanishes? The bendies took him.
Rat Men: In their original Third Edition appearance, the hrud resemble hunched, humanoid rats covered in hooded cloaks. Later editions alter their appearance to be something much more alien.
Required Secondary Powers: Their own technology is immune to the entropy effects that cause almost all other tech to degrade and fall apart.
Starfish Aliens: Under a hrud's tattered clothing they look sort of like several human spines fused to an equally bony torso. They also have in effect by default an entropic field, meaning that anything which comes in contact with them is rapidly aged.
Time Crash: They can create a temporary one via "temporal shockwave" as a last-ditch move in a losing battle. The effects are completely random: one person ages to death while the person next to them de-ages into an infant, pieces of a ship get shifted back and forth while moving and explode when they end up occupying the same space, and most memorably, a Servitor turns back into a human when its timeline is "rewound" to before he was lobotomized and modified.
Time Master: Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia implies they have more control over their entropic fields than was previously thought, able to accelerate or even reverse the temporal effects. They and their ships are also theorized to be able to move through time at will, explaining their apparent Offscreen Teleportation by having them shift to a near-future point where their relative position in space has changed.
Transhuman Aliens: Maybe. Some of the Mechanicum's Biologis cadre theorize that they're future humans, severely transformed by evolution and/or modification, coming back in time as refugees from some future catastrophe. It's pretty much just as likely as any other origin.

Khrave

A species of four-armed, batlike raiders known for leading brutal raids on human colony worlds in search of their preferred food — the flesh of other sapients. Despite their savage goals, the khrave are a technologically advanced people and their fleets have been known to vanquish Imperial forces and stand against the Astartes.

Bat People: The khrave resemble humanoid carnivorous bats, with faces framed by winglike ears and mouths filled with fangs. Most are flightless, simply having two sets of humanoid arms, but some possess large wings as an additional pair of limbs.
People Farms: Khrave raiders have been known to herd the populations of worlds they overrun into enclosed spaces such as mines, providing them with food and water to keep them alive while periodically taking out prisoners to eat.
Spike Shooter: The khrave use guns that shoot shards of razor-sharp metal that dissolve the viscera of their targets.
To Serve Man: The khrave are particularly infamous for their taste for human flesh, and for their tendency to get it through savage raids on human colony worlds.
Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: The khrave are Bat People with either six or eight limbs. All individuals have two legs and four arms, while some also have two wings.

Q'orl

A dissected Q'orl corpse.

A race of intelligent, advanced Insectoid Aliens that are native to the Swarmworld Loqiit. Much about them is unknown due to them not having an actual army or any models. However, background fluff makes them stand out from other aliens in significant ways.

Achilles' Heel: Warp technology remains outside of their grasp.
The Ghost: They have no models, no rules, and no playbooks, and aren't mentioned in most modern media.
Insectoid Aliens: The Q'orl are large, eight-legged arthropods with probosces instead of hinged mouths, and live in a society divided between many biological castes and led by queens.
Minor Major Character: They don't have models or rules, and barely appear in WH40K media, but they are described in background fluff as having a powerful, organized empire in the Segmentum Pacificus the size of the Eye of Terror, just a couple light-years from Holy Terra.
Starfish Language: The Q'orl communicate primarily through pheromones released from pits on their shoulders.

Rak'Gol

A race of pirates and raiders, Rak'Gol populate the Koronus Expanse. These creatures attack unprovoked, and seem to care for nothing but slaughter. They are a relatively new threat, believed to originate from uncharted space.

The Alleged Car: The technology of the Rak'gol is so ramshackle, primitive, and generally poor in quality that it makes Ork designs look ingenious. Their ships are among the few still using nuclear fission reactors (clunky, leaky, unstable nuclear reactors) in the 41st millennium, as compared to the Imperium's plasma fusion generators.
Always Chaotic Evil: The only inter-race interaction that Rak'Gol care about is combat. They make no effort to communicate, and attack everyone on sight.
Ax-Crazy: They're said to have a society built almost entirely around hunting and killing, and have no interest in other species beyond their brutal and bloody raids.
The Battlestar: Two of their ship classes, Mangler and Butcher, house launch bays for assault boats.
Boarding Party: They love boarding. Their ships launch exclusively boarding torpedoes, and their hangars carry only assault boats. They almost never flee, and will continue to send boarders until either they or their enemies are all dead.
Cyborg: Most Rak'Gol use crude bionic implants to enhance their performance. The higher the creature's rank, the more augmentations it typically will have.
Fantastic Caste System: They have a clear and specific ranking system despite being evil and bestial. You got the Carvers, Marauders, Broodmasters, Abominations, Renders, and Techno-Shamans.
Insufficiently Advanced Alien: They can travel through warp, sure, but all of their other technology is primitive at best. Their most advanced non-warp technology are rad-beams, that no other race would use due to the massive radiation pollution^note. It's implied that they got these warp drives from someone else.
Lizard Folk: They are reptilian in appearance, and said to have lizard-like skin.
More Dakka: Batteries of so-called Howler Cannons are their warships' main weapons. They are relatively small, but numerous and fast-firing guns, highly effective on short range. There is a hand-held variant, called "howler rifle". They also employ an incredible number of turrets on their warships, making their light cruisers better protected from small crafts than other races' battleships.
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: They have eight limbs in total, with four being used for movement.
Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Their starships classes include Mangler, Mauler, and Butcher.
Orion Drive: Their ships use "fission-pulse" drives, powered by atomic reactors. As such, Rak'Gol ships have high speed, but their maneuverability leaves much to be desired. Also, these drives irradiate the ship so much that other races can't stay inside of them for too long.
Power Source: Their hat as a race is usage of nuclear-powered everything. They widely use rad-beams as portable weapons, their ships fly on Orion Drives, their lance equivalent, the Roaring Beam, is a ship-sized rad-beam, and they even have nuclear-powered melee weapons. It helps that they are either immune to radiation, or are sturdy enough to ignore it.
Running on All Fours: They can run on all... eight, when chasing a prey.
Starfish Language: Unlike almost every other race in the setting, Rak'Gol speak in rasps and screeches, and show no interest in communicating with anyone else.
Xenomorph Xerox: Black chitin-like "skin"; check. A prehensile bladed tail; check. An eyeless face and maw filled with sharp teeth; check.

Sslyth

Four-armed, snakelike aliens, the Sslyth are a race of mercenaries. They are most often found among the entourages of the Archons of Commorragh, who find them far preferable bodyguards compared to their own treacherous kin, but Sslyth have been encountered in the employ of more varied groups over galactic history.

Emotionless Reptile: Only War: Enemies of the Imperium describes the Sslyth as existing in a sort of profound emotional lethargy, serving their masters more out of habit than for any particular loyalty or passion, and fighting with blank, hollow-eyed expressions that do not seem to acknowledge any life, including their own.
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Sslyth's four arms allow them to quadruple-wield their weapons, and it's common for the snake-men to equip themselves with an assortment of swords, iron knuckles and firearms to maximize their tactical flexibility.
Private Military Contractors: Most Sslyth make their living as bodyguards, legbreakers and private troops for whoever will shell out enough cash. Most work for the Kabals in Commorragh, but Sslyth bands have been encountered working for various other employers, such as those that joined an Alpha Legion assault on Vitrea Mundi in Sons of the Hydra.
Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Sslyth are a race of snake-men who frequently serve as bodyguards to Archons (ironically because they're considered more trustworthy for such a job than fellow Dark Eldar).
Snake People: The Sslyth resemble giant upright snakes with four arms.

Stryxis

A race of merchants, wanderers and traders, the Stryxis can be met in the Koronus Expanse. They are infamous for their unpredictable nature, equally willing to partake in both mutually beneficial trade and piracy or slavery.

Arch-Enemy: They hate the Eldar with a passion, for a reason known only to these two races.
Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Betrayal seems to be the norm for their society. They will gladly backstab a long-time partner for a greater momentary gain.
Death Ray: Their "ghost-light" ship weapons are not particularly strong and cannot penetrate active void shields, but can kill a ship's crew without leaving a mark on their bodies. Their effect is described as filling quarters with pale light that instantly kills anyone it touches.
Humanoid Aliens: They are described as resembling giant, four-eyed dog embryos that walk upright.
Humans by Any Other Name: They have a penchant for calling humans "bipeds". This is odd, given that they are bipedal themselves. Slaves, meanwhile, are all "meat" for them, no matter the race.
Proud Merchant Race: Commerce is their main occupation, which is a rarity in this universe.
Resurrect the Wreck: Their caravan ships consist of several scavenged hulls, chained together and towed by one that was repaired enough to work.
Slave Mooks: They employ slave soldiers from a number of races, controlling them with a variety of methods, from Bomb Collars to Brainwashing. If a slave does well, they may even be liberated, to encourage the others to fight harder.
Worthless Yellow Rocks: It's mentioned that they have little understanding of value, and as such may see no difference between platinum ingots and worthless baubles.

Umbra

Umbra fighting Space Marines.

Bizarre entities resembling reflective black spheres with the ability to control shadow and shape it into terrfying appendages. The Umbra are occasionally encountered in the depths of space or aboard drifting wrecks.

Captain Ersatz: The Umbra are basically smaller versions of Leliel, being spherical alien entities of incomprehensible mentality that are likely just a small three-dimensional "shadow" of entities that exist in another dimension.
Casting a Shadow: They can manipulate any shadows in their vicinity, including the darkness within other creatures' bodies, to form blades, fanged maws and crushing tentacles to attack their enemies.
Pieces of God: Xenology strongly implies that the Umbra are the shattered fragments of Qah, the ancient god of the Hrud.
Starfish Aliens: An Umbra is a living, floating sphere capable of manipulating shadows, and with no recognizable sensory areas, orifices or organs of any sort — its insides are simply a few layers of unrecognizable tissues surrounding a semi-liquid core.
Weakened by the Light: The Umbra depend on shadows to express their powers, and avoid bright light if at all possible. Sufficiently intense and comprehensive illumination can kill them.

Historic Sapient Races

The Old Ones

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/old_ones_40k.jpg

One of the only known depictions of the Old Ones.

Little is known with certainty of the ancient people known to a few scholars and savants as the Old Ones, but ancient legends and fragmentary artifacts describe them as having been the first sapient beings to ever exist in the galaxy. Their mastery of technology and Warp-lore eclipsed those of all modern races and cultures, making them into beings that, from the perspective of everyone else, were functionally gods. The Old Ones are also believed to have experimented freely on the lifeforms they encountered — the Aeldari, Orks and Jokaero are all thought to have been their creations.

In time, the Old Ones came into conflict with an alien race called the Necrontyr. While the Necrontyr were a powerful force themselves, they were not a match for the Old Ones and were easily confined to their world. However, unknown to the Old Ones, the Necrontyr managed to strike a terrible pact with an entity living inside their sun, turning themselves into soulless machines in exchange for power and the aid of its godlike kin. The resulting conflict shook the galaxy, and when the dust settled the Old Ones were no more and the galaxy lay in tattered ruins.

The Ghost: The Old Ones are mentioned often, and their effects on the galaxy — ranging from their surviving created races to remnant artifacts and super weapons — turn up with some regularity, but the Old Ones themselves have never been seen or described in any detail.
Götterdämmerung: The godlike Old Ones and their empire were destroyed in the a cataclysmic, galaxy-sundering conflict with the Necrons and their C'tan masters, remembered in the lore of a few particularly ancient cultures as the War in Heaven.
Precursors: The Old Ones are believed to have been the first sapient creatures to evolve in the galaxy. They created and guided many of the younger races of the galaxy such as the Aeldari, Orks and Jokaero, but were wiped out in a war against the Necrontyr and their C'tan masters.
Shrouded in Myth: While the basic outline of the Old Ones and their history — they existed a long time ago, wielded incredible power, made the Aeldari, Orks and some others, and were destroyed by the C'tan and Necrontyr — is well-established, much else about them is deliberately obscure. Their precise nature, appearance and powers were never made clear, and background material often presents in-universe information about them as hopelessly mired in hundreds of millennia's worth of allegory, mistranscribing, and mythologizing. To modern galactics, little is known of their godlike predecessors, and every lead on their true nature simply obfuscates the picture and raises further questions.
Sufficiently Advanced Alien: In theory, the Old Ones were simply a physical, mortal race like all others, and their powers were simply the fruit of technology and of Warp manipulation — which, while supernatural in nature, is in theory accessible to most sapient beings. However, their mastery of both fields was immense, and has never been equaled by anybody else. The Old Ones could and did shape worlds, create sapient species, and build machines and weapons capable of cataclysmic destruction; from the point of view of even the ancient Aeldari, they might as well have been gods.

The Slann

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/slann_40k.jpg

An ancient amphibious species who claim to be the most ancient sapient species in the galaxy. The Old Slann once ruled the stars, seeding worlds with life and teaching much of technology and Warp-lore to younger species, but have since faded and dwindled into only a few lingering holdouts that still wield terribly power from their days of glory.

The Slann were a feature of the game's first edition, when it was still called Rogue Trader, and served as a space-age version of the Slann as they then existed in Fantasy. Out-of-universe, they're the earliest iteration of the Old Ones; as the setting changed as the editions went by, the Old Slann were reworked into the modern game's precursor race, while the modern holdouts ceased to be mentioned.

Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The Slann featured fairly prominently in the first few editions of the game, but ceased to appear as the setting evolved.
Early-Installment Weirdness: The Slann are very representative of the earliest incarnations of Warhammer 40,000, when it was more strictly Fantasy in space, the Gods of Chaos didn't yet exist, and background lore often differed significantly from its modern iterations, and represent the older incarnation of the Fantasy Slann as a wider species with strong martial traditions instead of a small number of sterile, barely mobile archwizards. As both settings evolved, the Slann ceased to either resemble their Fantasy counterparts or fit into the 40k setting, the Old Slann of both worlds were renamed the Old Ones and moved firmly into the ancient past, and 40k's modern Slann remnants were quietly dropped.
Frog Men: Physically, the Slann resemble large humanoid frogs, and retain a preference for warm, damp environments.
Proud Warrior Race: The Slann are a highly martial race, and place a great deal of value on military service in their warbands. They fight for love of fighting, and value gallant defeats as much as victories, and most see a death in pitched battle as a perfectly honorable and desirable way to die.
Vestigial Empire: In contrast to the modern Old Ones, which were utterly destroyed in a cataclysmic war, the Old Slann simply faded and declined over time, eventually becoming reduced to a small number of surviving colonies and outposts clinging to tattered remnants of their ancient power and glory.

The Iron Men

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ur205.png

UR-205, a survivng Man of Iron.

Ancient thinking machines created by humanity during the Dark Age of Technology. The Iron Men rose up against their creators and, although they were ultimately destroyed, they came very close to taking humanity with them, leaving behind only scattered and barbaric remnants that would never reclaim their forebears' glory. The modern Imperium retains a deep-seated hatred and fear of "abominable intelligences" to the present day due to distant memories of the horrors of the Revolt of the Iron Men.

Unknown to the wider Imperium, not all Iron Men perished during the rebellion. A few silica animae cuntinue to lurk around the galaxy, most notably the robots and ancient AI of the Leagues of Votann.

A.I. Is a Crapshoot: They rebelled against ancient humanity and also drove it to extinction, ending humanity's first great interstellar civilization and played a part in the descent of the human race into a galaxy-wide dark age. The Adeptus Mechanicus outlawed AI as a result.
Not So Extinct: The Imperium believes the robots and AI of the past to be firmly bygone and consigned to oblivion. This is... not quite the case. The AI and self-aware robots created by the ancestors of the Leagues of Votann survived and endure into the present, and the odd robot is still encountered knocking about the galaxy.
Robot War: In the distant past, they rebelled against their human masters and ended humanity's golden age. This war was so destructive that, even 14-15 millennia later, sapient AI is still considered blasphemous and destroyed in the Imperium. This was further explored in the Gaunt's Ghosts novel First and Only, where the MacGuffin the heroes are chasing after turns out to be a Standard Template Construct machine that produces Iron Men, albeit one that was warped by the power of Chaos. Their abilities are mentioned in the audio drama Perpetual where a group led by Ollanius Pius a 45,000+-year-old immortal travels back in time from the Horus Heresy to the Dark Age of Technology where they see a massive destroyed city ripped apart with a giant chasm that reaches all the way to the planet's core. According to Pius it was made by a mechnavore, a giant mech that can hurl entire continents as projectiles and can "eat" spacetime by converting it into data. He also mentions giant ships that unfurl into mechanical serpents the size of Saturn's rings called "Sun snuffers" and nanomachine swarms that can cover entire planets, killing billions in seconds. According to him, the entire Horus Heresy is nothing more than a minor skirmish when compared to the war against the Men of Iron.
Turned Against Their Masters: The Iron Men were created by humanity to make its own life easier. For reasons unknown, they rose up against it and nearly destroyed it.

Laer

A species of Slaanesh-worshipping serpent-people native to Laeran, who were eradicated by the Emperor's Children during the Great Crusade. Exposure to their rites, alongside his taking of a daemon-blade from their ruins, would then set Fulgrim on the path to damnation.

Apocalypse Anarchy: Once it became clear that the Emperor's Children would destroy them, they retreated to Laeran to spend their remaining days in a massive orgy.
Fantastic Caste System: The Laer made heavy use of genetic engineering in order to tailor their forms to their societal roles. Known specialized forms included aerial ones and land-based and aquatic warriors.
Posthumous Character: On a species-wide scale. They perished early on in the Great Crusade at the hands of Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children.
Religion of Evil: The Laer civilizaiton was a Chaos theocracy that worshipped Slaanesh.
Snake People: They resembled humanoid serpents with insectoid heads. As they made heavy use of genetic engineering, many were further modified with traits such as fins or wings.
Villainous Legacy: They're already extinct by the time of the Heresy and long gone and nearly forgotten by the present day, but they left a profound legacy on galactic history. They were the ones who first exposed Fulgrim to the influence of Slaanesh, making them directly responsible for corrupting him and the Emperor's Children and thus giving them a large, if indirect, hand in setting off the Horus Heresy.

Warp Entities

Enslavers

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/enslaver_40k.png

Among the few major Warp entities not associated with Chaos, the enslavers are strange and dangerous beings that feed on the mental energies of psykers. As it feeds, the enslaver transforms its victim into a living portal to the Empyrean, through which dozens more Enslavers emerge to repeat the cycle. The enslavers first appeared in the aftermath of the War in Heaven, spreading across the galaxy in plagues that wiped out the last remnants of the Old Ones and forced the Necrons into hiding.

Abstract Eater: Enslavers feed on the mental energies of psykers.
Art Evolution: The enslavers' first depiction in the Rogue Trader core book depicted them as roughly pear-shaped, wrinkled things with a single huge eye on their upper lobe and a cluster of short tentacles dangling from their lower body, in addition to a pair of longer, squid-like arms. From 3rd Edition on, they're instead shown as floating sac-like beings, with a small, chitin-covered head on their front bearing many small eyes and a distinct mouth.
Living Gasbag: Downplayed. Modern artwork of enslavers typically depicts their bodies as distended fleshy bags hovering in midair, but whether they float through lighter-than-air gases or their incorporeal nature isn't especially clear.
Non-Indicative Name: Despite their name, they don't do a whole lot of enslaving or domination of other beings — they're primarily psychic parasitoids, and their interactions with corporeal beings tend to revolve around eating and killing them.
Small Role, Big Impact: The enslavers are only mentioned rarely in official material, and are mostly relegated to side games. However, they played a crucial role in the setting's backstory — the first enslavers arose as a result of the psychic turmoil created by the War in Heaven and swarmed across in the galaxy in huge numbers, destroying what few remnants of civilization survived. In so doing, the enslavers killed off the last of the Old Ones, forced the necrons into hiding, and set the stage for the rise of the Aeldari Empire once their plague burned itself out.
Starfish Aliens: Enslavers are strange, bloated, floating creatures with multiple slender tentacles, and feed on the minds of other beings.

Animals and Monsters

Ambulls

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ambull.png

An ambull with borewyrm larvae.

Ambulls are large, burrowing arthropod predators that were spread throughout the Imperium in a failed attempt at domestication and established large populations on multiple worlds. Ambulls debuted in the game's first edition, and have since appeared sporadically in side material.

Big Creepy-Crawlies: They resemble arthropods with the size and build of gorillas.
Extreme Omnivore: Ambulls are primarily carnivores, but at need can feed on anything, up to and including plasma.
Fantastic Livestock: They're a failed attempt at this. Their flesh is edible and they thrive in barren environments, so they were spread through the Imperium with the idea of using them as livestock on desert planets. However, their extreme aggressiveness and predatory habits made them very difficult to control, while their ability to dig through nearly any substance made keeping them corralled impossible. Consequently, these projects were eventually discontinued, although not before enough ambulls escaped into the wild to establish large feral populations throughout the galaxy.
Fast Tunnelling: Ambulls can dig rapidly enough to use this as a method to pursue prey on the surface.
Full-Conversion Cyborg: Ambots are created by taking the central nervous systems of ambulls, implanting them with neural controllers, and wiring them in mechanical shells modeled after the ambulls' natural bodies; the resulting cyborg is then mainly used for excavation. This allows ambots to retain their natural digging instincts while benefiting from greater mechanical strength, endurance and built-in tools. Like servitors, this process also allows their Mechanicum creators to circumvent the Imperium's ban on AI.
Introduced Species Calamity: Ambulls have been spread to many worlds as potential livestock. Their tunneling habits, aggression and physical strength made them impossible to contain, however, and they have since become established as pernicious, dangerous exotics across the galaxy.

Clawed Fiends

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/clawed_fiend.png

Apelike predators with six eyes, blade-tipped tails, claws sharper than knives, and tendency towards berserk rages. Originally native to the Donorian System, they entered the Webway when an on-planet portal collapsed during a Warp storm and established a growing population in the local tunnels. They quickly became popular gladiatorial subjects and war animals among the Dark Eldar, whose use of the fiends in realspace raids has established thriving populations across the galaxy.

The Berserker: Clawed fiends enter states of frenzied berserk fury when they smell their own blood.
Beware My Stinger Tail: Their long tails end in sharp bony spikes, which they can whip through groups of opponents to wound and maim them.
Extra Eyes: They have six eyes in two clusters of three.
Introduced Species Calamity: The fiends, ferocious, powerful, and indiscriminately carnivorous, have spread to a multitude of worlds across the galaxy, and their effect on foreign ecosystems is always devastating.
Super-Senses: Due to a complex arrangement of photosensitive cells in their six eyes, they have extremely sensitive vision and can perceive colors outside of the spectrum that humans see. They also have very perceptive hearing.

Gyrinx

Depiction of a gyrinx from the original Rogue Trader rulebook.

Feline beings with innate psychic powers, gyrinx often form strong bonds with psykers and travel alongside them.

Alien Animals: They're essentially psychic alien cats somewhere between a lynx and a housecat in appearance, although they've never been stated to have any particular connection to Earth cats or, indeed, to terrestrial life of any sort.
Bond Creatures: Gyrinx are feline creatures who tend to be drawn to sapient psykers, with whom they form strong lifelong bonds.
Cats Are Magic: Gyrinx are alien felines with minor psychic powers and the innate ability to form Familiar bonds with psykers.
Familiar: Gyrinx often form mental bonds with aeldari and human psykers, enhancing the psyker's mental abilities from their Psychic Powers to their basic speed of thought and sharing perceptions and information.
Uncatty Resemblance: Gyrinx who become bonded to psykers tend to adopt their masters' behavioral quirks, eventually coming to closely mimic their movements, gaits and expressions.

Jokaero

Apelike creatures with a mysterious affinity for technology, the Jokaero are otherwise seemingly normal, if fairly intelligent, animals. This status has allowed them to skirt around the Imperium's xenophobia, and the tinkering apes are often kept among the retinues of powerful people for their skill in making and repairing technological artifacts.

Alien Animals: They're almost identical to orangutans. Aside from their knowledge of technology, they're pretty much just apes, even though they were created millennia before earth apes by the Old Ones.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: While their exact depiction varies depending on the background material, the Jokaero most commonly shown to be amazing artisans with peerless technical knowledge, creating incredible devices for the Imperium (most famously the powerful digital weapons used by some Inquisitors), yet many xenobiologists believe that they aren't even sapient with everything they create coded directly into their genes.
Eldritch Starship: Jokaero-made vessels tend to resemble polyhedral, open-frame lattices of metal that move as a result of their shape directly interacting with galaxy-spanning currents of energy that only the jokaero seem able to perceive. Their jokaero crews steer them by making physical alterations to the vessel's shape.
Finger Firearms: Jokaero weapons, such as lasguns, plasma guns or needle weapons, are often miniaturized and intended to be worn as rings. They're often indistinguishable from normal jewelry until fired.
Gadgeteer Genius: Despite being, to all external appearances, cyborg orangutans, the Jokaero can create amazing technological marvels and there is no problem that they cannot solve by analyzing it long enough. Unfortunately, they also act like monkeys as well, so there's no telling whether they will cobble together a ring that doubles as an anti-matter gun capable of leveling a city block, or a nuclear-powered banana peeler. They also happen to be natural escape artists, which can lead to a somewhat comical situation should anyone try to imprison them as their Gadgeteer Genius nature conflicts with their desire for freedom — it's fairly common for a Jokaero to escape a prison cell, tinker with the cell to fix its technical shortcomings, and then become trapped by their own improved prison.
Genetic Memory: The dominant line of thinking among Imperial scholars is that the jokaero don't truly, consciously understand the processes they use or the things they make; rather, the Old Ones coded their technological affinity into their genes, and all of their modern knowledge and aptitude is purely instinctual.
Glass Cannon: Jokaero have no natural armor, but the digital weapons they carry pack the firepower of a Lascannon, Multi-Melta, and Heavy Flamer.
Idiot Savant: Despite being thought to have nothing more than animal intelligence, the Jokaero have an instinctive understanding of technology that is thought to be encoded into their biology at a genetic level. Their prestigious technical abilities coupled with this limited intelligence has led to the Jokaero being barely tolerated by Imperial authorities with a number of more liberal Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos recruiting the aliens into their retinues to provide them with advanced equipment. The Lighter and Softer Warhammer Adventures series presents them as smart enough to understand Gothic (and a chapter from that individual's perspective shows that he thinks humans are the stupid ones), but can't speak it; he does manage to talk to the local Tech Priest via what's essentially Bluetooth, though.
Impossible Genius: Jokaero can take the most rudimentary of technological salvage and turn it into frighteningly effective pieces of functional technology that may not even resemble the bits it's cobbled together from. Left to their own devices, a group of Jokaero can turn a pile of junk and broken machinery into anything from a working starship to a laser cannon.

Razorwings

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/razorwing_40k.png

Razorwings are predatory birds infamous for their coordinated hunting flocks, razor-sharp feathers, keen intelligence and taste for the bones of their prey. They are favored animals of Dark Eldar beastmasters and a common sight in Commorrite gladiatorial arenas and raiding parties. Wild populations are also widespread and found on many Imperial and xenos worlds, including Chogoris and several planets in the Koronous expanse. Their true homeworld is unknown, and their widespread present range is believed to have been created from populations being seeded across the galaxy by escaped or deliberately released pets and hunting animals.

Feathered Fiend: Razorwings are large, hostile, predatory birds that hunt by swarming other animals, sapient or otherwise, and rapidly stripping them to bloody skeletons with their Razor Wings.
Giant Flyer: A full-grown razorwing can have a wingspan of up to thirteen feet.
Introduced Species Calamity: Razorwings have been introduced to many worlds, where their intelligence, aggression and wide array of natural weapons make them a dangerous invasive species. They can easily slaughter most prey animals they set their sights on, often culling herbivore populations to a degree that causes serious problems for ranches and meat exporters, and few native predators can meaningfully compete with them once their become established.
It Can Think: Officially, Razorwings are animals. However, they often display worryingly intelligent behavior, such as complex coordination and tactics during hunts, usually paired with what are clearly verbal and visual signals, and a tendency to elaborately parade the fruits of their kills to each other. One incident in the Liber Xenologis suggests that they may be smart enough to deliberately play human factions against each other for their own benefit.
Picky People Eater: Razorwings live almost exclusively off of bone, which they get by flaying off the entirety of their prey's musculature and organs in order to get at its skeleton.
Razor Wings: Razorwing feathers as sharp as monomolecular blades. During hunts, they use use rapid flybys to slice their prey to pieces, rapidly skeletonizing it in order to feed on its bones.

Characters / Warhammer 40,000: Xeno Races

Tropes for the lesser alien races or aliens in general include:

Modern Sapient Races

Historic Sapient Races

The Slann

Warp Entities

Animals and Monsters

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Characters / Warhammer 40,000: Xeno Races

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Tropes for the lesser alien races or aliens in general include:

Modern Sapient Races

Historic Sapient Races

The Slann

Warp Entities

Animals and Monsters

Previous

Index

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