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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war!

Warhammer 40,000, known informally as "Warhammer 40k" or just plain "40k", is a miniatures-based tabletop strategy game by Games Workshop. Drawing heavily on their previous Warhammer Fantasy game, it began as "Warhammer In Space", but has over time grown distinct from (and far more popular than) its fantasy counterpart.

Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has spread across the galaxy, to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons; from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.

Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black and hurls itself over the edge. The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do until you die, but something to do until something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way - quite probably someone on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.

The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, the other forces in the galaxy are generally far, far worse. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal and in one case omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The basic sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid, has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The faster-than-light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of small cities and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.

The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life further than most people could believe possible. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of supercharged daemonhunting super soldiers and fanatical power-armoured battle nuns. The ancient and debased manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead; their depraved cousins cannot live without torturing numberless innocents to death in unimaginably horrible ways. There's a Bug Swarm trying to eat everything in the galaxy, a light-years wide hole in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilisation of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, everything down to the last bacterium. Everywhere you go, there's the genetically-engineered survivor warrior species that's infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything else in the galaxy because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code. The closest thing to the good guys you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment, sterilisation, and concentration camps.

As well as the game itself and its rulebooks, faction-specific, setting-specific and campaign sourcebooks, 40k has spawned a range of spinoff games and publications. Over sixty 40k novels and short story anthologies, including the successful Gaunt's Ghosts, Eisenhorn, and Ciaphas Cain novels, are published by the Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop, who also published the now out-of-print comic book Warhammer Monthly and short story magazine Inferno. Boom! Studios now publish comics set in the Warhammer 40K universe, in the form of various mini-series, rather than an ongoing title. Spinoff tabletop games include the space combat game Battlefleet Gothic, large-scale strategy Epic 40,000, gang-based Necromunda, all-Ork Gorkamorka, small scale Alien-influenced Space Hulk, RPG-influenced "narrative wargame" Inquisitor, and the more traditional RPG Dark Heresy. A small but growing number of 40k videogames have also been made, of which the most recent are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War, a Real Time Strategy game for the PC, Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, a First Person Shooter, and Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command, a turn-based tactical game. Currently in development are Dawn Of War II and a third-person shooter, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.

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Contains examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo (Guns which fire razor-edged molecule-thick ninja stars, guns which fire nets of Razor Floss, guns which fire wooden stakes, flamethrowers which squirt holy napalm, biological guns which use, um, muscle spasms to fire flesh-eating beetles/maggots or exploding tumours, guns which open holes into hell, guns which fire tiny goblins through hell.)
• Abusive Precursors (C'tan definitely qualify.)
• The Aesthetics Of Technology
• Affably Evil (Nurgle.)
  • Affable? Nurgle? His idea of a 'gift' is making his soldiers into disease-ridden bloated horrors. Admittedly many of his converts are on their death-bed and he saves their life in doing so, but still . . .
    • Seriously! Nurgle loves his little children, and shows it by giving them gifts (of horrible, flesh-eating diseases). His followers even refer to him as "Father Nurgle". He's like a festering, disgusting Santa Claus.
    • It just highlights how bad things are in Warhammer40000 that the only god who actually does care for and love his worshippers is the god of pestilence and disease.
• After Action Report (Battle reports, a long-standing feature in White Dwarf magazine.)
• After The End (Though there have been about five "ends" for humanity alone, each more awful than the last.)
• AI Is A Crapshoot (The first true human-created artificial intelligences, the Iron Men, wiped out humanity's first great interstellar civilization and plunged the human race into a galaxy-wide dark age. The Adeptus Mechanicus outlawed sentient AIs as a result, and for the most part the Imperium's modern-day "machine spirits" are pretty well-behaved.)
• Air Jousting (Eldar Shining Spears: space elf knights on flying bikes with laser lances.)
• Alien Blood (Tau have blue blood and Tyranid fluids are generally described as "ichor". Eldar and Orks, however, have red blood.)
• Alien Geometries (Try not to look too hard at Chaos buildings, or anything else Chaos makes, for that matter. Bad idea.)
• Aliens And Monsters
• The Alliance (The Tau Empire, who are the only faction with significant allies outside their own species. This being 40K, they don't always get along. And then there's the people who suspect brainwashing...)
• All There In The Manual (Numerous rulebooks, novels, magazines, supplemental sourcebooks and spinoff games with their own sets.)
• Alternate Character Interpretation (Pretty much every organisation's actions and motivations can be "read" in several different ways.)
• Always Chaotic Evil (Everyone. Even the humans? Especially the humans.)
  • The Tau are usually exempt from this, but there are, as always, alternate interpretations.
• Amazon Brigade (The Sisters of Battle and Eldar Howling Banshees. Not the Dark Eldar Wyches, oddly enough, unlike their Warhammer counterparts.)
• A Mech By Any Other Name (Dreadnoughts, Wraithlords, Gargants, Titans, etc.)
• Ancient Conspiracy (Just as planned...)
• Ancestral Weapon (Almost everyone's equipment seems to be ancient to some degree, most notably Eldar and Marine wargear and Necron everything. Somewhat justified by the fact that a lot of the more advanced wargear has to consist of ancient hand-me-downs, because humanity has forgotten how the technology works and considers it magical, as well as, obviously, having forgotten how to build it.)
• And I Must Scream (The Outsider, victims of daemonic possession, possibly Necrons.)
• And Man Grew Proud (Human history up until and through the war with the Iron Men that destroyed the first great era of human civilization lingers as myth and cultural superstitions.)
• Annoying Arrows (Half averted, half played weirdly straight - there's at least one instance of alien bows and arrows going straight through Space Marines, but failing to harm them because of their superhuman toughness.)
• Another Dimension (The Warp.)
• Anti Magic (Pariahs and Untouchables nullifying psyker abilities.)
• Apathy Killed The Cat (Imperial domestic policy. "Only the awkward question; only the foolish ask twice.")
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape (Played straight by the Eldar, thoroughly averted by the Orks.)
• Apocalypse How (Has an example on every level of the scale.)
• Apocalyptic Log (A few have cropped up from doomed Imperial research expeditions.)
• Apologetic Attacker (The Tau claim to always be this, at any rate.)
• Aristocrats Are Evil (Or just corrupt and really stupid; various background pieces have members of the Imperial upper classes joining Chaos cults out of boredom, smuggling xeno artifacts, using Dark Eldar as mercenaries to sort out their rivals...)
• Artifact Of Death (Most Daemon weapons lead to their owner's doom eventually.)
• Artifact Of Doom (By the truckload in every size and shape imaginable, from simple daemon weapons to entire planets serving as the titular cans in Sealed Evil In A Can.)
• Arm Cannon (Chaos Obliterators are this all over: their bodies are partly made out of weapons.)
• Armour Is Useless (Generally averted - armour can and does make a difference most of the time. However, there are many, many weapons that are so powerful they could not care less about any conventional armour.)
• Artificial Limbs (May be the above Arm Cannon. Even in the higher echelons of pretty much every Imperial organisation, there is some discrepancy over just what it is possible to replace damaged parts with. Sometimes actual flesh and blood vat grown limbs are referred to, but most of the time it's large, mechanical, piston-driven coolness.)
• As Long As There Is Evil (Chaos, but the Necrons seem to have an... unorthodox solution to the problem in mind.)
  • "Kill everything, everywhere" isn't all that unorthodox in this setting.
    • But permanently sealing off the Materium from the Immaterium is.
• A Team Firing (All Orks ever, who consider More Dakka far more important than such nonsense as "aiming".)
• The Atoner (Cypher and the Fallen Angels.)
• Attack Drone (Widely used by the Tau. Imperial servo-skulls are also somewhat like this.)
• Attack Pattern Alpha (Tau and Imperial militaries follow this.)
• Authority Equals Asskicking (Many Chaos leaders are warp-enhanced, the original Primarchs literally were demi-gods, and Ork and Tyranid leaders are Large And In Charge. Prevalent for all races in the tabletop game, though in later editions, either justified or rectified - taking away things like the unrealistically high Toughness of human characters, justifying the amazing weapon skills of certain heroes because they've literally been doing this sort of thing for centuries.)
• Automatically Violent (Generally the case with Chaos-inspired madness.)
• Axe Crazy (Two words: Khorne Berserkers. The worst of the bunch is Kharn the Betrayer, who's so blood thirsty that any missed attacks in close combat hit anyone in the same squad as him. Known to randomly kill anyone in his way, even other Khorne Berserkers.)
• Badass (Pretty much every character. Hell, pretty much every foot soldier. Characters get a whole new level of badass.)
  • Badass Biker (How much more badass do you get than screaming green maniacs on ramshackle scrap-metal motorbikes laden with giant machine guns? Oh yeah, that would be the Super Soldiers on giant armoured bikes the size of cars. Or the evil Super Soldiers on hell motorbikes covered in blades and skulls... or maybe the space-elf knights on flying bikes with laser lances... or the evil space elves that can fly their bladed flying death bikes with enough skill to cut specific arteries.)
  • Badass Boast (Too many to count.)
  • Badass Creed (Just about everyone barring Tyranids and Necrons. Generally shouted as a battle cry.)
  • Badass Grandpa (Lots. Pretty much every Space Marine will see their first century, the Craftworld and Dark Eldar are really old, the original Traitor Legions are going ten thousand years and still counting, while the Necrons, being older than most other things in the universe and with regenerating metal bodies, outlive most of the opposition.)
  • Badass Longcoat (Fear the Commissar more than you fear the enemy!)
  • Badass Normal (In some of the fiction, particularly the Gaunt's Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain novels, the simply human Imperial Guard prove again and again that they can kill just about anything in the setting. Given that this is a galaxy where most things can kill a tough, dedicated, well-trained and well-equipped human soldier by looking at him, these people are seriously badass. In the actual game... not so much.)
  • Retired Badass (more than can be counted. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick, any Space Marine Dreadnought, and Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! among them.
• Bad Powers Bad People (Chaos.)
• Bad Vibrations (Justified - if you don't feel the tremors of an approaching Titan, you deserve what you get.)
• Base On Wheels (The Leviathan, a mobile command centre on treads the size of a small city... which acts as an APC for tanks.)
• Battle Cry (It's not a proper fight till you've been deafened; if it's against Necrons it's not a fight but a slaughter.(Guess who is on what side of that))
• Beaming Grin (Tyranid bio-plasma, certain daemons and daemonhosts.)
• Beam Spam (The Imperial Guard universally tote rapid-firing laser weapons, and they field a lot of men.)
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished (Often played straight by the Eldar, and justified by the Callidus Assassins (who are all shapeshifters). Generally avoided by the Sisters of Battle, who are about as ugly, scarred and broken as you might expect "realistic" battle-nuns to be, and get older, fatter and meaner as you move up the chain of command.)
• Beauty Equals Goodness (Subverted to hell by followers of Slaanesh)
• Because I Said So (Frequently the only justification you'll ever get from the Inquisition.)
• Bee People (Tyranids.)
• Bellisarios Maxim (This setting runs on Rule Of Cool.)
• Belief Makes You Stupid (And keeps you alive.)
• Benevolent Alien Invasion (The Tau. At least compared to any of the alternatives.)
• Berserk Button (In-game with Arco-Flagellants, and also in real life. Try bringing up the Squats at any GW press event. See what happens...)
  • There was a secret rule on the official GW forums before they were closed. If you ever mentioned the Squats, for any reason whatsoever, the moderators would permanently ban you and delete the thread.
• Better To Die Than Be Killed (Considered an honourable end for disgraced Imperial Guard officers and those touched by the Warp, and much preferable to being taken alive by the Ecclesiarchy or Dark Eldar)
• Beyond The Impossible (How much Dakka can the Ork Mekboys put together [Answer: never enuff]? How much more evil can we make the Dark Eldar? How loud can Kharn scream "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"? How big of a Big Bad can Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!, defeat through a combination of dumb luck, skill and fast thinking? Just how much worse can things get? It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the setting pretty much runs on Beyond The Impossible.)
• Big Bad (Abbadon the Despoiler is the closest to the traditional concept-the other contenders for number one evil in 40k are better described as forces and gods than true villains)
• BFG (Way, way too many to list here. The short version is: Anything carried by a Space Marine.)
  • Or anything carried by the Tau, who are defined as the "shooty" faction.
  • Or anything carried by an Ork, whose guns mainly run on Clap Your Hands If You Believe and "moar dakka". The Ork Shokk Attak Gun, one of the most beautiful examples of the setting's "screw you, physics" attitude, sucks up tiny gremlins and fires them through the warp into armour. Having an insane daemon-tortured Snotling appearing inside your skull? Hurts.
  • Eldar wraithcannons send you straight to hell - and their standard issue assault rifles shoot tens of thousands of molecule-thick ninja stars at hypersonic speeds. Then there's the support weapon which vibrates the target to death. And the "Harlequin's Kiss," a device that shoots a mono-filament wire into the target, then spins, turning them into bloody soup. Oh, and a stupidly large handheld gun that shoots a cloud of these wires. And an artillery variant of the above, mounted on a house-sized flying tank.
  • The majority of Dark Eldar firearms are enormous spiky bladed things which fire pure pain.
  • Even the standard issue Imperial Guardsman's lasgun, one of the weakest weapons in the setting, is capable of blowing off heads and limbs with a single shot. Considered weak because the average footsoldier in the setting is either wearing an absurdly huge suit of armour made of future ceramics/living metal/enormous rusted steel plates held together by bolts and belief, or won't even notice a mere lost head or limb.
• BFS (Eight-foot-long chainsaw sword with bolt-on flamethrower, anyone?)
• Big Badass Wolf (Fenrisian Wolves.)
• Bigger Stick (Leman Russ not enough? Baneblade. Then Leviathan. Then a Titan. Then a bigger Titan. Then Exterminatus.)
• Black And Grey Morality (Opinions vary between whether 40k is black and grey, black and black, or black and ALL-CONSUMING LIGHT DEVOURING VOID.)
  • Obligatory Penny Arcade link.
• Black Magic (Everything connected to Chaos.)
• Blade On A Stick (A number of Grey Knights' Nemesis Force Weapons come in the form of glaives; it's the default form for them in Dawn Of War. Eldar Singing Spears are also an example.)
• Blessed With Suck (Psykers; these are also a debatable case of Cursed With Awesome, at least until a daemon eats their soul.)
• Blind Seer (The soul-binding process required to turn psykers into Astropaths - interstellar telepaths used for all long-distance communication - completely burns out their eyes, though their psychic abilities generally compensate for it. Many non-Astropath psykers are also depicted as physically blind.)
• Blood Knight (Orks and followers of Khorne, for the most part. You also get a fair number of Imperial, Eldar, and Dark Eldar in this category.)
• Body Horror
• Bond Creatures (Both natural, in the somewhat obscure Grynx, and the various creations serving psykers as Familiars.)
• Book Of Shadows (Various tomes kept by the Inquisition.)
• Broken Masquerade (The secular Imperium of the Great Crusade was founded on the idea that there were no gods, no daemons, nothing that could not be explained by science. That got disproved pretty comprehensively.)
• Brown Note (Chaos iconography can drive men insane. Chaos daemons are a whole world of horror beyond that.)
• Bug War (Whenever the Tyranids show up.)
• Bullet Proof Vest (The standard Imperial Guardsman is equipped with a flashlight and T-shirt a lasgun and flak vest. Guess how much good it does in this universe.)
• Burn The Witch (Standard government policy.)
• Canis Latinicus (Conventional rendering of High Gothic; e.g., Adeptus Astartes, Adeptus Mechanicus.)
• Cant Argue With Elves (...but you can shoot them in the face. Foul Xenos.)
• Car Fu (Tank Shock.)
• Card Carrying Villain (Followers of Chaos.)
• Cargo Cult (The Imperium of Man combines this with Ancient Astronauts in an interesting fashion, as the overwhelming majority of the technology they use predates the incident that put the Emperor on life-support, and maintenance has become more of a religious ceremony than anything else.)
  • A little more complicated, Depending On The Writer. The Mechanicus are often depicted as competent engineers despite/because of their mystical approach, who understand the workings of many things and for whom reverse-engineering the rest and discovering the physics responsible is a holy quest for enlightenment.
• Casual Interstellar Travel (Played straight by the Eldar with their Webway and the Necrons with their Inertialess Drive, brutally, horribly averted by everyone else.)
• Catch Phrase (The Emperor protects!/Death to the False Emperor!/For the Greater Good!/WAAAAGH!)
• Chandlers Law (When in doubt, have another Tyranid/Ork/Chaos/Necron invasion.)
• Character Derailment (Over the universe's many years at the hands of dozens of writers and developers, and in the minds of its huge fandom, a great deal of change, Flanderisation and decay has gone on.)
  • Wraithbone was, in the past, an exotic material even to the Eldar, reserved principally for Seers' rune armour and the construction of Wraithguard and Wraithlords. Now, it seems, everything the Eldar have is made of it.
  • Somewhere along the line the Necrons' aims in unlife changed from mysterious "harvests" and enigmatic plans to "kill everything, everywhere", though this is more a belief among fans than actual canon.
  • Khorne was once a god of martial prowess and honour, whose followers would not slaughter the defenceless. Now, all that matters is blood is shed and skulls are taken, caring not from where the blood flows.
• The Chessmaster (Ongoing manipulation contest between the Chaos god Tzeentch, the C'tan Deceiver, and the Eldar Seers. Chances are, any major galactic happening is going to have at least one of them cackling "just as planned".)
• Chunky Salsa Rule (Game mechanic: Instant Death.)
• Church Militant (Very, very Militant.)
• Chainsaw Good Chainsaws = God (The Space Marines, Eldar and Chaos regularly equip their close combat specialists with chainsaw swords. Not to mention the Church Militant handing out chainswords with blades eight feet long capable of cutting the armour of a tank to its most fanatical squads of religious psychopaths. And let's not even get started on the daemonically possessed mecha armed with a chainsaw the size of a skyscraper...)
  • As well as the ubiquitous (!) chainsword, the universe features chainsaw axes, chainsaw glaives, chainsaw claws, chainsaw scalpels and chainsaw fists.
  • Don't forget chainsaw bayonets!
• City In A Bottle (Some hive cities get like this.)
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe (Ork technology. If you hand an Ork a stick, and successfully convince him it is a gun, it will fire bullets. Paint things red and they will go faster.)
• Clothes Make The Maniac (Chaos-corrupted suits of armour. Granted, in most cases this is more a case of Clothes Make The Maniac Worse.)
• Coat Hat Mask (Commissars, although most don't wear masks. Gas masks on the other hand...)
• Cold Sniper (Vindicare Temple Assassins.)
• Colony Drop (Deconstructed, if you can believe it, but also used straight on occasion. "In close consultation with his advisors, Orkimedes determined that the best solution to the tactical flexibility of Imperial forces was to drop big rocks on them.")
• Companion Cube (The Adeptus Mechanicus and their treatment of any machine.)
• Compensating For Something (Imperial architecture in general. Mile-high Gothic cathedrals as far as the eye can see.)
• Complete Monster (Chaos and Dark Eldar, full force)
• Conservation Of Ninjutsu (Operates in full force.)
• Cool Ship (Millennia-old kilometres-long battle cathedrals in space.)
• Cool But Inefficient (Imperial Navy spaceships are hypertech vessels decorated with gargoyles and other morbid sculptures on the outside, and crewed mostly by throngs of press-ganged deck-hands that must do most everything by muscle power.)
• Combat Tentacles (Tyranids mount these on everything from mooks to spaceships.)
• The Corps Is Mother (The Adeptus Astra Telepathica, responsible for human psykers.)
• Corrupt Church (The Ecclesiarchy. Chaos cults go rather beyond "corrupt".)
• The Corruption (Chaos, if not the ur-example, is one of the most developed in any setting.)
• Cosmic Horror (The Warp is made up of the combined emotions and hatred of the universe. And it hates back.)
• Crack Is Cheaper
• Crapsack World (More like a Crapsack Galaxy...)
  • Make that a Crapsack Universe: escape the Milky Way and you're just going to run into more Tyranid Hivefleets and the dead galaxies they left in their path.
• Crazy Enough To Work (Everything the Orks do, ever.)
• Creepy Monotone (Necron Lords, on the few occasions they do speak.)
• Crippling Overspecialisation (The Eldar's Hat.)
• Crosses The Line Twice (The entire core of Da Orks' humour is their ridiculously, overwhelmingly violent nature.)
• Crowning Moment Of Awesome (Gets an entire page to itself.)
• Crystal Dragon Jesus (Of course, there's a chance that the Emperor was Jesus...)
• Crystal Spires And Togas (Eldar and Tau only.)
• Cult (Plenty serving Chaos, with some others devoted to the Emperor.)
• Culture Police (The Inquisition and Adeptus Arbites are pretty laid-back about culture, so long as planets revere the Emperor and pay tribute to the Imperium. However, if they see anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of Chaos, the purge will be swift and without mercy.)
• Custom Uniform (Many examples for minor characters and squad leaders, such as Imperial Guard commissars and techpriests and Eldar warlocks.)
• Cutscene Power To The Max (The differences in power between beings are drastically diminished in the actual tabletop game compared to the fluff - don't expect those greater daemons to kill whole worlds or the space marines to be a One Man Army... or those lasguns to punch through concrete.)
  • Lampshaded by a White Dwarf article that supplied rules for the "Movie Marines", more "accurate" depictions of Space Marines based on the fluff. Basically turns every Marine into a Hive Tyrant and every Bolter into an Assault Cannon, and they're about 100 points each.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul (Servitors, and most Adeptus Mechanicus magos. Possibly literal in the case of certain Necrons.)
• Dance Battler (Eldar Harlequins.)
• Dark Is Not Evil (Averted and played semi-straight. The Dark Eldar are a whole world nastier than their Craftworld cousins, but the Dark Angels, Black Templars et al are no more evil than other Space Marine Chapters.)
• Darker And Edgier (Taken almost to the point of parody. What positive attributes exist for the other factions are regularly pruned; particularly noticeable with the Eldar, who were getting almost sympathetic. Apparently, the Devs didn't like that.)
• Dark Messiah (Horus. A lot of Word Bearers seem to have delusions of this, too. The Emperor could also count as a successful version.)
  • It's just as possible that the Emperor was a straight Messianic Archetype whose plans were brutally subverted by the power-seekers and paranoids who took them up after he was forced to become one with the furniture.
• The Dark Side (Somewhat predictably, the setting takes this trope and hurls it off the deep end in the form of Chaos. The result? There's no Light Side-only a sort of Gray Side, and the actual Dark Side is sentient. A sentient, extremely intelligent, masterfully manipulative, and very powerful Dark Side that occasionally takes matters into its own hands when mortal pawns aren't getting the job done.)
• Days Of Future Past (Feudal or Oligarchal planetary government is the order of the day in most of the Imperium.)
• Deal With The Devil (Having anything to do with Chaos.)
• Death By Sex (Slaanesh is very tempting...)
• Death Of A Thousand Cuts (General Imperial Guard tactics - point enough "flashlights" at something and it should go down.)
• Death Ray (Rays which cause death, rays which fire death, rays which eat death, and rays which are fired by Death.)
• Death World (The Trope Namer, and one of the more common Single Biome Planets.)
• Defector From Decadence (The Craftworld Eldar and Exodites, before the Fall of the Eldar. Turned out they were right...)
  • Also, in their novels, the Soul Drinkers Space Marine chapter. Except the Decadence is the Imperium. After a Thirty Xanatos Pileup gone badly wrong, they decided that the Obstructive Bureaucrats, Corrupt Church, and ignorant, terrified populace couldn't possibly be what the Emperor wanted.
• Deflector Shields (Starting with personal infantry shields or shield drones and reaching up to Void Shields that defend Titans and starships.)
• Dem Bones (Servo-skulls and Necrons.)
• Demonic Invaders (Chaos being the prime offender, of course.)
• Demonic Possession (Even the tanks can get possessed.)
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells (Holy hammers, holy bullets, holy stakes, holy artillery rounds, holy flamethrowers.)
• Derelict Graveyard (Space Hulks.)
• Determinator: (The Necrons and Tyranids are entire races of Implacable Determinators, but insanely determined people crop up everywhere in this universe.)
  • One of the more extreme examples is Black Templars, who are the only army that move towards the enemy when their men die. On top of this, they are literally fearless in close combat - a lone Neophyte (a warrior novice) who has just seen the rest of his squad die will stay in the fight against a monster three times his size, which just happens to have huge claws, acidic blood, head-bursting psychic powers and Emperor knows what else.
  • On the Chaos side, the Khorne berserkers voluntarily undergo a partial lobotomisation that make them singlemindedly bloodthirsty and removes their inclination towards self-preservation. This means that they rush into melee brandishing chainsaw axes and are completely immune to morale effects.
  • Another notable example would be Commissar Sebastian Yarrick. Despite losing his left eye and his right arm, as well as being an old, old man by the time of his main exploits, Yarrick managed to inspire terror and respect in the Orks by his uncanny ability to fight in the thick of it no matter the odds (and the pain). When his right arm got chopped off he simply beheaded the offending Ork Warboss and kept on fighting, only "allowing himself the luxury of passing out" after the long battle was won. This has granted him the dubious honour of being WH40K fandom's answer to Chuck Norris, Jack Bauer and meme-makers know who else.
    • He then took the Warboss' giant, mechanical claw-arm. So Yeah.
  • Slightly subverted by the Tau, who are physically unable to disobey their Ethereal caste leaders. If an Ethereal tells another Tau to do something, they automatically become the Determinator. If all nearby Ethereals are killed in battle, they tend to react... poorly.
  • Also subverted by the Eldar. They're extremely flexible with individual plans (being a race of clairvoyant Magnificent Bastards) but their long term goal is to survive long enough to create a new god of Death using psychic crystals that hold their dead warriors' souls. All this to kill the old god of Lust they accidentally created that wiped out their civilisation. When their blood is up, the Eldar act a lot less like a dying race and a lot more like a horde of screaming kamikazes.
• Designated Hero (The Imperial Guard and the Space Marines. Witch Hunters aren't even trying.)
• Detect Evil (Psykers can sense the presence of Chaos.)
• Deus Est Machina (Taken literally by the Omnissiah, and almost literally by the Void Dragon.)
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu (Daemons, C'tan, and other Eldritch Abominations can be defeated, if only by throwing absolutely everything at them - but destroying the physical form of a daemon only banishes it back to the warp for a while, and the C'tan merely need to fashion new necrodermis bodies.)
• Dissonant Serenity (Eldar, mostly.)
• Does This Remind You Of Anything (Tyranid wargear. Do not examine the biology behind it too closely.)
• Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (The Eldar and Imperium are entire races in the middle of this.)
• Doomsday Device (Lots, in every form imaginable, from sucking planets into hell to simply breaking them apart from the inside out.)
• Dream Land (The Warp.)
• Dressed To Kill (Commissars, priests of the Ecclesiarchy)
• Drop The Hammer (Partly named after this trope. Thunder hammers, a gigantic hammer with a tank-splitting energy release, are a favourite of Space Marine Terminators and the Ordo Malleus... which translates to "Order of the Hammer".)
• Drop Ship (Tonnes, the best known being Space Marine Thunderhawk Gunships.)
• Dual Wielding (Done with swords, axes, chainsaw swords, chainsaw axes, giant hammers and enormous bladed claws that shoot lightning; a combination of this and Guns Akimbo, with a pistol in one hand and a blade in the other, is used by virtually all close combat troops in the setting.)
  • Taken to the next step by Eldar Striking Scorpions, who have a chainsword in one hand, pistol in the other, and mind-activated gun mounted on their helmet.
• Duel To The Death (Common in the Imperium and Dark Eldar; extremely common, if informal, among the Orks.)
• Dumb Is Good (A major tenet of Imperial dogma: "Thought Begets Heresy; Heresy Begets Retribution" and "Only the Awkward Question; Only the Foolish Ask Twice" are two common quotes in the fluff.)
• During The War (Though sometimes it feels more like After The End.)
• Dystopia (It really, really doesn't get any worse.)
  • Although, according to the progression of the canon in the rulebooks, it is getting worse. MUCH worse.
• Earth Shattering Kaboom (Just about every large Imperial vessel is equipped for Exterminatus, the cleansing of an entire planet, which is often employed at the mere suspicion of heresy. Then there are the Eldar Akliamor, the Planet Killer, the Blackstone Fortresses...)
• Earth Is The Centre Of The Universe (Played literally, and justified. Earth is the psychic beacon known as the Astronomican, necessary for faster-than-light travel.)
  • For the humans, anyway.
• Eldritch Abomination (Crawling with them.)
• Elite Mooks (Elites choices, of course. Also, Space Marines in general, compared to the rest of the Imperium's armed forces.)
• Elves Vs Dwarves (Everyone with a motive more complicated than "must eat" or "must kill" has some ideological disdain of everyone else or some futile set of grudges.)
• Emotion Eater (C'tan, Dark Eldar, a lot of Chaos things.)
• Emotions Vs Stoicism (Heck, it was the wanton debauchery of the Eldar that created the chaos god Slaneesh, is it any wonder that stoicism is not just a virtue but a survival tactic?)
• Empathic Weapon (Imperial Titans, Eldar witch blades. Chaos daemon weapons are more Artifact Of Doom.)
• The Empire (The good guys.)
  • Kinda.
• Empire With A Dark Secret (The Tau Empire has a few skeletons in its closet. The Imperium of Mankind has entire mausoleums.)
• Enemy Civil War (Ongoing between various factions of Chaos, the Imperium, Tyranids, and Dark Eldar since the beginning, and still no end in sight. Literally a way of life for the Orks.)
• Enemy Mine (Very, very occasionally, two factions will work together to destroy a common enemy, and may even give each other a few minutes to run when it's all over.)
• Energy Weapon (From the humble lasgun to the odd Wave Motion Gun, 40k has energy weapons of every size.)
• Energy Beings (Daemons are these in the Warp, where they attempt to break into spaceships travelling through it and devour the souls of everyone inside.)
• Equal Opportunity Evil (Chaos accepts/corrupts everyone, regardless of species, though the main races are, in general, conveniently resistant or immune - Eldar know how to resist, Tau have next to no warp presence, Orks and Tyranids have huge psychic strength and are too devoted to a single purpose (WAAAGH/OM NOM NOM, respectively) to be easily corrupted. The Necrons appear to have contractual immunity, considering Chaos comes from the Warp and the Warp is anathema to them.)
• Establishing Character Moment - The stories and legends about the Primarchs, semi-mythical figureheads of the Space Marine legions, and the Emperor nearly all involve some establishing moment from the Primarchs first actions after being born (normally slaughtering hordes of aliens) to the first meetings between the Emperor and the Primarchs which will say something important about how how they saw him or why they betrayed him.
• The Eternal Churchill (The Imperium lives by this trope. Though individual worlds may enjoy centuries of peace, the Imperium as a whole has been fighting a war for survival on a hundred thousand fronts for ten millennia.)
• Eternal Engine (Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Worlds are described as being planets covered in these.)
• Everyone Calls Him Barkeep (Everyone calls him... the Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind.)
• Everything Trying To Kill You (Non-video game example: the setting in general, life on a Death World in particular.)
• The Evil Army (The Imperial Guard. Yeah, the good guys.)
• Evil Counterpart (Chaos Space Marines to Space Marines, Lost And The Damned to Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar to Craftworld Eldar.)
• Evil Feels Good (Renegade Marines.)
• Evil Is Not A Toy (Chaos, the C'tan.)
• Evil Overlord (Every Chaos Lord, Dark Eldar Archon and Ork warboss, and about half of the Imperium's governors.)
• Evil Is Sexy (One word: Slaanesh.)
• Evil Laugh (Chaos specialise in this; most Traitor Marines having been turned batshit insane over ten thousand years of war and slaughter, and the mind-warping effects of the Immaterium. Dawn Of War has Chaos Marines randomly break down and cackle occasionally.)
• Evil Prince (Horus, the first and most favored son of the Emperor)
• Evil Tower Of Ominousness (The tower on the Thousand Sons' adopted homeworld, Adeptus Arbites citadels, Space Marine Fortress-Monasteries, etc.)
• Evil Versus Evil (Try and find any other conflict in this universe.)
• Eviler Than Thou (An ongoing contest between all the factions.)
• Exactly What It Says On The Tin (Most prominent example being the Planet Killer.)
• Exotic Weapon Supremacy
• Expansion Pack World (Suddenly, the Tau Empire!)
• Expy (Lord Solar Macharius, of Alexander the Great.)
  • "Sly Marbo".
  • The Navis Nobilite Navigators' Guild.
  • "Praetorians! First rank FIRE! Second rank FIRE! Independent fire at will!"
• Extreme Omnivore (Tyranids eat everything up to and including entire planets, right down to the bedrock, including the atmosphere.)
  • Orks count, too, due to their incredibly robust physiology. Point in case, Ork Fighta-Bommas run their fuel lines through their cockpits, in case the pilot gets thirsty.
  • Space Marines, due to their various enhancements, are also able to survive by eating things most people wouldn't consider food.
• Eye Beams (played straight with Eldar Striking Scorpions and Dark Eldar Incubi, who have lasers mounted on their helmets. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick, having had his eye shot out of his skull, had it replaced with a bionic laser eye implant.)
  • ...which is his Eyepatch Of Power.
    • And Yriel now has a literal Eyepatch Of Power.
• Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong (Genestealers.)
• Faceless Goons (Most troops are either alien monsters or wear full-face helmets, but most squad leaders and superior officers don't, to make them stand out more. Yes, men in suits of Powered Armour the size of tanks are running around with their heads completely exposed. Good thing 40k snipers haven't learned to hit the weak point For Massive Damage.)
  • Of course, Space Marines have skulls made of reinforced armour and can take small arms fire to the face. Then there's the Space Wolves who don't wear helmets because they can tell the location, armament, and morale of nearby enemies based on their insane sense of smell.
• Failure Is The Only Option (Try winning Annihilate as Imperial Guard. Have fun <3!!!)
• The Fair Folk (All varieties of Eldar are, when you get down to it, bastards.)
• Fallen Hero (Every Chaos Space Marine. Some (the original Traitor Legions) in a vast Chaos-inspired collective rebellion known as the Horus Heresy, ten millennia before the setting; some (Renegades) later, for various reasons. Even most of the Chaos Primarchs were once noble heroes with genuinely sympathetic backstory, and some, such as Magnus and Fulgrim, have particularly tragic reasons for their descent into damnation.)
  • A particularly tragic example is the Fallen Angels, a group of Dark Angel Space Marines who were tricked into siding with Chaos during the Heresy, and are mercilessly hunted and tortured by their loyalist brothers.
  • How about the Thousand Sons? If the God-Emperor had not sent the Space Wolves in response to Magnus' attempt to warn him about Horus' treachery, the Thousand Sons may not have fallen to Chaos.
    • Horus being the most prominent example at hand. An incredibly talented, charismatic and powerful leader, Horus was, essentially, tricked into rebelling by being shown a future where (so he thought) he had been forgotten (along with all the other traitor primarchs) and the Emperor was worshipped as a God. Ironically / Tragically, this was in fact that future that his very rebellion would create.
• Fan Nickname (Hundreds. A popular nickname for the blue-armoured Ultramarines is "Smurfs", which logically leads to their Chapter Master being known as "Papa Smurf". A list is available here.)
• Fantastic Racism ("Beware the alien, the mutant, the heretic". The Imperium of Man is rabidly and xenocidally human-centric, but considering that the Eldar view every other species as mindless pawns to be manipulated, the Tau are divided into genetically "pure" castes based on their physical specialisations, the Orks tend to "crump any o' 'dose gits what ain't Orky enuff!" - including other Orks - and everything else is trying to kill everything else, it's fairly understandable.)
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture (Among the Space Marines, we have the Viking Space Wolves, the Mongol White Scars, the Roman Ultramarines as the most obvious examples. Imperial Guard regiments include the World War II German-inspired Steel Legion and the rather more Grimdark World War II German-inspired Death Korps of Krieg, the fur-hatted Russian Valhallans and Cossack-based Vostroyan Firstborn, the Arabic Tallarn Desert Raiders, the Vietnam War-themed Catachan Jungle Fighters, the Prussian-esque Mordians, the pith-helmeted, red-coated Praetorians, and the Welsh/Scottish Tanith First-and-Only. The Orks started life as a caricature of British football hooligans, and in the Dawn of War series, the Tau are characterised by distinctly Asian accents, which rather coincides with their Taoist philosophy and rather Animesque designs. They're also commonly seen as Space Communists for their "Greater Good" philosophy.)
• Faster Than Light Travel (...travelling