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Warhammer 40000
alt title(s): Warhammer 40 K; Warhammer Forty Thousand
A hundred thousand worlds, ten hundred thousand wars. There is no respite, there is nowhere to hide. Across the galaxy there is only war.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

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 expanded beyond the boundaries of the Solar System...to discover that the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that even it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons (as well as soulless death-machines and nightmare 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, down to the last bacterium. There's a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species 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, but they will at least offer you admittance to their club.

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 RPGs Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. A small but growing number of 40k videogames have also been made, of which the most recent are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War and its sequel Dawn Of War II, a pair of Real Time Strategy games 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 is a third-person shooter, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.

Tropes for the Trope God, Examples for the Example Throne!

  • Absurdly Sharp Blade: Nearly every faction has an example.
  • 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, grenades consisting of super tears collected from a thousand crying statues of the emperor.)
    • Space Marine Sternguard Veterans ONLY carry abnormal ammo: rocket-propelled APDS rounds, rocket-propelled flaming airburst rounds, rocket-propelled vials of flesh-eating acid, and rocket-propelled miniaturized fusion bombs.
  • Abusive Precursors (C'tan definitely qualify.)
  • The Aesthetics Of Technology (Brutally averted for the Imperium. That huge, boxy, primitive-looking Leman Russ? That tank can practically tap dance it's so damn maneuverable. Also played straight for Eldar, whose tech is every bit as advanced as the inhuman sleekness suggests.)
  • Affably Evil (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.)
    • One of the three remaining Eldar Gods, Isha, the goddess of healing, is his prisoner, and he uses her as a test subject for his plagues. Since she's the goddess of healing, they are instantly cured. Her fate would be much worse if she had fallen into the hands of the other Chaos God who sought to claim her. Being taken alive by Slaanesh him(her? it?)self is, even in the 40k universe, perhaps the single worst fate imaginable. At least Nurgle does love her, though being a Chaos God with atrocious codependency issues makes him express it in twisted ways.
  • 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.)
    • Tau drones are also entirely well-behaved. Mind you, their AI is approximately the same as a squirrel (OK, pterasquirrel).
  • 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 have red blood, although Eldar blood crystallizes instead of scabbing, and Ork blood used to be as green as their skin before Games Workshop retconned that. The Orks are now considered green due to thick amounts of algae that grow beneath their skin.)
  • 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, and the evidence of forced sterilization and concentration camps....)
  • 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 (Chaos and the Dark Eldar. Conversely, the Imperium and the Tau are Always Lawful Evil, the Eldar are Always Neutral Evil, the Orks are Always Chaotic Aggressive, the Necrons are Always Lawful Omnicidal, and the Tyranids are Always Neutral Hungry. All subject to interpretation, of course.)
  • Amazon Brigade (The Sisters of Battle and Eldar Howling Banshees. Not the Dark Eldar Wyches, oddly enough, unlike their Warhammer counterparts.)
    • Howling Banshees do have male members according to the lore, though they are rare. This is not, however, represented in any of the models.
      • It's stated in some sources that males walking the path of the Howling Banshee shed their gender identity and consider themselves female, so it's more like Amazon-Transvestite Brigade.
  • A Mech By Any Other Name (Dreadnoughts, Wraithlords, Gargants, Titans, etc.)
  • A Million Ten Billion Is A Statistic
  • Ancient Conspiracy (All over the place. Just as planned...)
    • A key example of this is a multi-race super secret Illuminati like group, whose entire goal is to rid the universe of Chaos. And what, do you ask, is their genius way of doing this? Aid Horus in every single way so he kills the Emperor, hopefully relying on the fact this will trigger the last ounce of guilt in Horus, effectively driving him into emo mood, which will cause only more civil war, eventually ridding the universe of humanity and leaving Chaos' best plaything destroyed. Evidently their plans weren't that smart. Horus got a nasty headache.
  • 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 largely forgotten how the technology works and considers it magical. More progress would be made in regaining that lost knowledge, but the Adeptus Mechanicus, the priesthood of technology, guards all their secrets jealously and considers the act of invention to be heresy punishable by death.)
  • 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.)
  • Animesque (The Tau and the Eldar, albeit in two diametrically-opposed fashions.)
  • 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. Which means you're immune to all the psychic and sorcerous nastiness out there, but everyone hates you because you have no soul and the Necrons will do unpleasant things to you if they find you.)
  • 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 Craftworld Eldar and the Tau (except possibly Commander Farsight), thoroughly averted by everyone else.)
  • 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, trying to cut a deal with the Physical God of death...)
  • 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 and force fields can and do make a difference most of the time. However, some weapons that are so powerful they could not care less about any conventional armour, including vortex weapons, C'tan phase weapons, and certain daemon weapons.)
    • Within the background, the standard flak armour is considered to be almost useless against the weapons of pretty much other race in the universe.
  • 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.)
  • Art Major Biology (First the biologically supermen are designed to look cool, then they later explain how it (doesn't) work.)
  • As Long As There Is Evil (Chaos, but the Necrons seem to have an... unorthodox solution to the problem in mind.)
    • "Kill everything, everywhere, down to the lasy microbe" isn't all that unorthodox in this setting.
      • But permanently sealing off the Materium from the Immaterium is.
  • Asskicking Equals Authority (Ork 'society'. It is said that a powerful enough Ork warlord uniting all of the galaxy's Orks could curbstomp every other faction. This is also how Space Marines get promoted, and how champions of Chaos gain renown.)
  • A Team Firing (All Orks ever, who consider More Dakka far more important than such nonsense as "aiming". The one exception would be Warboss Nazdreg, who has learned that dakka + aimin' = bigga 'splosions.)
  • The Atoner (Cypher and the Fallen Angels.)
  • Atop A Mountain Of Corpses
  • Attack Attack Attack (Orks)
  • 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, though in most cases those afflicted were already violent.)
  • Ave Machina (The Adeptus Mechanicus first and foremost, but also the Iron Hands chapter of Space Marines.)
  • 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.)
    • Lesser Axe Crazies include Imperial Penal Legion troopers, Blood Angel Space Marines in the throes of Black Rage, and the entire Ork race.
    • It should be noted that while every single Ork is an Omnicidal Axe Crazy Complete Monster by human standards, members of the Goff klan are considered Axe Crazy by other Orks.
  • Badass (Pretty much every character. Hell, pretty much every foot soldier. Characters get a whole new level of badass.)
    • Badass Army: The Space Marines. EVERY PLAYABLE ARMY.
    • 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.)
      • Let's not forget about DOOM RIDER, who's basically the Chaos equivalent of Ghost Rider (and who may or may not do cocaine... oh, who are we kidding. He's a daemon prince of Slaanesh, of course he does cocaine. And a bunch of other horrifying substances that make cocaine seem like powdered milk by comparison).
      • Don't forget to mention the White Scars, which is basically an entire Space Marine chapter of Badass Bikers.
    • Badass Boast (Too many to count.)
    • Badass Creed (Just about everyone barring Tyranids and Necrons. Generally shouted as a battle cry.)
      • That must have required some tactical geni- CREEEEEEED!
    • Badass Decay (The Necrons in general and the Void Dragon in particular have been steadily losing their mystery and power since being introduced.)
    • 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 (The Imperial Guard: ordinary human soldiers, taking on enemies that can kill ordinary human soldiers by looking at them funny, and winning. Admittedly more visible in the fiction than on the tabletop.)
    • Retired Badass (more than can be counted. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick, any Space Marine Dreadnought, and Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! among them.)
      • Aun'shi of the Tau got pretty close to retiring, before he was put back on duty by his bosses.
  • Bad Boss (Ok, maybe many Comissars have the justification of shooting fleeing men because there are a lot that can follow suit, and their infantry depend on More Dakka via their numbers to kill stuff, but...)
    • Ork Nobz also aren't above "krakkin' a few uv da ladz' 'eadz" (often fatally) in order to restore order, and Runtherdz maintain the "morale" of their Gretchin charges by having their squighounds devour a couple of them whenever they try to flee.
    • The grand master of this trope (insofar as the 40k universe has a grand master of horribleness) is Abaddon the Despoiler, Warmaster of Chaos. A fairly unpleasant person BEFORE he turned to Chaos, Abbadon is very much a believer in the Darth Vader approach of anger control, namely immediately killing those who displease him. However, this being the GRIMDARK setting it is, Abaddon takes it just one step further and will happily destroy ships of his own fleet if the captain of said vessel displeases him.
  • 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.)
    • Orks have their own version - A krawla will vary in size from a tank APC to a city on wheels which may in turn contain smaller krawlaz.
  • Battle Cry
    • "Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!"
    • "For the Emperor!"
    • "WAAAGH!"
    • "Harriers for the cup!"
  • 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.)
    • Questioning an Inquisitor for a justification will get you executed for Heresy. If you're lucky that is.
    • Repeat after me: The Commissar is always right.
    • Notice how the quote for Apathy Killed The Cat only goes as far as two...
  • Bee People (Tyranids. Also the Tau's Vespid Auxilaries, though they're more like Wasp People.)
  • 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.
    • A similar thing happens if you bring up the idea of female Space Marines.
  • 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.)
    • Or Chaos. Or the Inquisition. Or the Necrons. Or the Tyranids. Or....
  • 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 (Abaddon 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. Ghazghkull Thraka is another strong contender, though, and most other factions have their own Big Evil Overlords as well.)
  • Big Brother Is Watching (And ready to burn you at the stake.)
  • BFG (Way, way too many to list here.)
  • BFS (Eight-foot-long chainsaw sword with bolt-on flamethrower, anyone?)
    • Eviscerator, Uge choppa. Dreadnaught close combat weapon. Titian close combat weapon.
    • Special mention must go to the Dawn Blade wielded by Commander Farsight, which not only has to be mounted on a battlesuit, but can hack through tank armour. And it's got crackling energies all over it. About the only thing it lacks is a chainsaw edge.
  • Big Badass Wolf (Fenrisian Wolves, chaos hounds.)
  • Big Book Of War (The Tactica Imperium and the Codex Astartes. The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer would be this, were it not full of outright lies uplifting Imperial propaganda.)
  • 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.)
  • Black Magic (Everything connected to Chaos.)
  • The Blacksmith (Vulkan, who passed the trait on to the Salamander Astartes Chapter. To a lesser and weirder extent, Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands.)
  • 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.)
    • The Necron warscythe is one of the most feared close-combat weapons in existance- a glaive that can cut through energy fields without slowing down.
  • 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.)
  • Bling Of War (Imperial armour tends to turn into this if the wearer lives long enough and achieves high enough rank. Orks, particularly of the Bad Moon and Deathskull clans, also tend to acquire some pretty tricked-out combat gear.)
  • Blood Knight (Orks and followers of Khorne, without exception. You also get a fair number of Imperial, Eldar, and Dark Eldar in this category.)
  • Bloody Hilarious (Orks wouldn't be nearly as popular if they weren't so funny)
  • 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.)
  • Brain Bleach (What you'll need after reading Space Marine (the tabletop game, not the new video game). Or some of the stuff on /tg/.)
  • Brainwashed (Liberally used by Chaos, the Imperium, and... well, pretty much everyone else, really.)
    • Brainwashed And Crazy (Again much loved by Chaos. The Imperial Ecclesiarchy also likes to combine heretics with a partial lobotomy, advanced hypnosis, generic brainwashing, combat drugs and cybernetic implants to create Arcoflagellants, Ax Crazy combat monsters which are often set against their former allies)
  • Breath Weapon (Tyranid bio-plasma, certain daemons and daemonhosts.)
  • Bribing Your Way To Victory To Being Able To Play (A starter army, with the rule book, matching codex, bitz for customization, paints and glues, and a case to put it all in? Expect to put down half a grand. At least.)
    • Unless you get your pieces off E-Bay. The market's saturated.
    • Depend on what army you play. If you play World Eaters, you can get two squads of Khorne Berserkers and Kharn the Betrayer for about 50 bucks and have a pretty decent 500 point army.
  • 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, and things got worse as a result — thus demonstrating why the Emperor established the Masquerade in the first place.)
  • 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.)
  • Call A Rabbit A Smeerp (And occasionally Call A Smeerp A Rabbit.)
  • 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.)
    • Tau don't use the warp, but due to the short range of their technology they can't be considered as casual as everyone else.
  • Catch Phrase (The Emperor protects!/Death to the False Emperor!/For the Greater Good!/WAAAAGH!)
  • Chainsaw Good Chainsaw Is God (The Space Marines, Eldar, Orks 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.
  • 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".)
    • The Emperor is also a likely candidate for this trope, as it is hinted at in several texts that he knew the Horus Heresy would happen, and planned for it and all future events leading up to the present and probably beyond so as to (presumably) prepare the galaxy for an ultimately happy fate.
  • Chunky Salsa Rule (Game mechanic: Instant Death.)
    • Quote from the 5e Codex: "It can be imagined that the creature is vaporized, burned to a pile of ash, blasted limb from limb, or otherwise mortally slain in a suitably graphic fashion."
  • Character Exaggeration (The Imperial Guard's leaders are generally considered General Rippers who care very little about their troops because We Have Reserves by fans, as well as Commissars being complete sadists who will kill Guardsmen at the drop of a hat. Naturally, the Imperium doesn't encourage death - the 3rd edition 2nd Imperial Guard Codex says itself "A good general does not lead an army to destruction just because he knows it will follow." The Imperium just has lower standards of 'pointless' compared to us. However, that is usually done for Gallows Humor, and helps them say Warhammer 40000 is a World Half Empty very well. Which is still is.)
  • Child Soldiers (Space Marines are inducted at 10-14 and become Scouts by 15 at the latest. Cadian education and military training are the same thing, and they're typically full soldiers (which requires earning a medal) by some time in their teens — assuming they live that long. Orks incubate in their underground wombs until adolescence, and are ready to fight and kill the moment they break the soil.)
  • Church Militant (Very, very Militant.)
  • 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 (although it would take quite a lot to actually convince an Ork this is the case). Paint things red and they will go faster. It's important to note that not ALL ork technology works this way, and they are capable of building mechanically functioning equipment. They just don't often do so.)
    • It's not quite as simple as that - the item in question has to reasonably approximate whatever it is that the Ork believes it is. A stick won't fire bullets, but a slapped-together slugga will, provided there are actually bullets to be fired.
    • It's been hinted at that humans are, to an extent, capable of this too- their Tech Priests try to fix machines by praying to them, and while it usually fails like the Cargo Cult it is, it works just slightly too often to be coincidence. Pretty much confirmed, if you take the abilities of the Tech Priest from the Dark Heresy tabletop game as canon.
  • Clothes Make The Maniac (Chaos-corrupted suits of armour. Granted, in most cases this is more a case of Clothes Make The Maniac Worse.)
    • Eldar Phoenix Lords as well, for certain definitions of "maniac."
  • Coat Hat Mask (Commissars, although most don't wear masks. Gas masks on the other hand...)
  • Cold Blooded Torture (Most typical of the Inquisition - the torturers of other races usually have far too much fun to be called cold-blooded.)
  • Cold Sniper (Vindicare Temple Assassins.)
  • The Collector Of The Strange (Chaos, the Orks, and the Dark Eldar collect the skulls (and occasionally other body parts) of their enemies as trophies. The Imperium collects the skulls of particularly pious servants for use as relics and Attack Drones.)
  • 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." A surprisingly common Ork technique to both deploy close to the enemy [in fact on top of a portion of them] and weaken aforementioned enemy.)
  • Colour Coded For Your Convenience (Space Marine chapters, Chaos Space Marine legions, Eldar craftworlds, Ork klanz, Tyranid hive fleets, Necron tomb worlds, Tau septs — practically every major army has a set of color-coded subdivisions, and many of these have associated composition themes and stereotypes. Only the Imperial Guard defy color-based pigeonholing, and even they have certain color schemes they tend to favor.)
  • Combat Medic (Space Marine Apothecaries, Ork Painboyz, and pretty much anyone else with a medkit or the equivalent.)
  • Combat Tentacles (Tyranids mount these on everything from mooks to spaceships.)
  • Commissar Cap (Trope Namer, and not entirely restricted to Commissars-a few regular regular officers and the odd Inquisitor wear similar hats, and some Orks love looting 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 Starship (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.)
  • 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 Story (It's a universe where even death won't save you from an eternity of torture.)
  • Crack Is Cheaper (Just ask any Warhammer minis gamer.)
  • Crazy Awesome (Orks are Complete Monsters and Ax Crazy by human standards, and even have Bigger Stick as as cultural mark - but, being Warhammer 40000, they are used for Gallows Humor, which works very well. Sadly, the setting of Warhammer40000 is not a character, as the name for this trope describes half of it perfectly. The other half?...)
  • Crazy Enough To Work (Everything the Orks do, ever.)
  • Creepy Child (The Apex Twins, a minor but memorable background note. Think the girls from The Shining, except omnipotent and deadly.)
  • Creepy Monotone (Necron Lords, on the few occasions they do speak, and techpriests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Servitors are independently creepy and monotonous.)
  • Crippling Overspecialisation (The Eldar's Hat.)
    • Averted with the Space Marine Sternguard and the Deathwatch, who carry different types of ammunition for all different threats, and modifications for their standard issue boltgun to make it a powerful, long range sniper rifle.
  • Critical Failure (Hope you don't roll a 1 while carting that plasma gun around.)
  • 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, and plenty of others devoted to the Emperor. At least one devoted to Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!)
  • 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 — and not all Inquisitors agree on what constitutes a sign of Chaos.)
  • 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.)
    • In the transition from 2nd to 3rd Edition, orks went from dark comedic relief to darker and more brutal comedic relief.
    • And then the Tau went from "we'll negotiate for weeks if that's what it takes" to "join us or die." Of course, offering the "join us" option is still far, far nicer than everyone else.
      • This is partially explained, however, in that the current stage of Tau expansion is the Third, which came as a response to the Damocles crusade, a period of extreme and brutal fighting after which the Tau might hae noticed that the Imperium see negotiation in pretty much the same light as bloody holocaust when it comes to Xenos. They simply found out that it won't work as well as they thought, and adapted their strategy.
  • Dark Messiah (Horus. A lot of Word Bearers seem to have delusions of this, too. The Emperor of Mankind was either this or 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, extremely intelligent, masterfully manipulative, very powerful, and 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.)
  • Deadly Doctor (Mad Doks and Apothecaries are fully qualified and lethal combatants with their medical equipment.)
  • Deal With The Devil (Having anything to do with Chaos.)
  • Dead Man Switch (The facilities imprisoning a planet's psykers before they can be carted off to Terra usually have one. In case of any trouble, all held psykers are instantly gassed. Considering how much trouble "any trouble" can evolve to when you deal with several hundreds of untrained and unsanctioned psykers, this can be considered a wise precaution...)
  • Death By Sex (Slaanesh is very tempting...)
  • Death From Above (Jump infantry of every shape and size, Space Marine drop pods, Tyranid mycetic spores, and Ork roks.)
  • Death Of A Thousand Cuts (General Imperial Guard tactics - point enough "flashlights" at something and it should go down. Eldar shuriken and splinter weapons are a more literal example.)
  • Death Or Glory Attack (The Trope Namer.)
  • Death Ray (Rays which cause death, rays which fire death, rays which eat death, and rays which are fired by Death.)
  • Death World (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...)
  • Defictionalization (Look! A Rhino. A RHINO. Our game developers are building METAL BOXES, the cowards. The FOOLS!)
  • 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.
    • Played with 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.
    • Not only are the Orks determinators individually, they're determinators as a race. They reproduce by giving off spores that grow into orkoids (orks, gretchin, snotlings or squigs) in the ground. Orks come out of their pods fully formed and ready to fight anything they can find; since the more an Ork fights, the more spores he gives off, once you have Orks on a planet you will always have Orks on that planet.
  • 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. Then there's the part where they might be the same being...)
  • 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, though some of the more beatific Living Saints of the Imperium can manage to pull this off.)
  • The Ditz (Ogryn. Nork Deddog is considered to be a genius by Ogryn standards, in that he can sign his own name and count to four; even after receiving neural enhancement surgery, the very brightest of Ogryn only have the mental capacity of an eight year-old. Even the Orks look clever by comparison.)
  • 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 (Some Commissars, priests of the Ecclesiarchy, and Inquisitors make a point of dressing conservatively or humbly. The rest gleefully embrace the same Bling Of War worn by everyone else.)
  • 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.)
  • Drunk On The Dark Side (Don't stand too close to anyone powered by Chaos.)
  • 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. Half a step to the left are Dark Eldar Incubi, who trade the chainsword and pistol for a double-handed glaive but keep the head-gun.
  • 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," "Only the Awkward Question; Only the Foolish Ask Twice," and "Blessed Is The Mind Too Small For Doubt" are all common quotes in the fluff.)
  • During The War (Though sometimes it feels more like After The End.)
  • Dying As Yourself
  • Dystopia (It really, really doesn't get any 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 humanity's faster-than-light travel.)
  • 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 (or genetically-engineered) 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.)
  • Emperor Scientist (The Emperor, appropriately enough.)
  • The Empire (The good guys.)
  • Empire With A Dark Secret (The Tau Empire has a few skeletons in its closet. The Imperium of Mankind has entire mausoleums. To go further, since they inadvertently created an entire Chaos god, one of the most terrifying forces in the Galaxy, you could say the Eldar have an entire necropolis. The other sides also have dark histories; they're just more honest about them.)
  • 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. Again, a way of life for the Orks; the only thing that can put a stop to Orkish infighting is another, more enjoyable enemy to stomp.)
  • 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.)
  • Enthusiasm Versus Stoicism
  • 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, and 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.)
    • Although chaos orks do appear, particularly stormboy kultz.
  • 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 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. Or as planets that are these.)
  • Everyone Calls Him Barkeep (Everyone calls him... the Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind.)
  • Everything Is Better With Monkeys (The Jokaero.)
  • 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.)
    • And everyone else.
  • Evil Counterpart (Chaos Space Marines to Space Marines, Lost And The Damned to Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar to Craftworld Eldar.)
    • Not that those they're the counterparts to are good guys...
  • 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, Inquisition strongholds 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!)
  • Explosive Leash (Used on Imperial Penal Legion troopers to keep them killing the enemies of the Emperor and not their fellow Imperials or each other.)
  • Expy (Lord Solar Macharius, of Alexander the Great.)
  • 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.
    • The Kroot eat anything they can so near future generations will take on certain aspects... they also digest EVERYTHING they eat, to make up for the few things they don't.
  • 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.)
  • Eyepatch Of Power (Yarrick's aforementioned bionic laser eye. Prince Yriel of the Eldar also sports one.)
  • Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong (Genestealers.)
  • Face Heel Turn (Biggest example would be Horus. The brightest hope of all humanity since the Emperor, beloved by all of mankind, a peerless warrior and sublime statesman. The very best that humanity could ever be... is almost killed and shown Scrooge like visions of a future where he is forgotten and his Father is worshipped as a God across a million worlds. Cue instant patricidal hatred, and the begginings of a rebellion that would eventually damn the Galaxy into a slow decay of labyrinthine beaurocracy, never ending bloodshed, and, perhaps most tragically, no future for mankind. In other words... exactly what he saw.)
    • He hasn't quite been forgotten, even by the Red Shirt Army Imperial Guard; a character in the Ciaphas Cain book Caves of Ice describes a recently-shot Ork as being "deader than Horus". Also, officers with the rank of "Warmaster" (Horus's old title) often change it to something else to avoid the unpleasant associations with the title.
  • 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.
    • Another explanation for why some Space Marines and other users of power armor don't wear helmets is given by Inquisitor Amberley Vail in the Ciaphas Cain novel Duty Calls: since most sets of power armor are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old, the oxygen scrubbers that recycle air for the user are "tainted with the lingering bouquet of Emperor knows how many centuries of old sweat and flatulence."
    • The best reason so far to justify it was cooked up on warseer. Marines spend so much time up close and personal with a chainaxe, that visor lens are gonna be covered in blood most of the time anyway.
  • The Faceless (Eloeholth the Faceless, possible main villain of Dark Heresy.)
  • Failure Is The Only Option (Try winning Annihilate as Imperial Guard. Have fun <3!!! Thankfully no longer true as of the new Codex.)
  • Fainting Seer (Imperial Psykers with prophetic abilities tend to go a bit... quibbly when particularly world-shattering events, like Black Crusades, Tyranid invasions, or Ork WAAAGH!s are about to happen. Naturally, since this is 40k, the side effects are generally more messy and permanent than simple fainting.)
  • 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.
      • In the Horus Heresy book False Gods, the Emperor sent the Space Wolves to arrest Magnus. Russ attacked because Horus incited him to kill Magnus. When he hears it succeeded, Horus gloats that Magnus will end up on his side.
    • Horus himself is 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.
  • Fandom Rivalry (With Starcraft. Also with Warhammer on a certain level.)
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • The Eldar are a grab-bag of different cultures, combining Greek, Japanese, medieval European, and Commedia del'Arte influences with good old-fashioned Tolkienesque elvishness.
    • Both the Necrons and the Thousand Sons Chaos Space Marines show ancient Egyptian influence in their design.
  • Faster Than Light Travel (through hell.)
  • Fate Worse Than Death ("Pray they don't take you alive.")
  • The Federation (The Tau Empire, who ironically would be the bad guys in most settings. In 40k, they're the idealistic ones.)
  • Feel No Pain (Necrons, Orks, Space Marines, Nurgle, Thousand Sons. Don't even ask about followers of Slaanesh...)
  • Fetish Fuel (Between Slaanesh in general, the Dark Eldar, and some of the more esoteric Sisters of Battle troop types...)
    • And it's been confirmed: Sisters of Battle are not required to be celibate, and there are female Commissars. Of course, anyone hitting on a Battle Sister is likely to be mercilessly shot in mid-pick up line. (Or just have their head twisted off. Why waste the bullet on an annoying civilian?)
  • Fetus Terrible (The offspring of the Genestealer-subverted.)
  • Feudal Future (The Imperium, Ork empires, and Saim-Hann Craftworld being the most prominent, though most interstellar organizations eventually exhibit shades of this. Justified in all cases by slow and unreliable interstellar communications and travel.)
  • Finagles Law (Applies to everything and everyone, everywhere.)
    • To the point that the rogue chaos god Zuvassin is, for the most part, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Murphy's Law; he doesn't so much as give his worshippers orders as much as just let them loose, because if he actually were to give orders, they would find some way of messing them up.
  • Fisher King (Daemon worlds.)
  • Five Rounds Rapid (In background material, trying to take down warp-spawned horrors with conventional weapons usually achieves nothing, and alternative methods must be employed. Generally averted in the tabletop game; even greater daemons and star-gods can be hurt, but can take a hell of a lot of punishment.)
  • Flat Earth Atheist (The Tau, whose lack of warp sensitivity and general inexperience and naivety makes them doubt stories of daemons and other warp-spawned horrors.)
  • Flechette Storm (Eldar shuriken weapons, Dark Eldar splinter weapons, and at least one type of bolter shell all work like this.)
  • For Doom The Bell Tolls (The Bell of Lost Souls is located atop one of the highest towers of the Imperial Palace, and tolls once whenever a truly great hero of the Imperium dies. It is said to be audible on the other side of the planet.)
    • It is hinted at in the fluff that the bell tolls for every space marine that died in service to the Emperor. It must be ringing nearly all day and night if that is true.
  • For Science (Guiding star of the Adeptus Mechanicus, though their definition of "scientific progress" is tracking down and recovering ancient relics. That's the only difference; the Mechanicus will go to any ends to recover even a fragment of a STC device, no matter the cost. The Logician cult from Dark Heresy takes this creed even further, often with horrifying results.)
  • For The Evulz (Chaos, Dark Eldar, and Orks pretty much have this as their main motivation.)
  • Fragile Speedster (Taken to extremes by the Eldar; taken to ridiculous extremes by Dark Eldar.)
  • Frickin Laser Beams (Starting with lasguns.)
  • Friendly Enemy (Ghazghkull Thraka, to Commissar Yarrick. The feeling is not mutual.)
    • Orks have a word to describe this: "Skumgrod" roughly translates to "Favourite Enemy." Or "Best Friend." This is the Ork psyche in a nutshell.
  • Forever War (That should be obvious by now.)
  • Four Is Death (The four chief Chaos Gods, The Corruption distilled. Massively powerful warp entities, each a reflection of one survivalist emotion as present in the collective subconscious of all sentient beings. Each has their own set of daemonic creatures and corrupted followers. Similarly, the surviving C'tan number four: The Deceiver, The Nightbringer, The Outsider and the Void Dragon.
  • Full Frontal Assault (Sisters Repentia, Arco-flagellants, and daemonhosts.)
  • Funetik Aksent (Orks.)
  • Gaiden Game (The various Spinoffs listed in the introduction.)
  • Galactic Conqueror (Too many to count. Some evil, some really evil.)
  • Game Breaker (The new Ork codex, especially the infamous Nob Biker list, an army list designed around a loop hole in the wound allocation rules of 5th edition.)
  • Gang Of Hats (All the various gangs from Necromunda.)
  • Gatling Good (Consider the Assault Cannon, a gatling gun which can cut through light vehicles. Next, consider the Punisher Gatling Cannon, a gatling gun the size of a main tank cannon that can slaughter entire squads of light infantry at a time. Then the Vulcan Mega-Bolter, a gatling gun the size of a whole tank that can mow down armies. Now look at the Hellstorm cannon, a gatling gun the size of a skyscraper. And that's just in the Imperium. Yep, 40k likes this one.)
  • General Failure (One begins to wonder why Failbaddon Abaddon the Despoiler even bothers with his Black Crusades any more. Despite being able to unite just about every Chaos faction, daemon, monster, corrupted legion of super-soldiers and titanic war machine under his banner, he's failed at every attempt to destroy the Imperium for ten thousand years. To be fair, he does have to go through the most heavily-fortified world in the galaxy, and total destruction of the Imperium of man doesn't seem to be his only goal. . . )
  • General Ripper (More or less Imperial policy.)
  • Genetic Memory (Space Marines and Tyranid Lictors have the ability to absorb the memories of the dead by eating their flesh, particularly the brain. In addition, each Space Marine Chapter is based on the genetic templates of one of the Primarchs, and occasionally display traits and memories of that Primarch; Blood Angels, for example have a random chance of triggering the genetic memory of their Primarch's bloody death, which can drive them into an Unstoppable Rage. Ork Mekboyz and Painboyz have their (respectively) technological and medical talents genetically encoded, and Kroot are said in designers' notes to have gained Ork technology through their ability to absorb the DNA of prey.)
  • Genre Savvy (Imperial Guard regiments know exactly how expendable they are, and have low morale as a result.)
  • Geo Effects (Placing units in or behind pieces of terrain can greatly increase their chances of survival thanks to various rules for movement, shooting, and close combat.)
  • Get A Hold Of Yourself Man (Common among the Imperial Guard. Occasionally delivered via bullet.)
  • Ghost Ship (Space Hulks. Also some Eldar vessels, albeit more as "ships crewed by ghosts" than the traditional sense.)
  • Giant Flyer (Winged strains of the larger Tyranids.)
  • Giant Mook (Squad leaders: Veteran Sergeants, Sybarites, Warlocks etcetera. Literally in the case of Ork squad leaders (aka Nobz), who are actually physically larger than the Boyz under their command.)
  • Giant Spider (Giant robot spiders, no less, in the form of Necron Tomb Spyders, and a Humongous Mecha-scale variant called the Tomb Stalker.)
  • Girl With Psycho Weapon (Sisters of Battle "Sisters Repentia", entire squads of young women wearing scraps of parchment and carrying eight-foot-long chainsaw swords, driven on by an armoured woman with a barbed cat-o-nine-tails in each hand, who are apparently assigned to these squads to "repent" for perceived acts of immorality. Fetish Fuel much?)
  • Gladiator Revolt (The backstory of Angron, the primarch of the World Eaters in Warhammer 40000's copious backstory, involves this.)
  • Glass Cannon (Eldar put emphasis on the "cannon", Dark Eldar on the "glass".)
  • Glowing Eyes Of Doom (Everyone seems to have these.)
  • Golem (Eldar wraith-constructs.)
  • Goddamn Orks (Orks (indirectly) the trope namer. But also....Boy howdy...Goddamn Chaos Space Marines, Goddamn Dark Eldar, Goddamn Necrons, Goddamn Tyranids...)
  • God Is Evil (Taken to an extreme.)
    • Tzeentch: Chessmaster god of change, mutation, manipulation, sorcery, Magnificent Bastards and the long game. Daemons take the form of mutated horrible things which squirt hellfire from every orifice; followers are usually mutated-beyond-all-recognition sorcerers, or automatons reduced to dust sealed inside armour. Odds are high that everything going on in the entire galaxy is part of his Xanatos Roulette. Reflection of the emotion of hope.
    • Nurgle: God of decay, disease, corruption, entropy, maggots and Body Horror. Daemons take the form of potbellied maggotridden monsters of barely-held-together rotten flesh, mortal followers aren't much better. Apparently has a sense of humour, and is called Grandfather Nurgle by his followers, who see him as a kind and loving god. Born from the emotion of despair.
    • Khorne: God of rage, violence, war, oversized weapons and the Axe Crazy. Daemons take the form of spiky muscular freaks covered with blood and brass, usually holding really big axes. Followers are uniformly psychotic axe-waving Blood Knights, although this may be something of a Flanderisation - earlier background material described Khorne as the god of martial prowess, not just blind, screaming bloodlust. Khorne embodies the emotion of rage.
    • Slaanesh: God of pleasure, excess, Fetish Fuel, indulgence, Sense Freaks and Does This Remind You Of Anything. Daemons are bizarrely sensual things ranging from seductive siren-creatures absolutely covered in breasts to enormous worms with prehensile tongues which are... also covered in breasts. Accidentally squicked from the decadance of the Eldar, its birth destroying most of their civilisation in a galaxy-wide Mind Rape. Slaanesh embodies the emotion of desire.
    • Gork and Mork: the ork gods of Cunning Brutality and Brutal Cunning (The subtle distinction being: one hits you when you're not looking at it, the other does when you are). Reflection of ... er ... everything Axe Crazy in existence? By the way, those two kinda qualify as nice ones, or at least Comic Relief ones.
    • Then we have the Star Gods C'tan, who eat souls, or eachother for that matter.
    • The God Emperor of Mankind, a fascist overlord who reunited umanity by Curb Stomping everyone not agreeing with him being in charge, who qualifies as less evil.
  • Good Is Boring (Fortunately, there's very little of it around.)
  • Gotterdammerung (Literal and metaphorical.)
  • Gothic Punk (The nicer Imperial worlds are like this.)
  • Grim Reaper (The Nightbringer is the Grim Reaper of 40k, a hooded, scythe-wielding omnicidal star-god who gave all creatures (except the Orks) the fear of death. A lot of others in the universe like to style themselves after the ideal of the hooded reaper, including Eldar Dark Reapers and their Phoenix Lord Maugan Ra, various Dark Angels, the Death Guard primarch Mortarion and a few of his champions.)
    • In the case of the Dark Reapers and Maugan Ra, this is directly from the Nightbringer. The Eldar Aspect Warriors are all embodying a single aspect of Khaine, the Eldar War God; the aspect of the Reaper is a direct result of Khaine getting a bit of the Nightbringer stuck in him.
  • Grimmification (First-edition Rogue Trader started off - started off - as a spectacularly grim and horrible place where the good guys were insane thugs and war and horror dominated everything. It got much, much, much, much worse.)
  • Guns Akimbo (Cypher and Sisters of Battle Seraphim, mostly.)
  • Half Human Hybrids (Genestealer hybrids, though in an unusual take the original Genestealer itself is never a parent - it infects another creature with its genetic material, and when that creature reproduces normally with another of its kind, the offspring will be part Genestealer. Necron Pariahs are horrifying hybrids of Untouchable humans and Necron technology.)
  • Hanging Separately (Common among the Imperial armed forces, much to the Imperium's detriment.)
  • Hanlons Razor (Almost always inverted - never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by malice or conspiracy.)
  • Haunted Technology (Chaos has a bad habit of corrupting, if not outright possessing, various bits of technology.)
  • Have You Seen My God (All but three of the old Eldar pantheon were killed before or during the Fall of the Eldar; the survivors are Cegorach, the Laughing God of the Harlequins, Khaine, the god of war, shattered into pieces (which sleep in each craftworld as Avatars of Khaine), and Isha, the mother goddess, imprisoned by the Chaos God Nurgle to test his plagues on. The Eldar are also attempting to create Ynnead, a new god of death, from the souls of dead Eldar stored in the Craftworlds' Infinity Circuits, the idea being that when the very last Eldar dies, Ynnead will be strong enough to rise and defeat Slaanesh. Hopefully.)
  • He Who Fights Monsters (Older Inquisitors tend to have radical (not, not that kind of radical) ideas about protecting the Imperium, such as using alien technology to battle aliens or daemon-possessed weapons and artifacts to battle Chaos. This tends to cause friction with younger, more puritanical Inquisitors. Some postulate that this is the inevitable fate of every Inquisitor, and given their job description, it's not very surprising.)
  • The Heartless (Daemons of Chaos.)
  • Healing Factor (The entire gimmick of the Necrons and their "We'll Be Back" special rule, C'tan with their Necrodermis "skin", and certain Tyranid monstrous creatures. To a lesser degree Orks, who routinely survive anything short of including decapitation.)
  • Hellgate (The Eye of Terror, the Maelstrom, Van Groethe's Rapidity...)
  • Hellhound (Khornate Flesh Hounds. Also, to a lesser extent, Dark Eldar Warp Beasts. The Imperial Guard also have the Hellhound, a tank armed with a flamethrower.)
  • Hellish Horse (Daemonic mounts. Generally... somewhat less than pleasant.)
  • Heroic BSOD (Horus's BSOD was so epic, it ended up destroying the galaxy-wide empire he'd fought so hard to build in the first place.)
  • Heroic Willpower (Both played straight, and inverted - Villainous Willpower determines which of the two possible One Winged Angel routes a follower of Chaos goes down, mutating into either a mindless Chaos Spawn, or a Physical God.)
  • Hidden Elf Village (Eldar craftworlds, Exodite worlds, and Maiden Worlds. The Eldar aren't a very social bunch.)
    • They can be very sociable...to other Eldar. Everyone else, not so much.
  • Hive Mind (The Tyranids.)
  • Hive Queen (Tyranid Synapse Creatures.)
  • Hobbits (Seldom seen, but present as specialist snipers in the Imperial Guard.)
  • Hollywood Atheist (The Tau take this one so far it turns back on itself and they become Scary Dogmatic Aliens. The Emperor is portrayed as one as well; in one story he goes to the last church on Terra with the express purpose of destroying it, but not before he's broken the faith of the priest living inside and offered him a chance to join the new Imperium.)
  • Hollywood Cyborg (While there are "realistic" bionics, senior Mechanicus adepts often approach full-body conversion in their attempts to remove every trace of "weak flesh". Also Cyborks, Orks who suffered from particularly grievous injury or a particularly enthusiastic Painboy, and acquired lots of bionik bitz as a result.)
  • Hollywood Tactics (Generally averted by most races, barring the odd Imperial Guard regiment. Both thoroughly embraced and thoroughly subverted by the Orks, who actually make it work.)
  • Homage (Tonnes and tonnes of 'em, some minor, like planets named after Games Developers or deodorants, some much more major. The best example of a major homage would be the Necrons, started as a clear and blatant homage to the Terminator films: mysterious robotic skeletons, who carried on trying to kill you even if reduced to crawling torsos with no legs, and a special rule called "I'll Be Back". Later changes departed from this, focusing more on their image as impossibly ancient servants of even more impossibly ancient monsters. Essentially now a bunch of Ancient Evil Determinators with rather too much scalpel imagery, they maintain the robo-skeleton and "I'll Be Back".)
    • In what may be a twisted homage to the original Terminator's flesh gradually getting messed up to reveal the robotic endoskeleton (as well as a reference to the Aztec deity Xipe Totec), Necron Flayed Ones invert this: they start as machines that then drape themselves in the flayed corpses of their victims.
  • Hopeless War (For everyone.)
  • Horde Of Alien Locusts (Tyranids are possibly the ur-example.)
  • Horny Devils (Slaaneshi Daemons and Dark Eldar. The latter even have elite troops called Incubi and Succubi.)
  • Horny Vikings (Space Wolves are Vikings IN SPACE, though they don't wear horned helmets - those are reserved for Chaos Marines.)
  • Horse Of A Different Color (mutant horses, cyber-horses, cyber-boars, giant lizards, daemons that look like slugs, daemons that look like metal rhinos...)
  • House Rules (If you and your opponent agree to them.)
    • The rulebook actually takes a very congenial stance towards them. Some things basically HAVE to be decided by the players (especially when dealing with terrain).
  • HSQ (You must have thought of a few expletives if you read everything from the top to here, at least. Just keep in mind that you are only half-way through, though.)
  • Humans Are Bastards (Although, to be fair, so is everyone else. In addition, it has been established that the Imperium has to be terrible in order to survive. So Humans Are Bastards out of necessity rather than choice. Think of it as I Did What I Had To Do on a larger scale.)
  • Humanity Is Superior (Which is why everything else should be killed with fire.)
  • Human Resources (The one resource the Imperium has in unlimited amounts, which tends to lead to... wastefulness.)
  • Humans By Any Other Name (We're mon'keigh to the Eldar, gue'la to the Tau, humies 'umies to the Orks, playthings to the Dark Eldar, and lunch to the Tyranids.)
  • Human Sacrifice
  • Humongous Mecha (Titans, Gargants and, to a lesser extent, Space Marine Dreadnoughts, Ork Dreads and Killa Kans, Eldar Wraithlords and War Walkers, Chaos Defilers, Tau Battlesuits, Witch Hunter Penitent Engines...)
  • Hyperspace Is A Scary Place (The Warp, or Immaterium, is a reflection of the emotions of all sentient beings, the collective Dream Land of the galaxy and home to all the nightmares there have ever been, given form. Part Spirit World, part Phantom Zone, a sea of emotion and the source of all psychic power, it's also the daemon-infested home of the Chaos Gods and is, for all intents and purposes, hell. And going through it is the only faster-than-light travel available to most races.)
  • I Have Two Kidneys (Space Marines and Tyranids.)
  • Im A Humanitarian (Soylent Viridians, a form of food ration, also referred to as "corpse starch.")
    • There's also a widely known and somewhat popular religious sect whose main gimmick is cannibalism, though this behavior is generally frowned upon by the Ecclesiarchy as a whole.
    • The Kroot have this as their hat, as when they eat something they incorporate parts of its genome into their reproductive DNA. They began as vultures scavanging ork corpses and eventually became a bipedal, if still distinctly avian, species that eats their own (and everyone else's) dead, if the individual was strong enough to warrant being incorporated into future generations.
  • Immune To Bullets (Big daemons and monsters are generally more or less proof against small arms, though not against heavy weapons.)
    • Armour Value 14. Especially the Monolith.
  • Impaled With Extreme Prejudice (Sometimes on a chainsaw.)
  • Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy (Orks + guns = hilarity. Fortunately, they have More Dakka where that came from. Averted with the Imperium of Man's own Storm Troopers, who can aim just as well as any Space Marine.)
  • Implacable Man (Things like higher-level Tyranids, Space Marines, Orks and Daemons are ridiculously hard to take down, but the Necrons really take the cake.)
  • Implausible Fencing Powers (In the spin-off game, Inquisitor, characters are able to take a talent called "Deflect Shot" which allows them to attempt and deflect any shots fired at them as long as they are armed with either a power weapon (a melee weapon surrounded by a matter-disrupting energy field) or a force weapon (which is psychically linked to its wielder). This is also demonstrated in the last book of the Eisenhorn trilogy.)
    • Although, in an odd case of quasi-realism, when somebody else does this the protagonist's underling's answer is to switch to full auto and shoot her to bits.
  • Improvised Weapon (All Ork equipment is basically improvised out of bits of scrap metal. Even spaceships, because...)
  • It Runs On Nonsensoleum (...Ork technology is a justified case of this.)
  • Infernal Retaliation (Only mentioned in relationship to Tyranids, but more than likely applies to Necrons and Orks as well.)
  • Initiation Ceremony (Space Marines, especially the Grey Knights; also Chaos.)
  • Instrument Of Murder (Noise Marines.)
  • Intangible Man (Necron Wraiths.)
  • Interservice Rivalry (To the point that rival Imperial Guard regiments, Space Marine chapters, Inquisitorial task forces, or any combination of the above will occasionally open fire on each other in the name of the Emperor.)
  • In The Name Of The Moon (Every faction has their own equivalent.)
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting (Everything touched by Tzeentch.)
  • Inherent In The System (Were the oppressive and xenophobic Imperium of Man to ever fall (or even undergo significant reorganisation), the resultant chaos would lead directly and rapidly to Mankind's extinction at the hands of its many, many enemies.)
  • In Working Order (Justified for Orks - if they think it'll work, it will, even if it's actually broken. Averted and avoided by everyone else.)
  • It Got Worse (And how! The 5th Edition of the game has taken this even further, fleshing out the history of the past few hundred years - the Time of Ending - and revealing just how monumentally screwed the Imperium actually is.)
  • Its Raining Men (Deep Strike.)
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique (The "Nine Actions" are the Inquisition's specific guidelines on gradually increasing the intensity of their questioning, psyhological manipulation, torture, and Mind Rape. Action Nine would kill any normal human pretty quick, but then normal humans usually give in at about the two-mark, which involves explaining exactly what is going to happen through the next seven stages.)
    • Dark Eldar are also adept at this, owing to their experience with torture in general. Generally, however, they're more interested in the captive's screaming than in any information he might have to offer.
  • Join The Army They Said (The Imperial Guard.)
  • Judge Jury And Executioner (Several organisations and individuals with this power. The Adeptus Arbites (who rather resemble the Judges of Mega City One) who govern the populace, the Commissars of the Imperial Guard, the Ecclesiarchy (who tend to favour unusual punishments) and, of course, the Inquisition. Innocence proves nothing.)
  • The Juggernaut (Necrons, Tyranids, and the Imperial Guard. There's also a breed of Khornate daemon actually called the Juggernaut; for the uninitiated, it's the thing that looks like an angry metal rhino.)
  • Julius Beethoven Da Vinci (The Emperor may have been Jesus, among numerous other historical figures.)
  • Kick The Dog (Everyone, to everything, all the time.)
  • Kill Em All (This one was a no-brainer.)
  • Killer Rabbit (The Catachan Barking Toad, a large, sad-looking amphibian◊ sometimes dubbed the "Ronery Toad". If attacked, hurt or even surprised, it explodes into a cloud of obscenely virulent toxins, killing absolutely everything for miles around and poisoning the earth so that nothing will ever grow there again.)
  • Kill It With Fire (Government policy towards everything. The Salamanders chapter of Space Marines and the Witch Hunters specialize in fire based weapons.)
  • Killed Off For Real (GW's Old Shame, the Squats.)
  • King In The Mountain (The Emperor, several primarchs. Or so it is said.)
  • Knight Templar (Considered an ideal in the Imperium.)
  • Large And In Charge (Orks actually get steadily bigger as they gain more authority, Chaos Lords who have ascended to daemonhood tower over their merely giant minions, and the size of Tyranid "Synapse Creatures" leads to one piece of advice in dealing with Tyranids: "SHOOT THE BIG ONES!")
  • Large Ham (Given how many characters are batshit insane, and how insanity tends to feel good in this setting... players who don't treat the game as Serious Business tend to get hammy as time goes on.)
  • Laser Blade (Most power weapons are a disruption field-based variant of this, but a couple of genuine laser swords have come up in the fluff.)
  • Laser Sight (Tau markerlights are a variation of this, and they also appear on a lot of Imperial Guard weapons. Some unkind players suggest that Imperial lasguns are laser sights; while they can remove a head or limb with a single shot, compared to the other weapons...)
    • An Ork Targita or Gitfinda can be a crude version of this.
  • Last Stand (At any given moment, somewhere in the galaxy, an Imperial force is being wiped out to the last man. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium.")
  • Lawful Stupid Chaotic Stupid (Plenty of examples of both.)
  • Law Of Chromatic Superiority (Da blue wunz iz lucky, and da red wunz go FASTA!)
  • Law Of Inverse Recoil (Averted - firing an Autocannon has been known to break bones in an ordinary human, while Imperial missile launchers have been stated to have no recoil when fired correctly.)
    • In 2nd Edition, Wazdakka Gutzmek (an Ork mekboy) rode a motorcycle that mounted a battle cannon, a fairly large tank cannon. The recoil would knock his bike back several yards every time he fired it.
    • Bolters are a strange example, and have many inconsistencies. They would actually be a lower recoil weapon than a traditional projectile weapon due to the bolts being self propelled; some publications have them with little recoil while others demonstrate massive recoil for the imagery.
  • Lean And Mean (The Dark Eldar.)
  • Least Common Skin Tone (In the future there is only war... and white people.)
    • Though most all of the Space Marines of the Salamanders chapter are black in official art, and the White Scars are distinctly Asian. The fluff states the Tau have different skin colours, although all are variants on blue/grey. We have the distinctly shh-we're-not-Arabs Tallarns too.)
    • Also, one of Inquisitor Vail's footnotes in Caves of Ice indicates that while black people are decidedly rare on Valhalla, there are several nearby planets where pretty damn near everyone is black. Of course, there are still about 100 billion times more white people in the Imperium, So Yeah.
    • Also a good few modern Imperial Guard armies have black soldiers, especially the Catchians. It's how the gamer paints his stuff really.
  • The Legions Of Hell (Chaos. But they won't stay there, because they're...)
  • Like A Badass Out Of Hell (Chaos Marines, and anyone crazy enough to invade the Eye of Terror-mostly Space Wolves and Orks.)
  • The Library Of Babel (The Black Library.)
  • Light Is Not Good (The Church Militant makes sure of this one.)
  • Lightning Bruiser (Necrons exhibit shades of this on the ground (assuming they make full use of their monoliths and other fast-moving troops), but their naval fleet really takes the cake.)
    • The commanders of many armies are wicked fast in combat, orders of magnitude tougher than basic infantry, and often capable of wiping out entire squads of enemy troops single-handed in melee.
  • Living Ship (Tyranid vessels.)
    • Eldar vessels are living in a way, some even have no crew being piloted solely by the spirits of the dead.
  • Lizard Folk (Loxatl are lizardmen amphibian-men that are very resistant to lasgun fire and have weapons that would be very nasty in any other setting. There are also the Slann, the Recycled In Space version of Warhammer Lizardmen, though they don't show up much in the fluff anymore.)
  • Look On My Works Ye Mighty And Despair (The Eldar and pre-Imperium humanity.)
  • Lost Colony (All over the place.)
  • Lost Technology (See also Cargo Cult, Ancient Astronauts, Sufficiently Advanced Alien and Sealed Evil In A Can. The Blackstone Fortresses come under all five.)
  • Macross Missile Massacre (Sisters of Battle Exorcists, huge gothic church organs mounted on the backs of tanks, which fire anti-tank missiles as the battle nun in her armoured cockpit presses the keys. 40k, quite literally, pulls out ALL the stops.)
  • The Mad Hatter (Occasionally seen as a symptom of corruption by Chaos, particularly by Tzeentch.)
  • Mad Oracle (Precognition is a fairly well-known power of psykers, but carries with it The Dark Side. Aside from the Eldar, The Dark Side seems to win more often than not with would-be prophets.)
  • Mad Scientist (The only kind of scientist in the Imperium. Non-Imperial examples include Fabius Bile, Dark Eldar Haemonculi, and Ork Painboyz and Mekboyz (also known, appropriately enough, as Mad Doks and Mekaniaks respectively).)
  • Madness Mantra (Blood for the Blood God! Blood for the Blood God!!! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!)
    • And Skulls for the Skull Throne!
    • MAIM! KILL! BURN! MAIM! KILL! BURN! MAIM etc. etc.
    • In the spinoff game Battlefleet Gothic, an entire starship gets a Madness Mantra: the Chaos cruiser Killfrenzy is so named because, whenever it draws near, all that can be heard on every comms frequency is an endlessly-looping broadcast of +++KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY+++
  • Magic Knight (Grey Knights.)
  • Magic Misfire (Perils of the Warp.)
  • Magitek (Mostly the Eldar and the Necrons, though Imperial and Chaos gear crosses into this sometimes.)
  • The Magnificent (Kharn the Betrayer, Abaddon the Despoiler, and Scyrak the Slaughterer — among others)
  • Magnificent Bastard (Tzeentch is literally the god of Magnificent Bastards, and the Emperor is no slouch, either. On the mostly-mortal side of things, the Alpha Legion of Chaos Space Marines is composed entirely of Magnificent Bastards.)
  • Man Eating Plant (Crop up all the time on Death Worlds.)
  • The Mario (Space Marines.)
  • Mary Suetopia (The Tau Empire like to believe they're this, but really, everyone that even has a society are all Straw Dystopias...)
  • Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane (40k loves this one, given how blurry the line between magic and technology tends to be.)
  • Mc Ninja (Anything that has Infiltration, and then some.)
  • Meaningful Name (Both played straight and inverted where Space Marine Chapters are concerned; a popular joke pokes fun at this.)
  • Mecha Mooks (Necrons.)
  • Mechanical Horse (Krieg Death Riders and the like on the Imperial side, cyboars for the Orks.)
    • Mogul Kamir of Atilla had a mechanical horse made for him by the Adeptus Mechanicus, because he kept riding the flesh-and-blood ones to death.
  • Medieval Stasis (In SPACE! Also literal on many worlds.)
  • Mental World (The Warp.)
  • Memetic Molester (Lucius the Eternal. Even has his cry of OH YEEAAHHH!!!! (sounding like the Kool-Aid Man).)
    • Sisters of Battle are pedophiles, Eldrad lusts after the young (and supple) races, and Macha Biel-Tan cannot for the life of her lose her virginity. There are also numerous theories about what would happen if Slaanesh and the tentacle-happy Tyranids ever got together...
  • Memetic Mutation (The Traditional Games board of 4chan has spawned a great many 40k- and Dawn Of War-based memes, such as "Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!" and "METAL BOXES!")
  • Merchandise Driven (Oddly enough, the majority of the background material and fiction does not fall to this trope, although rules modifications and new army lists are often accused of changing stats only to boost sales of certain models, and both the monthly magazine White Dwarf and the Games Workshop website have gradually become less hobby supplements and more miniatures catalogues.)
  • Mercy Kill (The Emperor's Peace.)
  • Messianic Archetype (The Emperor.)
  • Mighty Glacier (Models wielding Power Fists strike last in close combat, but can punch clean through tank armor and pound enemy infantry into a bloody paste. The Leman Russ battle tank is slower than most vehicles its size, but it's a stable firing platform capable of unleashing twice as much firepower as most other tanks at combat speed.)
  • Military Mashup Machine (The Imperium in particular has a recurring love affair with these, and the Tau may be starting to lean this way.)
  • The Milky Way Is The Only Way (Mostly justified by the limitations of the various races' FTL. The Tyranids come from outside the Milky Way, but nothing more is known.)
  • Mind Rape (40k loves this one:)
    • The process of turning a psychically sensitive human into an Astropath is basically a Mind Rape, though it has a few physical aspects as well, such as their eyes being completely burned out.
    • Daemonic possession.
    • A lot of psychic powers are basically this, most obviously an Eldar power called "Mind War".
    • The psycho/hypnotherapy Space Marines undergo as part of their conversion from human to Astartes is a limited form of Mind Rape, a sort of mental The Spartan Way.
    • The Nightbringer Mind Raped proto-life so horribly that he instilled the fear of death in all living creatures in the galaxy, except the Orks.
  • Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness (Among the softest on the scale. In 40k, Rule Of Cool is physics.)
  • More Dakka (The Trope Namer, and home to the greatest examples in fiction or out of it.)
  • More Teeth Than The Osmond Family (Tyranids.)
  • More Than Mind Control (Chaos is insidious indeed.)
  • Monogender Monsters (Orks, all Boyz.)
  • Monster Clown (Eldar Harlequins are psychedelic space elf ninja killer clowns. They wear holographic harlequin costumes and extremely scary masks, and carry horrifyingly nasty weapons even by 40k standards; as an example, their usual squad support weapon fires molecule-edged crystal discs covered in toxins that make the target's blood explode. They worship the "Laughing God", and are the Eldar equivalent of a roving carnival, visiting the various Craftworlds and acting out tales from Eldar mythology with holographic, psychically-enhanced interpretive dance. When they're not killing people in unspeakably horrible ways, that is.)
    • Just to put this one in perspective, the Dark Eldar, a race of beings who have an almost genetic urge to torture people in anatomically horrific ways, are terrified of the Harlequins and dare not refuse them entry into the normally impregnable dimension they reside in.
  • Moral Event Horizon (The Tau and Eldar are about the only ones who even realize there is one, the Eldar having found out about it the hard way, and even then they don't think it applies to anyone else.)
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate (Ork Mad Doks and Painboyz to a Boy.)
  • Motive Decay (Those who attempt to use Chaos generally end up being used by it - and not caring.)
  • Multi Armed And Dangerous (Warp Spider Exarchs, the mandrake Decapitator, certain Mechanicus adepts, some cyborks, every Tyranid ever.)
  • Musical Assassin (Noise Marines and Goff Rokkerz kill with The Power Of Rock.)
  • My Country Right Or Wrong (The Imperial Guard sometimes gets this treatment, especially when they're the antagonists.)
  • My Significance Sense Is Tingling (Psykers can sometimes feel the psychic backlash of mass deaths or other strange events in the Warp. They can also detect the warp shadow of an oncoming Tyranid hive fleet, by going insane and dying.)
  • Names To Run Away From Really Fast (Chaos leaders' names like Kharn, Abaddon and Scyrak sound scary enough, and then you find that their respective nicknames are "the Betrayer", "the Despoiler" and "the Slaughterer". Ork names tend to be made up of words like "smash" and "skull," and that's before you get to the self-given titles like "Arch-Arsonist," "Arch-Dictator," "Arch-Maniac," and for a change of pace, "Da Big Bad Beast."
    • Also names like Decapitator or the Red Terror.
    • Dark Eldar get in on this, too. Lelith Hesperax, Urien Rakarth, and Asdrubael Vect, Supreme Lord of the Kabal of the Black Heart are all about as nice as they sound.
  • Necessarily Evil (Imperial servants in general, and Inquisitors in particular, knowingly and willingly do horrible things to innocent people on a regular basis because the consequences for not doing so could be catastrophic for humanity as a whole.)
  • Negative Space Wedgie (You really can't get more negative than the Eye of Terror.)
  • Neglectful Precursors (Strangely enough, inverted as it's more like neglectful moderners. Back in the golden age of technology, people were smart enough to create standard template constructs (STCs). Anyone who had one could build anything from a house to a tank if the situation required, regardless of ability or technology. Ten thousand years later, these same items created millenia ago are still in use, but the massive galaxy-spanning Imperium appears to be having trouble finding the things.)
    • To be more exact, the Imperium is having trouble finding even drawings of the things. A single ancient sketch of a blueprint taken off a broken STC (Broken is as good as they come after 20,000 years or so) is a prize enough to burn entire star systems.
  • New Technology Is Evil (Cornerstone of the Adeptus Mechanicus.)
    • Ask any two Magi and you'll get at least two answers, though. They all believe in the existing rituals of construction and maintenance, most believe in reverse engineering, enough believe in "respectful improvement" that new weapons do emerge, and they sometimes fight each other over whether xenos tech can be studied and recreated in a "purified" form or is just a blasphemy against the Machine-God.
  • Nice Hat (Commissars', though the wearers aren't.)
  • Nietzsche Wannabe (And they're the unbelievably and naively optimistic in this setting. Be honest and ask yourself what's worse: a cold and uncaring universe, or a universe actively out to get you?)
  • Night Of The Living Mooks (Necrons.)
  • Nightmare Fuel (Unleaded) (Oceans of it. Absolutely wall-to-wall, to the point that explicit descriptions of people being raped by axe-waving daemons, flayed alive and cut to pieces with chainsaws rarely get a raised eyebrow from veterans of the game.)
  • Night Vision Goggles (Tau blacksun filters, Imperial "heat see" devices and Space Marine autosensors.)
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot (*deep breath*:)
    • Repentant fanatical bondage nuns with chainsaw flamethrowers.
    • Psychic space elf torture-obsessed ninja bondage pirates/psychedelic ninja killer clowns/knights on flying bikes with laser lances/wizards/split-personality warriors with chainsaw swords and guns that shoot ninja stars/Luddite wood-elf hippie dinosaur riders.
    • Skin-stealing soul-eating green-lightning-spraying undead doom robots.
    • Psychic genetically engineered fanatically religious daemon-killing knights.
    • Genetically engineered green-skinned soccer-hooligan axe-crazy techno-barbarian space-orc aliens who are subconsciously psychic.
    • Asian caste-based bunny-eared-mecha-using alien hooved collectivist suicide bombers.
    • Axe-waving blood-drinking/mutated burning tentacley/rotting maggot-ridden cyclopean/androgynous crab-clawed sex-fiend psychic emotion daemons.
    • Viking/Mongol/Roman/Spartan/perverted Sense Freak bondage-obsessed/Axe Crazy/magic zombie/cyborg/vampire/Daemon-possessed genetically engineered power-armoured super-soldier warrior monks.
  • No Brainer (Space Marines, Tyranid Lictors.)
  • No One Gets Left Behind (Thoroughly averted for the most part - the Tau and Eldar are about the only ones who ever try, and the Eldar consider recovering the waystones of the dead good enough consolation for being unable to save the bodies of the living. Similarly, although the Marines consider it the highest honour to die in battle, they'll fight hard to recover the progenoid glands from the still-cooling bodies of their battle brothers.)
    • Necrons have an automated version of this.
    • Also, given the Cargo Cult/Ancestral Weapon nature of technology in the Imperium, the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Space Marines will often insist, and go to sometimes-absurd lengths to ensure that No Tech Gets Left Behind.
    • Orks invert this trope brutally and repeatedly.
  • No Plans No Prototype No Backup (Even the best and brightest Mekboyz don't know how some of the things they build work, or occasionally even what they had in mind when they started nailing bits on. Often the purpose of a mekboy speshul invention can only be determined by testing it, a dangerous pursuit.)
  • Nothing But Skulls (Most commonly associated with the Imperium. Yes, the good guys. They're also known for using skulls as Attack Drones.)
    • Orks, followers of Khorne, and Dark Eldar aren't slouches in the skull-taking department, either.
  • Noun Verbers (Lots of Space Marines, both Imperial and Chaos: World Eaters, Word Bearers, Soul Drinkers, Flesh Tearers, Flesh Eaters, Blood Drinkers, Skull Takers, Deathmongers, Fire Reavers...)
  • Nuke Em (Standard Imperial policy on dealing with anything more dangerous than an angry dog. Usually the right thing to do.)
    • A particularly egregious example is the Death Korps of Krieg, who "subjected their homeworld to a 500-year campaign of atomic cleansing."
  • Number Of The Beast (The Grey Knights are Chapter 666, and their initiation involves the 666 Rites of the Emperor. They hunt daemons.)
  • Numbered Homeworld (Both averted and played straight.)
  • Obstructive Bureaucrat (Planets of them. At least one of them is actually on the verge of civil war because they're running out of places to store the paperwork.)
  • Obviously Evil (Played straight, but also possibly subverted depending on just how "evil" you consider the Imperium.)
  • Officer And A Gentleman (The Imperial ideal. True to real life, many are also corrupt, incompetent, treasonous, or all-around bastards.)
  • Offscreen Villain Dark Matter (Ten thousand years of continuous war, and the Traitor Marines are still in bolter shells. This has been made somewhat less ridiculous in recent fluff, with mention of Chaos forge worlds, and a change in focus towards Renegade (recently-corrupted) Marines to distract from the question of how the original Traitor Legions even still exist. And since they do reside in the Eye of Terror, where "physics" is even more of a joke than elsewhere, they have literal Offscreen Villain Dark Matter.)
  • The Ogre (Ogryns of the Imperial Guard, armed with automatic shotguns designed to be equally useful as giant clubs.)
    • Feral World Ogryns, from the abhuman rules in White Dwarf, don't even get the shotguns.
  • Old Shame (GW regards the Squats and Zoats as "things better left forgotten." However, hints of them do pop up in new material from time to time...)
  • Omnicidal Maniac (Necrons, Tyranids, and certain Chaos factions to some extent. Orks too, just for fun.)
  • One Gender Race (Justified by the Orks because they reproduce asexually and are biologically a lot like fungi, justified by Space Marines for genetic engineering reasons and Sisters of Battle for political loophole reasons, avoided by Eldar, Dark Eldar and Imperial Guard, mostly played straight by Tau, don't even ask about the Necrons. Or Tyranids.)
    • Tau have different sexual characteristics from humans. The female dissected in Xenology is nearly indistingushable from a male Tau. End result: you could be fielding an all-female or all-male or mixed group of Fire Warriors. There's no way to know.
  • One Man Army (The entire point of Space Marines. Also taken to ridiculous limits by Shas'la Kais from the forgettable 40k FPS Fire Warrior. Also the Primarchs and the members of the Adeptus Custodes.)
  • One Winged Angel (Warriors of Chaos can be blessed or cursed with "gifts" from their patron Gods, turning them steadily more inhuman. Eventually, at a certain point, the weak-willed become mindless Chaos Spawn, while those with sufficient willpower ascend into Daemon Princes who retain their sentience and control over their vast powers. In either case the warrior now becomes a full Daemon extra vulnerable to anti-Daemon abilities and armament.)
  • One World Order (The Tau Empire, though as their fluff is expanded, differences between Tau Septs are starting to appear.)
  • Only Sane Man (Possibly the Tau Empire, though this is more of a subversion - it's the insane people who are completely correct and realistic about things, and the sane Tau seek to play by the rules in a universe that has none.)
  • Orcus On His Throne (Of the Chaos daemon Primarchs, a grand total of one has left his daemon world to attack the Imperium. And he got booted back home by a bunch of angry Space Vikings.)
  • Order Versus Chaos (Generally accepted as Imperium, Eldar, and Tau for Order, and Orks, Dark Eldar and, well, Chaos for Chaos. Necrons and Tyranids are off to the side a bit.)
  • Organic Technology (See Tyranids again.)
  • Our Monsters Are Different
  • Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions (The Imperium was created as a galaxy-wide example of this trope, and during the course of the Heresy became a comprehensive and horrible subversion.)
  • Out Of The Inferno (Happens a lot, especially with Space Marines, Orks, and particularly Necrons.)
  • Parental Issues (The Emperor and the Primarchs.)
    • Truly Single Parent (The Emperor was responsible for the creation of the twenty Primarchs before the start of the Great Crusade, at least partly from his own DNA.)
    • Parental Abandonment (The infant Primarchs were scattered through the Warp by the Chaos gods, coming to rest on various human worlds throughout the galaxy. It was, to be fair, hardly intentional, but they were all adults before the Emperor found them again.)
    • Like Father Like Son (Of the eighteen known, each Primarch had risen to a position of power before they were found, and most were the rulers of one or more planets.)
    • Raised By Wolves (Literally in the case of Leman Russ, more figuratively for some of the others.)
    • Parental Favoritism / The Un Favourite (Horus was the Emperor's "first son", both in order found and as the Warmaster of the Great Crusade, while some of the Emperor's decisions about his other children (especially concerning Magnus the Red) have been... questionable.)
    • Calling The Old Man Out (The Horus Heresy. Never let it be said that 40K does things on a small scale.)
    • Offing The Offspring (As a direct result of the above.)
    • Cain And Abel (Guilliman killed Alpharius after Horus' followers scattered, and was later mortally wounded and forced into stasis by Fulgrim.) (Though it was hinted that either Alpharius or his identical twin may not be as dead as was thought.)
      • In all likelihood, both Alpharius and Omegon are probably alive, as the entire Alpha Legion present themselves as Alpharius at one point or another. It is quite possible that the Alpharius killed was just a high up Space Marine sent to prove their worth.
    • Promotion To Parent (Roboute Guilliman essentially promoted himself after the Emperor's death/ascension/interment.)
    • Rage Against The Mentor (Alpharius, against Roboute Guilliman, although Alpharius admitted nothing more than a pragmatic indifferance to his brother's boasting. Other examples include Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, masters of fortifaction and endurance and Peteraubo, the Primarch of the seige expert Iron Warriors.
      • Perhaps the biggest example of this trope is that of Horus and Abaddon. Abaddon looked up to Horus, and his loyalty (before and during the heresy) was greater than any other. Except for when Horus eventually loses the seige of Terra and Abaddon starts having second thoughts. Cue taking immediate command of all chaos forces and retreating back to the Eye of Terror, thus coining the phrase "Horus was weak, Horus was a fool". Such was his hatred of Horus's weakness, Abaddon renamed the Sons of Horus legion to the Black Legion and, upon hearing about even the potential to clone Horus, launched an all out attack to destroy the project. Not that Abaddon has done much better than Horus... 13 Black crusades later and not an awful lot has changed....
  • People Puppets (Occasionally seen as an ability of psykers.)
  • Percussive Maintenance (Often a religious ritual, complete with chanting and sacred unguents, and it works. In one battle report, a Techmarine was described as fixing a complete tank engine with "a lot of chanting, and a few hammer blows".)
    • Ork Meks as well, via the "think it works" method.
  • Person Of Mass Destruction (Untrained Psykers are regarded as these by the Imperium, with good reason.)
  • Phantasy Spelling (Chaos "daemons" might or might not be an example of this. The word technically means "minor deity", but since that's what a lot of daemons actually are...)
  • Phantom Zone (The Warp. Again.)
  • Physical God (The Emperor may have been one of these, and the Primarchs were basically demigods; also, the Avatars of Khaine and the C'tan. Daemon Princes can sometimes have pretty god-like powers, too.)
  • Pirate
  • Pistol Whipping (A game mechanic.)
  • Planet Of Hats (Applies to several races, to try and reduce their Separate But Identical nature.)
    • Imperial Guard: Everyone from Cadia is a soldier, everyone from Krieg is an exceptionally grim and dour soldier in a longcoat, everyone from Praetoria is a Zulu extra, everyone from Catachan is Rambo (but more hardcore).
    • Eldar: Five major subfactions are each a Craftworld of Pointy Helmets: everyone from Ulthwe is either a professional soldier or a Seer, everyone from Alaitoc is a hooded loner with a sniper rifle, everyone from Biel-Tan is an Aspect Warrior, everyone from Saim-Hann rides a flying bike, everyone from Iyanden is dead.
    • Orks: Every Goff is grim and dour and takes fighting (comparatively) seriously, every Evil Sun is fanatically obsessed with fast-moving red vehicles, every Deathskull is a thieving bastard who welds guns together into bigger guns, every Bad Moon is a rich bastard who buys all the best wargear, every Snakebite is a backwoods hick who clings to traditional ways of doing things, and every Blood Axe is a sneaky bastard who believes in un-Orky things like tactics and camouflage.
    • Space Marines: Ultramarines are all Romans, Space Wolves are all Vikings, White Scars are all Mongols. Dark Angels were, at one point in their history, all Native Americans, which is why the Deathwing Terminators have feathers and beads hanging from their armour.
    • Chaos Space Marines: Every Word Bearer is a religious fanatic, every World Eater is a beserker, every Thousand Son is an Egyptian style sorcerer or an empty shell, every Death Guard is a rotting bloated disease bag, every Emperor's Children is a hedonistic heavy metal guitarist (minus Fabius Bile), every Iron Warrior is a seige engineer, every Night Lord is a scary ass serial killer, and every Alpha Legion is a sneaky, identical, unorthodox Magnificent Bastard.
  • Planet Looters (Mostly Orks, but occasionally the Imperium. Tyranids and Necrons go some way beyond "looters".)
    • Note Orks will occasionally loot a planet and turn it into a space ship of ridiculous size.
  • Planet Ville (Averted and played straight in equal measure. A lot of fluff has, often for game reasons, the fate of systems decided by tiny battles, while just as much - particularly the novels and worldwide campaigns - features thoroughly "realistic" planetary campaigns, with millions upon millions of soldiers and years of fighting involved.)
  • Plant Aliens (The Orks are symbiotic creatures, a seemingly mammal-like anatomy with a fungus in its skin and blood, meaning they have green skin but red blood. They reproduce asexually, giving off spores all the time which grow new Orks in underground wombs, and as a result are nearly impossible to completely wipe out by any means short of planet-wide firey holocaust.)
  • Pleasure Planet (Garden Worlds.)
  • Plot Armor: All races to an extent but some tend to have more than others. The most extreme example of this trope are the Tau, which earns them a certain degree of hate from the fan base.
  • Plucky Comic Relief (You know you're on the extreme end on the cynical side of the scale when this role is filled by the rampaging, murderous hordes of orks, whose idea of a good time is to indiscriminately kill anything, including each other, and introducing people's internal organs to daylight.)
  • Portal Network (The Eldar Webway.)
  • Power Born Of Madness (Followers of Chaos are generally crazy enough to do anything, but the Imperium itself acknowledges this trope: "In the darkness, a blind man is the best guide; in an age of madness, look to the madman to lead the way.")
  • Power Crystal (Eldar have their "Waystones", a gem worn over the heart which captures the soul of the Eldar upon death to prevent it from being painfully devoured by the Chaos god Slaanesh. These spirit stones allow the Eldar a peculiar kind of necromancy with Wraithguard and Wraithlords, battle constructs controlled by the spirit of a long-dead Eldar in a waystone. The Eldar also pimp out their vehicles and weapons with countless more mundane gems.)
  • Power Fist (Trope Namer.)
  • Power Floats (C'tan.)
  • Power Gives You Wings (Living Saints, daemon princes.)
  • Power Incontinence (Usually human and Ork psykers, but also some Chaos sorcerers.)
  • Power Limiter (Applied to psykers such as Astropaths and Guard Sanctioned Psykers, making them less powerful but a little less likely to go insane and melt everyone.)
  • The Power Of Rock (Slaaneshi Noise Marines. Corrupt power armoured super soldiers armed with daemonic killer guitars, who blow people apart with their power chords.)
    • Goff Rokkerz also fit in here.
  • Powered Armour (Ubiquitous.)
    • Imperial: Varies from what-it-says-on-the-tin man-sized suits of armour that can carry themselves and enhance strength a little, to one-man-army exoskeletons plugged directly into the skin that turn you into a walking tank, can shrug off armies, enhance strength a hundredfold and carry a built-in minigun and chainsaw fist.
    • Chaos: As above, corrupted by the forces of spiky Chaos and pulsating with daemonic energies, screaming faces and little kids' bones. Also, might involve horns and tentacles.
    • Eldar: Advanced body-suits made out of living plastic covered in gems, can change shape according to the will of the user and frequently come with psychically activated helmet-mounted nasties. Generally doesn't enhance strength but can come with integrated weapons. Can also come equipped with holographic generators, which let them dance around while the enemy think they're somewhere else, which while being utter genius, is useless against someone blasting you with a tank (In theory).
    • Orks: The Scrapheap Challenge approach to power armour: gigantic ramshackle suits bolted together out of giant pistons and tank parts with ridiculously big cannons and huge bladed claws all over, powered by anything from nuclear reactors to steam power, lumbering and lethal for the user but practically unstoppable.
    • Tau: Animesque suits ranging from Tau-sized bodysuits with cloaking fields to mini-Humongous Mecha mounting vehicle-killing railguns and packing small saucer-shaped drones for shielding. Usually lacks competent melee weaponry, though. Granted, the suit itself is strong enough to make a tank explode by kicking the engine, but that doesn't change the fact that the Tau inside fights like a little old lady.
  • Praetorian Guard (The Adeptus Custodes.)
  • Pre Ass Kicking One Liner
  • Primal Fear (Apart from being made largely out of hideous monsters and darkness, Sarpedon's main psychic power in the Soul Drinker series deserves points: it's called the Hell, and it conjures illusions of whatever Sarpedon thinks will scare the crap out of the enemy, such as making all his Marines three times as large or causing hellbats to come out of nowhere.)
  • Private Military Contractors (For all the Tau's efforts at securing their loyalty, the Kroot will work for anyone who can offer appropriate compensation. Ork and Dark Eldar mercenaries have also been seen on occasion, as well as Human ones.)
  • Properly Paranoid (Justified - if you're not paranoid in this setting, you should be: everything really is out to get you.)
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy (Khorne Berserkers are one part this to nine parts Axe Crazy. And "Orks iz made for fightin'." Space Marines also qualify to some extent. Also: Biel-tan, Lucius the Eternal, Cadia, the Tau Fire Caste . . . let's just say 40k is quite fond of this trope and move on.)
  • Psychic Link (Eldar specialise in these.)
  • Psychic Powers (In the background, necessary for FTL travel, but carry the risk of being possessed or worse by daemons. In the game, originally the excuse for a Recycled In Space magic system, now mostly minor but useful powers in some armies.)
  • Psychic Static (The Shadow in the Warp.)
  • Psycho For Hire (Lots of people, especially the Dark Eldar.)
  • Psychopathic Manchild (Orks, to a Boy.)
  • Punctuation Shaker (Tau personal names are bad; Tau spaceship names are nigh-unpronouncable.)
  • Puny Earthlings (Humans are among the most feeble things that can be seen on the battlefields of the 41st Millenium. The Imperial Guard attempt to compensate for this with weight of fire, very large tanks and sheer numbers.)
    • Geneboosted implanted humans however are a completely different matter even before you add the enormous power armour.
  • Putting On The Reich (The uniform of many Imperial regiments.)
  • Quirky Miniboss Squad (Command squads. Also nobz mobz.)
  • Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits (Imperial penal legions, entire armies of convicts sentenced to death at the hands of the enemy; in death they may be forgiven for their crimes. The best known unit is Colonel Schaeffer's "Last Chancers", inspired by every war-movie Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits ever.)
  • Random Number God (A number of bizarre good-luck superstitions have arisen, such as never calling missile launchers by their proper name (it has the word "miss" in it), the idea that painted models are luckier than unpainted models, the usage of blue dice for important rolls and the practice of occasionally muttering prayers to the Emperor. Never taken seriously, but often endearing.)
  • Rain Of Blood (Khorne, through the actions of his champions.)
  • Razor Floss (Many Eldar weapons.)
  • Really Big Gun (Humongous and dreadfully lethal pistols abound, most notably the Imperial bolt pistol, which fires small armour-piercing rocket grenades.)
  • Reality Warper (C'tan, distinct from the setting's other gods in that they are literal Physical Gods, immensely powerful in the material world rather than being warp entities. The more powerful psykers can also break the setting's (already tenuous) grip on physics.)
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old (Most wealthy Imperials, via juvenat technology.)
  • Recycled In Space (Began as a Recycled In Space version of Warhammer, which predated it by four years, but has over time diverged from it. Now contains a Recycled In Space of nearly every fantasy and SF trope imaginable, turned Darker And Edgier to a ridiculous degree and armed to the teeth. With chainsaws that are on fire.)
  • Red Eyes Take Warning (The Salamanders are revealed to have red eyes in the 5th edition Space Marine codex. Most Orks have red eyes as well, though a few exhibit yellow or other colors.)
  • The Red Planet (Home to the Adeptus Mechanicus.)
  • Red Right Hand (Marks of Chaos.)
  • Redemption Equals Death (One of the fundamental concepts behind the Church Militant's idea of "penance.")
  • Redshirt Army (The Imperial Guardsmen are ordinary humans in a world filled with genetically engineered Super Soldiers in both religious-fanatic and daemon-corrupted flavours, unstoppable death robots, and aliens with horribly lethal weapons and/or terrifying Psychic Powers. They are surprisingly Genre Savvy about this, meaning that infantry have crap morale because they know exactly how expendable they are. Of course, Commissars are there to solve that little problem.)
    • Typically, a world's Planetary Defense Force (PDF) has it even worse than the Guard, as their primary job in most stories is to die horribly at the hands of the invading forces until the Imperial Guard arrives. That's right, they're the Redshirt Army for the Redshirt Army.
  • Refuge In Audacity (Basically runs off this and Rule Of Cool.)
  • Reign Of Terror (Began with the Emperor's unification of Terra and has since settled into a permanent state of affairs.)
  • Religion Is Magic (Used to its fullest by both the Imperium and Chaos, especially the Sisters of Battle, who can literally stop bullets with their faith.)
  • Religion Of Evil (Chaos cults. Not that the "good" religions are much better.)
  • Ret Con (The Squats, Zoats and the fifth Chaos God, Malal, were removed from the game background - the Squats because they weren't sure what to do with them, Malal because they weren't quite sure who owned the copyright. Other forces changed drastically, for example, the Tyranids turning from curiosity bugs into a galaxy-eating horror, and the C'tan becoming the Necrons' star gods.)
    • There have also been a number of RetCons of technology, such as Terminator armour and plasma weapons being changed from utterly irreplaceable relics to simply very, very difficult to make.
    • The removal of the Squats is not a Ret Con so much as a Dropped A Bridge On Him, as they officially existed, but were utterly eradicated by the Tyranid Hive Fleet Kraken. The Zoats get a quarter-page mention in the Tyranid book, as they were wiped out by the Imperium.
    • The general tone of the setting has shifted quite a bit over the years. In the original Rogue Trader rulebook, the Imperium had a ragtag, Scavenger World feel (still present but not to the same degree). In fact, the whole thing had kind of a Mad Max IN SPACE feel to it. The copious amounts of black humor and irony that marked Rogue Trader have also been downplayed over time.
    • Inquisitors were originally lone adventurers not unlike U.S. Marshals in Western fiction—our friend Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau would not fit in with the Inquisiton of modern 40K.
    • At first, Orks were capable of sexual reproduction; now they hatch from pods. Also, they were originally created by the Snotlings, who eventually devolved into semi-sapience; now they're creations of the Old Ones.
    • Daemons and Chaos were originally not part of the setting; the Warp was instead inhabited by a variety of dangerous but non-daemonic "Warp Creatures", such as Enslavers, Psychaneuein, and Vampires, though it was mentioned that some inspired legends of demons on especially superstitious planets, and they still were drawn to unprotected psykers.
    • The Tyranids at first were less bestial in appearance, and the Hive Mind concept wasn't as thoroughly fleshed out. The Genestealers were originally unconnected to them.
    • There was a lot less romanticization/fetishization of the Space Marines in Rogue Trader—they were clearly Badass mofos, and the most dangerous fighting force in the setting, but they were also played as the most brutal and insane individuals in a brutal, insane universe. In fact, most were recruited from psychotic murderers on feral planets. Most of their transhuman elements (such as all those extra organs) were also added in later.
      • The Soul Drinkers novel Crimson Tears has a Guard general describing them pretty much exactly like that.
  • Reverse Mole (Possibly the entire Alpha Legion, according to recently-published fluff. Secretive Magnificent Bastards that they are, no one's quite sure for certain.)
  • The Right Hand Of Doom (All those Power Fists give this effect, often occurs in the mutations of daemon princes but special mention must go to the Crimson Fists who all paint just one of their hands so that it at least looks a little bit more prominent.)
    • One member of the Soul Drinkers has an extremely large mutant hand, which he either uses to wield his power axe to great effect, or uses to splat people dead while using his normal hand to use the axe.
  • Right Hand Versus Left Hand (Common in the Imperium, standard operating procedure in the Inquisition.)
    • Dark Eldar.
    • Orks tend to add in both feet, and an all in brawl ensures.
    • Tzeench will add an impossable number of tentacles, limbs and psychic appendages and give them a hard, manly twist just so...
  • Robe And Wizard Hat (Eldar Farseers, some Chaos sorcerers.)
  • Robot War (Wherever the Necrons show up.)
  • Roboteching (Tau Smart Missile systems.)
  • Rock Beats Laser (A setting of world-splitting superweapons, ludicrously powerful weaponry and interstellar empires, and the standard tactic of most factions is to charge screaming at their foes waving a sharp thing. And it works.)
    • To be fair, if you're 8ft tall, largely immune to firepower and can throw tanks into the sun it is a lot more logical.
  • Room 101 (Commorragh, the home of the Dark Eldar, is implied to be a City 101.)
  • Room Full Of Crazy (Psykers are prone to this)
  • Rubber Forehead Aliens (Eldar resemble nothing so much as tall, thin humans with pointy ears, Tau stocky grey humans with funny toes and faces. Justified, or at least Lampshaded, as of Xenology.)
  • Rule #34 (Sexy Tyranids, loli Daemonettes, the Ronery Wych, Faptau... among others. Beware some of the stuff that comes out of /tg/.)
  • Rule Of Cool (Absolutely everything. Rule of Cool in the sense of "governed by.")
  • Rule Of Funny (The Orks. Seriously, just read their Codex and you'll understand.)
  • Rule Of Perception (According to 40k's What You See Is What You Get rules (which are not the same thing as the trope of that name), if a particular upgrade or piece of wargear isn't somehow visible on a model, the model can't claim to have it. This encourages players to spend more money on toys come up with interesting conversions to represent these upgrades, particularly in the case of things like veteran skills and other non-physical traits.)
  • Scary Black Man (The Salamanders are an entire chapter of this, and they're one of the nicer chapters of Space Marines.)
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens (All the factions:)
    • The Imperium of Man and its subfactions: Scary Dogmatic Humans. Xenocidal and imperialist, as happy to wipe out billions of its own people as it is to exterminate entire alien races.
    • Chaos: Extra-dimensional malevolent gods and daemons that are capable of crossing into the physical realm and corrupting the minds and bodies of sentient species. Four principal Chaos Gods and countless lesser deities and daemon princes, served by billions of cultists and thousands of ancient daemon-corrupted Super Soldiers who rebelled against the Imperium during a galaxy-splitting civil war ten thousand years before the setting. Unquestionably evil, delighting in murder and depravity. The four main gods are born from the emotions of hope, love, bravery and acceptance; this should tell you most of what you need to know about 40k's place on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
    • Craftworld Eldar: Dying elder race with massive superiority complex. Through their past depravity responsible for creating the Chaos god Slaanesh. Not quite Xenocidal, but consider the deaths of millions of humans to safeguard a few hundred Eldar lives more than a fair trade, and have the psychic future-prediction and manipulative skills to make that sort of thing a reality rather than a dream. As an example, they tricked the Ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka into attacking the human planet of Armageddon, setting off the Second and Third War for Armageddon, killing billions of humans, just to prevent Ghazghkull from attacking one of their world-ships. The Fragile Speedster/Glass Cannon race, with some conceptual ties to Warhammer's High Elves.
      • Dark Eldar: Torture-obsessed Dark Elf-esque counterparts to the Craftworld Eldar. Still practice the same depravity that led to their race's fall. Sadistic in the extreme, need to feed on others' souls to avoid their own being devoured by the Chaos God Slaanesh. They rival Slaanesh for the kinkiest faction, and in game terms take the jets-equipped glass cannon even further than their Craftworld cousins.
      • Exodite Eldar: Descendents of Eldar who left before the fall to live simpler lives on planets with harsh conditions. Their tech is deliberately less advanced than that of their Craftworld counterparts, and by choice they are reclusive, sticking to their own planets for the most part, making them Wood Elves in Space. They are a background plot element rather than a playable faction, but unofficial army lists have been made for them, complete with dinosaur-riding, laser-lance-equipped knights.
    • Orks: Genetically engineered by a precursor species as a biological weapon. Peculiar biology (see Plant Aliens), personalities based on ridiculously exaggerated football hooligan stereotypes, all "boyz" and speak with Funetik Aksents. Violently sociopathic, prone to infighting, and genocidal, but all in good fun; an Ork "Waaagh" is described as a combination of mass migration, pub crawl and holy war. Highly psychic, but not aware of it - Ork technology only works because the Orks THINK it should. This also has other effects - for example, Orks piously believe "da red wunz go fasta", so if an Ork paints his bike red, it will go faster.
      • An entire spinoff game, Gorkamorka, concerns a planet full of Orks that holds no strategic importance to the other races, with the Orks having no way off (having turned their space hulk into massive statues of two gods... and then destroyed them). They pass their time with a massive, futile tribal war between themselves.
    • Tau: Technologically advanced humanoids with a rigidly caste-based society. The Ethereal caste rule over the Earth, Air, Fire and Water castes, who are all utterly loyal and devoted (one theory has it the control is based on pheromones). They see themselves as benevolent imperialists fighting religiously for the 'Greater Good,' and are singled out for being the only faction that seriously engages in diplomacy or offers anything other than genocidal total war. Despite a thing for mass sterilisation, warmongering and concentration camps, they really are the nicest people you'll find in this galaxy. Imperialist, expansionist, slightly fanatical ("slightly" in this setting meaning that only one mech per army can be upgraded to a suicide bomber.)
      • Gue'la! How dare you question the GREATER GOOD?
    • Tyranids: Extra-galactic locusts in apparently limitless numbers. If they take over a planet, they devour all organic material, eat the soil, drain the geothermal heat from the planet's core, drink the oceans and suck up the atmosphere, leaving a cold airless rock. Hungry. Extremely psychic, with the psychic chatter that forms their Hive Mind being so powerful that their mere presence drives psychics insane and interferes with technology that uses psychics - including interstellar travel and communications. Bug Wars crop up wherever they go, with the suggestion that the three galaxy-eatingly-enormous, near-unstoppable Hive Fleets are just scouts for the real invasion.
    • Necrons: Ancient undead metal constructs powered by the souls of long-dead aliens that hate all living things. In thrall to gods that wish to consume all life. Ridiculously advanced technology, almost impossible to kill, omnicidal down to the last bacterium.
  • Scenery Gorn (About half of the art. A fair proportion of the other half is just regular Gorn.)
  • Schizo Tech (Planets in the Imperium of Man range from Stone Age-level Feral Worlds to hyper-tech Forge Worlds.)
  • Science Related Memetic Disorder (Orks again.)
  • Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale (Has a love-hate relationship with this one. At times, distances, timescales and the number of soldiers needed to launch a sector-spanning crusade are handled "realistically", but just as often a few hundred Space Marines defend - or purge - an entire world. Of course, they are Space Marines...
  • Scrappy Mechanic (The skimmer rule in 4th edition. Worst offender are Eldar skimmers with holo fields and spirit stones, which are nearly impossible to kill. More fuel is added to the flames when you realize that most if not all Eldar players use three Falcons with those upgrades. Thankfully, skimmers lost a lot of their power in 5th edition.)
    • 5th Edition introduced the Annihilate mission rules, which have quickly generated a huge hatedom from Imperial Guard players. Why? IG troop choice rules are incompatible with the kill points rule, making the mission an extreme case of Failure Is The Only Option. For example, one troop choice in a 500 point game is worth as much as your opponent's ENTIRE army (assuming not against another Guard player). Add in the fragile nature of guardsmen and you have a recipe for disaster. Thankfully, with the release of the 5th edition Guard codex, this is no longer the case.
  • Screaming Warrior (Eldar Howling Banshees, who - thanks to a psychosonic amplifier in their masks - can actually shut down someone's nervous system by screaming at him.)
  • Screw You Elves (Well, Screw You, Eldar...)
  • Scry Vs Scry (Primarily between Eldar farseers and Tzeentchian sorcerers; human and even ork soothsayers sometimes try this as well, but are generally far less successful at it.)
  • Sealed Evil In A Can (Many, many examples.)
    • Just about everything can have a daemon sealed in it, turning an ordinary weapon - or monument, or tank, or planet - into an Artifact Of Doom.
    • It's heavily implied that the Forge World of Mars imprisons the Void Dragon, a sleeping C'tan star-god. The Outsider, another C'tan, is currently trapped in a Dyson sphere (also batshit insane.)
    • Done both metaphorically and literally by the Necrontyr, a short-lived, life-hating race who had themselves sealed in undying living-metal battle shells, becoming the Necrons. "In a can" indeed.
  • Sense Freak (Followers of Slaanesh.)
  • Separate But Identical (All races suffer really badly from this, although it's being gradually fixed with different Craftworlds, bio-augmentation, regimental doctrines, etc.)
  • Shapeshifter Weapon (Chaos Obliterators combine this with Arm Cannon in an interesting way.)
  • Shared Universe (Particularly in the novels; most fans regard anything written by some authors, especially C.S. Goto, as automatically non-canon.)
  • Shiny Looking Spaceships (Eldar/Tau, mostly.)
  • Shock And Awe (Necron ranged weapons typically fire bolts of green lightning that strip away the target's flesh one molecular layer at a time. A great many psychic powers also involve using bolts of lightning to fry people.)
  • Shoot The Dog (Happens very, very often in the Imperium. One of a commisar's duties is to maintain unit cohesion and discipline- by execution, if necessary. Discovered psykers are usually killed to stop them getting daemon-possessed and destroying worlds, fed to the Astronomicon to preserve it and the Emperor, or put through brutal conditioning to serve the Imperium as "sanctioned" psykers. And, if that weren't bad enough, in extreme catastrophes planets are subjected to Exterminatus in order to prevent the taint from spreading and put the inhabitants out of their misery. To highlight how monumentally screwed up this galaxy is, people are actually awarded medals for such acts.)
  • Short Range Long Range Weapon (Shamelessly prevalent in the tabletop game, even the artillery. The worst offender is the Imperial Guard Basilisk, whose range is both unnecessarily long for the tabletop game - twenty feet, several times the length of the average game table - while also far, far too short for an artillery piece of that size.)
    • As of the 5th edition Imperial Guard codex, the Basilisk has passed its crown to the Deathstrike Missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 12" - 960". In other words, an ICBM with a maximum range of less than a mile, that can also be used to shoot at people standing sixty feet from the launch site. Short Range Long Range Weapon indeed.
    • In contrast to this is the Imperial Hunter-Killer missile, which can be mounted on an ordinary tank and explicitly has unlimited range.
  • Shoulders Of Doom (Space Marine armour takes this to ridiculous heights. And widths.)
  • Shout Out (Tonnes, some subtle, some obvious.)
  • Shrug Of God (Games Workshop has deliberately left everything regarding the two "missing" Primarchs open for fan speculation. Ditto for other major characters, like Commander Farsight.)
  • Sickly Green Glow (Necrons in general and gauss weapons in particular.)
  • Single Biome Planet (Used and averted equally often.)
  • Sinister Scythe (Trademark of Nurgle followers and the Nightbringer.)
  • Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism (Take a wild guess. This is a universe where extreme prejudice and xenophobia against anyone remotely different — psykers, mutants, etc. — is truly the best option, since anything else will, in a best case secenario, get you possessed by demons.)
  • Sliding Scale Of Silliness Versus Seriousness (Generally sits at the far serious end. Most of the time, the extreme GRIM DARKNESS of the setting is played deadly straight, taking the painful, horrific hopelessness of the setting almost - but not quite - to the point of parody. At other times, particularly in the Ciaphas Cain novels and the Gaiden Game Gorkamorka, the brutality, insanity and genocide are broken up by occasional humour and silliness... albeit humour so dark light cannot escape its surface.)
  • The Slow Walk (Necrons are masters of this, as is any unit with the Slow and Purposeful rule (e.g. Obliterators, Meganobz, Thousand Sons).)
  • The Smurfette Principle (A dearth of female special characters usable in the game proper, although the fluff doesn't suffer from this so badly.)
  • Some Call Me Tim (Some call me Commander Farsight. Standard practice with Tau.)
  • Sourcebook (By the bucketload.)
  • Sound Off (Imperial battle hymns, Ork war chants.)
  • Sorting Algorithm Of Evil (The Tau aside, the question is... where does the algorithm begin in this setting?)
    • It begins with the Tau, and no one knows where it ends because anyone who sees just how horrible this can get explodes into a shower of condensed insanity and pain.
    • The Imperium also sends its forces to a planet based off this - the worse the situation there gets, the more Mooks, Elite Mooks, Tank Goodness and Humongous Mecha it sends. If that all fails, they call down Exterminatus on the planet.
  • Space Amish (The Imperium actually has "medieval worlds" and "feral worlds." The Eldar have exodites, and the Orks have feral tribes and the Snakebite clan.)
  • Space Is An Ocean (Complete with starship-sized kraken and moon-sized leviathans. Also see the Battlefleet Gothic page.)
  • Space Marine (Imperial Guard Stormtroopers, Tau Fire Warriors, Eldar Aspect Warriors, just about any Necron, but especially...)
  • Space Opera (Emphasis on the epic heroes, villains, and battles - not so much on the love stories.)
  • Space Pirates (Eldar, Dark Eldar and sometimes Orks, Chaos and Humans.)
  • Space Romans (The Imperium, right down to the Latin. Especially the Ultramarines.)
  • The Spartan Way (Taken to utterly ridiculous extremes by the Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines. Just look at the page quote.)
  • Sphere Of Destruction (Eldar wraithcannons and D-cannons and Imperial vortex weapons work this way, neatly removing perfect spheres of matter and sending them straight to hell.)
  • Spider Tank (Chaos, specifically Defilers and Brass Scorpions. Necron Tomb Stalkers may also qualify.)
  • Spikes Of Villainy (Chaos all the way. Dark Eldar go for more of a bladed look, while Orks will mix spikes with blades and add anything else brutal you can think of.)
  • Split Personality (Throughout their lives, Eldar allow themselves to only follow one "path" (such as the path of the sculptor, warrior, seer) at a time, in effect subjecting their personalities to Crippling Overspecialisation.)
  • Spotlight Stealing Squad (The entire game, if you ask many Warhammer Fantasy players. A recent White Dwarf commemorating the latest Space Marine release had a staggering total of one article dedicated to WHFB and one dedicated to The Lord Of The Rings. Everything else was dedicated to the Marines, a level of coverage roughly on par with a Catholic newspaper during a papal visit.)
  • Spy Catsuit (Several Eldar have one, but it's pretty much standard issue for the Officio Assassinorum agents of the Imperium. Some employ chamaeleonic mimicry abilities, others have no special reason apart from being Fetish Fuel. In one of the newer novels, this tendency is repeatedly lampshaded when several characters can't keep their eyes from the girl-assassin brought up by a rather puritanical sect who would most likely kill them if she had any idea why they looked at her like that)
  • Squick (The Dark Eldar basically live on it. Slaanesh was literally created by it.)
  • Squishy Wizard (Played straight by most races' psykers, but subverted by some being real hardcases, such as Tyranid Hive Tyrants (but not Zoanthropes), Space Marine Librarians, Grey Knights and Chaos Daemons. Eldar Farseers are actually tougher than most other Eldar, due to slowly turning into crystal.)
  • Stab The Sky (Common pose of characters in artwork-not so much in actual tabletop models.)
  • Standard Redshirt Procedure (Some Imperial Guard regiments.)
  • Standard Sci Fi Setting (Only painted black and covered in skulls.)
  • Standard Time Units (The Imperium's officially runs on Terran years, and presumably Terran days onboard starships.)
  • Stanley Steamer Spaceship (And Stanley Steamer Tanks.)
  • State Sec (The Imperium's secret police are called the Inquisition. It suits them.)
  • Status Quo Is God (The huge fate-of-the-galaxy-depends-on-the-outcome-of-this summer global campaigns never seem to change anything. However, 5th Edition advances the plot a couple of hundred years, and the Imperium, though it hasn't collapsed yet, is apparently more screwed than ever before.)
  • Stripped To The Bone (Necrons make wide use of gauss-flayer weapons, which strip the target away layer by molecule-thick layer - although most have so much power that even a single shot usually ends up vaporising the victim whole.)
  • Strong As They Need To Be (Depending on the writer, the Guard can be filled with competent men and women able to pull their weight against the superhuman enemies of the Imperium or full of redshirts only good for cannon fodder and buying time for the tanks or Space Marines.)
    • Note that Imperial regiments probably vary like this, due to varied enrollment/conscription and training methods over the big galaxy.
  • Subspace Ansible (Sending telepathic messages... through hell...)
  • Sufficiently Advanced Alien (C'tan/Necrons, and to a lesser extent the Eldar.)
  • Summon Magic (Summoning daemons.)
  • Superpower Meltdown (Happens to psykers. A lot.)
  • Superpowerful Genetics (The Primarchs and the Space Marines. Also Orks.)
  • Super Registration Act (An extremely euphemistic way of describing the treatment of psykers.)
  • Superpowered Mooks (Psykers and those "blessed" by the Chaos gods.)
  • Superweapon Surprise (Eldar Maiden worlds and Imperial medieval worlds - Do not touch without a force big enough to repel the reinforcements.)
  • Survival Mantra (The many, many little prayers and litanies recited on a regular basis by the Imperials. Often have Chaotic counterparts.)
  • Swiss Army Weapon (Obliterators again.)
  • Sword And Gun (Generally favoured by every somewhat-sentient race in the game for close-quarters combat troops.)
  • Synchronisation (Titans and their Princeps, some ships and their captains.)
  • Tagline ("There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only WAR!" "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war!" Really?)
  • Take Cover (Terrain on the table is not just for decoration, as hiding behind a bush can protect you from even anti-tank weaponry (though not flamethrowers).)
  • Taking You With Me (Once again, taken to extremes; a good example would be the Eversor Assassin. When you kill him, his blood explodes with tank-destroying force. All vehicles in the game have a chance of exploding, to the misfortune of everyone around, when destroyed.)
  • Talk To The Fist (Standard Imperium policy with talkative xenos filth.)
  • Tannhauser Gate
  • Tank Goodness (Naturally, taken up to eleven. Every race has its armoured death machines, but honestly the Imperial Guard Armoured Companies are the kings of this trope. TANKS FOR THE TANK GOD, TREADS FOR THE TREAD THRONE!)
  • Tear Jerker (For a series that is so insane that it really shouldn't be taken seriously, its casual treatment of unbelievable courage in the face of impossible odds makes it a favorite for those who don't mind shedding Manly Tears.)
    • Indeed, there's a reason why the novels focusing on the Imperial Guard in particular are so successful, as they slap a human face on the setting and more often than not - dare I say it? - a touch of optimism and faith in the human spirit. This troper would argue that it's the insanity of the setting that makes this so effective.
  • Technopath (Eldar are and know it, Ork Meks are but don't, and the Adeptus Mechanicus think they are.)
  • Techno Wizard (The Adeptus Mechanicus takes the "wizard" part seriously, to boot.)
  • Tele Frag (The Ork Shokk Attak Gun - see BFG.)
  • Telepathic Spacemen (Imperial Astropaths.)
  • Teleporters And Transporters (The Imperium has a few of these, though they have the kind of reliability you expect when maintenance consists of a lot of chanting and application of sacred oil. The Ork mek Orkimedes also created a "tellyporta" device for the Battle of Armageddon.)
  • Temple Of Doom (Necron tombs form the majority, although there are (probably) other cases.)
  • Temporal Paradox (Though Time Travel is rare in the 40K universe, the Warp does strange things sometimes. Take, for example, the waaagh of one Ork Warboss traveling back through time via warp-storm, meeting up with his army's past self, then attacking it so he could have two copies of his favorite gun. The remaining Orks were so confused by the result that the waaagh was called off.)
  • Thats No Moon (Necron tomb-complexes tend to look relatively small and innocuous at first... then they're revealed to be much, much bigger, and often occupied by their builders.)
  • Theory Of Narrative Causality (Why do things keep getting worse and the factions less sympathetic? Inertia and because the writers say so.)
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill (Standard operating procedure for the Imperium. Justified in that there are some things you'll want to kill really quickly in this universe, and some things you want to stay very dead.)
  • The Thermidor (All of the Imperium's reforms and resolved civil wars since the Horus Heresy.)
  • These Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (Be strong in your ignorance!)
  • They Changed It Now It Sucks (Practically a warcry for the hardcore 40k fandom. The fans love to bitch about the game almost as much, if not more so, then they like to play the game itself.)
  • This Is A Drill (Corvus assault pods for Titans, the bizarre-yet-cool mole mortar.)
  • This Is Your Brain On Evil (Chaos tends to have this effect on the mind - goes double for psykers. SANITY IS FOR THE WEAK!)
  • This Is Your Premise On Drugs (Warhammer40000 is your Standard Sci Fi Setting injected with a cocktail of every drug known to man and genuine lunar dust, stuck in a blender with Alien, Mechwarrior, Starship Troopers and Star Wars, bathed in blood and turned up to eleventy billion (and then set on fire). Twice. With 8ft chainsaws.)
  • Time Abyss (Most Eldar, but a few ancient Marines and Chaos Marines cross into this trope as well.)
  • Took A Level In Badass (The Imperial Guard went from the whipping boys of the entire setting to the utterly terrifying gods of mechanised combat in the space of one codex.)
  • Tome Of Eldritch Lore (The Black Library is an entire extradimensional stronghold full of these. See also the Book of Lorgar.)
  • Torture Technician (Dark Eldar Haemonculi, quite a lot of Inquisitors. Most Ork painboyz have got the Torture part down, but the Technician (keeping him alive) part is usually ignored.)
  • Touched By Vorlons (Not always a good thing... in fact, almost never a good thing. Partly because you're liable to get nailed to a stick and purged with flame if you get touched by any alien... or listen to them... or look at them... or live in the same general area as someone who looked at them... and Emperor help you if someone on your planet was engaged in a Chaos Cult.)
  • Touch Of Death (Mainly used by C'tan and daemons, but the odd high-power psyker has been known to do this.)
  • Tournament Play (The kind of competition at a 40k Grand Tournament is enough to give the casual player horrible nightmares. Quite appropriate for the setting.)
  • Training From Hell (Pretty much the only training there is. The only way they can top it is by having people trained inside the universe's hell.)
  • Tranquil Fury (Usually this or an Unstoppable Rage.)
  • Translation Convention ("Low Gothic", the common language of the Imperium, is presented as English, while "High Gothic" is rendered in Pseudo-Latin. Ork language is generally shown as English with a Funetik Aksent, and is sometimes explicitly said to be pidgin Low Gothic. Depending on the context, nonhuman languages are either translated as English, or shown to need interpreters.)
  • Treachery Cover Up (Most of the Imperium's citizenry don't know anything about the Horus Heresy, including the fact that fully half of the Space Marine Legions rebelled against the Emperor.)
    • Did someone forget the Dark Angels?
  • Trope2000 (... Wait, why settle for two when you can have 40?)
  • Trope Overdosed (We reiterate: 40k contains examples of damn near everything, most of it trying to kill you. And the rest of them have something worse in store for you...)
  • Troperrific (See above.)
  • Turn Based Strategy
  • Ubermensch (The Emperor himself.)
  • Ugly Guy Hot Wife (Nurgle and Isha.)
  • Ultimate Evil (The Emperor, the Chaos Gods, and the C'tan all get this treatment to varying degrees.)
  • Un Cancelled (Even this was turned Up To Eleven, as Dark Heresy was released, cancelled and Un Cancelled within the space of a month.)
  • The Unmasqued World (The realisation that daemons actually existed was the death knell for Imperial Truth, and helped kick-start the Horus Heresy.)
  • Unnecessarily Large Interior (All Imperial ships. Also covered in religious iconography and kilometres-high skulls-and-eagles gold bling.)
  • Unobtainium (Plenty of it; Wraithbone, Necrodermis and Adamantine are the widest used examples.)
  • Unpredictable Results (Anything connected to the Warp or Ork technology. Represented ingame by psykers suffering "perils of the warp" attacks and more esoteric Orky wargear having its own tables of random effects. Ork psykers are beyond random, rolling just to see what completely-unpredictable power they get... every turn.)
  • The Unpronounceable (Tau names can get hard to pronounce - but ask any Battlefleet Gothic player about Tau ship names...)
  • Unusual User Interface (A lot of Eldar and Imperial gear.)
  • Unstoppable Rage (Black Templars. Blood Angels. Khorne Berserkers. Even Eldar, when the Avatar is nearby.)
  • Up To Eleven (Everything. And often to twelve, thirteen and several forty thousand.)
  • Urban Segregation (Taken to utter extremes with hive cities.)
  • Used Future (Again, taken to extremes. Almost all of the current technology and equipment being used by the Imperium is thousands of years old, and much of it they can't even make any more.)
  • Utopia Justifies The Means (For the Greater Good!)
    • The Logician cult described in Dark Heresy combines this with copious amounts of For Science, as they are perfectly willing to sacrifice millions of human lives — at a time — in the name of returning to humanity's technological golden age.
  • Vader Breath (Because of the wildly differing techlevel of the setting, cybernetic lungs can work perfectly well and even better than the natural ones - or they may let the recipient do an unwilling Vader-impersonation, which is not practical when you're trying to be stealthy.)
  • Vapour Wear (Dark Eldar Wyches practically wear anti-clothing.)
  • Villain By Default (Upon close inspection, everyone.)
  • Violence Is The Only Option (No comment necessary.)
  • War For Fun And Profit (The Orks, who go on interstellar sprees that leave billions dead because they're fun. "Orks iz made for fightin' and winnin'.")
  • The War Has Just Begun (Countering the Gotterdammerung of the Eldar and Imperium, increasingly heavy hints have been dropped that the Necrons are just beginning to wake up for their galaxy-wide omnicidal spree and the Tyranid Hive Fleets have barely started to turn their attention on our galaxy.)
  • Warrior Heaven (The Realm of Chaos... though perhaps more of a Warrior Hell. Unless you're an Ork.)
    "Told yer I knew where da best fightin' woz." — Great Boss Tuska
  • Warrior Poet (The Craftworld Eldar.)
  • Wave Motion Gun (Bombardment Guns, Nova Cannons, the appropriately-named Planet Killer, etc...)
  • We Are As Mayflies (Eldar are immortal; so, biologically, are Space Marines and Orks, though their entire lives being devoted to war somewhat gets in the way of that. Nobody's found anything that can stop the Necrons getting back up.)
    • It is worth mentioning that in at least one case in the novels the Necrons in question had been partially vaporized and the remainder was a little puddle of liquid metal on the ground. They still managed to teleport back to their base for repairs.
    • Averted by the Tau. They're pretty short-lived, with fifty years being considered ancient to them. They're painfully aware of this.
  • We Are Everywhere (The Inquisition.)
  • We ARE Struggling Together (Chaos.)
  • We Are Team Cannon Fodder (Kroot, Imperial Guard anytime they aren't the protagonists, Gretchin, everyone else for the Eldar.)
  • We Have Reserves (Basically the Catch Phrase of the Orks and Imperial Guard. Tyranids take this to such an extreme that their Mooks don't even have digestive systems - they are created, sent into battle for a few hours of frenzied combat, and then recycled.)
  • We Will Use Manual Labor In The Future (As an example, gigantic anti-ship missiles with onboard reactors and homing AIs are loaded with the back-breaking labour of thousands of deckhands. Using ropes. While being whipped.)
  • Weapon Of Choice
  • Weird Science
  • Well Intentioned Extremist (The Tau. The "well intentioned" bit is what sets them apart.)
  • Well Done Son Guy (Several primarchs. Giving up on that was one motive to join the Horus Heresy.)
  • The Wesley (The Necrons and their C'tan masters are seen by some as an entire faction of this. The Tau were too until they got more of the Grimdark slapped on.)
  • What Measure Is A Non Human (Although, to be fair, pretty much every other race sees those not of its kind as worthless too.)
  • When All You Have Is A Hammer (The Imperial Guard. When all you have is men and tanks... a lot of men and tanks... The Imperial Guard has been even referred to as 'The Hammer of the Emperor')
  • Whip It Good (Has Fetish Fuel examples with Dark Eldar Agonisers and Sisters of Battle "Mistresses", and a rare non-fetishy example with Arco-Flagellants, which are just plain horrible.)
    • Oh, and Chaos has a psychic power called Lash of Submission. Guess which god it's associated with.
    • Ork runtherdz often carry grot prods and whips.
  • White Haired Pretty Girl (The Sisters of Battle often bleach their hair white, though whether they're actually pretty varies from artist to artist)
  • The White House (The Imperial Palace, which is said to cover most of Europe and be visible from Mars.)
  • White Magic (Sisters of Battle Acts of Faith... maybe.)
  • Who You Gonna Call (The Sisters of Battle or the Inquisition, generally, including the Grey Knights and the Deathwatch. Calling might get you killed, but not calling will often have worse results.)
  • With My Hands Tied (Just about everyone, hence why more... exotic... measures are commonly employed.)
  • Winged Humanoid (As well as having troops in the Eldar, Dark Eldar and Chaos use "jump packs" with mechanical wings, there are examples of humanoids with actual wings. The Primarch Sanguinius, known as "the Angel", had perfect white wings, and the Battle Sisters' Living Saint manifests them as part of being a saint. Of course, this being 40k, the Angel was a vampiric demigod who fought giant blood daemons (and while he may not be the first such character, This Troper does not remember any angel or saint to defeat the daemon by breaking daemon's spine over his knee) and was horribly killed by his brother, and the saint is spouting lines like "By my light, we shall purge this wretched, tainted land.")
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity (And with that insanity comes even more power!)
  • With Us Or Against Us (The Imperium, the Tau. The rest generally don't even bother to ask, and even the Imperium generally only bothers to ask if you're human.)
  • Witch Species (Eldar. Human psykers are also regularly referred to as "witches".)
  • A Wizard Did It (The Warp did it. Or the Eldar. Or the C'tan. Or Tzeentch.)
  • Wolf Man (Wulfen are basically werewolves. In space. With guns. In power armour. )
  • Womb Level (The interior of Tyranid hiveships.)
  • Wooden Ships And Iron Men (life on board Imperial Fleet ships is this trope Recycled In Space)
  • Words Can Break My Bones (Daemons and the Grimoire of True Names.)
  • The Worf Effect (New races or factions are commonly introduced in the background completely dominating Space Marines. One particularly memorable example has a Necron destroyer firing straight through a near-invulnerable Land Raider tank, accompanied by an After Action Report of tech-priests talking about the obscene amount of power required to do such a thing.)
  • World Gone Mad (Creeps into this territory at times-the universe is a Crapsack World taken to such a ludicrous extent that one sometimes wonders if the setting hasn't well and truly lost its marbles.)
  • World Half Empty (Warhammer 40K is by far one of the most relentlessly grim and hopeless settings in all of fiction. Note that this could very well be literal, depending on how much the Tyranids have already eaten.)
  • The World Is Always Doomed ("World" meaning the entire galaxy. Or just any world chosen at random.)
  • The Worm That Walks (The alien Slaugth, one of the (many) primary antagonists in Dark Heresy.)
  • Wretched Hive (The "Underhive" in hive cities always qualifies - sometimes the entire arcology, with its population of billions.)
  • Xanatos Roulette (Everything in the galaxy, as played by Tzeentch (who rigs the game), the Deceiver (who rigs the players), and the Emperor (who knows when to call in the cops))
  • Xtreme Kool Letterz (The Orks' Funetik Aksent is written with these. Other examples, such as Dark Eldar Wyches, feature occasionally.)
  • You Are Not Ready (Common Eldar sentiment to humans. The most common reply is a bolt shell to the face.)
  • You Have Failed Me (Regularly used by Chaos, Orks and Imperial Commissars.)
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness (Gleefully employed by followers of Chaos and the Dark Eldar.)
  • Your Head A Splode (When a psychic Mind Rape is a bit too subtle. Ork Weirdboyz even used to have a power called "'Eadbang", which is exactly what it sounds like. An 'Eadbang is also how the Orks refer to what happens when a Weirdboy suffers Perils of the Warp. Just guess what happens...)
  • You Kill It You Bought It (The Ork hierarchy tends to work this way, ditto the Dark Eldar and Chaos: if you succeed in killing the previous Warboss/Archite/Lord, the former officeholder clearly didn't deserve the job.)
  • Zerg Rush Zerg Rush (Tyranids - unsurprisingly, as the Zerg were based on them. A lot of "horde" armies, such as Orks and Imperial Guard, employ this one as well.)
  • Zombie Apocalypse (After occasionally menacing the depths of Necromunda, plague zombies cropped up in force during the 13th Black Crusade, courtesy of Nurgle. Dark Heresy introduces many more new and exciting ways for characters to find themselves up to their eyeballs in shambling dead.)
    • And there's another kind in The Bleeding Chalice, where it's all the fault of a super-mutant produced by a Techpriest experiment on cleansing mutations, and who can psychically create viruses through ship hulls and hard vacuum that have this effect. His main battlecruiser is essentially intended as a massive drop assault ship that breaks apart and spews down a ridiculous number of zombies, making the first air drop Zombie Apocalypse.

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