Warhammer 40000 / W40K: Tropes E to H

By the will of the Immortal God-Emperor, the great reliquary, or "page" as it is known, of tropes has grown to the point that it shall be broken up into four different pages. These pages are divided by the letter that starts the trope, and misplaced tropes shall be returned to their proper place. This page is for those tropes that start with the letter E through the letter H.

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Tropes A to D | Tropes E to H | Tropes I to P | Tropes Q to Z

E

• Early Installment Character-Design Difference:
  • The models from the game's early years often show that Citadel was still learning their craft, as the poses are awkward and some of the models look distinctly cartoony, particularly when stood up against their modern incarnations. This sculpting style of persisted into 3rd Edition's first couple of years (perhaps most notoriously in the original Drukhari^note then known as Dark Eldar model range from 1998-9, which many claim aged very poorly, very fast). By the time Games Workshop launched The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game in 2001, Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy had both moved towards a more realistic sculpting style.
  • The models for the Tyranids originally carried separate weaponry, instead of having it as part of their bodies. In addition, they were much more stick-like — though they still have obvious Xenomorph influences, they weren't as pronounced as post-Starcraft Tyranids.
  • The Kroot change quite substantially within the timeframe of 3rd Edition. They made their first appearance in a piece of artwork from the core rulebook where the Kroot warrior lacks a beak, has a more human body layout and an almost fungal head.
  • The aesthetic of the Dark Eldar (now Drukhari) shifted significantly between the release of their original model line in 1998-9, and the current range that has been continuously added to since 2012. The original range (conceptualised by Gary Morley) was much closer in appearance to the look of Hellraiser's Cenobites, while the current model line (conceptualised by Jes Goodwin) moved them closer to the sleek look of their Craftworld Eldar/Aeldari kin, with a more streamlined (yet still suitably spiky and BDSM-inspired) appearance and cleaner model designs.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • While the game has remained fairly consistent in theme and tone from 3rd Edition onwards, First Edition (also known as Rogue Trader) and Second Edition were very, very different from the modern game. The game began as something much closer to an RPG (as opposed to its current status as a miniatures strategy game) and included a Gamemaster. The game didn't take itself particularly seriously (it was Warhammer In Space and the developers happily embraced that idea) and had loads of tongue-in-cheek references. Second Edition moved the game closer to its current state mechanically, and somewhat in terms of background (many fundamental aspects of the current lore and factions were established either in those days, or in very late First Edition), although it was still significantly more lighthearted than the eventual tone the game would take, and it was famed for having Loads and Loads of Rules (fires were persistent and you had to check what happened to them each turn, vehicle crew could be affected by shooting and could act to replace injured crew members or try and repair an out-of-control vehicle, so on and so forth).
  • Keeping with the Warhammer In Space theme, Aeldari were originally called "Space Elves", while the now-background and Gaiden Game only Squats were known as "Space Dwarves" and Orks were more commonly referred to as "Space Orcs". There were also Space Slann, and Space Skaven were rumoured for a time, though never implemented.
  • Space Marines were originally something akin to a galactic police force. Their armour was covered in crude slogans and they were sometimes given names that alluded to pop culture of the day. The armor was different (fairly birdlike, which still exists in canon as Mark 6 "Corvus" armor), the bolters had the magazine right behind the barrel, and Marines also had more Starship Troopers influences along the Space Knights theme — there were even some Space Marines who were brainwashed criminals.
  • Back in the Rogue Trader days, the Adeptus Arbites weren't expies of Judge Dredd. Instead they were a shoutout to a different sci-fi franchise. The Arbites were described as sword-carrying men who went barechested and wore a mask and a cloak with a colour darker than black.
  • Early editions featured a number of Chaos God beyond the four Great Power, including Malal who was eventually dropped from all the Games Workshop’s setting due to legal troubles.
  • All twenty Space Marine legions were originally known. Two of them (the Valedictors and the Rainbow Warriors) would eventually be changed to later foundings.
  • There are a few minor xenos that have been dropped over the year, including the Piscean Warriors/Saharduin, ugly barracuda/shark freaks.
  • Some names and spellings were different in Rogue Trader (1st edition), for example Spacewolves instead of Space Wolves, Power Glove instead of Power Fist (the latter term is used occasionally, but it isn't capitalized and refers to a Marine's armoured gauntlet), Blaster was an alternative name for a Bolt Gun, Chaos Space Marines were usually called Traitor Legionnaires, Heresy-era Space Marine Legions were called Chapters, the Imperial Guard was called the Imperial Army, etc.
  • Also in Rogue Trader, you could wear Mesh Armour together with Flak Armour, which gave you a 4+ armour save, but was cumbersome and reduced your movement speed.
• Easy Logistics: Averted in the novel Helsreach, which takes place during the Third War of Armageddon. It takes three whole pages for the POV character, Grimaldus the Black Templar, to go over everything that's talked about for the nine days before the war starts. He even abridges it; going over the Imperial Guard numbers for the city alone takes two whole days.
  • Imperial Guard and Astartes equipment is designed towards this trope as much as possible. Tanks and other fighting vehicles use common chassises (Rhinos for the Astartes, Chimeras and Leman Russ' for the Militarum) so mechanical expertise and replacement parts are transferrable, and the ubiquitous lasgun, though not an impressive weapon in any sense, is so simply engineered that it can be mass produced by the thousands every day and even a complete dimwit can repair and operate it (which helps because some regiments recruit from worlds where the local tech level is pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural). A lasgun power cell can be recharged from just about any municipal or vehicle power source or even in a campfire in a pinch, and a Leman Russ tank can run on nearly any fuel from prometheum to coal and wood.
• Easy Road to Hell: In a small bit of mercy for this setting Subverted. While the Warp is technically the only afterlife, most human souls aren't strong enough to remain conscious after death. So everyone goes to the Warp but for the vast majority of humanity this is no different than Cessation of Existence, as their souls simply dissolve into the background insanity of the Warp. Ironically the only humans who actually do get this are the followers of Chaos who, unless they succeed enough to be rewarded with immortality as a Daemon Prince, are for the most part doomed to become minor daemons like Furies after death.
  • On the flip side this is played very straight with the Eldar whose souls are strong enough to remain conscious past death. Unless their souls are absorbed by the Magitech crystals they wear, they go to the Warp where Slaanesh eats their souls, condemning them to a Fate Worse than Death.
• Earth Is the Centre of the Universe:
  • Played with. Earth (aka "Holy Terra") is the undisputed capital of the Imperium of Mankind and site of both the all-powerful government that runs it and the psychic beacon known as the Astronomican, which is absolutely necessary for humanity's faster-than-light travel to work reliably. It is however always displayed on the left side of any galactic-scale map, so the majority of the galaxy is counted as "east" of the solar system.
  • Averted for most of the non-human races, for whom Earth is just the place those Puny Earthlings call "home", but played oddly straight for the Tyranids. That Astronomican we mentioned? That humans use as their faster-than-light beacon? The Tyranids can see it too. And they want to eat it.
• 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...
  • Then later explained in the Tabletop games. The Imperium actually does NOT equip most of their heavy capital ships with planet-killing weapons, for fear that somebody other than the Inquisition will wind up using them. The Inquisition has special ships built for the purpose, imaginatively named Kill-Ships.
  • That being said, a mid-sized fleet packs enough massive guns that it could probably break up a planet with sheer weight of fire, if it wanted.
  • As of the Thirteenth Black Crusade, Cadia itself has suffered this fate, causing a giant warp rift to divide the galaxy in half.
• Earth That Used to Be Better: By the time of the start of the Imperium, the oceans are gone, siphoned off and boiled away, and large swathes of land are rendered inhospitable (at the very least) due to pollution or fallout from historical nuclear wars. Although it's the seat of the Imperium, much of it between the arcologies and hives are lawless wastes. By the present time of the Imperium, Earth, as seen from orbit, is a huge cityscape swathed with dirty brown clouds, much of which is agglomerated pollution, and most of the many billions of people live in terrible squalor under the eyes of the uncaring overlords who use Terra as their various headquarters.
• Eating the Enemy:
  • This is the overall strategy of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, what isn't eaten in battle will eventually be broken down and absorbed after all resistance is annihilated.
  • In early editions, a bad roll for a Shokk Attack Gun (a gun that sends tiny goblins into a tunnel through hell, popping out completely insane and frenzied inside the target) meant that the pilot of the targeted dreadnought or Terminator knows how to react to the sudden apparition of a crazed snotling next to his head, voiding itself in his ear: turn his head and take a big bite, resuming the battle as if nothing had happened.
  • Kroots are a species of sentient carnivores allied with the T'au that can absorb the genetic information of their foes by devouring their corpses. They also happen to consider this a sign of respect towards worthy adversaries. The T'au for their part consider this behaviour barbaric, but they reluctantly tolerate it since the Kroot are their top melee combatants.
• Elemental Motifs: Despite the strong East Asian elements of their design, the Tau use the Classical theory of elements (water, air, earth, fire and ether):
  • The Water Caste are diplomats, described as being much like water in that they work subtly, with nothing being visible on the surface, and leave little trace behind.
  • The Air Caste are the pilots of both air and spacecraft.
  • The Fire Caste are Hot-Blooded warriors, being naturally tougher and stronger than the other castes.
  • The Earth Caste are the builders and engineers of the Tau.
  • The Ethereal Caste are the leaders of the Tau, possibly through More than Mind Control.
• Elite Agents Above the Law: The Holy Orders of the Emperor's Inquisition. In addition to their totally unfettered powers of requisition (ranging from safehouses to entire fleets of starships), Inquisitors technical have no limits on their authority save for what the Inquisitor imposes on themselves, allowing them to do things (like summon daemons and consort with aliens) that would get any other citizen burned alive. Other Inquisitors can, and do, attempt to impose standards on Inquisitorial operations but these are far from universal and tend to rely on the influence the Inquisitors themselves, and a well respected Inquisitor can get away with far more than one that has fallen out with his colleagues.
• Elite Army:
  • The Adeptus Astartes form small armies of super-soldiers that officially count at most 1000 active Astartes. However, the Space Marines are so strong, fast, resilient, courageous, well-trained and well-equipped, that a mere 100-strong company of them can engage any army without support. Downplayed for the Heretic Astartes, whose warbands are not armies, but when they form armies, they come at Legion strength which number in the tens of thousand of Space Marines. While still comparatively small compared to what the Imperium can mobilize, the Traitor Legions have the potential to lay waste to whole sectors.
  • The Aeldari are supposedly comparatively few, being a Dying Race. However, they are naturally "better" than other mortals, being quite fast and psychically potent, as well as having very advanced technology. Even their lowly Guardian citizen soldiers are more than a match for the soldiery of other races. Thanks to that, they can also challenge armies several times their size, provided they use hit-and-run tactics to minimize casualties.
• Elite Mooks: Elite choices for armies. Some elite choices are powerful warriors with specialized equipment, and others are basically better versions of Troop choices, and they consequently fit the spirit of this trope better. Space Marines have Veterans, Imperial Guard have Stormtroopers, Orks have Nobz, Eldar have Dire Avengers, Dark Eldar have Trueborn, all Chaos Daemons all have elite variants, the list can go on. Fits lore, too: Space Marines are viewed as this compared to the other Imperial forces, the Imperial Guard and PDF, who do the bulk of the fighting... and dying.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Warp, also known as The Immaterium, is a parallel dimension made of pure psychic energy underlying the material plane. In here, there is no concept of logic to be found and the Chaos Gods shape their realms according to the dominant concepts they embody. Alarmingly, all spaceships of the Imperium must travel through there to shorten the time span of galactic travel to reasonable durations.
  • Warp Rifts are locations in the material plane where the barrier between the Immaterium and the Materium has weakened, allowing the energy of the Warp to modify a zone in all sorts of freaky ways. These rift can encompass whole sectors of the galaxy and all planets in these rifts become almost as weird as the Warp itself. After the Fall of Cadia, a great Warp Rift known as the Cicatrix Maledictum has practically split the Imperium in two.
  • Meanwhile, the Aeldari use another parallel dimension known as the Webway as shortcuts between fixed points in space. Said Webway can be described as a labyrinthine network of wormholes where the norm is non-Euclidian space. It notably allows the city-port of Commoragh to have gigantic spires that seem to go upward near ones that go downward.
• Elves Versus Dwarves: The Aeldari with their sleek hover-tanks and elite warriors vs. the humans of the Imperium with their masses of conscripts backed up by smoke-bellowing armoured vehicles. Aeldari see humans as primitive and particularly heavily-armed vermin spreading everywhere, humans see Aeldari as fickle and degenerate Subpar Supremacists who need to accept their time in the galaxy has come and gone.
  • Played more literally albeit to a lesser extent with Aeldari vs. Leagues of Votann. The Kin traded with the Aeldari frequently in the time of the Age of Isolation before contact with the Imperium, but relations fractured when the Aeldari ignored several requests for aid in defending the Kin's homeworlds from Ork invaders. The Aeldari regard the Kin with as little regard as they do everyone else, but the Kin harbour a special hatred for the Eldar as a result, denouncing them as fickle and untrustworthy.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: Oddly enough, by Lukas Bastonne. A very-decorated sergeant of the Cadian Shock Troops with eidetic memory, who is incapable of forgetting the soldiers who have died under his command. The narration of his background describes him as having tattooed his body with the names of all the said soldiers as a momument to them even if his impressive memory ever fails him, and describes it greatly in a way that implies it true, but prior to that states it's a rumor and mentions his high-collared and tightly-pressed uniform, which would certainly be hiding it well if it were true.
• 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 (and in this case, the Squickiest of the four), you could say the Eldar have an entire necropolis. The other sides also have dark histories; they're just more honest about them.
  • Almost each of the Space Marine chapters have at least enough secrets to fill a tomb or two. Special mention goes to the Dark Angels, who are more than willing to kill members of the Inquisition to hide their secret (which is similar to killing a judge at your own trial) and are so secretive about it within their own Chapter that it would make Happyology seem like an open book.
• Empowered Badass Normal: The Sisters of Battle used to be nothing more than power-armored nuns with guns; better equipment and training aside, they were just ordinary humans like the Imperial Guard. Recent Sisters lists have weaponized the Sisters' faith, allowing them to manifest battlefield miracles that protect them from enemy fire and further increase their combat prowess.
• Enclosed Extraterrestrials: The Tau's body armor tends to be a lot more enclosing than those of other factions (they still indulge in Helmets Are Hardly Heroic, just not to the extent of the others), including their basic troops. Their helmets' Cyber Cyclops appearance can also unnerve some of the humans they deal with.
• The End of the World as We Know It: This age of mankind has been dubbed The Time Of Ending, since it is believed that humanity will either be extinguished, or it will evolve into a brand new species.
• Enemy Civil War:
  • For Chaos, the Imperium likes to believe that because it's the nature of Chaos to fight itself when they aren't occasionally united by a common goal, being the reason why the mortal forces tend fracture during or after a major offensive. While sometimes true, the real reason is that Chaos forces are often a collection of discreet warbands and cults with their own goals in mind and no real authority to answer to. They don't fracture as much as it's the nature of Chaos, as much as it's politics.
  • For the Imperium, while nominally united, it's not uncommon for forces to meet each other on the battleground. The reason can be that one side justifiably believes the other has turned renegade or traitor. Other times they have conflicting goals and are unable or unwilling to talk it out (the Dark Angels, with their extreme secrecy and priority on hunting the Fallen are rather infamous for being prone to this). Sometimes it's local political reasons, sometimes it's the ambitions of one commander for glory or for a vendetta that causes him to take his force against other Imperials.
  • The Tyranid Hive Fleets have been observed fighting one another when they encounter each other. The Hive Mind actually encourages this, as the better adapted Hive Fleet wins and takes the loser's biomass and agglomerated genetic information, thereby strengthening the race as a whole. As a bonus, the winning swarm loses no resources from either side other than the time spent fighting these wars (any ammo, troops, or ships lost on either side get eaten up and recycled into more).
  • For the Dark Eldar, it's a cultural standard to go just shy of this, since the Kabals are focused on scheming against and subverting one another rather than resorting to outright warfare. Obviously, they do engage in this when Kabal relations heat up.
  • For Orks, this is actually the standard way of life for clans and tribes to fight one another in the absence of other enemies. Until an aspiring Warboss pops up and butts enough heads together to form a Waaagh! to fight against other enemies. Accepted strategic doctrine for other races is that the simplest way to defeat a Waaagh! is to kill the Warboss, and then the Orks' unity will dissolve into old rivalries and they'll start infighting again.
  • The Eldar are normally highly adverse to this trope as befits their Dying Race status, but thanks to the vague and open-to-interpretation nature of Eldar prophecy its not unheard of for Farseers acting independently of each other to spark off conflict.
  • The Greater Good — the overarching philosophy of the Tau Empire — was explicitly created to avert this and, thanks to a maybe-pheromone link to the Ethereal Caste, the main body of the Tau empire is refreshingly free of Tau-on-Tau conflict. The sole exception is the Farsight Enclaves who have broken ranks with the main empire after losing their Ethereals to a demonic incursion. Open conflict is fairly rare, but the main Empire considers the Enclaves to be highly threatening to the cohesion of the Greater Good.
• Enemy Mine:
  • It's 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.
  • 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. In-game, the Allies table codifies this with the "Allies of Convenience" and "Desperate Allies" conditions, which translate to "working together until we don't have to" and "working together but spending as much time watching each other for betrayal as watching the enemy".
• Energy Weapon: From the humble lasgun to the odd Wave-Motion Gun, 40k has energy weapons of every size.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: This is part of the theory behind the Tau "Greater Good", that, unlike with every other faction in The 'Verse, multiple species can work together and still attain their own goals. For example, the Kroot seek new enemies to diversify their genetic material, so they work with the Tau as frontline troops to get plenty of meat and DNA. Like every slightly positive aspect of 40K, it's best not examined too closely, as it's possible the Tau use mind-control devices to make sure their allies don't forget about the "benefits everyone" part and the Kroot work to keep the Tau from finding out that they do mercenary work for other races too.
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Harnessing the energies of the Warp is RISKY business. Untrained use of it almost always has dire consequences, ranging from uncontrollable changes in the weather tobolts of energy and straight-up exploding heads. The Imperium's disdain for unsanctioned psykers, while extreme and fueled by hatred and superstition, is often quite justified with the damage they can cause. Psyker training, in fact, is not meant to learn how to be more powerful and harness more power, but the exact opposite of restraining one's power. And every one of these concerns is MAGNITUDES more justified when talking about Chaos. If you try to harness Chaos magic, you are literally putting yourself in the hands and at the whims of the Chaos Gods, and they WILL use you to cause as much pain, suffering and destruction as they can wring out of you.
• Epic Tank-on-Tank Action: The Battle of Tallarn, the greatest tank battle recorded in the history of the Imperium. During the Horus Heresy, the Iron Warriors invaded Tallarn, an industrial world that was responsible for producing tanks. Because the atmosphere was poisoned by virus bombs, both the Iron Warriors and Tallarn's defenders had to use the tanks they had to fight for supremacy, resulting in epic tank vs tank engagements where it was common to witness thousands of tanks shooting at each other.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Chaos accepts/corrupts everyone, regardless of species, though the main nonhuman races are, in general, conveniently resistant or immune — Eldar know how to resist, Tau have next to no Warp presence, and Orks and Tyranids too reliant on their native psychic fields to be easily corrupted by the Warp. The Necrons have contractual immunity, given that they are robots without souls and have technology that nullifies the effects of the Warp.
  • Although Chaos Orks do appear, particularly stormboy kultz. However, the Orks have a natural aversion to Chaos and corrupted warbands are almost immediately wiped out when they run into some of their uncorrupted kin, who will kill them off for being "un-Orky".
    • The difficulty with corrupted Orks (and, to a lesser extent, Tyranids) is that it's very difficult to tell the corrupted from the non-corrupted. They'll both try to kill you with abandon.
  • Ironically, one of the few positives of the grim darkness of the far future is that traditional forms of discrimination, such as racism of the non-fantastic kind and sexism, are almost non-existent. As long as you are human, or at least human enough, you will be treated equally. Equally poorly.
• 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.
• Eternal Engine: Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Worlds are described as being planets covered in these. Or as planets that are these.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Most factions in the setting (friendly reminder that all of them are some degree of evil) despise the Drukhari, seeing them as a bunch of sadists and degenerates. Not undeservedly, mind.
  • Khornate warbands are blood crazed psychopaths that will kill you without mercy or hesitation, true. But they will do so quickly and (relatively) painlessly. This is not because any moral quandary, it's because pain and suffering feed Slaanesh, Khorne's most hated rival god(ess).
• Everything Is Online: Wherever the Mechanicus is given free reign, they set up a noosphere network, which is an odd combination of augmented reality and massive electronic intercommunications, and appears most commonly as auroral streams and clouds of data. The catch is that one has to be properly augmented to see them. In the context of this trope, it's mostly averted with Mechanicus protocols and the rarity of the technology needed to crack the noosphere, though specialist sorcery originating from the Dark Mechanicus can have... adverse effects on the noosphere.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Non-video game example: the setting in general, life on a Death World in particular.
• The Evil Army: The forces of Chaos, the Dark Eldar and the armies of the Imperium on a bad day (or under a bad leader).
• Evil Counterpart: Chaos Space Marines to Space Marines, the Lost and the Damned to Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar to Craftworld Eldar, although the latter only appears that way from the outside. Some Craftworld Eldar see their Dark brethren as not so much "evil twin", as just a Jerkass sibling. The "Great Work" of the Harlequins is to reunite the two factions; not necessarily through any major change either factions' lifestyles.
  • The Chaos Gods could be seen this way too; Slaanesh as a corruption of Love or Happiness, Khorne as a corruption of Bravery or Glory, Tzeentch as a corruption of Hope or Wisdom, and Nurgle as a corruption of Acceptance or Friendship.
  • The Imperium of Man who wants to destroy all Xenos and the Tau Empire who wish to convert everyone to "The Greater Good" whether they like to or not.
• Evil Feels Good:
  • Renegade Marines and some Traitor Marines enjoyed the freedom that came along with not having to work for the Imperium any more.
  • This is pretty much Slaanesh's thing. To a lesser extent, the Chaos Gods attract followers who are naturally drawn to the way of life they offer, and thus the way of life they would likely enjoy the most.
  • Dark Eldar do all of the horrible things that they do halfway out of need, the other half because they legitimately enjoy the fruits of being twisted sociopaths.
  • Orks are hyperviolent brutes because war is literally their favorite hobby.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Chaos, the C'tan.
• Evil Is Visceral
  • Chaos — Many creatures of chaos have long prehensile tongues and various other features covered by subtropes.
    • Nurgle — The Great Unclean Ones have exposed organs, use their intestines as weapons, use vomit and pus as ranged weapons, etc.
    • Slaanesh — Daemonettes have big crab claws in place of one of their hands, and are rumored to have a nasty surprise instead of normal genitals. Keepers of Secrets are a mix of many different body parts, including breasts.
  • Tyranids — Everything.
• Evil Overlord: Every Chaos Lord, Dark Eldar Archon and Ork Warboss, and about half of the Imperium's governors.
• Evil Tainted the Place:
  • Just about anything corrupted by Chaos becomes this, often the only way to remove it is to destroy the planet.
  • A variation with the orks: a planet that's been invaded once will pretty much always have them, since the way they reproduce is by releasing spores on death that float around and eventually mature into even more orks (these are known as feral orks, and have a lower level of technology than the regular kind), though using fire to dispose of their corpses helps a bit.
• 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.
  • The primary conflict in Warhammer 40000 can be surmised as "Catholic Space Nazis vs. The Legions of Hell". Occasionally highly supremacist Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, Space Communists and warmongering green-skinned psychopaths get thrown in for extra fun.
  • Maybe if we went further back in time, we could find some genuine objectively good guys. Probably before Horus's treachery, though.
• Eviler than Thou: An ongoing contest between all the evil factions.
• Evil Will Fail: Comes up a lot when dealing with Chaos and the Orks. Tzeentch would die if his plans caused the destruction of the mortal realm and he knows it, so he often sabotages his own plans and makes them mutually contradictory — it's a testament to his sheer unnatural bastardly that none of his myriad schemes ever work even by complete accident. As for the Orks, their hostility which makes them such a threat also means they will never unite under one banner, and any alliances between Orks are purely temporary as it is inevitable that they will fall back into squabbling once their Warboss dies (and he will, if not by the hand of a challenger than by a weapon malfunction, a freak buggy accident, doing something silly like riding a missile...)
• Evolutionary Levels:
  • Referenced in the background material, as a wave of anomalous energy radiating out of the Eye of Terror raised the birth rates of psykers and mutants across the Imperium. The implication being that humanity is now evolving into a psychic species, and the mutants are an unfortunate side-effect. Under normal circumstances this would make zero sense whatsoever, since simply being a psyker is much more perilous of the average person due to the dangers of Daemons and the Imperium itself. Evolutionarily speaking, the "psyker species" should die out before it is even born. That said, anything having to do with the Warp, psykers, and the will of the Emperor can't be considered normal circumstances.
  • 40k also has an aversion which is completely ignored in the fluff. Humans have, by the 40th century, evolved around several divergent paths. Astropaths (at least in much older fluff), Ogryns, Ratlings, Beastmen and Squats are (or were for the latter two) distinct species that were offshoots of Homo Sapiens adapted to different environments and specializations. "Mutants", capital M, were listed as a sub-species along with all the other examples, but the concept of a species entirely made of mutants doesn't really work scientifically.
  • Navigators are effectively a human subspecies with exotic psychic powers and a physiology that gets increasingly bizarre as they age. They are born with a third eye quite unlike the other "natural" two as it sees directly into warpspace rather than the physical world. As they age and grow in power, they start gaining mutations that make them look less human and more otherworldly. Many humans (justifiably) consider them to be mutants, but Navigator are tolerated and even given a privileged place in the Imperium; because rather than a random aberration, their were deliberately created by genetic engineering during the Dark Age of Technology. And Navigators are indispensable when it comes to navigating the Warp.
• Evolutionary Pressure Cooker:
  • Some Space Marine chapters, notably the Blood Angels and the Black Templars, use Gladiator Games or other combat tournaments to select new aspirants: the survivors come out battle-hardened fighters that can then undergo the conversion and training into Super Soldiers.
  • Done accidentally by Lord Inquisitor Kryptmann during the Third Tyrannic War. He managed to trick one of the major wings of Hive Fleet Leviathan into invading the Ork Empire of Octarius, hoping they would either destroy each other or at least buy the Imperium some time. Unfortunately, it resulted in the Hive Mind absorbing ork DNA, resulting in even stronger tyranid organisms emerging from the star cluster when they finally destroyed the orks. Ultimately it took a Deus ex Machina at the Siege of Baal to finally end the war.
• Evolutionary Stasis:
  • The major genetic evolution in humanity has been the emergence of psykers, and even then they're around one in a million. Somewhat enforced, however, in that FTL travel is far from easy: the populations of planets become known for very particular traits (every Catachan looks like Rambo and the Predator squad) and there is little opportunity for interbreeding. The other major modification, which involves taking the cloned genes of a long-dead superhuman warrior and injecting them into a human until they're seven feet tall and bulletproof also makes them sterile.
  • This is actually averted with the various "Abhumans" who sometimes show up as Imperial Guard auxiliaries. In contrast to the various mutants created by Chaos energies and genetically altered supersoldiers, Abhumans are new races who have evolved naturally on planets with different environments than Earth, most notably the Squats, who evolved on a high-gravity planet.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: Stanley Steamer Spaceships and Stanley Steamer tanks.
  • It should be noted that the primary STC tank of the Imperium is of extremely basic design, so much so that the things can be adapted to run on wood with minimal adjustments. Steam is a relatively popular form of power in many tanks, especially considering the availabilities of particular fuel types can vary wildly in an empire that's lost count of how many planets it contains.
• Exotic Weapon Supremacy
  • Played With, as most weapons is the setting are exotic or amazingly cool, but are standard issue and became blasé.
  • Every army has a laundry list of Relics, many of them are powerful, one-of-a-kind weapons. One of the weirdest was for the Skitarii, and it was allegedly the skull of Nikola Tesla wired up to emit an EMP.
  • Daemon weapons are usually seen in the hands of a Chaos Lord, who's the only one strong enough to earn it and crazy enough to use it.
  • Force Weapons are a psyker's best friend in hand-to-hand, and the only ones able to turn a fancy but otherwise normal weapon into a lethal killing tool.
  • Witchblades are swords and spears available to Eldar psykers, and are nasty weapons in a fight.
  • Followers of Nurgle and Slaanesh enjoy this trope. Plague Marines can take biological weapons that should outright kill any other user, and Noise Marines use devastating sonic weapons that amplify their screams.
  • Dark Eldar love this trope. Wyches use exotic gladiator weapons to show off their skills in close combat. Archons have access to a slew of bizarre and strange weapons to show off the wealth and skill needed to acquire them. The Haemonculi covens have all sorts of weapons that work like twisted medical equipment or artifacts that seem to work like magic.
  • Actually averted with the 30K World Eaters. Sergeants and commanders have the option of taking Caedere Weapons, melee weapons that were lifted from Angron's gladiator days. Most of them were based around gimmicks and situational bonuses, and a consensus was formed by the base that most of them were simply inferior to regular power weapons, and possibly even the good ol' chainaxe which World Eaters got for free.
• Experience Points: The 9th Edition narrative play Crusade rules include an experience points system that allows units^note except named characters, Swarms, Drones, Buildings & Summoned units to gain levels during a campaign. A unit can gain experience points for taking part in games, killing enemy units, completing game objectives, or is chosen as being Marked for Greatness after a game. Once a unit has earned enough experience it is able to advance a Rank, and earn bonuses such as new abilities, stat buffs, artefacts and the like.
• 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: The Imperium as a whole was heavily based on the Imperium of the Dune novels. Both Imperiums are led by a God-Emperor, have a ban on artificial intelligence, utilise mutated Navigators to achieve faster-than-light travel and are protected by elite troops with a training regime so harsh that half die before reaching their teens.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut:
  • This is used as a vital means of transportation for the Imperium and Chaos forces. The problem with this sort of FTL travel is that they have to travel through the Warp, a twisted alternate dimension where the Chaos Gods and their many daemons reside, meaning it's not uncommon for a ship to get lost, arrive way off target or off time, or suffer a malfunction that would expose the ship to the Warp and the crew to a fate that would make them envy the dead. This is usually less of a problem for Chaos, who use forbidden knowledge or daemonic pacts to mitigate the risks, but that doesn't quite make them immune to it. Those ships that get lost or destroyed in there usually become Space Hulks, massive patchwork shipwrecks that drift about in space.
  • The Webway is a labyrinthine alternate dimension used by the Eldar which has an oblique connection to the Warp (some sources say that it's built across the warp, some that it's built right on the border, etc.), however some sections have been completely lost or blocked off due to breaches into the Warp, a lack of maintenance, or the Necrons invading. However, it's home to it's own category of strange creatures, locations, and phenomena. The Dark Eldar have their main city of Commorragh in it, as it's the only place where they're relatively safe from the attentions of Slaanesh. The Harlequins are rumored to be headquartered at the Black Library which is also hidden somewhere within. While much of it has been lost, the Webway still allows access to millions of locations across the galaxy.
  • The Tau have no psychic ability and thus no ability to see the Warp. Their FTL is therefore achieved by putting the ship into the space between realspace and the Warp, reaching lightspeed, and coasting out (the effect is directly compared to holding a ball underwater and letting go). While much safer, it's also around five times slower than Warp travel.
• Extreme Omnivore: Tyranids eat everything up to and including entire planets, right down to the bedrock, including the atmosphere.)
  • 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.
• Extreme Speculative Stratification: Hive cities are homes to millions if not billions of people, who are richer the further up you go. Since hives are often the only habitable places on a Death World, the richest live in the upper atmosphere that's actually breathable, while the poorest have to fight off mutants, giant spiders and each other, feeding off the waste that gets dumped from higher strata. Unsurprisingly, the Imperial Guard recruits heavily from the scavenger population, since surviving to adulthood is no easy feat (and often have other useful skills, like scrounging or a highly-developed sense of 3D direction).
• The Extremist Was Right: Consistently and in the worst possible way. The Adeptus Mechanicus' stranglehold on technological development is justified by historical Robot Wars and more than one galaxy-spanning apocalypse. The horrific treatment of psykers is justified by the fact they can be possessed by Warp Daemons from even the tiniest lapse of concentration or mishap in using their powers. The horrific Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque totalitarianism is justified by the horrors of the Horus Heresy and the fact Chaos really is that insidious. The Imperium's Absolute Xenophobes have been proven right so often in their belief that all Aliens Are Bastards that genocidal violence on contact is not only justified, but likely the only way to be sure. In the grim darkness of the far future, humans have to be Space Nazis plus Space Spanish Inquisition because any other approach will lead to total extinction.
  "In ancient times, men built wonders, laid claim to the stars and sought to better themselves for the good of all. But we are much wiser now."

F

• The Face: A group of Tau will often have a member of their diplomat caste around that can do all the talking when they have to meet with members of another species.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Genestealers infect their victims via the "Genestealer's Kiss", which involves them using their freakishly long tongue to perform some Orifice Invasion.
• 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. While the idea that men in suits of Powered Armour the size of tanks are running around with their heads completely exposed leads to some serious Fridge Logic, Word of God is generally that the characters do wear their helmets, but the models representing them don't to make them more distinctive. (Actual fluff is interesting on this front. At least in the case of Astartes, their skulls are just as tough as any helmet could hope to be, and their augmentations render them immune to most poisons and diseases (though, this being 40k, there are always higher levels of lethal, but a helmet would do squat against those anyway). The only reason to take a helmet is for the Autosenses suite, which is far more useful for shooting than for combat. As characters prefer melee....
  • It should probably be noted that, in the case of the aforementioned Powered Armour wearing tank-sized men, being shot in the exposed skull is generally seen as a fairly minor inconvenience, both in-game and in fluff terms.
  • Space Wolves will deliberately defy this trope, as in their Space Viking culture it's not enough to single-handedly take down a giant monster with nothing but your bare hands, someone needs to see you do it. That, and they feel deafened while wearing the helmets, due to their heightened senses. As we mentioned earlier, helmets are only good for enhancing the senses of the wearer- if a marine's senses are equally good without, no reason to wear one, especially as it restricts smell.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: Sigismund delivers an epic one to Abaddon in Black Legion:
  "You will die as your weakling father died. Soulless. Honourless. Weeping. Ashamed."
• 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 sometimes more messy and permanent than simple fainting.
• 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.
  • 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.
• False Prophet:
  • Several organizations preaching a slightly different version of the Imperial creed turned out to be genestealer cults preparing the planet for Tyranid invasion. Chaos cults tend to act similarly, at first out of a genuine desire for social reform in some cases.
  • Inverted by the God-Emperor of Mankind, who did emphatically did not want to be considered a god, hoping to destroy Chaos by banning all religion. Ironically, faith in Him is now one of the most potent weapons against Chaos.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Really, the only way to die in this galaxy.
• Fanatical Fire: The various forces of the Imperium of Man — most notably the Sisters of Battle and the Inquisition — frequently make use of flamers in combat, and the Imperium is certainly fanatical.
• Fangs Are Evil: Averted with the Space Wolves and the Blood Angels. Played horrifically straight with Chaos Space Marines and the Tyranids.
• Fanservice:
  • The 3rd edition Daemonettes of Slaanesh were lithe and beautifully (if eerily) feminine with shapely bare breasts (in some cases, more than two of them). This was toned severely down for the next edition of the models, which covered up all the nipples and made them more twisted and ugly again, although still not as bad as the hideous 2nd edition models.
  • Drukhari Wyches are often enchantingly beautiful and scantily-clad, particularly their Succubi leaders and most notably their hero character Lelith Hesperax, who somersaults into battle wearing an armoured thong.
• Fantastic Naming Convention: The Tau Empire as a whole have a fascinating naming convention for their citizens, using [Caste]'[Rank] [Sept they were born in] [Defining traits]. For example, Shas'la T'au Kais means "Brave Fire Caste Initiate from T'au".
• Fantastic Firearms:
  • Aeldari (nee eldar) shuriken weapons use gravity manipulation to make their projectiles-monomolecular plastic discs-move like they were dropped off of a very high cliff on a very high-gravity planet. Once they exit the weapon, their momentum keeps them going forwards.
  • Drukhari (nee Dark eldar) splinter weapons use spikes of crystalized toxins, but otherwise use the same mechanism to launch them as shuriken weapons.
  • Ork weapons:
    • Sluggaz (pistols) and Shootaz (rifles) only look and act like conventional (if big) machine guns because the orks think they ought to, and what orks think takes prescedence over reality. They're actually boxes full of odds-and-ends ("bitz" or "gubbinz") in the rough shape of a gun that the orks "fire" with their Psychic Powers. This doesn't stop at just projectiles-or guns in general-either. This seems to have a fair bit of Depending on the Writer, though. In some works, they NEED to be used by an ork to function at all (one example was an ork armed with a lead pipe attached to a stubber ammo belt), and in some works, their guns are actually functional, but only an ork can make them work *properly.*
    • The Shokk Attack Gun works by opening a tunnel in the Warp to its target (inside a vehicle or suit of Power Armor). Gretchin are shoved into one end of the tunnel, driven mad by the horrible things they see, and emerge kicking and screaming into the target zone, tearing the crew apart. ...At least, in theory: this being an ork weapon, it can fail in any number of darkly hilarious ways, such as the gretchin panicking and running the wrong way, the gunner being sent into the target, the whole thing exploding and being sent into the Warp, etc.
    • The Bubble Chucka is based on Void Shield technology, and fires energy bubbles that do completely random damage. It seems to be based on how much air it compresses into a bubble, as big ones feel like being slapped and small ones explode like missiles.
  • Chaos Space Marine Weapons
    • Daemons can possess normal weapons, causing any number of strange things to happen with the guns used by Chaos Space Marines, like spewing tortured souls, globules of hellfire, and daemonic ichor. These usually just happen to look like a rusted-out old bolter, with the guts of the weapon replaced with just about anything-including actual guts.
    • Chaos Sonic weapons are repurposed instruments from a symphony dedicated to Slaanesh performed at the time the Emeror's Children legion fell to Chaos. Over the millenia, the musical instruments mutated (yes, really, Chaos can mutate non-biological matter) to the point that they look like guns to reflect how their wielders use them. They "fire" sound waves at such intensity they make the air glow purple, and kill enemies right through their armor by liquifying their insides.
  • Tyranid guns are symbiotic and resemble gun-shaped insects. They fire living ammo by way of peristaltic muscle spasms, or by persuading the (viciously hangry^note hungry+angry) ammo itself to jump out of the muzzle by giving it a bio-electric shock.
    • Devourers fire swarms of flesh-eating maggots. These worms absolutely love nerves, and will try to eat as much as they can, eventually gobbling up the victim's brains.
    • Fleshborers launch beetles that try to munch through anything in their way. They're a rough analogue to a tyranid assault rifle.
    • The Deathspitter shoots acidic worm guts, and is fired by having one part of it ("a spider-fanged set of jaws," and weather that means its jaws looks like a spider or it has chilicerae is unclear) grab a worm, skin it alive for its nummy outer layer and toss the yucky insides away, which the barrel reacts to with a spasm similar to being violently sick, launching the projectile, which splats against the target like a water balloon full of Hollywood Acid.
    • Spinefists have an air bladder that parasitically links to the wielder's lungs, and is roughly analogous to an assault shotgun.
    • The Spike Rifle (DMR), Impaler Cannon (sniper rifle), Barbed Strangler (grenade launcher), and Venom Cannon (Anti-Materiél Rifle) fire sharp bone spikes, insanely-fast growing thornbush seeds, and crystalized venom, respectively, by peristalsis of the intestine-lined barrel. The Impaler Cannon's ammunition is actually able to see, and guide itself to the enemy in the few seconds it has to live before it bleeds to death.
    • Moving up to artillery, the Spore Launcher uses peristalsis to lob spore mines (self-aware living bombs filled with acid, chitin shrapnel, or fungal spores) vast distances.
• Fantastic Plastic:
  • Plasteel is a type of advanced synthetic material that has the consistency of plastic but the tensile strength of a steel alloy that was developed during the Dark Age of Technology, but long used by the Imperium of Mankind in the construction of many types of personal infantry armor. Heavy-duty plasteel were combined with the heat-resistant ceramic material called ceramite to craft the plating of Terminator Armour when the Adeptus Mechanicus still maintained the technical knowledge required to manufacture it.
  • Wraithbone is a form of reprogrammable matter comprised of solidified psychic energy, comparable to steel in terms of strength but far lighter, and its colour, density, shape and hardness can be changed on the fly by any of the Asuryani with an iota of psychic potential (that is, all of them). It is used to create everything from silken bodysuits and psychic runes, to the bodies of colossal war walkers and the hulls of starships.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • It's right there in the Imperial Creed. "Beware the alien, the mutant, the heretic." Yet despite the Jerk Justifications that have been raised in the Imperium's favour to justify it, the overall mood of the Imperium's take on xenophobia is a deconstructive one. The Emperor became this after seeing how many if not most of the allied alien races humanity had worked with prior to the Age of Strife turned against them after their fall, enslaving and killing them in great numbers. He decided that the galaxy was not big enough for his vision of humanity and these existing Xenos empires. But he took their legitimate beefs with certain races and twisted them into a carte blanche that justified, in his mind, anything humanity did to any other race in the future. To this day, humanity has a shoot-first-ask-questions-never approach to aliens, including those who are pre-spaceflight and pose no threat to them; for instance, they were prepared to bomb the Tau out of existence when they first encountered them despite the Tau being barely out of their Iron Age. The Emperor was also not above presenting Xeno races he deemed useful to him with Join or Die offers that included a non-negotiable obligation to accept humanity as their overlords, nevermind that that was exactly the kind of behaviour he had bitched about aliens doing to humanity. Humanity may have many enemies in the galaxy that cannot be negotiated with, but their hyper-aggressive foreign policy hasn't done them any favours with other species. Aliens don't hate the Imperium because they're humans; they hate them because to them, Humans Are Bastards.
    • Seems to have ebbed slightly as of the Dark Imperium storyline, where the Eldar of the Ynnari Cult intervened directly to revive Roboute Guilliman and are actively seeking to forge a lasting alliance between themselves and the Imperium. They firmly believe that the fates of the two species are irrevocably linked, and must either unite against Chaos or be extinguished separately by it. Time will tell if Guilliman and the Imperium proper are receptive to the idea.
  • Speaking of whom, the Eldar have this problem in a big way as well, and it is also deconstructed. Their monumental arrogance has led them to direct threatening alien forces into Imperial or Ork-held systems to save their own people's lives, even if the number of Eldar being saved is a fraction of the other people being killed in the resulting throwdown. They also greatly underestimate the capabilities of non-Eldar fairly often, which has come back to bite them in the ass more than once.
• Fantastic Rank System: The Imperial Guard have several additional ranks, such as "Lord General Militant" and "Colonel-Commissar". Non-human factions have entirely invented rank systems; see the trope page for details.
  • More generally, the Imperial Guard (Astra Militarum if you want to avoid a copyright) are patterned roughly off of WWII British ranks, with several additional fictitious ranks added above the typical pones to reflect the colossal size of the Imperium, and Soviet political officers appended to it, plus entirely made-up psychic ranks beside those.
• Fantastic Slurs: XENO!
  • In the Imperium, "twist" is often used for mutants, though the mutants have largely reclaimed the term.
  • Also, members of the Imperial Guard have used the term "cogboy" for Adeptus Mechanicus Techpriests.
  • The Eldar refer to humans as "Mon'keigh". The fact that it sounds like "monkey" is the least offensive thing about it ^note Translated from Eldar, it means something like "lesser being to be exterminated"..
  • The Tau term for humans is less blatantly insulting, but is still quite condescending if one is versed in their language. Their standard term is "Gue'la", which, apart from it sounding like the Chinese slur for Europeans (gwailo) doesn't seem that bad. However, their term for humans who have joined the Tau Empire is "Gue'vesa", which translates as "human helpers", clearly highlighting their status as second-class citizens. It's also worth noting the only other categorical use of the suffix -'vesa is in reference to their mindless robot servants who have the same level of intelligence as a rodent.
• Fantastic Underclass: The Imperium of Man considers the natural human form to be holy and perfect, and any deviation from it to be repulsive, often indicative of a twisted and debased soul. However, due to the cumulative influence of thousands of years on wildly alien worlds, abundant chemical or radioactive mutagens, and the constant influence of Chaos, mutation or divergent human phenotypes are very common. Consequently, when they're not lynched outright, the Imperium's mutant and abhuman natives tend to make up the downtrodden underclass of Imperial worlds, living in run-down and squalid ghettos in the worst parts of the hive cities — or in some cases entirely outside of them — and allowed to do so purely to serve as cheap, expendable workforces and cannon fodder. Abhumans, originating from purely environmental adaptations and sporting no further mutations, tend to be at least somewhat more accepted than mutants... but not by much.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer 40,000 were born in the 1970s and 1980s. This was an era of turmoil, chaos, deindustrialization and revolution in the UK, and the various races and factions reflect this. The game itself is a satire of the World War One, with its primitive tactics, generals' indifference on their men, horrible casualties and senseless sacrifice of men. The various tanks are direct rip-offs of the WWI armoured fighting vehicles with their high profiles and sponson-mounted cannons. The early editions even contained horse-riding cavalry.
  • The Imperium resembled many of earth's greatest civilizations, especially of the western variety, during its prime in the Crusade era. Most notably overall being The Roman Empire, with extensive use of Latin in the political and military infrastructures of the empire, such as the frequent resurgence of the term praetorian as a rank or informal role, as well as many characters' names. Many elements of military composition throughout the Astaftes and Imperial Guard are directly inspired by Rome's legions, not least among them the use of the word legion, such as the practice of standard bearers, the rigidly structured chain of command within uniformly organized companies and the Aquila iconography representative of the Emperor's authority. Many Astartes are described in the literature as wearing togas in their down time, and primarchs and chapter masters often wear steel embelishments mimicking laurel crowns in their official functions. The Empire's crusade, aiming to unite all of humankind under one banner, is similar to Rome's drive to conquer, colonize and "Romanize" all of the known world, as they believed was their responsibility and right. In literature, some characters are even portrayed cleaning themselves with oils and subsequently scraping the grime from their skin with dull, curved knives, a hygienic process the Romans also practiced with tools called strigoi.
  • Space Marines in general are based off of the famous Greek Spartans. More specifically, we have the Viking Space Wolves, the Mongol White Scars, the Roman Ultramarines as the most obvious examples. Blood Angels have some Christian iconography, particularly from the Renaissance period (in the form of immaculate angels). Dark Angels have a particularly monastic feel to them, reinforced by their Old Testament-style angelic names. The Dark Angel's Death Wing Company also has a sort of tribal feel to it, due to the history of their armor, and the Ravenwing, with their huge, wing-like standards and emphasis on rapid assault, are dead ringers for the famed Winged Hussars of Poland. Black Templars are likewise based off of The Knights Templar and The Teutonic Knights, which also affects their gameplay. Prussia is also present in the Imperial Fists, whose attitudes and methods of sovereignty are straight out of the junker playbook, while the Raven Guard are loosely themed around Celtic culture, especially Corvus himself, who takes heavily from mythological Celtic heroes like Naoise. The pre-Angron War Hounds with their brotherly bonds and shieldwall tactics are based on Sparta, but the World Eaters largely degenerate into a raving band of bloodthirsty madmen.
  • The Inquisition shares a lot of imagery with (surprise, surprise) the Spanish Inquisition. The Witch Hunters are also very obviously based off of the witch hunters from movies, and possibly the Salem Witch Trials.
  • Imperial Guard regiments include the World War II German-inspired Steel Legion and the rather more Grimdark World War I 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, the tribal Attilan Rough Riders (just guess), and the Welsh/Scottish Tanith First-and-Only.
    • The Cadians are intended to be your standard modern/futuristic soldiers but their name is supposedly a reference to Canada's underappreciated army (which would make their voice actor in Dawn of War amusingly appropriate). They are also influenced by Blitz-era Britain — Lord Castellan Ursarkar Creed is basically Winston Churchill in Space, cigar included.
  • 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. Interestingly, though, their military doctrine of rapid movement, fluid battle lines and overwhelming force backed by drones, long range precision weaponry and laser-guided destruction (minus the battlesuits) is absolutely American.
  • Both the Necrons and the Thousand Sons Chaos Space Marines show ancient Egyptian influence in their design.
  • The Kroot have a very Aboriginal Tribal feel to them, using relatively primitive weapons and warbeasts rather than the high-tech weaponry of every other race (and it's not like it's hard for them to get the equipment either, they just simply don't want it because it's too flimsy).
  • The Orks are the British underclass: skinheads, football hooligans, petty criminals, teddyboys etc. Their speech reflect this - they speak Cockney, the traditional London and Thames Estuary working class dialect. While Skinheads were a staple of underground music before then, being a term for working-class young men who loved jazz and ska, these new Skinheads of the 1970s were fond of punk rock and dressed accordingly. They were loud, aggressive, picked fights and aligned themselves with movements like the National Front, which could be summed up as “I’m the best. I just am. I’ll fight you to prove I’m right!”
  • While the Orks are the British underclass, the Eldar are the privileged boarding school and Oxbridge educated upper classes: smug, snobistic, scheming but a dwindling privileged class who look everyone else down their noses. The 1980s saw something of a revival of class snobbery among Britain's political classes. To put it bluntly, there has long been a sense of entitlement among Britain’s upper middle class families. They have the money, power and connections to do pretty much what they liked, the concerns of the poor were of little concern and the British Conservative Party was thought beholden only to the interests of this close-knit network.
  • Chaos Space Marines represented the postmodern Nihilist counter-cultural scene. It’s no coincidence the eight-point star of Chaos happens to also be the symbol of a branch of occult magic also called Chaos. In the 1970s the UK had its own form of new-age rhetoric which included the practice of Wicca. Chaos magic wasn’t like these. Being in island full of nihilists, Wicca didn’t sit well with everyone. Chaos presented the idea there was no objectivity, no centerpoint of the universe. Reality was whatever you could imagine it to be. It was magic from a nihilistic perspective, a magic by doing rather than offering and hoping. This is represented as the Horus Heresy.
  • The Dark Eldar are the Neo-Nazis. Far more intelligent and connected than the lower class Orks, the Dark Eldar, like the normal Eldar, were fanatic about the glorious old days. This was Neo-Nazi rhetoric in a nutshell, that if the successes of National Socialism were replicated, the empire could be reborn. The leaders of these movements however, were anything but sympathetic. Vicious, angry, spite-filled, they targeted the abandoned youths with sadistic glee, grooming them to share their anger at the death of the old and the rejection of what they believed could have been Britain’s salvation. They were predators, working in the shadows unlike the toffs who sat in the open and preened their feathers in Westminster. Lying, stealing, conning and duping while looking down on anyone they deemed ‘inferior’, except while the toffs looked down on the working class, British neo-Nazis looked down on non-Europeans, just like the Dark Eldar.
  • As for the Necrons, they were British impressions of horror. Before Matt Ward completely transformed them into space versions of Warhammer Fantasy’s Tomb Kings, the Necrons were basically zombie Terminators with the sole mission of wiping out all life. But there is a British inspiration that goes beyond the Terminator movies: zombies and slasher horror movies. The Necrons are effectively a distilled version of the sort of stuff that slipped under the radar of the BBFC: Zombies and mummies were stuff we’d seen before, but then there were invincible serial killers, sickly wet gore and gratuitous bloody violence.
  • The Tyranids are the Communists. The British upper classes have always been sympathetic to the Communist cause, and their nature reflects this: hive-minded and a general face with no redeeming qualities that players could easily gun down to avoid a face-clawing, and who have come from a distant galaxy to eat up all resources and life. They are the ultimate predators; to them, all living things, from the lowliest insect to the most advanced starfaring civilisation, are mere prey (compare to the Marxist idea of class warfare and extermination of the retrograde classes). They are said to be fleeing from something even worse and more powerful - that is: the Soviet Union.
  • The Tau (or T'au) represent the Thatcherite neo-liberal middle class mixed with the worst aspect of the Japanese society: self-righteous, hypocrite, ambitious and conformist society obsessed with technology and robotics. The Tau took on an Orwellian flavor and Imperium-esque elements, with the Ethereals being totalitarian autocrats performing acts of ruthless indifference towards their subjects, including eugenics or up to Exterminatus of lost races (e.g. Orks and Tyranids), in the guise of being for the Greater Good (compare to Thatcherite ideals).
• Fashionable Asymmetry: Tau Fire Warriors wear an over-large, reinforced shoulder pad on their left shoulder to provide additional protection when they open fire on the enemy. Some older patterns of Space Marine power armor have a studded, reinforced shoulder pad on one side for the same reason.
• Fast-Roping: A tactic that was introduced in the Cities of Death expansion that allows troops to drop directly onto buildings from their skimmers. Later adopted as a standard— if dangerous— technique for exiting a Valkyrie at speed in Codex: Imperial Guard.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • The Emperor's arrogance and detachment from humanity. He never felt the need to explain himself, and assumed that no one would betray or disobey him regardless of what he did. He also couldn't comprehend people's need to believe in a higher power, and thus never believed that his own anti-religious actions would eventually lead to his own people worshipping him as a god posthumously.
  • Lion was a Horrible Judge of Character who couldn't read or relate to other people.
  • Jaghatai was an Ineffectual Loner who hardly ever associated with any of his brothers and always preferred going off and doing his own thing and being his own man. So when the Heresy kicked off, he could trust nobody and nobody really trusted him either.
  • Leman Russ had Undying Loyalty which meant he never questioned orders even when they were questionable, like being ordered to burn an entire world when it was really a false order given by Horus, and that Leman's actual orders were to bring Magnus back to the Imperium alive to face judgement from the Emperor. Also, his lack of tact made him an outcast among his own brothers.
  • Rogal Dorn's Determinator tendencies often translated as stupidly aggressive tendencies in battle. He literally didn't know when to stop. The Iron Cage incident (where the Iron Warriors Legion lured Dorn and his Imperial Fists into a death trap) exploited this and his legion was decimated as a result.
  • Roboute Guilliman had a need for control and orthodoxy that often made his thinking predictable and inflexible. This was how Fulgrim ambushed and wounded him.
  • Fulgrim had an obsession with emulating his father and perfecting himself that drove him to madness.
  • Perturabo always felt like The Un Favourite of his family because his father and his brothers never valued him or his accomplishments. So when the Heresy happened, he fell in line with the one brother who he felt didn't treat him as a Butt-Monkey.
  • Konrad's unflinching desire for justice made him a brutal psychopath.
  • Angron's uncontrollable rage, his obsession with avenging his comrades, his resentment against his father for dragging him away to fight some intergalactic crusade he never cared about when he would have preferred just dying as a hero with his friends planetside, his inability to relate with any of his brothers because of the pain of losing his old brothers-in-arms on his homeworld, his Never My Fault tendencies which made him very hard to like... Poor guy.
  • Mortarian's confidence issues led to him seeking council from the wrong people.
  • Magnus was an Insufferable Genius who recklessly and arrogantly sought knowledge and power wherever he could, which led to him turning to Chaos.
  • Lorgar always sought a higher meaning to dedicate himself to. When the Emperor rejected and humiliated him, he turned to Chaos.
  • Alpharius' desire to constantly look like the most brilliant person in the room ironically made him very easy to manipulate for both Chaos and the Cabal. Also, his Complexity Addiction which eventually resulted in his death at the hands of Dorn.
  • Horus Lupercal himself, who above all other things wanted glory. He hated sharing credit with his brothers and eventually he hated sharing credit with the Emperor too.
  • The Chaos Gods' selfishness which is why cooperation between them is impossible.
• A Father to His Men: Literal in the case of the Emperor to the Primarchs and the Primarchs to their respective legions during the Great Crusade. Also see the image on that page for much lulz.
  • Surprisingly, Nurgle's Great Unclean Ones are described as Fathers to their Daemons. The Lord of Decay Nurgle himself even engenders a twisted affection in his followers, who refer to him as "Grandfather Nurgle".
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: A squad has a morale stat, and when it drops enough the squad is considered "broken", forcing them to flee until they can rally and reform their ranks. This can lead to them fleeing from cover and leaving themselves open to further attacks from ranged enemy units. Some squads are completely immune to this, with reasons ranging from a literal lack of fear like the Necrons or Tyranids, to sheer strength of will like the Space Marines or some units of the Imperial Guard.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Any unit with "fearless" will fight to the death, despite the casualties they take, and cannot be pinned by enemy fire, however they would continue to fight even against the enemy they cannot possibly hurt, until it rips them to shreds, where more reasonable warriors would at lest try to retreat to fight something more suited to their capabilities, and they also cannot go to ground under heavy fire, which makes them more vulnerable to being focus-fired.
• The Federation: The Tau Empire, who ironically would be the bad guys in most settings. In 40k, they're the idealistic ones.
• Feed It a Bomb: As of the Sixth Edition, grenades now have a separate strength-stat that is used when fighting Monstrous Creatures; that's right, even the Mighty Carnifex, practically impervious to Strength 4 Bolters, can be taken down by a unit of humble Tactical Space Marines, all tossing a once-humble (Strength 6) Krak Grenade down its Toughness 6 throat...
• Feel No Pain: Necrons, Orks, Space Marines, Nurgle, Thousand Sons, the Dark Eldar if they kill enough people. Don't even ask about followers of Slaanesh...
  • This is a special rule in the game, described as an ability to shrug off injuries and keep fighting. Models that have the rule can make an additional dice roll to attempt to negate an unsaved wound.
• 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.
• Fiction 500: Anyone who has a "Warrant of Trade" in the Imperium is this. The poorest of these trades has to do with a single space cathedral attached to a battle ship, while the richest owns entire fleets and controls the trade of hundreds of planets.
• Fictional Flag:
  • The Imperium of Man uses a double-headed eagle with outstretched wings. In-universe, this symbolizes the union of Earth and Mars that began the Imperium. Out-of-universe, it's derived from the Austro-Hungarian crest.
  • All Space Marine chapters have traditional symbols with some meaning to them — a wolf's head on grey for the Space Wolves, a black dragon's head on green for the Salamanders, and so on.
    • Ork Klanz lack formal banners, but have symbols and themes that turn up in their iconography. The brutal and aggressive Goffs have a black bull's head, the Blood Axes have crossed red axes, the Evil Sunz and Bad Moonz their respective celestial bodies, and so on.
• Finagle's 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.
• Final Solution: Exterminatus is a disturbingly popular problem-solving tool.
• Firearms Are Cowardly: Played with by certain factors.
  • The forces of Khorne believe this trope for much of the time. Even Khornate forces use boltguns due to the high-tech setting, but only to have something to do as they close in for melee.
  • Subverted with the Blood Knight Orks, who are just as happy to attack with their ridiculously overpowered and inaccurate guns as to close in and get chopping with rusty axes. To an Ork, honor means nothing when it comes to fighting and winning.
• 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.
  • On the tabletop, Five Rounds Rapid is ineffective. Five Hundred Rounds Rapid, on the other hand...
  • In the 3rd-7th Editions of the game, Star-gods and a few nasty T8+ creatures were utterly immune to most small-arms fire in-game, due to the rule that if a weapon's strength was 4 or more less than the toughness of the target, it couldn't hurt them (and the standard firearm is usually Strength 4, if not less). They also had a helluva lotta wounds to withstand anything that can hurt them. In 8th Edition, it's theoretically possible for any weapon to harm any target via Scratch Damage, but most big nasties have even more Wounds on their profiles to compensate.
• Flamethrower Backfire: Ork weapons are designed with no safety features in mind, so shooting the Ammunition Backpack is usually a good tactic.
  • Crossing this trope with Every Car Is a Pinto, the Hellhound Flame Tank can suffer a catastrophic explosion even to a mild hit as a result of its flamer tanks going up.
• 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.
  • The Horus Heresy novels have shades of this in places too — the Emperor has promoted a society based on atheistic secularism, so people lend absolutely no credit to stories of Chaos Gods being behind the various Bad Things that happen for the first few books. Justifed because the Emperor is a Nay-Theist trying to stave the Chaos Gods of worship and belief to destroy them. It doesn't work.
• Flaying Alive: The basic method of Cold-Blooded Torture employed by various factions in the setting. They just get worse from there.
• Flechette Storm: Eldar shuriken weapons, Dark Eldar splinter weapons, and at least one type of bolter shell all work like this.
  • The Tau have an upgrade for their tanks that shoot flechette storms while using tank shock rules.
  • Similarly with the Land Raider variant patterns (Crusaders and Redeemers): They have Frag Assault Launchers, which shoot a cloud of shrapnel outward from the front assault ramp, allowing those within (usually Terminators) time to close with the enemy.
• Flesh Versus Steel
  • Tyranids vs. everyone.
  • Chaos Marines using possessed daemon engines versus the more conventionally mechanizes Loyalist Marines.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Make no mistake, 40k taken at face value is a horrible, depressing setting in which all of the various factions, good and bad, are going to annihilate each other leaving a dead, ruined galaxy in their wake. However, some of the most powerful and human moments in the series are when a small group of Astartes, guardsmen, or even civilians decide they absolutely will not give up, and fight to the last for duty, honor, to live one more day, or even for the very survival of their species. The so-called "hero" races of 40k often lose, and many times their hard-won victories cost thousands or even billions of lives, but their refusal to give up in the face of such ludicrous odds is awesome.
  • More specifically, this was the Emperor's intent with the formation of the Grey Knights Space Marines. As the Imperium was being torn apart by the Horus Heresy, he sent his closest adviser, Malcador, to assemble what would become the Inquisition and the Grey Knights.
  One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness, One last blade forged in defiance of fate, Let them be my legacy to the galaxy I conquered, And my final gift to the species I failed.
• Foil:
  • The Imperium of Man is a vast, galaxy-spanning theocratic regime that had its golden age millennia ago and is now slowly but surely falling apart. The T'au Empire is relatively small and young, but on a meteoric rise. The Imperium is intensely xenophobic and orders genocide of all aliens as state policy, whereas the T'au are a de facto alliance of many alien species working towards a quasi-utilitarian ideology. You could also make the case that the T'au, mechanistic Flat-Earth Atheist newcomers to the galactic scene, are actually foils to the deeply spiritual and traditional, Magitek-using Aeldari.
    • According to Word of God, the Kroot were originally envisioned as a standalone army before they were folded into the T'au as auxiliaries. So their low-tech Noble Savage appearance and healthy skepticism towards the Greater Good ideology is intended to contrast with the T'au's high-tech anime porn and confidence in their manifest destiny to unite the stars.
  • The Ultramarines and Alpha Legion were big rivals in the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy due to their differing approaches to the Jack of All Stats Super-Soldier Astartes. The Ultramarines favoured a highly centralised command and control structure with a highly complex Codex to dictate their actions, an iron discipline, and an aversion to civilian casualties. The Alpha Legion was the opposite: personal initiative among independent cells was encouraged, as were simple strategies and tricks based on The Thirty-Six Stratagems with multiple contingencies, and collateral damage was actively sought for to sow as much chaos as possible. Put simply, one operated like the Roman Legions, the other operated like the Vietcong.
• Foreboding Fleeing Flock: The Tyranids, of all creatures, are this in two ways:
  • It's implied that they've come to our galaxy because they're fleeing from something even worse. Take a moment to consider what would be terrifying enough to make Horde of Alien Locusts who number in trillions flee for their lives.
  • If Tyranid fleet enters your system, then immediately turns around and gets the hell out of there, it's a sign that you should pack you stuff and follow their example, as the only thing they run from are the Necron and you're sitting on top of a Tomb World which may have just awakened from the backlash of hive fleet entering the system.
• 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. More accurately, it's stated that, "...[the bell] would toll itself hoarse were it to ring for every Space Marine that falls in His name."
• Foreign Ruling Class:
  • The Tau Empire has annexed several planets inhabited by other species, including humans, who are usually treated well though still ruled by Tau Ethereals.
  • While the Imperium of Man tend to be portrayed as Absolute Xenophobes some writers mention minor Xeno races who are just enslaved by the Imperium.
• Formerly Sapient Species: The Kroot's ability to taste individual parts of the DNA they eat and incorporate them into themselves can, if they continuously eat too much of certain species, risk a permanent regression to a bestial state. Several subspecies have been formed this way, like the vaguely-canine Kroothounds, apelike Krootoxen, and carnosaurid Knarlocs, which are now used as beasts of burden and battle by their kin.
• 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: Dark Eldar and most Chaos worshippers pretty much have this as their main motivation. Orks would be this too if they cared enough to distinguish between "good" and "evil".
  • The whole franchise strives to be as mindbogglingly terrifying as it can for no f**king reason!
• Foregone Conclusion: For the story, no matter what new threat shows up and no matter how much its power is hyped it will never mean the end of the Imperium. Similarly, there is no way any of the other factions will be permanently defeated. In real life, whenever an army gets a new codex they will definitely win the battle report in the White Dwarf magazine or at least a second chance if they lose the first battle.
• Forever War: That should be obvious by now.
  In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war!
• Forged by the Gods: The Chaos Gods sometimes grant their mortal or daemonic servants powerful weapons, though usually their forging is done by daemons, not the gods themselves.
• 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.)
  • The Eldar are working on it. Only three of their gods Isha, the Goddess of Healing, Cegorach, the Laughing God and Khaine, the God of Murder survived the fall in any way. The Eldar's endgame is to create a fourth god— Ynnead, the god of death— from their fallen. So in this case, their fourth god is quite literally death.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted Trope — weapons of the Blast variety can hit allies, and single-target ranged attacks are not allowed to target enemies engaged in a melee with allies due to the possibility of hitting their own troops.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: The Blood Angels are pretty decent people. However, don't get near them when the Black Rage takes effect as they start getting Ax-Crazy and literally bloodthirsty when it takes effect.
• From Bad to 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. Although, given this is 40k, with loose ends such as the prophesied return of the missing Primarchs, the Alpha Legion, various Eldar contingencies and the possible rebirth of the Emperor via the Star Child, it's unlikely any faction is going to gain total victory.
  • Just when fans thought things couldn't get any worse for the Imperium, along came 8th Edition. To put it short, Abaddon's Thirteen Black Crusade resulted in a stonking win for the forces of Chaos: Cadia's been blown up, and the Imperium has been fractured into two, with much of Segmentum Obscurus (the galactic "north") and Ultima Segmentum (the galactic "east") lost in an "Imperium Nihilus". The Astronomican in the Nihilus is obscured and many important worlds such as Baal, Mordian, Valhalla and the Gothic Sector are isolated and besieged. The Imperium is trying desperately to reestablish control with the help of the newly awakened Primarch Guilliman, but things have never been bleaker.
• Frontline General: An actual game mechanic, as the minimum to play is two units of troops and a general / HQ unit. Depending on their stats, you either keep them the hell away from attack (see Tau Ethereals) or are horrifying death machines to be rushed into melee as soon as possible (orks, some Chaos leaders). In the fluff, however, the less insane armies keep their high command well out of harm's way.
• FTL Travel Sickness: Imperial vessels must traverse the nightmare hellscape of the Warp in order to make interstellar trips. While they use Gellar fields to keep out the daemons and raw stuff of Chaos that permeates the Warp, their presence and influence still affects the ships' crews to a small degree. This routinely causes them to feel intense paranoia, experience visual and auditory hallucinations, and/or have terrifying nightmares. Those who are particularly sensitive or weak-willed may completely snap; some mutilate themselves or even commit suicide to escape the horrors they've experienced, while others may attack their fellow crewmates. A void jump that ends with only having to kill a few hundred people is considered successful.
• Full-Circle Revolution: All of the Imperium's reforms and resolved civil wars since the Horus Heresy.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Sisters Repentia, Arco-flagellants, Slaaneshi daemons and daemonhosts.
• Future Food Is Artificial: Soylens viridians is a filling and nutritious (and utterly bland) "corpse-starch" that looks like green slop and is easy to grow in vast quantities from just about any organic matter. It's a common staple in underhives, manufactorum canteens and Astra Militarum ration packs. Anyone spreading absolutely unfounded and untrue rumours that soylens viridians is made using the dead bodies of citizens of the Imperium are to be reported for disciplinary action immediately.
• Future Imperfect: Given that the setting takes place 10,000 years After the End, this is pretty much a given.
• Future Spandex:
  • "Body Gloves" are a general term in-setting for form-fitting one-piece wardrobe elements, with both military and civic applications. Some of them are valued for their ability to be worn under other clothing, which is especially useful if the fabric of the body glove contains unusual properties or pockets for inserting form-fitting armor plates that need to be discreet.
  • Imperial Assassins wear uniforms that are quite literally sprayed on: the substance (called SynSkin) comes in large aerosol cans and provides whole-body protection from various airborne toxins and temperature variation whilst allowing the skin to breathe properly, but only if applied directly to naked flesh.

G

• Gaiden Game: Specialist Games set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe include Inquisitor (a 'narrative wargame'), Battlefleet Gothic (space combat wargame), Aeronautica Imperialis (air combat wargame), Adeptus Titanicus (Titan combat wargame using mini-miniatures), Epic (an epic battle game using mini-miniatures/multiple-model worth of bases to represent giant armies), Apocalypse (an epic battle game mode-turned-Specialist Game using standard miniatures and accessories to represent giant armies), Kill Team (skirmish game using the same models as the main game), Gorkamorka (all-Ork skirmish game), Necromunda (gang-based skirmish game), Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade, Only War, Wrath And Glory and Imperium Maledictum (role-playing games).
• Gambit Roulette: Everything in the galaxy, as played by: Tzeentch (who rigs the game); the Deceiver (who rigs the players); the Emperor (who knows when to call in the cops); Cegorach, the Eldar Laughing God (who keeps wandering off the floor to visit the buffet and watch the stage show); Eldrad Ulthran (who's counting cards); and Castellan Creed, who has a Warhound Titan hidden under the table.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: One of the appeals of the tabletop game is that any army can be pitted against any army and still be faithful to the story and setting. ^note Yes, even Tyranids versus Tyranids if you try hard enough, though admittedly this is the biggest stretch, at least until Cain's The Greater Good came out. . After all, in the Crapsack Universe the 41st millennium is, a given battle could feasibly be happening somewhere.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: No matter how absurdly powerful each faction is made out to be in the fluff, they are all brought down to some level of balance on the tabletop. Even the Space Marines, the biggest badasses in the universe, become the Jack of All Stats infantry units.
  • The Imperial Guard have an odd case of this. The novels based around the IG state that >90% of the time, they are fighting other humans (rebels, cultists, mutants, etc.) and actually have a reasonable chance of success doing so. However, when the more powerful armies are disproportionately represented on the tabletop, with Space Marines (both types) being the most popular, it's not hard to see how the Imperial Guard gets its reputation as a Red Shirt Army that loses horribly almost every time.
  • The stats of the humble Bolter and Chainsword would surprise anyone who was familiar with them, but not the game. The Bolter is described as basically a rapid firing RPG launcher, but in-game is little more than a powerful slug thrower and not all that intimidating. The Chainsword is a Chainsaw in sword form, so you'd expect it to have some effect on enemy armour, right? Not so much. It literally has the same stats as the "butter knives" the Imperial Guard uses.
  • Also ties into Power Creep, Power Seep as, in the earlier editions, the Imperial Guard were suppose to be baseline, with other races compared to them for what was "elite". This is a holdover at the time from Warhammer Fantasy, where stuff like toughness 3 and 5+ armor on a rank and file soldier would be a godsend. This is most notable with the Eldar, who are suppose to have "elite" infantry in heavy armor that can run about unhindered (represented by having 5+ armor and the fleet rule). This, of course, was completely screwed up with Space Marines being the most popular and populous army, so they became the baseline, resulting in everything in the fluff being rather skewed when compared to the tabletop.
    • In fact, the Primaris Marines seem to have been conceived, from a gameplay perspective, of restoring the feeling of superhuman warriors to the Space Marines, as they play much like Marines function in the fluff.
• Gangbangers: Hive worlds' Underhive levels tend to be extensive and run down to the point that the planet's authorities tend to write off keeping order in it. This leads to hive gangs becoming the closest thing to authority in a very large percentage of the hive where violence and banding together therefore is the only realistic way for many underhivers to hope to survive every day in the destitution surrounding them. Said violence is commonplace and fierce enough that recruiting wisdom in some places consider hive gangers to be ready to make the cut for the Imperial Guard (making the cut willingly or otherwise) - or even a source for the truly-exceptional fighters that could be deemed worthy of becoming a Space Marine. In some hives, these gangs may even assemble such influence that they are an indelible part of the hive's power structure recognized even by the nobles, such as the Clan House gangs in Necromunda who all have official dominion over a particular corner of Necromunda's industries (but naturally, continue violently clash with each other for a variety of reasons still).
• Gang Initiation Fight: Becoming a full member of the Space Marines includes a fight against current members, although applicants are not expected to win, they are judged on how well they do.
  • This is actually a fairly rare means of admission and few chapters use it. After ten years of training and surgical implants, there's not much point in being initiated in a way that could take you out of circulation.
• Gang of Hats: Adeptus Astartes chapters as well as their Heretic counterparts usually share one culture and characteristics. Loyalists usually have chapters copying ancient warrior cultures, for instance the Space Wolves are vikings, while Imperial Firsts are teutonic knights and Ultramarines take after the Roman Empire. Likewise, Heretic Astartes Legions still share common elements, with four Legions devoted to one Chaos God each for instance.
• Garrisonable Structures: Tabletop 40K was doing this long before Video Games did. In the case of more "open" buildings such as ruins, typically the general terrain and cover rules are used, but in the case of more "closed" (as in it is hard or impossible to place models inside of them) structures, more abstract rules exist for determining how many models can fit inside, where the fire points are and how many of them there are, where the entrances and exits are, etc.
• 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.
• Gem Tissue: Several exist.
  • After being exiled into the Webway, Aurelia Malys ran into a crystalline entity and defeated it, ripping out its heart and her own and exchanging the two. Now that the crystal heart beats instead of her own, she has minor precognitive abilities and complete immunity to psyker powers, which she uses to plot the downfall of Asdrubael Vect, who caused her exile in the first place.
  • Eldar Farseers slowly turn to crystal as they age due to their connection with their Craftworld's wraithbone (the psychically-active material used by Eldar for their armor, weapons and buildings). Eventually they retire to a special area of the Craftworld where their spirit joins the Craftworld as their body continues to turn into wraithbone.
• General Failure: A good number of Imperial Guard officers fit the bill.
  • Abbadon the Despoiler was this until recent codices retconned the goals of his thirteen Black Crusades from simply "invade the Imperium" to "secure important objectives and resources while launching relatively small assaults against Cadia to bleed the Imperium of much-needed resources and destablise it even more".
• Generic Doomsday Villain: The Tyranids are the original for this, with no established backstory, and aren't likely to get one since they've been around since the early days and still haven't gotten one; no characters with personalities, they're just a Horde of Alien Locusts that devour everything they see with no goal given. GW then decided to have another with Necrons, who while having a scary backstory, were ultimately just another faction bent on killing everything in a game that already had one, led by Jerkass Gods that were kinda a rehash of the Chaos Gods as far personalities went. Since their retcon they've become more interesting, but the Tyranids are unlikely to ever change. Some of the earlier Tyranid fluff implies that the reason they're invading our galaxy is because they're fleeing from something even worse. Think about that for a moment.
• 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. Kroot are said in designers' notes to have gained Ork technology through their ability to absorb the DNA of prey.
  • In fact, according to one version of their backstory, the Kroot started out as fairly ordinary birds, aside from their ability to absorb DNA and evolved into intelligent, humanoid lifeforms by scavenging dead Orks.
  • The Hive Tyrants take this to the logical end by being able to retain their memories in death, allowing them to learn from their mistakes for when they fall in combat. The ultimate example of this is the fabled Swarmlord, which is implied to be the only unique Tyranid among the hivemind; its consciousness and memories are beamed across the galaxy at a moment's notice when its tactical acumen is needed, and a fresh body is grown for it. Once its purpose is fulfilled (or if it's killed) its consciousness and memory are beamed off to another body.
• Genius Bruiser: A wide variety, although who, why and to what extent vary wildly depending on the setting. Of particular note, perhaps, is The Emperor, who is/was clever enough to construct his own Webway Gate, design Space Marines, and command the Great Crusade, and was badass enough to kick the crap out of pretty much anyone in the setting. His Adeptus Custodes and Space Marines are a close second— in particular, the Tech Marines, and anyone Space Marine who survives long enough to gain some experience (notably, Dante of the Blood Angels, Logan Grimnar and Bjorn the Fell-Handed of the Space Wolves). Each faction has their own representatives, as well— Fabius Bile, various Mekboyz (though they have more of the bruiser than the genius about them, they are a damn sight smarter than the rest of da boyz), most Inquisitors, various Eldar... the list goes on.
• Genre-Busting: It doesn't matter if the tropes the series uses are from Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror, or whatever, as long as they make the setting Darker and Edgier.
• Geo Effects: Placing units in or behind pieces of terrain can greatly affect their survivability and effectiveness thanks to various rules for movement, shooting, and close combat. For starters, if the terrain can conceal the models at least partially from a firing foe, then they can Take Cover! and benefit from a Cover Save. Some terrains, such as wood or craters, can also impede movement. The 8th Edition also also rules for fuel pipes that can explode and harm the unit near said pipes if they use the pipes for cover and roll a 1.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Common among the Imperial Guard. Occasionally delivered via bullet.
• Ghost Ship: Space Hulks, which are masses of ships and asteroids that have clumped together over time, forming enormous masses that can shift in and out of the Warp. However, they are always inhabited by Orks, Genestealers and the likes. Also some Eldar vessels, albeit more as "ships crewed by ghosts" than the traditional sense.
• Giant Flyer: Winged strains of the larger Tyranids.
• Giant Medical Syringe: Doks (more commonly known as Painboyz due to their madcap sense of what counts as "medicine") are the Orks' medical specialists. Their kit often includes huge syringes called 'Urty Syringes that are either used in medical procedures on other Orks or to inject foes with nasty chemicals in melee combat.
• Giant Mook: Squad leaders: Veteran Sergeants, Sybarites, Warlocks etcetera.
• Giant Spider: Giant robot spiders, no less, in the form of Necron Canoptek Spyders, and a Humongous Mecha-scale variant called the Tomb Stalker, which is more of a Giant Centipede. The Tyranid Hierophant biotitan has elements of this as well, combined, of course, with reptilian features.
• 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.
  • In a similar vein, Death Cult Assassins. These are lithe and acrobatic girls in gimp suits wielding a pair of power swords. And disturbingly, they are not considered to be actual Imperial Assassins. Why? Because they are literally from random unsanctioned cults that are dedicated to murder, with the belief that it pleases the Emperor in some way (unsurprisingly a lot of these cults eventually fall to Khornate worship). In essence they are literal murderous fangirls.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The Jokaero combine this with Lethal Joke Character. They wear technomagic rings on their fingers that fire beams that can do three different types of ranged damage, but they die just about as easily as you'd expect unarmored space monkeys to.
    • Taken to extremes by the joke army build known as the "Barrel of Monkeys"^note Take Inquisitor Coteaz, who can take Jokaero as troops. Spend all the rest of your points on Jokaero. You will murder your way across the tabletop, provided you keep up the pace and not give the other guy an opening because the second you do he'll turn you into Swiss cheese.
  • Most rank and file units that cost more than 25 points tend to be this. You wouldn't think a Grey Knight or an Assault Marine, being clad in what is essentially tank armor to be glass cannons, but their relative cost means that while they have decent survivability, you're going to feel every one of those losses as the opponent can simply outnumber you in bodies (which in turn may bring more attacks to the field).
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Everyone seems to have these.
• A God I Am Not: The Emperor, despite what his worshippers say.
• God-Emperor: Read through the page and if you can't guess who it is by the end, we'll give you a cookie. We'll even give you a clue: his name begins God- and ends -peror, and despite ascending to literal godhood after his reign ended due to the worship of the masses he is so totally not a Dune rip-off.
  • Ironically, the guy tried to make sure that he wouldn't ascend to godhood. It didn't work. Far worse than he would publically admit to liking.
• 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 Gambit 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 Flanderization— 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, indulgence, Sense Freaks, fetishes 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.
  • Malice: God of nihilism, punishment, destruction, and self-destruction. His soldiers fight the other Chaos forces most of the time, either directly or by infiltrating their ranks. Followers are chosen from those most obsessed with destroying chaos, which he is only more than happy to reward them with. Malice represents the emotion of justice.
  • Then we have the C'tan, who are almost as good as the Chaos gods themselves on the soul eating and reality warping front.
  • Khaine, the most powerful of the surviving Eldar gods, is as much a psychotic murderer as a warrior and protector.
  • The God Emperor of Mankind, a fascist overlord who reunited humanity by Curb Stomping everyone not agreeing with him being in charge, who qualifies as less evil. In life, he conquered by diplomacy or economics whenever he was personally in charge, or at least preferred those approaches. The perception that his regime was exclusively focused on ass-kicking is mostly tied to the public regarding the psychic warriors he artificially created to delegate the combat to as his 'sons' and 'heirs', even though thinking about it for half a second should tell them that an immortal and unkillable being has no need or desire for either. This makes his betrayal by his manufactured servants exceptionally tragic, since even the loyal side of the civil war betrayed everything he stood for by putting his own legacy purely in terms of violent conquest and enforcing his worship as a god.
  • Subverted (finally) with Isha, the Eldar Mother Goddess. She's been Nurgle's prisoner for centuries, and he tests his plagues on her, learning something when she cures herself. When Nurgle isn't looking, Isha whispers the cures for these diseases to mortals.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Played with, The Emperor of Mankind thought the Chaos Gods worked this way and tried to starve them of worship. Except they exist as embodiments of emotion and do not need direct worship (although it doesn't hurt). However, due to the nature of the Warp trillions of humans worshipping the Emperor as a god empowered him beyond his already considerable psychic power.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Despite getting Flanderized to being a solution for any problem, Exterminatus is actually treated this way within the canon. While the Imperium is willing to sacrifice millions of lives in a single war, even they hesitate to completely destroy a habitable world. The situation must be beyond hope of salvage or victory. Anyone who is found to have declared an unwarranted Exterminatus will likely be executed.
  • Sometimes, factions who are so mutually opposed that working together would be an absurd idea find themselves having to team up to fight a mutual foe. In-game, this represents the "Come the Apocalypse" level in the Allies tables; these factions have the same restrictions as the "Desperate Allies" level but cannot start the game within 12" of each other. As an example, in the 7th edition rules all Imperial factions are at this level with Chaos factions, Necrons, Orks, and Tyranids, while they are only Desperate Allies with Dark Eldar and Tau and Allies of Convenience with Eldar.
  • The Rangdan Xenocides were a case of this. They were a series of apocalyptic wars fought during the Imperium's infancy, against a species known as the Rangda. Precisely what happened during the war is largely unknown, with most records sealed, except that it lasted over seventy years and cost hundreds of thousands of Space marine lives and billions of normal human infantry. What pushed it to this point was what the Emperor had to do to end the war: he unlocked the Noctis Labyrinth, otherwise known as the place where he sealed the Void Dragon, in order to use that C'Tan shard against the Rangda to end the Xenocides once and for all.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: The Blood Angels chapter use a predominantly red color scheme. The Sanguinor,◊ an angelic psychic manifestation called "the Exemplar of the Host", is almost entirely gold.
  • The Adeptus Custodes, the Space Marines who guard Terra and are said to be to Space Marines what Space Marines are to humans, are gold-armored.
  • Bad Moonz Orks certainly consider themselves superior, paint their stuff yellow, and are the only Orks to decorate in gold (mostly because all the other Orks notice that it's soft and stop caring about it).
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Roll up! Gaze unprotected into the Warp! Lose your mind!
  • The past three editions of the Eldar/Aeldari codex have provided this lovely quote:
  Inquisitor Czevak: Ask not the Eldar a question for they will give you three answers, all of which are true and terrifying to know.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Rubric of Ahriman, cast by the Chief Librarian and his Cabal, was meant to protect their brothers from the terrible mutations of Chaos and Tzeentch. It did... by turning all of but (at most) 100 Thousand Sons Marines into dust and sealing their souls into their armor. The Rubric Marines are now nothing more than groups of Animated Armor controlled by Sorcerers
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Or rather, the Bad, the Evil, and the Really Really Evil. The Tau and Eldar Harlequins are the Bad; the Imperium, Craftworlds, Necrons and Orks are the Evil, and the Tyranids, Dark Eldar, and Chaos are the Really Really Evil. A few specific chapters and factions, such as the Salamanders and the Space Wolves, could legitimately be considered Good.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • The Salamanders fight not for glory, but for the people. Hurting civilians is a Berserk Button for them, which a chapter master found out the hard way. Outside of that, they're ruthless in battle and are an entire chapter of scary black men who like to burn things.
  • The Space Wolves, an entire chapter of Chaotic Good Boisterous Bruisers who are scary enough to convince the Inquisition to change its operating policy.
  • Tau rule can seem restrictive to people not accustomed to it, but the Tau inhabitants like it quite a lot. Even the humans are probably better off than they would be in most other places.
  • The Eldar. A race of psychic Space Elves with hyper-advanced weapons who have dedicated themselves to fighting the genocidal Necrons and the forces of Chaos. Unfortunately, they're also douchebags. Not total douchebags, though.
• "Good Luck" Gesture: For some Imperial troops, "thumbing one's palm," or planting the thumb of one hand in the palm of the other to produce an eagle's wing of sorts. This represents the aquila, the two-headed eagle used as the Imperium's insignia.
• Good Shepherd: A Corrupt Church the Ecclesiarchy may be, but there are a few Imperial preachers who legitimately care about the common folk of the Imperium. You're more likely to run into the other variety, though.
  • They even have a phrase for the really greedy ones: Temple Tendency.
• Good Taming, Evil Taming: In Warhammer 40,000, the techpriests believe that while they get machine-spirits to work by observing the proper rituals and giving them the respect they deserve, the orks merely threaten their machines into working. The limited AIs (and the fact that their machines work without requiring hours of rituals and incantations) used by the Tau confuse them, and some try to entreat Tau tech by offering the xenos machine-spirits reverence.
• Goomba Stomp: A popularly depicted maneuver in the fluff is for jetpack-equipped assault troops to come down directly on top of their victims. This has predictably devastating effects as the individual performing this attack is either a half-ton Space Marine, a massive Tau battlesuit or a really, really crazy Ork. As of 8th Edition, it's finally manifested as an actual rule with Primaris Inceptors, who are not only even more massive than a regular Marine, but are wearing a jetpack equipped form of their already ridiculously heavy Gravis armor.
• Götterdämmerung: Both literal and metaphorical.
• Gothic Punk: The nicer Imperial worlds are like this.
• Grayscale of Evil: The color scheme of the Sons of Malice Chaos Space Marines is black and white, representing the renegade Chaos God's paradoxical nature of evil fighting itself, as they're far more likely to destroy other Chaos forces.
• Great Big Book of Everything: Various tomes kept by the Inquisition.
  • The Codex Astartes, written by Primarch Robute Gulliman as a foundational document for the training and doctrine of the Space Marines after the terror of the Horus Heresy. Comprehensive in scope and application, the Codex is used by the vast majority of Space Marine Chapters as their primary manual. Just how closely you should follow the Codex remains a bone of contention both in-universe and among the fans.
• The Great Exterminator: "Exterminatus" is the act of so utterly destroying a habitable planet as to render it a "Dead World" (typically to prevent the spread of infection or heresy). Those who give the order typically become famous (or notorious) for the act.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Chaos Gods are the best example of this in the fiction. Many of the horrendous atrocities in this setting are either done in their name or to deny them victory, yet they're on such a higher order of existence that their involvement said atrocities could be compared as a passing glance.
  • The C'tan are also this, but they take it even further in that they're largely responsible for the way the Galaxy is in the first place. They killed most of (possibly all of) the Old Ones, were directly responsible for the creation of the Orks and the Eldar (and indirectly responsible for the Dark Eldar), and lead to the Warp becoming the hellhole that it is due to the War In Heaven (which would bring rise to the Chaos Gods, Chaos Demons, Chaos Space Marines, and the like). Essentially, they're the Biggest Bad. They still would be, if not for a Retcon in the Necron 5th Edition Codex that got them Demoted to Extra via a deserving Humiliation Conga.
  • The Imperium itself is this to the Tau Empire, a fact which the Tau themselves are only just barely beginning to become cognizant of. The Tau have 12 major "Septs"; worlds with populations in the high millions or greater and serving as cultural hubs for the Empire, scattered across a few hundred lightyears. By contrast, the Imperium covers roughly 80% of the entire galaxy and has millions of such worlds, being bog-standard Imperial or Hive Worlds that can be wiped out by the dozen and the greater Imperium doesn't even notice. For final, damning comparison, the whole Tau Empire occupies part of a single Imperial Sub-Sector, of which there are tens of thousands. A few Tau have learned exactly how massive the Imperium is compared to them, nearly all of them have been driven to madness or suicidal despair at the monstrous scale of what they previously assumed was a fairly equal opponent. Indeed, the Tau regard the Imperium as their Arch-Enemy, the Imperium is almost totally unaware the Tau even exist.
• Greek Letter Ranks: The psyker rating scale goes all the way from Alpha Plus (can snap a Titan in half with their mind) to Omega Minus blanks (invisible to daemons and cause immense suffering to psykers just by being present due to their having no Warp presence). Baseline humans are Rho or Pi.
• 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.
• Guarding the Portal:
  • Warp Rifts are constantly guarded by whole fleets and entire chapters of Space Marines are dedicated to guarding these places where the Warp spills into reality.
  • The deepest parts of the Imperial Palace are said to be home to eldritch abominations whose existence must be kept secret and whom only the Custodes can hold back from invading the Palace. A special shield host of the Adeptus Custodes named the Shadowkeepers guard the portals leading to their godforsaken places named the Dark Cells.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Pretty much every single race has a reason to exterminate every other race and has plans to do so.
• Guns Akimbo: Cypher and Sisters of Battle Seraphim, mostly. Dire Avenger Exarchs can have this too. As of 8th Edition, Primaris Marines of the Inceptor discipline also get in on the fun. A few old, 3rd edition-era Chaos Marine models are constructed this way, though in their case, it's purely for visual flair and has no function on the tabletop. The Necron Hexmark Destroyer is the most impressive, though, holding 6 guns simultaneously.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way:
  • Colonel "Iron Hand" Straken's model's shotgun has both box and tube magazines.
  • Invoked with Ork guns, which tend to be haphazardly mashed together pieces of junk that only work because their owners think they do.

H

• Half-Human Hybrid: 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 were horrifying hybrids of humans and Necron technology... before they were retconned out.
  • In a less Squicky example, there's the idea of Eldar/human hybrids. The exact canonity of Eldar/human hybrids has long been up for debate due to the fluff supporting this being absolutely ancient (we're talking Rogue Trader/2nd Edition years here) and also supporting such horrendous biological impossibilities as Eldar having zero body fat and triple helix DNA, but seeing Phil Kelly's recent comments on the subject, the idea seems to be making a comeback. Unfortunately, according to Phil, most of the offspring of these unions are found in Commorragh, which has some highly disturbing implications. There are also quite a few Corsairs (Eldar space pirates) who have human blood in them.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: In a World of Ham where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, members of the various factions will spend as much time trying to out chew each other as they will trying to kill each other.
• Hand Cannon:
  • Imperial bolt pistols, a few human stub pistols, plasma pistols, and inferno/infernus (melta) pistols, particularly the versions wielded by Space Marines. Ork sluggas also qualify. Other races tend to be a bit more... restrained when it comes to their sidearms.
  • Laspistols technically count; while las weapons in general are some of the weakest weapons in the 40K setting, by real world standards they are incredibly powerful, capable of severing limbs and causing massive explosive tissue damage.
• Hand Wave: In all the years of the game, there's never been an attempt to explain why the Emperor can't make a new generation of Primarchs. The usage of the "we can't make more Primarchs" excuse, helps to contribute to the sense that there won't be any more progress in the Imperium.
• Hanlon's Razor: Almost always inverted — never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by malice or conspiracy.
• Happiness in Slavery:
  • Aversions abound, but there is one straight example: the Chapter Serfs of the Space Marine Chapters. They fill all positions in a chapter not involving leadership or infantry combat, and are better trained and equipped than any non-Astartes. The Space Marine Chapters, in turn, recognize the skill and dedication of their serfs, and chapter serfs are full members of the chapter cult, and enjoy a better lifestyle than all except the richest citizens of the Imperium.
  • Some Dark Eldar willingly submit themselves to other Dark Eldar for torture and humiliation. This has less to do with them enjoying it, and more with the fact that they're just that jaded with freedom.
• Happy Ending: No, seriously, in this grimdark setting, there are stories with happy ending. The problem is it's either an Esoteric Happy Ending, or that one happy ending is just the starting chapter of another story.
  • A group of Orks came to a Daemon World looking for a good scrap, and got killed for it. Then they found out that everyone on the planet is fated to fight daily until they get overwhelmed, die, and be resurrected the next day, ready for another fight. Definitely the best afterlife ever for Orks.
  • Fulgrim's backstory had him stranded on the barren wasteland of Chemos. He swore to change it all, and through various his efforts, productivity slowly increased until Chemos citizens could finally enjoy the finer luxuries of life once abandoned for sake of survival. Within 50 short years, Fulgrim was then the undisputed ruler of Chemos, who turned the dying planet into a shining beacon of prosperity. An unambiguously happy ending for the people of Chemos, definitely. Unfortunately for them, they're just prequel characters of the horror that will be known as Horus Heresy.
• Hard-Coded Hostility:
  • The tyranids are ravenous insect-like aliens whose only purpose is to break everything into biomass and devouring it. As such, nobody really wants them around, so much so that in the new edition's ally rules, which measure each faction's willingness to cooperate with each other, the Tyranids have absolutely no allies. ^note  Technically, rules apart and from the lore perspective, the Genestealer Cults may have some allies in their uprisings, but only as long as they are mistaken for revolutionary mutants or abhumans fighting against the Imperium's oppression. As soon as their allies discover they are Tyranids, they break their deal.
  • Pre-5th edition retcon, the necrons (undead robots) existed only to scour the galaxy of every single living thing down to the last bacterium. Nowadays they can be negotiated with.
  • Orks. WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!
  • A downplayed example with vanilla Humans, who are simply taught to fear and hate aliens as a default. Played straighter with Space Marines, who are brainwashed to hate and kill anything that isn't human on sight. Any exceptions that occur with either of these groups either involve unusual circumstances, or is otherwise considered a grievous breach of ethics and warrants punishment.
  • Chaos Daemons exist only to kill and corrupt the denizens of realspace.
  • Other Chaos groups have a striking tendency to always be fighting or preparing for it when they aren't forced to exist covertly. Even each other. Especially each other
• Harmful Healing:
  • Ork Doktors (Otherwise known as "Painboys" or just "Doks") have a delightful tendency to "eksperiment on da subjekts" when they are given their "anastetiks" (IE. knocked out with a hammer). To quote the book "An unfortunate ork who goes to the Dok to have his toothache fixed might wake up with a set of lungs that allows him to breathe water instead!!"
  • This is also how healing magic works for the forces of Chaos. Healing comes from Nurgle, the God of Plagues. It isn't so much "healing" as cancerous growths filling up the space left by the wound.
• Harmony Versus Discipline
  • 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. Within the traditional context of the trope, the best fit would be the snooty, highly cultured Eldar and their shiny weapons and hyper-advanced Hover Tanks vs. the boisterous, crude Orks and their gritty guns and smoke-belching trucks and looted tanks.
  • Emotions vs. Stoicism: The Chaos Gods embody various emotions and are fed by the emotions of the living. Their associated armies (the Chaos Space Marines and Daemons of Chaos) are both divided up by their allegiance to a specific god and the emotions associated with each. By contrast, the Necrons have no emotions at all, on the whole at least, since they are robots without souls. Conflicts between Chaos and Necrons tend to contrast one with the other. Similarly, Eldar only feel any kind of emotion in extremes, so the Craftworld Eldar make sure to train their warriors to be The Stoic as standard practice while the Dark Eldar embrace all their emotions and revel in the feelings their lifestyle brings them.
  • Flesh Versus Steel: The Imperium relies on mass-produced vehicles and weapons, non-disfiguring biological implants, and sheer stubbornness to face mutated Chaos monstrosities and the Tyranid swarm. The Eldar use some psychic powers and a lot of hyper-advanced technology for everything, while the Dark Eldar are vat-grown and have a fondness for growing strange monsters and grafting bits onto themselves. The Necrons and the Daemons of Chaos wage war on each other regularly, intending to destroy each other. This is good, and bad, because if Chaos is destroyed, our universe and the Warp will not become one, but the Necrons will exterminate everything in the galaxy that isn't them. If Chaos wins, the Necrons are no longer a threat but the Chaos Gods' plans continue.
  • Magic Versus Science: The battle against the Warp and Chaos (which is for all intents and purposes the "magic" of the setting) is one of the most central plot points. Faith is also used, but ridiculously large caliber guns and energy weapons also help. Of course Chaos can and does corrupt technology by stuffing daemons into it. There's all sorts of scientists fallen to Chaos too since new ideas generally open someone up to the influence of the Warp and who wouldn't be slightly curious to see how it all works? The most known faction of those is the Dark Mechanicus who use more forbidden technologies like artificial intelligence and bio-tech to make very powerful potent weapons. The idea also comes to light when one considers the Tau, who stick entirely to technology and do their best to ignore the presence of sorcery and faith as active forces in the galaxy. The result, among other things, is that their ships move at a snail's pace compared to everyone else, since powerful sorcery is necessary to travel through the Warp. The Necrons don't have any psykers because none of them have any souls. They have Anti-Magic technology instead, and were responsible for creating a rare genetic defect in humans which causes them to be born without souls, making them cause intense pain for nearby psykers and allowing the Necrons to convert them into prototype Necron soldiers; the 5th edition retconned away their involvement with this gene, but it still exists in the fluff. Those born with it are known as "psychic blanks".
• Hat of Authority:
  • Commissars take their hats seriously.
  • Members of the Inquisition, particularly the Witchhunters, sometimes have a distinctive (and cool) hat.
• Haunted Technology: Several examples:
  • Eldar Wraithguards and Wraithlords. They are both robots that are controlled via souls of dead Eldar.
  • Many Chaos vehicles (and other technology) can be subject to Demonic Possession in lieu of an actual pilot.
  • The Adeptus Mechanicus believes that every piece of technology has a "Machine Spirit" that needs to be appeased in order for it to work. Appeasement consists of complex religious rituals. Whether the Machine Spirits are real and the rituals actually work, or are simply ancient A.I.'s and maintenance procedures, respectively, is kept rather ambiguous.
• Healer God: Isha, the mother goddess of the Aeldari, is also the goddess of healing and rejuvenation. After the Fall of the Aeldari, Isha was captured by Nurgle, the Chaos God of Plagues, who holds her prisoner within his mansion, testing his newest infections on her to see how long it takes her to heal herself. Isha continues to help her children, however, sending them the cures for Nurgle's diseases in their dreams whenever the Plague Father is distracted.
• Healing Factor:
  • The entire gimmick of the Necrons and their "We'll Be Back" special rule, C'tan shards with their Necrodermis "skin", and certain Tyranid monstrous creatures.
  • In terms of universal rules, this is represented in two ways; really efficient combat medics or regenerative creatures have "feel no pain" to either represent them shrugging off an otherwise fatal wound or rapidly regenerating said wound. The more rarely seen "It Will Not Die" is a more straight application of this trope, giving the model a 1/3rd of a chance to heal one wound every turn. The reason It Will Not Die is much rarer than Feel No Pain is because a lot of the models are One-Hit-Point Wonder and due to the way It Will Not Die works (i.e: the model has to survive the wound), it can only be applied to particularly huge monsters.
• Heaven Above:
  • The natives of Fenris believe that the Sky Warriors will come down to young warriors on the brink of death and bring them back to their heavenly domains to feast and fight for all eternity. In fact, the Space Wolves monitor the constant battles waged by the natives and use them to select candidates for Space Marine training and transformation.
  • Many inhabitants of backwater planets who witness the Space Marines (also known as the God-Emperor's Angels of Death) descend to save the planet assume they are gods. Local authority rarely sees any need to disabuse them of the notion (and depending on the level of isolation, it's possible only the government is aware that there is an Imperium to belong to).
• He Knows Too Much:
  • The very existence of the Grey Knights chapter is kept secret from the rest of the Imperium. If circumstances dictate that they must fight alongside other Imperial forces, then the secret is maintained after the fighting is over with executions or when the soldiers in question are valuable enough to be allowed to live (such as in the case of other Space Marines) with Laser-Guided Amnesia.
  • The Inquisition regularly executes anyone who might have come into contact with Daemons or the Ruinous powers due to potential corruption, especially psykers who delve too deep into forbidden lore. However what constitutes "contact" can range from either physically touching a tainted artifact, to being on the same planet as said artifact, depending on the Inquisitor at hand.
  • The Dark Angels are highly paranoid about anyone knowing about the Fallen. For members of the Chapter, they do give one moment of reprieve, where the Chapter's Inner Circle gather to deem whether or not the member is mentally capable of accepting the new "truth". This is why the Death Wing (the highest non-command rank a Dark Angel can achieve) is so bloated with recruits; a lot of them weren't promoted due to combat skill, but because someone spilled the beans within hearing distance. If deemed unworthy though, either a quick painless death or lobotomy is ordered. As for non-Dark Angels who get wind of this...Let's just say the Inquisition often treats it's guilty better than the Dark Angels.
• Heel–Face Town: Subverted. The primarch Konrad Curze was found on a planet of perpetual crime, and started cleaning it up by basically becoming a mix of Batman and The Punisher. The Night Haunter's reign of terror did succeed in lowering crime (that is, people were too scared to leave their homes if they risked being found dismembered the next day), but as soon as Curze left the planet went right back to its old ways, which played no small part in Curze's Villainous Breakdown.
• Hellfire: Naturally, Chaos can produce this. Only it's called Warpfire.
• 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 a tank called the Hellhound, which is armed with a flamethrower.
• Hell on Earth: This is what happens during Daemon Incursions. The barrier between the Materium and the Immaterium can weaken on a certain planet (usually because of a chaos ritual), hordes of daemons invade the material plane looking to cause as much destruction as possible, and the land itself will mutate as the energies of the warp spill over the planet. Such incursions can be temporary, but in case they are not, then the Grey Knights become sorely needed to close the portal.
• Henotheistic Society: Servants of Chaos can either worship the four Chaos Gods as a whole as Chaos Undivided, or pledge themselves to a single one and receive different gifts and curses depending on who they worship. Each god used to have an entire Space Marine Legion dedicated to them, but these are now broken down and serve as Elite Mooks (Khorne's World Eaters are bloodthirsty berserkers, Slaanesh's Emperor's Children are hedonistic rockers with superpowered guitars, Tzeentch's Thousand Sons are powerful sorcerers and animated suits of armor, Nurgle's Death Guard are nearly-unkillable walking masses of cancerous growths).
• The Heretic: The Ecclesiarchy, the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Space Marines all have different ideas of what constitutes heresy, but all three agree that worshiping Chaos fits the bill.
• 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.
  • The Eternal Warrior rule often denotes a character with unusually high Heroic Willpower that they can tank wounds that should have obliterated a lesser man. The name has caused no small amount of Fridge Logic, as many big Daemons (who are literally eternal) or other ancient warriors (like the Swarm Lord) do not have this rule while various mortals (including normal humans like Yarrick) have it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Generally how the nice people in 40K die if it's on their own terms. To quote von Remus from Damnatus: In this universe, one is either sacrificed, or sacrifices themself.
  • It is said that there is a colossal bell on Terra, the Bell of Lost Souls, that rings once every time a great hero of the Imperium martyrs themselves by dying against the myriad foes of mankind. It is said to be the size of a building, and can be heard from the other side of the planet; the bell-ringers themselves have to be stationed in reinforced bunkers to prevent blown eardrums and organ failure. The Bell is near-constantly ringing.
• Hero Unit: Characters are powerful individuals—commanders, psykers and army experts, who can either operate on their own or join another unit. Every army (with very few exceptions) needs at least one character to serve as its Warlord, and while more expensive than rank-and-file soldiers, they also boast superior characteristic values and have many more customisation options, with the specific details varying on the individual army and edition.
• Hero with an F in Good: While the Marines Malevolent Chapter does loyally serve the Emperor and seek to drive back His foes, they also have a disturbing disregard for the well-being of the Imperium's civilians, and they care not if other Imperial forces are felled in the collateral damage that they cause.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Happens shockingly often.
  • There are two kinds of Inquisitors in the Imperium; Puritans and Radicals (no, not that kind of radical) and they both have different beliefs on how to fight Chaos. Puritans believe that daemons must only be destroyed, never consorted with or used, in fact they're willing to destroy a bolter touched by a daemon because it is considered corrupted, but by contrast, Radicals believe that the best way to fight daemons is to basically use daemons against them, and this is fine as long as the purpose is pure. The Inquisition is split down the middle, but there's only one truth; Inquisitors usually begin as Puritans and die as Radicals. This is because they start out as Wide Eyed Idealists, but after years of calling Exterminatus, expending thousands or even millions of lives and fighting losing battles with the ruinous powers, they eventually see no hope in the tactics they use and begin using tainted powers and weapons against their monstrous foes in the faint, desperate hope of finally beating them, only to be executed themselves for heresy by a Puritan, who will eventually go on and do the same thing years down the line. Grimdark.
  • How do you get rid of crime on a planet? Why, become a terrifying serial killer who kills all the other criminals, down to jaywalkers. At least, that's how the Night Haunter, Primarch of the Night Lords, chose to go about it. Is it really surprising he fell to Chaos?
  • Really, you can apply this to the whole of the Imperium. It helps that in some cases, they are fighting actual monsters.
  • The fallen Primarchs really have this going as a theme. In his youth, Mortarion fought with the human slaves of his home planet against the sorceror warlords that lived in the highest, toxic peaks for freedom. As a Daemon prince, he rules from on high through a cloud of daemon-plague where countless human slaves toil below. The fact that he also became a sorceror is a sore point, one where he will kill anyone who points out the hypocrisy. Angron fought against the gladiators who captured him in his youth and resented the Butcher's Nails which have been hammered into his head. As the lord of the World Eaters, he made all legionnaires receive the butcher's nails, and as a Daemon prince he rules a realm where the slaves are pitted against eachother for amusement (or just straight up killed by being used as punching bags). The list goes on. Only Konrad and Horus really realized what had happened, and both ended up choosing to be killed (in the case of Horus, Deader than Dead by having his very soul obliterated).
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Almost everyone save certain Imperial Guard outfits. Space Marines in particular have the saying "camouflage is the color of cowardice." Then again, being an obvious target is not particularly problematic for a human tank...
• Hired by the Oppressor: Psykers are widely hated and feared in the Imperium, and routinely rounded up to either be drained by the God-Emperor or undergo Training from Hell and become Sanctioned Psykers, who can control their powers and be used by the Imperium. Thing is, this is the correct procedure: untrained psykers inevitably fall to Chaos and end up joining cults or helping the Dark Gods take over their planet, that is if their head hasn't exploded before then. And if the Emperor wasn't kept "alive" by their sacrifice, the Astronomican (the psychic beacon that allows humanity to travel faster than light with any accuracy) would fall, and humanity would become a disunited and quickly-annihilated species.
• History Repeats: The planet of Ullanor was, first, the site of the Ullanor Crusade, a climactic battle between the newborn Imperium and the greatest Ork empire the galaxy had ever seen. Almost a thousand years later, it's once again witness to the climactic battles of The Beast War, which features a resurgent Ork empire, after which the location of this legendary system is ultimately lost the Imperium. It was actually renamed Armageddon, and has since been the site of three more immense wars, including two more against yet another Ork empire. In an astonishingly appropriate turn, the leader of this new empire, Ghazkull Mag Uruk Thraka, is practically named after the battlecry of The Beast, "I am Slaughter", as that phrase translates to "Mag Uruk Thraka" in Orkish.
• Highly Visible Landmark: Imperial Navigators orient themselves and the voidships they're aboard in the Warp using the Astronomicon, a psychic "lighthouse" generated by the God-Emperor's near-dead body on the Golden Throne. There are areas of the galaxy where the Astronomicon is not visible, however, and these are particularly dangerous to navigate. Most of these are on the far side of from Holy Terra of Warp phenomena like the Eye of Terror or the Cicatrix Maledictum, but the Astronomicon has been slowly dimming as the Emperor gradually succumbs, and is visible from a slightly smaller radius every year.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Doombreed is among the oldest of Khorne's Champions, having been elevated to Daemon Princehood even before the Emperor first manifested himself as the Master of Mankind, and is heavily implied to have been Genghis Khan in life. His exploits in 40K include wiping out two entire chapters of Space Marines.
• Hit Points: All models have a Wounds characteristic which represents how much damage they can sustain before they succumb to their injuries. Typically, footsoldiers only have one wound, but commanders, vehicles and giant monsters have several wounds, making them harder to kill.
• Hive City: The Trope Namers are the hive cities. These enormous cities cover large areas like anthills, and the lower parts are so broken down and toxic that they aren't safe for human habitation any longer (mutants, outcasts and giant spiders like it just fine). And most inhabitants of a hive city never see the light of day. Only the nobles in their spires have that luxury.
• Hive Mind: The Tyranids.
• Hive Queen: Tyranid Synapse Creatures.
  • The Norn-Queens especially, which fill the role of the classic, Mook-spawning bee queen analogue in the Tyranid hive fleets for the most part.
• Hobbits: Seldom seen, but present as specialist snipers in the Imperial Guard. In keeping with the grimdark theme, they're called Ratlings and care only about eating, boozing, stealing and fornicating.
• 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, which ends up with the Priest at the last moment realizing how hypocritical the Emperor's argument was and telling him to his face how he'll just end up becoming the very thing he hates, before going back inside the burning church.
• 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. Played straight in some comics and game cutscenes, though.
  • Second Edition Lord Commander Solar Macharius had the rather unique ability as your army's leader and a tactical genius to totally screw up your battle plan on the basis of a dice roll; just having him in your army might potentially lead to all your reserve units being committed immediately and skipping the devastating Preliminary Barrage step that was one of the IG army gimmicks (every artillery weapon in your army could fire before the battle actually started).
  • While Hollywood Tactics are typically averted both in written fluff and in the game itself (again barring Orks,) it is quite commonly depicted in artwork made for the game. A very common theme is to show two opposing armies of huge size standing in lines and firing at each other from practically point blank range with no cover and no room to move laterally. It looks very dramatic, but such battlefield situations almost never occur in a narrative, and will only occasionally happen on the tabletop.
• Holographic Terminal: Used extensively by the Imperium, although they require a solid punch to work at times. They're manipulated with special "wands", with something like touchscreens or keyboards to back it up.
• Holy Hand Grenade: The Grey Knights have an array of weapons specifically for battling the daemonic spawn of Chaos. The Black Templars have the actual Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
  • Holy Burns Evil
• Homage: Tons and tons of 'em: some are minor, like planets named after games developers or deodorants, while some much more prominent. The best example of a major homage would be the Necrons, who started as an 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 "We'll Be Back" rule. Eventually, "We'll Be Back" was re-dubbed "resurrection protocols" and their fluff moved them further away from the simple Terminator Expies they once were.
  • 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.
  • Horus' betrayal began while recovering from injury, like Benedict Arnold.
• Holy Ground: Holy Terra, Shrine Worlds, and some Space Marine recruitment worlds are entire planets devoted to this trope.
• Holy Pipe Organ: An over-the-top example of this trope. The Sister of Battle has the Exorcist, an artillery that has an organ mounted on the vehicle which fires missiles when playing it.
• Home Guard: The Planetary Defense Forces, considered as under-equipped and far less competent by the Imperial Guard. Repeat, the Imperial Guard, Butt-Monkey Cannon Fodder extraordinaire, believes the PDF to be beneath them, which, given their status as "Imperial speedbump" (the ones who slow down the enemy until the Guard is there), might have a grain of truth. If anything, they lack a quality the Guard has: Quantity.
• Hopeless War: For everyone.
  • Though, oddly enough, no longer for the Aeldari. As of the most recent editions, they have actually been given a ray of hope for preserving their (originally) doomed race.
  • And the Orks, who embrace the endless, pointless war and love every minute of it.
• Hope Spot: Why the Imperium discourages the foolish notion of hope.
  • Tzeench, being a living embodiment of hope (among many other, far nastier things) is quite fond of inflicting these on both his foes and followers alike. A fantastically cruel example of this is Ahzek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, who desperately seeks to acquire the knowledge to undo the Rubric of Ahriman, restore the thousands of his brothers who he reduced to ash, and even free his legion from Tzeench's control. He successfully restored a single one of his followers, though unbeknownst to him, Tzeench allowed this solely to delude Ahriman into thinking his quest could possibly succeed.
  • For all the darkness, Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines is awake and though he loathes what the Empire has become, he's doing what he can to change the corruption and ignorance, having written a history of the Imperium's truth for every citizen to read freely and launched a crusade to retake as much as possible. The final novel of Dark Imperium has the Emperor himself strike out against the Daemon Primarch Mortarion, even badly wounding the Plague God Nurgle himself. What's more, it's outright stated Guilliman's brothers are set to return, with Corvus Corax out there hunting the other traitors in the Webway. For the first time in a long time, there's a true hope returning.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: Tyranids are possibly the ur-example.
• Horny Vikings: Space Wolves are Vikings IN SPACE, though they don't wear horned helmets— those are reserved for Chaos Marines (and members of the Wolves' 13th Company, who have been in the Warp for 10,000 years and occasionally had to scavenge gear from dead 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...
• Horror Hunger: Tyranids. Their Hive Mind is driven only by a single minded need to consume everything that lives.
• Hostile Terraforming: "Tyrantforming" is the first stage of devouring a planet by the Tyranids— the spores dropped onto the surface merge with local plantlife, turning it into a Hungry Jungle and rapidly draining the ground of all nutrients. The Tyranids then devour the plants.
• Hot as Hell: Slaaneshi Daemons and Dark Eldar. The latter even have elite troops called Incubi and Succubi.
• Hot Blade: The God-Emperor sported one back in his heydays.
• Hot-Blooded:
  • Shas'O Vior'la Shovah Kais Mont'yr aka Commander Farsight has this right in his name. He is also A CHAR.
  • The Tau of Vior'la Sept are famous among the Tau for being this, although a good number of Tau lapse into this during battle. Orks and Chaos to an extent as well.
• Hover Bot
  • Servo-skulls, which look like what you would expect given the name. They're used for a variety of functions, from surveillance to simply holding a flashlight. The kicker is that the casing is sometimes a real skull.
  • T'au drones are simple robots resembling flying metal saucers with a variety of things bolted to their upper and undersides, such as civilian tools, guns, shield generators, and cameras. They're used for a variety of roles that are either too simple and tedious or too risky for a living person to perform, such as performing rote maintenance, assisting workers or soldiers, or running scouting missions.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: The Imperium and the Aeldari were once the undisputed masters of the galaxy. Now, the Imperium is a has-been ex-superpower in a technological dark age being picked off by inches, and the Aeldari are Space Nomads fighting with grim determination for survival in a galaxy that wants them dead.
  • The Imperium once fielded Titans in such massive numbers that entire dedicated Legions of skyscraper-sized warmachines fought across thousands of miles of planetary surface and brought civilizations to their knees. Now, the Imperium fielding one Titan to a battle is considered a wanton extravagance. And Baneblades, the nigh-unstoppable house-sized tanks with eleven different cannons and guns on them? They were the light reconnaissance tanks in the Imperium's heyday - all of the larger vehicles and the means to create them have long since been lost to the dust of time.
  • And the Aeldari, don't even get us started on them. They used to quench, kindle and move entire suns at their height, and this was a minor display of their power. One advanced weapon they've recently rediscovered from raids on their homeworlds in the Eye of Terror (by recently, we mean millennia ago; they were zooming around the galaxy in spaceships while the dinosaurs were roaming the Earth) is the D-Cannon - it shoots small black holes.
• Humanity Is Superior: Or so they claim, using this trope as an excuse to kill the other races with fire.
• Humanity Is Young: Played straight though on somewhat greater timescales than is usual. The Imperium of Man may well be ten thousand years old, and humanity may well have had interstellar travel for the last 37,000 years, yet the Eldar, Orks and Necrons are many times older still. However, the situation is reversed with the Tau, who were primitive hunter-gatherers just 6,000 years ago; in fact they would have been wiped out by the Imperium if a freak warp storm hadn't destroyed the colonization fleet. Culturally, the Tau embody a kind of naive youthful optimism normally associated with humanity in more optimistic science fiction settings — their society is bright, hopeful, scientifically-minded and technologically advanced, compared to the stagnant, superstitious and highly xenophobic Imperium of Man that dominates the galaxy.
• Humanoid Aliens: Pretty much every main race except for the Tyranids. Lampshaded in Xenology.
• Human Resources: The one resource the Imperium has in unlimited amounts, which tends to lead to... wastefulness.
  • This is hilariously lampshaded by some Hive Worlds claiming Imperial Guard troopers as their prime (and sometimes sole) export. This is also the case with Cadia, which apparently does nothing else other than pumping out battle-ready babies (although their effectiveness is no better than any other world in-game).
  • Don't forget, Cadia also helps guard against The Eye of Terror. And they're awesome, so that's that.
• Human Sacrifice: The Golden Throne is fed, daily, the souls of one thousand psykers who weren't powerful enough to be put to use by the Imperium. Chaos rituals frequently make use of this also.
• Humans Are Bastards: Although it has been established that the Imperium has to be terrible in order to survive, it can be hard to figure out how far this justification extends, particularly due to the corruption and incompetence that riddle its governing bodies.
• Humans Are Morons: The Imperium of Man has hardly advanced their technology in the 10,000 years since anyone has last seen The Emperor Of Mankind. Human culture throughout their vast empire is extremely paranoid and superstitious, and the government is such a vast, inept bureaucracy that a simple filing error can lead to entire populations of people being immediately forgotten about and/or destroyed.
• Humans Are Special:
  • Largely Averted. Traits other settings give to humans to make them special — optimism, curiosity, adapting technology, social savvy — are given to the Tau. What humans have going for them is the fact that they're heavily entrenched throughout the galaxy, have bigger and outright better military sector than most, they outnumber everyone else apart from the Orks and Tyranids, and that they're willing to cross any moral line or sacrifice anyone if it means winning.
  • This is all largely thanks to the Emperor and his most able servants. The downside is that the Imperium as it is, is mostly coasting off of his successes, and it's all largely degenerated into a corrupted, debased version of his ideals. If he weren't interred in the Golden Throne, we might have seen a wiser, more restrained, and better-organized humanity than exists in the Imperium's present.
  • Directly related to the above point, humans do have one force multiplier nobody else has: Super Soldiers.
  • They are, however, quite special in two horrifying ways. The first is they are practically the ideal mortal servant race of the Chaos Gods, and as such are constantly under threat of falling to the dark powers and being wiped out by those who seek to defeat the Forces of Chaos. The second is the phenomenon of Blanks, which are beings born without souls that work as living dead zones in the warp, is exclusive to Humanity.
• Humans Are White: For many years there was some discrepancy between the written lore and the visual lore, with most of the models and artwork dipicting humanity as predominantly white, while an increasing ammount of novels and Flavor Text having a far more diverse cast. From around the end of 7th Edition onwards, however, non-white models and awtwork have been growing in number, but are still outnumbered by white humans.
• Humans Are Ugly: Eldar view humans as disgusting, ungainly, hairy, bumbling, stupid troglodytes. Orks view humans as puny, squishy, pink things. Tau think humans all look the same; humans have similar sentiments towards them.
• Humans by Any Other Name: We're mon'keigh to the Eldar, gue'la to the Tau, humies to the Orks, playthings to the Dark Eldar, and lunch to the Tyranids. We don't know what the Necrons call us.
• Human Outside, Alien Inside:
  • While it'd be heresy to call them "alien", Space Marines definitely count. They look like oversized humans, but the process that turns them into One Man Armies is much more interesting on the inside. Their bone structure is remade — among others, their ribs are fused together into a biological "plate" — and they're given third lung (which can breathe in water and oxygen-low environments), a super-kidney and second heart. They also get a membrane that lets them enter suspended animation, an organ that extracts memories from food, gland that lets them spit acid, superhuman enhancements to senses and light armour growing under their skin, which lets them interact with their Power Armour. Not to mention the progenoids, which are located in the neck and which are the most important of all "extras", as they can grow all those other organs, making them essential to continued existence of Space Marines.
  • The Eldar, while looking like tall humans with almond eyes and pointy ears, are also different on the inside. Their skeleton is more plastic and bending, their muscles stronger compared to human ones, their teeth are actually parts of jawbone (like with some birds), and their pregnancies can last several years. There's also the fact that while human psykers appear to age quicker from using their powers, eldar ones start to crystallize instead.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes:
  • Eldar think that we're bumbling, hairy savages with no appreciation for the dangers of our galaxy who need to learn that they know better than us.
  • Orks think we're fun to fight against, but are confused about how we can figure out who's in charge because we're all the same size.
  • Tau think we're promising as a species to be inducted into their empire, but look down on us as superstitious and primitive.
  • Tyranids think we're delicious, and the Hive Mind is all too aware that human worlds are its easiest targets for Genestealer infiltration.
  • Necrons think we're abominations and need to be cleansed, like everything else that lives.
  • The Chaos gods absolutely adore us. They enjoy nothing more than whispering (or screaming, in Khorne's case) into our minds to fuel our strongest emotions and passions, which in turn gives them an endless source of power. They also love us for providing them with an endless supply of followers in the materium to fight in their name, for they cannot act directly outside of the warp without us. If we (and the Eldar) were wiped out, they would have nothing to feed on and would simply fade away.
  • Dark Eldar... You know what, it's probably best you don't know.
  • The Leagues of Votann trust us as far as they can throw us, as they do with pretty much everyone else.
• Human Subspecies: The Space Marines fall under this trope, being so modified that they're practically a different species. Also, the various Abhumans.
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: Thunder hammers are a type of power weapon used by some Imperial combatants: in addition to their enormous size, they generate an energy field that releases a concussive shockwave when they hit something. Thunder hammers are usually used only by Space Marines, who wear Powered Armor on top of being physically augmented Super Soldiers (typically the head of a Space Marine's thunder hammer is larger than their own helmet, but a Space Marine's head is a lot smaller relative to their body than that of a baseline human), but lighter versions such as the Lathe Pattern are also popular with Adeptus Ministorum priests and Inquisitors of the Ordo Malleus.
• Humongous Mecha: Titans are a special class of war machines of vaguely humanoid shape. Factions with an advanced technological level are said to field these building-sized machines that equipped with guns, armors and shields worthy of a spaceship and which slowly walk on the most contested of battlefields so that their overwhelming firepower will break the enemy, which they usually do. Titans comes in various sizes, from titans that are the size of a hab block to those the size of a skyscraper, and each races that have them have also their take on what to make of these. Eldar Titans will be deadly and yet graceful compared to the relatively cumbersome Imperial and Ork Titans. One can technically field Titans on the tabletop, what they are very expensive both in terms of money and points, so they are very rare.
• 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. A significant issue with travel through the Warp is the fact that unless your ship has a functional Gellar Field isolating a bubble of reality around the ship, you and the rest of the crew WILL be consumed by every nasty thing that's out there, in suitably non-euclidean ways. THEN there's the issue of time not moving consistently or in the right direction, so even if you reach your destination you might not get there when you wanted.
• Hyperspace Lanes:
  • There are a few routes through the Warp that are both well known and well traveled enough that fleets using them have a reasonably accurate expectation of both reaching their destination and even when they'll arrive. Trying to go somewhere off the beaten path is both more difficult, slower, and more prone to the temporal vagarities associated with long-distance travel.
  • The Webway is this mixed with Portal Network. is a labyrinthine set of wormhole highways that bypass the warp entirely, accessed via webway gates. It used to cover most, if not all of the galaxy, but has since shrunken by a few thousand years of disrepair and the whole Fall of the Eldar thing. Webway gates range in size from a typical garage door to monumental structures large enough to drive a spaceship through. Originally only the Eldar and the Dark Eldar had access to the Webway, having inherited it from the Old Ones, but the Necrons managed to hijack sections for their own use. Rumor has it that the Emperor of Mankind was working on getting access and bypassing the whole "needing to fly a ship through hell to get anywhere" but the Horus Heresy put the kibosh on that project.
• Hypocrite: The Imperium. Big time. Their culture is obsessed with keeping the purity of the human form, and so is hugely supremacist against mutants. However the Adeptus Astartes, their finest warriors and their strongest line of defence against their inhuman opponents, are so heavily augmented with cybernetic and genetic modification (so they are able to take them on one-on-one) that they certainly don't qualify as anything remotely human any more. The Imperium also persecutes psykers despite the fact that a) the whole Imperium would undeniably collapse without them, as their FTL travel relies on their powers, and b) the God-Emperor who founded the Imperium and whom they now worship as a god was/is one, the most powerful one in the galaxy, bar none to boot.
  • Imperial propaganda against Xenos races tends to go thusly: Aeldari are decadent and fickle opportunists who will always prioritize the lives of their own kind even if it comes at great cost to others; Necrons are creepy techno-fetishists who refuse to accept their time has come and gone; Orks are murderous, stupid, trigger-happy and spread everywhere with the frantic pace of vermin; and T'au are sinister imperialists guided by an arrogant manifest destiny to conquer the galaxy, with entire mausoleums in their closets that they desperately do not want their citizens to find out about. Hmmm.

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