Fanfic / Nobledark Imperium

The night is dark and full of horror, but the dawn is coming — and it will be glorious. All we must do is survive.

— Srg. Marcus Albus, Mustavaar 3rd Rifles Regiment, 845.M40.

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Eternal Emperor and Empress have been joined in their holy union. He is the last relic of a lost age when hope and wisdom ruled the galaxy, still clinging to his purpose of forging a better future, and she is the last remnant of an ancient pantheon, a mother watching over dying children brought low by their own hubris.

Together, they are the Masters and Guardians of Mankind and Eldar, the keepers of the Last Alliance, the embodiments of the Imperium to which a hundred sapient species swear their fealty.

At the core of the Imperium is Humanity, its teeming multitudes ever resilient, stubbornly carving out a future amongst the hostile stars. The greatest of Man's allies are the Eldar, ancient and wise, their shared bond forged in battle and sealed in blood millennia ago. Since then, others have been judged worthy to join in the light of the Imperium, to stand with Men and Eldar as fellows: the industrious Demiurg, enigmatic Tau, countless strains of Abhumans, and many more.

Yet for all the Imperium's numbers, it is barely enough to stave off the forces that would tear it down. United under savage Beasts, the Orkish hordes throw themselves at the great edifice of the Imperium. The Necrons are awakening to a changed galaxy, and seeth at the primitives who would dare harbor their greatest foes the Eldar. From the galactic east, the Tyranids have made landfall and sweep over countless worlds in their hungering tide. In the shadows lurk the Dark Eldar, reveling in the carnage of a galaxy at war. And from the Immaterium, the Chaos Gods brood and plot their eternal vengeance, served by the twisted Chaos Eldar.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold trillions. It is to live in the last bastion of civilization as the darkness draws near. These are the tales of those times. Forget the stories of peace and harmony, for they are fables of a gentler time, when the world still made sense. Remember the stories of struggle and defiance, full of brotherhood and sacrifice, for those are the ones that really matter.

Peace is a distant dream growing ever fainter, and there is only war as Men and Eldar hold the line for the promise that has been whispered through the generations, from father to son, from mother to child: that there is good left in the world, and that is worth fighting for.

It can be found here.

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This fanfic includes the following tropes:

• Abusive Precursors: The Old Ones projected a very deliberate image of wise benevolence to their vassal races, but got up to some very shady things behind the scenes — for instance, they had no particular qualms about steering the vicious Mon-Keigh towards undeveloped worlds and testing the worthiness of the locals by whether they lived or died. As the War in Heaven reached its desperate, mutually annihilatory crescendo, however, the increasingly desperate Old Ones started sinking to increasingly foul depths to survive — the things they did to turn the simple, peaceful proto-Orks into the modern bioweapon species was an inexcusable act of manipulation and, ultimately, genocide.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: In canon, the Grey Knights were created in secret by the Emperor using his own genetic material as founding material. Here, they're a Thousand Sons successor chapter.
• Adaptational Badass: Although many individuals are weaker than they are in canon, all factions get a serious buff in competence and power. Special attention should go to the Tau. They're doubled in size from in canon, and their territory is about the same size as Ultramar is now. Since there's much less xenophobia, they're also able to spread their word of the Greater Good, peacefully now. In fact, in a change from their status in canon as a very minor xenos species, they're the third most populous demographic in the Imperium, behind Humans and Eldar, respectively.
• Adaptational Heroism: Humanity, the Craftworld Eldar and Tau are all far easier to identify as the "good" guys in this story. On a more individual level:
  • The Void Dragon, while a Mad Scientist on a scale that puts nearly all others to shame, is hardly malevolent and inscrutable like they are in canon... mostly. Unless you make him mad (in which case, start praying. Unless you worship the Omnissiah, in which case don't bother, since it's actually him). He's also the only C'tan to actually try to live up to the ideal that "We're the gods of the Necrontyr, we should act like it." He regrets that the Necrontyr souls were stolen (once he learns that those were something that Necrontyr kind of need). That being said, he doesn't really get people and has no sense of restraint.
  • Kor Phaeron was Katholian (essentially a distant descendant of Christianity) instead of a Chaos worshipper like his canon counterpart. He was also a Good Shepherd who raised Lorgar well.
  • No Primarch turned traitor, and Horus at one point explicitly rejected Chaos' offer. Most of their legions followed suit, although some marines turned traitor.
  • Inquisitor Kryptmann is definitely dangerous, obsessed with revenge against the Tyranids, and widely feared, but he's still on the Imperium's side.
  • Legienstrausse, canonically the sole assassin of the Maerorus temple (an experiment into using genetic modification to create the perfect assassin) who went rogue immediately, is here the only sane result of the project, and helps hunt down her less fortunate fellows.
  • Oscar himself is far more of a genuine hero than the canonical Emperor, being more humble and generally more connected to the Imperium he rules.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • In baseline 40k, Inquisitor Kryptman's first name is Fidus; here, it's Boaz.
  • A few of the original founding Legions have tweaked names, such as Terra's Children (Emperor's Children, as the Warden was not interested in setting up the cult of personality his canon counterpart was and did not use the title of Emperor until relatively recently anyway) and the Void Wolves (Luna Wolves, renamed to reflect their origin among the spaceborne Migrant Fleet).
• Adaptation Species Change:
  • In canon, the Squats^note prior to their reintroduction as the Leagues of Votann, which occurred several years after the Nobledark Imperium writing project began are their own separate race of abhuman, similar to the Ogryns and the Ratlings. Here, the Squats only have their short stature and physical traits because they are Heavyworlders. Squats raised on lighter-gravity worlds have human stature, and humans raised on high-gravity worlds resemble Squats. The only reason they are classified as abhumans is because of spite from the Adeptus Mechanicus.
  • In canon, the Emperor is a Humanoid Abomination bordering on Eldritch of unknown origin. Here, the Emperor/Steward/Oscar is a "Man of Gold", basically an Artificial Human created by the Great and Bountiful Human Domain (the Precursors of the Imperium who ruled the galaxy during the Dark Age of Technology and the Age of Strife) and who is also the closest thing that humanity's ever created to a Warp God.
  • Brief mention is made that Doomrider was a Croneworld Eldar prior to his ascenion to daemonhood, rather than a Chaos Space Marine.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Fyodor Karamazov, a notably hard-line and ruthless Inquisitor in canon who is still loyal to the Imperium, is a traitor here, and much worse.
  • Lady Malys was already as evil as one would expect from the Dark Eldar in canon, but here, she's as evil as one would expect from the Crone Eldar.
  • Many of the Orks have been suborned to Chaos. In fact, the Beast from the titular War of the Beast more or less serves the same role as the traitorous Horus from the Horus Hersey here in terms of being the Chaos Gods' greatest mortal Champion.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • The Primarchs in this timeline were not the geneforged sons of the Master of Mankind, but normal humans who were simply Oscar's greatest generals. Those that were augmented only received the basic Space Marine upgrades, and a number were not augmented at all — Lorgar, Corvus and Guilliman simply never received augmentation, while Magnus' mutation and Horus' abhuman nature made them incompatible. Granted, this also means that they are as a whole far more stable and sane than their counterparts were, so it's ultimately more of a mixed bag.
  • Downplayed, but while the Space Wolves are still insanely tough and deadly Super Soldiers in this canon, they're products of another super soldier program the Imperium was researching during the Unification Wars on Old Earth, the Canis Helix, which has less extensive surgery and more focus on altering human DNA with that of deadly animals (i.e., wolves). Thus, they're not as deadly as the other Astartes Chapters are, but are still terrifying combatants in their own right.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The Chaos Gods minus Slaanesh were originally artificial creations of the Old Ones who were meant to be the ultimate anti-Necontyr weapons and guides for lesser sapients. Unfortunately, the combination of the war warping them with negative thoughts and the callous, dismissive view the Old Ones had of them (especially Be'lakor's abuse of the proto-Tzeentch) eventually caused them to develop their nihilistic outlook on life and start working towards indulging their nature before all else.
  • While the Men of Iron are often seen as this, the truth is that they were Benevolent A.I. before the Fall of the Eldar, at which point the Iron Minds got front-row seats to the opening of the Eye of Terror, which drove all of them insane.
  • Played with in the case of Castigator, an A.I. Titan from the Dark Age of Humanity who ended up falling to Chaos (despite retaining his sanity earlier because he was mothballed during the Fall), but explicitly did so for the very human reason of revenge; when he was reactivated, he got garbled transmissions that made it look like the humans had suddenly turned on and destroyed the Iron Minds unprovoked.
• The Alliance: The Imperium is a mass alliance between humanity, the Eldar, Tau, the Demiurg, the Watchers in the Dark, and dozens, if not hundreds, of other species.
• And Then What?: Lucius the Eternal spent the majority of his life pursuing immortality, eventually becoming a C'tan vampire to do this. Once he achieved this goal and completed the quest that had taken up centuries of life, he had to sit down and figure out what in the world he was going to do with eternity. He eventually settled on perfecting his martial skill and fighting the greatest warriors of the ages to come.
• The Ark: One of the Inquisition and Mechanicus' most tightly-hidden secrets is an immense ark, containing the stasis-held forms of its Inquisitor captain, its heavily mechanically-augmented crew, and thousands and thousands of frozen embryos of every sapient species in the Imperium. It's a contingency plan for the absolute worst-case scenarios, the victory of Chaos, the Necrons or the Tyranids. Should any of these things come to pass and the galaxy cease to be fit for sapient life, the Ark is to activate and head as swiftly as possible outward, stop at some outlying star cluster to resupply and rendezvous with whatever Craftworlds managed to escape as well, and begin the long, long journey out into the dark.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Lady Malys, canonically a Dark Eldar character and rival to Asdrubael Vect, becomes the chosen of the Chaos Gods and basically is the setting's Abbadon.
  • The Beast, while still a major Ork in canon, essentially took the place of Horus.
• Awesome, but Impractical: In-Universe, the Canis Helix are this in comparison to the Astartes. Both are incredibly powerful Super-Soldier programs, but the latter was simply more cost-effective and resulted in less debilitating failures in comparison to the former, so the Steward decided to mass-produce Astartes when beginning the Great Crusade. He did still let the Canis Helix remain under Leman Russ' command and they even continue to exist to this day in the form of the Space Wolves Chapter, though.
• Battle Butler: Ciaphas Cain's assistant during his stay as the Imperium's ambassador to Biel-Tan is a prim, stuffy graduate of the Schola Progenium named Edmond Aldsworth (his usual aide Jurgen is traveling with Inquisitor Vail, since you'd have to be crazy to take a blank to a Craftworld full of psykers). Unknown to both Cain and the majority of Biel-Tan's population, Edmond did not train as a diplomat at the Schola, but as a stormtrooper, and spent most of his career afterwards doing things like performing counterraids on Dark Eldar slavers in the bowels of hive cities and hunting Ork kommandoz. He still has a necklace of Ork trigger finger bones stashed away that's worn more like a bandolier.
  To everyone that works with him man and xeno he is just a neat man with grey hair and a fussy little moustache.
• Battle Trophy: Illic Nightspear adorns himself with with mementos taken from the dangerous creatures that he hunts, such as a necklace made from genestealer teeth, a knife with a handle carved from a single chunk of squiggoth ivory, and a necron finger.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • In the Happalachian Hill Race, it's stated this is what happened with the Tau. When the Tau finally joined the Imperium proper, many of their Fire caste officers looked forward to the opportunity to show what they saw as the backward, stagnant forces of the Imperium the obvious superiority of the Tau's way of doing things. To their abject horror, the reintegration campaign of Happalachia gave them exactly what they'd been asking for.
  • At some point, a rogue Inquisitor found out that the Mechanicus was hiding the Void Dragon, and blackmailed them into letting him meet it. The Mechanicus reluctantly obliged and showed him to the Void Dragon... who was very unhappy at what the Inquisitor had done to his followers.
    Void Dragon: You have 2.2104 seconds to live following the end of this statement. I hope you enjoy this time.
• Benevolent A.I.:
  • The Ark Mechanicus ships in this version are run by A.I. who were isolated from the mass insanity that infected the others. They still loyally serve the Mechanicus, but they keep their true nature secret because they know that humans are quite justifiably worried about A.I. after the Iron Minds went nuts.
  • Oscar himself is an Artificial Humanoid created during the Dark Age of Technology to serve as a go-between between humans and the Iron Minds. He's also the co-Big Good for the Imperium, along with Isha.
• Berserk Button: Colonel-Farseer Taldeer (leader of the Cadian 412th) tends to get very angry when people theorize about her having an Interspecies Romance with various humans around her — mostly because she’s in a relationship with LIIVI, and gets twitchy when she thinks people might know.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Contrary to what most people tend to think, pre-Necron Nemesor Zandrekh was just as benevolent (if more coherent) than he is now, but it's specifically noted that this did not make him harmless — Necrontyr politics were insanely cutthroat, and Zandrekh could afford to be so nice because he was also a brilliant strategist who could make people pay for underestimating him.
• Beyond the Impossible: Humans and Eldar may look alike, but they're entirely biologically incompatible. Interspecies Romance is a thing, but Eldar/Human hybrids are not. So why is Taldeer pregnant by her human lover?
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: C'tan are... weird, to say the least. General conjecture is that their entire personalities were shaped by their first reaction to suddenly being introduced into reality (having been basically non-sentient before the Necrontyr contacted them). The Nightbringer was the first, and started abusing his power because no one else could stop him. The Void Dragon's reaction was wonder at all the cool stuff he'd been missing — which is why he's an Genius Ditz Mad Scientist, but also why he's the only one who actually cares about non-C'tan. The Deceiver was originally named after the Necrontyr equivalent to Hermes, and started lying to people because he found he could get away with it.
• Butt-Monkey: Be'lakor, the last of the Old Ones, is a downplayed version of this — he is extremely dangerous (during the War of the Beast, he was responsible for causing enormous casualties to the Alpha Legion) and has many Chaotic followers, but his plans tend to end up going badly for him. It is noted in one of the threads that this isn't so much because he's incompetent as because Tzeentch hates him on a personal level and takes a distinct pleasure in screwing him over.
• Cat Folk: The Felinids are a strain of genetically modified humans that were created during the Dark Age of Technology to colonize Carlos McConnell, a humid world whose continents and islands are covered by dense temperate and tropical rainforests. Since areable land is very scarce and there aren't any native animals useful as large livestock, it was decided to create colonsists who could live directly off of the wilderness' abundant small fauna and move through the dense growth with ease. Cats were a major source of genetic material, although a fair amount was also derived from small primates such as marmosets. Modern felinids have mostly human faces, with enlarged teeth, protruding pointed ears, manelike hair, and feline eyes. Their bodies are much hairier than baseline humans', their fingers are tipped with retractable claws, and their feet are very apelike, with opposable big toes and flexible ankle joints for gripping tree branches; they also have tails, for balance when climbing. Their homeworld is split between an islander culture that relies on seafood to feed itself and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes in the continents. In the Guard, they're very poor at regimented tactics and worse at holding a position, but make excellent scouts, skirmishers and wilderness troops. They have an unfortunate habit of taking enemy bones to make trophies with.
• Citadel City: Originally, Lorgar and the Word Bearers built Monarchia as a beautiful holy city of wide avenues, grand cathedrals and ornate debate halls, intending for it to be the living ideal of what civilized life could be. This design, however, left it difficult to defend, and the Taskmaster of Slaanesh was able to invade it, desecrate it and raze it and its planet to the ground as part of his effort to establish Slaanesh as the Imperium's devil figure. The Word Bearers rebuilt it as a fortified hive, designing it with an eye for defense, and when Arrotyr came along at the head of Khornate warhost to prove his god's superiority he had to work hard to take it, but he was able to raze it once more. The survivors, who were noteably more numerous this time around, rebuilt Monarchia to be even stronger, and the result is a fortified hive that is counted among the strongest foritifications in the Imperium.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Done twice for Warmaster Macharius, with a portrait of him in his younger days◊ making him look like Hugh Jackman and a portrait of him towards the end of his life◊ making him look like Clint Eastwood.
• Dances and Balls: The Dark Carnival, an everlasting party that is hosted by the Harlequins and travels the Imperium from world to world.
• Dark Secret: The higher-ups of the Adeptus Mechanicus who are in on the existence of the Void Dragon are, as a whole, aware that it is the Omnissiah, but keep it locked up out of fear. The Void Dragon doesn't appear to mind being locked up too much, though...
• Defector from Decadence: The Craftworld and Exodite Eldar as in canon, as well as the Dark Eldar (such as Yvraine) that have left Commorragh.
• Didn't See That Coming: Twenty years before the present, the Tyranid Hive Fleets lay siege to the world of Terranis, and the Imperium wrote it off as a loss. This means that it was a real big surprise when, after twenty years of constant war against the Tyranids, the Imperium gets an astropathic message from Terranis asking for reinforcements to help clean up the remaining 'nids.
• Do Not Go Gentle: The Squats, when one of their worlds was being invaded by the Tyranids, didn't focus on fighting, instead focusing on evacuating everyone they could. Then, when the rescue fleet arrived and helped evacuate, the governor, who remained on the planet, pulled a switch — and collapsed the planet's crust into the lava-filled mantle.
  "Fry, you overgrown space roaches."
• The Dreaded:
  • The Night Lords (who remained loyal to the Imperium here) are apparently infamous enough that even the daemons of Chaos are scared of them.
  • Lady Malys, even to the Chaos Gods — although not because she could hurt them directly, she's just crazy enough that they realize that, if they tried to depower her and it wasn't all four working as one (which is difficult to achieve on a good day), then she'd use the powers of the other three gods she had to destroy the forces of the one who removed their blessing.
• Eldritch Location: The Veiled Region is an area of space largely believed to be cursed; no one ever settled it — the ancient precursor empires all gave it a wide berth, their modern descendants do the same, and nothing lives there now except for a very primitive species of slug things and a few Orks, because there are always Orks. In the Veiled Region there is a star system, around an old red giant; it is surrounded by an asteroid belt made out of unguessable numbers of petrified Daemons, their faces forever locked in terror, and beyond there is nothing. Oh, observations may show that there is a planet in there, with traits to measure and a surface to land on, but those observations would be wrong. The planet doesn't exist, and anything that lands on therefore also doesn't exist. It's believed that this is where the C'tan Llandu'gor was killed using weapons that tore away at reality itself, and the current state of things is the result of universal constants being changed, erased and reinstanted.
• Enemy Mine: The Harrowing, whatever it was, pretty much got almost everyone working together to stop it, including Trazyn, who is an independent party and not taking orders from either the Silent King and Oscar. Even if they weren't sure what was happening (the Harlequins said flatly that it beat them when asked). Chaos helped by creating the Hadex Anomaly.
• Epic Race: The Iron Race is a cross-galactic racing competition held at irregular intervals by Craftworld Saim-Hann. Participants are chosen by invitation, but there are no particular requirements other than skill — typically lineups include Craftworld Eldar, Humans, Kroot, Kabalites, Orkish Speed Freaks and more bizarre entrants still, and racers are permitted almost any kind of vehicle that they care to turn up in, which historically has included light battleships. The race itself winds in and through the Webway and across some of the most hazardous regions that the galaxy has to offer, including active warzones, Tyranid hive fleets, the event horizons of black holes and the edge of the Eye of Terror. Competitor casualties tend to be high, earning it the nickname of "the Suicide Race", and on at least a few occasions all of the competitors died before reaching the finish line.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • It's rumored that the Chaos/Crone Eldar who serve Slaanesh engage in acts that even the Dark Eldar have been disgusted by. Asdrubael Vect and Lady Malys (here the "Abbadon" of the setting) allied Commoragh and the Crone World Eldar through an Unholy Matrimony. Part of the fallout from this was a mass exodus from Commoragh by the Dark Eldar who decided that allying themselves with Chaos crossed the line.
  • To emphasize just how evil Fyodor Karamazov is in this continuity, Inquisitor Kryptmann (who everyone, including himself, sees as teetering just on the edge of Necessarily Evil) calls him a Genestealer infiltrating the Imperium and wants him purged.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Chaos' failure to corrupt Konrad Kurze was, essentially, a failure of Chaotic Evil to understand Lawful Evil. Chaos assumed that, since Kurze was objectively a monster, he would be easy to lure into their clutches by promising him the ability to vent his darker urges without any checks or limitations. Kurze found this repulsive, since he ultimately desired order, structure and stability — his evil was done specifically to protect the Imperium, and he was very loyal to it.
    The dark whispers of Chaos began to tempt his mind, the fallen Eldar of the Crone Worlds assailing his dreams with tantalising offers of untold riches and endless power. Yet every offer was found wanting; every envoy cut down, every promise met with scorn. They had made the mistake of assuming that one such as Curze had become would revel in their depraved debaucheries, without considering that he would find them every bit as repulsive as other, better, people found him. He was a monster, this was true, but he was a monster who ripped and tore and tortured in the name of order; by the Emperor he was the Imperium's monster and nobody else's.
  • The Dark Eldar of Commorragh are this to Fabius Bile. The man acts so strangely to them — he does every job to the best of his ability, with absolutely no treachery or scheming above his station. If you go to him, you will get quality biological horrors. People wonder what he's really up to, when in truth, Fabius has no plan. He just wants to get more materials for his research and accepts commissions for his work.
  • In another treachery-cannot-comprehend-loyalty version, one reason the Chaos Gods are somewhat scared of Lady Malys is because she can cause serious trouble to the first god to withdraw his power (with the end result that none of them are willing to), but she has absolutely no desire to take advantage of this. She's quite happy in her current position and truly loyal, but they're pretty much all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
• Fallen Hero: Goge Vandire, instead of being Obviously Evil nearly from the get-go here, was actually chosen by Oscar himself to be the Emperor, and did a good job of it for quite a while before he fell off his rocker.
• Fantastic Flora: Necromunda, much like in canon, was originally a wastelands of a planet consisting of immense hyper-dense Hive Cities amidst continent-spanning expanses of slag heaps, exhausted strip mines, ash deserts and fields of toxic sludge, beneath skies choked with smog and toxic gases. This left the planet with a persistent food problem, which an ancient governor tried to address by commissioning the Adeptus Biologicus to scour the galaxy for any kind of plant that could be made to grow on the planet. The result was a mengaerie of flora, Earthborn and alien and of unclear origin alike, selected from a double dozen worlds and mainly of the kinds found growing around volcanoes or on Venus-like planets. The AdBio then spent decades crossbreeding the chimeric ecosystem they had created until they were able to create hybrid alien plants that could actually produce food; none of it tastes remotely tolerable but it can be processed down in edible slurries with most of the flavor removed and that's sufficient for the planet's needs.
• Fantastic Racism: Much less prevalent than in the canon timeline, where the typical reaction of a human to an Eldar is "Xenos Witch, Five Rounds Rapid." That said, racism does still exist, despite the near ten thousand years of the alliance. It's more similar to modern-day racism, though, with prejudices and people treating each other badly, but not anywhere near what it could be.
  • Common problems include the fact that many Eldar were raised on stories of the Old Eldar Empire and how it covered the galaxy, and they haven't had many generations living outside of that empire. While many do understand that there were problems with it (see also how said Empire led to the birth of Slaanesh and the creation of the Crone and Dark Eldar), the long life spans and tendency of the Eldar to fixate on things mean that many still believe their species is superior to their supposed allies, and want to beat back the Dark Eldar and continue the days when they ruled the galaxy. It is noted that this is a particularly hardline stance, and that there are many friendly Eldar in the galaxy, but two whole Craftworlds have refused to join the Imperium because of these beliefs.
  • The Tau, as a young, naive race, tend to look down on the other races of the Imperium until they get smacked in the face how things actually are. They initially assumed that the first reports of Terra's wonders and the size of the Imperium were exaggerations, things designed to make the Imperium look good (thinking that the Imperium was about the size of Ultramar, which is the same as their own empire in size). They had to severely rethink a lot of their beliefs once they realized that, if anything, the initial reports downplayed how huge things were.
  • The Death Korps of Krieg, due to the deprivation of their homeworld, see aliens as parasites who consume resources that more rightfully belong to proper humans, and barely tolerate their presence in the Imperium. Amusingly, this means they basically have the attitude of the canon universe Imperium.
• Fantastic Slur: The Space Wolves and other Canis Helix-descended Chapters have been derogatorily referred to as "Dog Soldiers" by other humans.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • A heavily downplayed case — generally, the fanfic's canon has written the Imperium to be reminiscent of Europe during the 1600s, with a political structure similar to the Holy Roman Empire's, and the Necron Star Empire as Victorian Britain.
  • The people native to Happalachia, a Single-Biome Planet covered in nothing but mountains and forests, are a rather unsubtle take on stereotypical Appalachian hillbillies.
• Fire-Forged Friends:
  • While the Eldar and humanity initially made their pact out of convenience, their societies have become much closer over ten millennia of struggling for survival together.
  • The inhabitants of Terranis managed to hold out against a Tyranid invasion thanks to the Hrud, who can sniff out genestealers and have just as much invested in not getting devoured by the Hive Mind as the other inhabitants.
• Future Imperfect: The Tindalosi, a poorly-understood species of time-traveling predators, are named such due to reasons long lost to the Imperium beyond a single written account from the 23rd Millennium, which compares them to creatures from "an ancient Terran story".
• Future Primitive: Many Exodites shun the advanced technology of the Eldar in order to lead deliberately stone-age lives. Illic Nightspear left Alaitoc over a thousand years ago to become an Exodite and developed a profound fascination with the hunt, particularly the very low-tech kind done on his adopted planet, wears animal skins and ash and hunts using a simple stone spear, bow, and flint arrows. He would be considered a joke, if it weren't for the fact that he can reliably navigate the webway and that the hunting trophies that he adorns himself with include body parts taken from genestealers, squiggoths, and a necron.
• Genius Ditz: The Void Dragon is one of the most advanced Mad Scientists possibly ever created (he was behind a lot of Necron tech), and has been stated to have a lot of trouble with the concepts of "collateral damage", "potential consequences", "subtlety", and "proportional response".
• God Couple: The Imperium is ruled jointly by Oscar, the last Man of the Gold and thus last survivor of the race of transhuman demigods created to rule over the ancient human empire, and Isha, the Eldar's mother goddess and one of the only three deities of the pantheon to survive Slaanesh's birth. Their marriage was originally a politically-minded move necessary to bring the scattered societies of humanity and the Eldar under a single banner, but has since become the cultural cornerstone of Imperial society. How well this fits the "god" part of the trope depends on who you're asking; Oscar is very strongly of the opinion that he is not, in fact, a god, while Isha thinks he's just fooling himself.
• A God I Am Not: Oscar the Emperor is very emphatic on the point that he is not a god, and does not want to be worshipped as one; one of the few hard rulers imposed on members of the Imperium is that they are forbidden from worshipping him. This is in large part due to the stories he was raised on of the old Men of Gold and their bloody rampages through the old human empire after they were driven mad by Slaanesh's birth, and his fears of becoming something like that. Notably, however, the Eldar of the old Empire viewed the Men of Gold as the closest thing that humanity had to gods, and the modern ones viewed his marriage to Isha as politically valid solely on that basis. Isha herself is of the opinion that the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds were humanity's counterpart to the Eldar pantheon and that Oscar is a god in denial, a topic that they have had heated arguments on on a number of occasions.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Kryptman's reason for continuing existence in a nutshell. He's a monster, and everyone knows it. It's stated that the two reasons for the Kryptman Institute are to stop the Tyranids and to keep Kryptman himself in check. Oh, he gets the job done, and is totally devoted to the destruction of the creatures. But he's willing to make sacrifices — horrible, nightmarish sacrifices. Look at the Kryptman Line (where he destroyed an entire line of star systems in the path of Behemoth to starve it of resources) for an example of this.
  • To end the Harrowing, humanity focused the Astronomican from a psychic lighthouse to a psychic death laser. This nearly broke the thing entirely, stranded hundreds of ships in the Warp, and caused madness in every system it passed, but it did do something to stop the Harrowing.
• Good Feels Good: When Asdrubael married Lady Malys and Commorragh threw in its lot with Chaos, many of low-ranking Dark Eldar and quite a lot of the alien pirates and mercenaries living in the city fled while they still could and tried to find new boltholes to hide in. One of the groups was a band of Sslyth pirates who ended up in Cherys, a system consisting of gas giants orbited by several Earth-sized moons that had been scouted by the Imperium for settlement and had an early space station built but had to be abanonded for 500 years after being isolated by Warp storms. The Sslyth decided that this seemed like an excellent new base of operations and set up shop, and had the good fortune of being mistaken for legitimate settlers by the first Imperial patrol to head their way, since there are a few old Sslyth enclaves in the Imperium. The Sslyth still deal in black market, weapon smuggling and back alley deals, but more and more find that having steady jobs and nobody shooting at them is actually really nice, and they actually make more money seeling processed resources through legitimate channels than using them to make ships and guns, and despite insisting that they're still pirates they've been finding to their increasing discomfort that they're falling more and more into the role of legitimate administrators and liking it enough that they're not sure that they'd want to go back to their old ways if the chance presented itself.
• Good Shepherd: In contrast to his canon Religion of Evil-preaching self, Lorgar was a beloved preacher and theologian, remembered for his reconciling of the splintered Katholian sects on Earth and commitment to debate, syncreticism and interfaith dialogue, although he did tend to view everything through the lens of his own Katholian faith.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Played with: it's stated early on that the Eldar and humanity are not genetically viable, and there are no known exceptions (if not for lack of trying). However, given the relationship between Farseer Taldeer and LIIVI, and the former's current Pregnant Badass status, as well as the Starchild Prophecies and Ynnead, this has a good chance of changing...
• Happily Adopted: The APEX Twins refer to the Inquisitor who looked after them as "mom", and there's a writing piece that mentions a human-Eldar couple who adopted a pair of orphans since they couldn't have children.
• Happily Married: While it's debatable whether they became a Perfectly Arranged Marriage or remain Just Friends despite their wedding, Oscar and Isha are stated to be happy with each other.
• Hegemonic Empire: Unlike its canon self, which typically expands through military subjugation of human nations and extermination of alien ones, the Imperium prefers to expand through diplomacy. First contact with new polities is typically followed by attempts to establish diplomatic relationships, with the intent of drawing the new group fully into the Imperial fold. This is typically achieved through a combination of perks from doing so, such as access to the Imperium's immense industrial base, its trade networks and the protection of its armies, contrasted with the danger of trying to survive in the darkness of the far future alone. Even so, the Imperium doesn't really press reluctant nations to join, mainly because it's been around for a very long time and is willing to play the long game, and gives joining states a great degree of autonomy, provided that they pay its tithes and don't try to leave.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ollanius Pius, just like in canon, sacrifices his life to try to slow down a seemingly invincible foe. What could be more awesome than standing up to Horus when he was empowered by all the Chaos Gods? Ramming his ship into the Ork's Attack Planet when Ullanor came to the Sol system, in a grand example of Ramming Always Works.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Here, the Iron Hands Chapter of Space Marines don't actually have a geneseed (like the Space Wolves in this canon, who are Canis Helix), and are instead modified Skitarii of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
• Horrifying the Horror: In the Battle of Montlúcon, a legion of Khornate daemons fought the Nightbringer and its own horde of thralls. The Nightbringer proved to be a foe far beyond what the Neverborn expected — its power had been greatly magnified by the fear and agony of the worlds it had already purged, it radiated a supernatural aura of fear, and, when it killed a daemon, it absorbed and unmade its essence instead of allowing it rebirth in the Warp. Faced with a foe that cut them down like wheat and experiencing mortal fear and the threat of mortality for the first time in their lives, the daemons fought, and wavered, and turned and ran — quite possibly the first time a Khornate force ever did so, to Khorne's immense displeasure.
• Humble Hero: The Word Bearers strive to embody the virtue of humility, to sometimes extreme degrees. For instance, they remained an effectively homeless fleet-based chapter for fifty years after a Slaaneshi warhost razed their homeworld because the event had slipped through the cracks of the Administratum and they didn't want to make a fuss about it.
• Immortality Seeker: Lucius the Eternal was obsessesed with living forever, and abanonded the Imperium when Fulgrim was unable to figure out a way for him to do so. He eventually became a C'tan vampire in pursuit of this goal.
• The Infested: Malaria, the Living Hive, is a Chaos Eldar in the service of Nurgle. After Isha's rescue, she offered herself to the Plague God to act as a replacement guinea pig for his experiments; he eventually let her go, since she couldn't match Isha's endless regeneration that had made her an ideal test subject, but in the process she became... changed. In the present, Malaria's body is a mass of honeycombed insect nests in the rough shape of a person, covered in some parts by a thin layer of skin and elsewhere open to the air, which is home to immense swarms of daemonic wasps, flies, and maggots, which fly out of her in clouds so dense that they can blot out the sun.
• Insanity Immunity: Nemesor Zandrekh cannot be controlled by the Silent King because of this; he's absolutely convinced that he's still living, and only robots can be controlled like that. Funnily enough, because of this, all the other Necrons under his command are still free, because technically they are still obeying their commander... it's just that said commander doesn't obey the Silent King and generally lets them do their own thing.
• Interspecies Adoption: Librarian Tigurius's backstory in this universe is that he was taken in as a baby by an Eldar who lost her family in an ork attack. As he grew up however he didn't fit in with his Eldar home, so he was sent off and he eventually joined the Ultramarines. Due to his background he was able to survive psychic contact with the Tyranid Hive Mind.
• Interspecies Romance: Romantic relationships are known to happen at times between humans and Eldar, with the highest proportion of relationships coming from the world of Cadia and Craftworld Ulthwé.
  • The rulers of the Imperium are an Eldar-Human couple... sort of, the Eldar in question being the mortal host of the goddess Isha while the Emperor is a Man of Gold.
  • Farseer Taldeer and LIVII from Love Can Bloom had their story play out from that series. However, what makes their coupling unique is that now Taldeer is pregnant with a half-human, half-Eldar child — which, to the best of in-universe knowledge, shouldn't actually be possible.
• In Spite of a Nail: For all the differences, Krieg still ended up becoming a bombed out ruin of a world thanks to a civil war between rebels and Imperial loyalists, resulting in a Death Korps of Krieg that is basically identical to their canon counterparts.
• Last of His Kind:
  • The Emperor, instead of being a shaman fusion/superhuman Perpetual/something else, is the last known Man of Gold, who was found by Malcador on an expedition to the Ringworld of Cthonia, the old capital of the human empire during the Dark Age of Technology.
  • Elmo is the only remaining AI from the Dark Age of Technology that is loyal to the Imperium, along with possibly the Ark Mechanicus AIs.
• Last Stand: The Last Roll of Thunder — the very last of the Thunder Warriors, at that point retirees in failing health, mustering to the Imperial Palace and fighting to the last against the forces of the Beast during the invasion of Terra.
• Life in Zero G: The Voidborn are Space People who have lived on spaceships for millennia, having enduring the fall of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion and the ensuing dark ages on their fleets. They have long since gotten into the habit of not using artificial gravity on their ships, and have become pale, drawn-out and slender thanks to ages of this lifestyle. When the Tau explorer Por'O M'arc encounters one of their crews during his travels, he wonders to himself whether this will be the fate of his species' Air Caste.
• Loon with a Heart of Gold: The Nemesor Zandrekh is one of the only Necrons who's allied with the Imperium, and is probably the most likable killer robot in the galaxy. He's also insane and thinks he's still flesh-and-blood.
• The Magnificent: Khârn is often referred to Khârn the Oathsworn, and sometimes as the World Eater^note in the setting, the War Hounds were never renamed to the World Eaters in memory of an incident where he was able to single-handedly cripple a rebellious planet's military. He was not fond of the name, as he spent most of that incident in a berserk rage and he did not like how close he came to losing himself completely.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The Imperium panics when the core Tyranid fleet arrives near the end of M41. For reference, here the three main Hive Fleets are the vanguard.
• More than Mind Control: Defied with the Tau, since unlike in canon there's no ambiguous Eldar uplifting giving their Ethereal caste psychic powers. They worked their way up to where they are by their own effort.
• Multiple Government Polity: The Imperium operates like this as a result of the galactic distances it stretches over making centralized government effectively impossible and of it tending to expand by confederating preexisting starfaring nations. In general, the Imperium doesn't particularly care how its member states and planets run themselves as long as they pay the Imperial Tithe, don't worship Chaos and don't try to leave, and the modern Imperium thus takes the form of an immense patchwork of semi-independent systems, Craftworlds, alien and human star nations, and nomadic fleets of spaceships, all ultimately reporting to the central Imperial government but largely self-running in their day-to-day internal affairs.
• Mundane Utility: The Void Dragon is... weird, that way. He has created a tremendous amount of extremely destructive devices, but they were all originally intended for mundane uses. For instance, a star-killing device was originally intended for mining black holes.
  Early on in the War in Heaven Mag'ladroth, despite being one of the most physically powerful of the C'tan, was sidelined into building devices for the Necrontyr and the other C'tan. He had more of a taste for it, though the other C'tan all made fun of him behind his back. Among the things he invented were the designs for the Cadian pillars and other such devices. Sure, he made a whole boat load of what might have appeared to be doomsday weapons, but never as actual weapons. Case in point, he made a long range mega gravitation inverter. Charge it up, point it at a thing and press the ominous red button. It makes a portion of the object's gravity turn into anti-gravity, usually resulting in an explosion and if you point it at a star can cause a supernova and irradiate whole swathes of space.
  He said it would be useful in future mining endeavors. For when you want to mine a black hole.
• Named by the Adaptation: The God-Emperor of Mankind is usually called just that (or a variety of derogatory nicknames) in canon, with his true name being lost to history. Here, his name is Oscar.
• Odd Friendship: Rogal Dorn and Perturabo, who in canon Warhammer 40,000 hated each other, actually got along (sort of) here, despite being opposite in many ways.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The Chaos Warband that tries to abduct Isha gets one when they realize that she isn't running at them to embrace them, she's running at them because she's in the midst of a PTSD-fueled rampage... which they realize once she punches their leader in half and starts beating his companions to death with his upper half.
  • The rulers of the Tau get one when they realize that all those things they threw out the window as "The Imperium trying to suck up and look more impressive," like having an Emperor married to a literal goddess, or the scope of Hive Worlds, or the moon-sized Craftworlds... not only are all those things real, but there's so many weirder and more horrifying things out there. In another sense, they thought the Imperium was the size of Ultramar, and were unprepared for the true, utter vastness of the Imperium.
• One-Gender Race: Mostly played straight (as with canon) for the Space Marines, but averted with the Iron Hands. Since they're all technically "only" modified Skitarii of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the only barriers for entry into their chapter are being a member of the Mechanicum and being able to survive the conversion process.
• Only Sane Man: Ciaphas Cain still exists here, but after his posting with the Valhallan 597th he became the Imperial Ambassador to Craftworld Biel-Tan. His main job is to act as the one guy in the most warlike Craftworld who says "Maybe we should try not going to war at the drop of a hat, and save some of our precious lives for actually worthy fights?"
• Our Vampires Are Different: C'tan vampires are created by implanting a fragment of a C'tan shard within a living being, turning them into a powerful and immortal monster. C'tan vampires feed parasitically on other beings, which they can convert into new members of their kind by planning a new fragment into them, and grow progressively stronger as they age and feed. Their specific abilities and behaviors vary depending on their progenitor; Strigoi, descended from Mephet'ran the Deceiver, are cultured aristocrats who manipulate society from within, while Nosferatu, descended from Aza'gorod the Nightbringer, are undead monsters interested in little beyond death and destruction. For all their power, however, they're vulnerable to intense radiation — sunlight harms them, but direct x-rays, gamma radiation or microwaves harm them even more — and unknown to them they can all be directly manipulated and influenced by their C'tan progenitor.
• Our Wyverns Are Different: "Wyvern" is the term used for shards of the Void Dragon, most of which were broken off in his battle against the other C'Tan sixty-odd million years ago. They only retain a small fraction of the power and majesty of the original being — they typically have only one pair of legs instead of the Void Dragon's four, and are little more than ravening animals whereas their progenitor is one of the most brilliant minds in the universe. However, given the sheer scale of a full C'Tan, wyverns are still terrible, terrifying monster to anything that isn't some kind of god, and are impossible to meaningfully hurt with anything other than C'Tan tech.
• Phlebotinum Killed the Dinosaurs: During the days of the Old Ones, Earth was at the tail end of the Mesozoic and mostly served as a wildlife preserve and source of fresh experimental stock for the Old Ones. During the War in Heaven, the battle between the Void Dragon and the other C'tan happened to take place in the Sol System, and included one of the fighters getting body-slammed in the future Yucatan peninsula, resulting in the Chicxulub bolide impact and killing off Earth's megafauna.
• Praetorian Guard: The Adeptus Custodes (as in canon) and the Handmaidens of Isha are the personal guards of Oscar (the Emperor) and Isha.
• Quantity vs. Quality: The human Forces of Chaos lean more on the latter side of this scale than the former in this canon. Since the Horus Heresy never happened here and no legions of Space Marines ever entirely turned over to Chaos, there are fewer Chaos Space Marines and the Chaos Gods generally have to rely on smaller numbers of forces than they would in canon, as seen with the Crone Eldar, Fallen, and Chaos Guard. However, their numerical disadvantage is balanced out by how the Chaos Gods lavish their favorite toys with powerful daemons, advanced Heretek technology, and deadly blessings, to the point that every Fallen Captain is approaching Chaos Champion-tier power here.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: How Nemesor Zahndrekh comports himself, largely due to him being crazy. He once asked the Imperium for help because of "A spot of trouble with a group of insectoid life forms," before contact was broken... which for those who read between the lines, means that he was under attack by a Tyranid Hive Fleet.
• Ramming Always Works:
  • Ollanius Pius took down the Attack Planet Ullanor/Armageddon by ramming a starship into it at a third light speed, which knocked the planet off-course and shattered its crust. The description really drives it home just how dangerous this is.
    When Ollanius Pius slammed his ship at a third of lightspeed into the Attack Planet and knocked it off its collision course with Old Earth, the force of impact broke the stone crust like a dropped vase. Immense volcanic fissures opened up swallowing vast sections of the gun-continents, mountains that should have taken millennia to form were thrust up in a day, the oceans rushed back to their former positions, and everything not covered in lava was covered in ash.
    Enough of the teleporter system survived for just long enough for the Mekboyz to hit the big red button and teleport the Attack Planet one last time.
    When the Imperium re-encountered the world which had once been Ullanor, it was shattered almost beyond recognition. Vast plumes of ash carpeted the continents. The rust oceans were filled with toxic metals from flooded war machines and boiled from undersea volcanoes. The continents were speckled with standing seas of molten metal where volcanic heat met mind-boggling amounts of steel. The air consisted mainly of volcanic gasses, with occasional pockets of breathable air scattered throughout the mangled planet-spanning superstructure.
  • However, for the most part this is averted, as the official Imperial Doctrine is stated as saying "No, do not do this. All it does is cost us lives and resources." It even specifically mentions Ollanius Pius and the Astral Knights (who did their canon stunt of ramming a World Engine to take it down) as very, very rare exceptions where this worked and should not be considered official policy.
• Reimagining the Artifact: Multiple elements of old storylines and lore in the canon 40K setting are heavily reworked and implemented in differing ways for Nobledark Imperium. One good example of this is with the Zoats. In canon, the Zoats were basically a Flawed Prototype to the Genestealer Cults created by the Tyranid Hive Fleets, and due to their unpopularity among the players, were eventually retired and abandoned, with it being Hand Waved as the Hive Mind having made them too independent-minded to be useful infiltrators and so they were almost completely consumed after they kept rebelling against the Hive Mind. Here, the Zoats are the last vestiges of a previous species who fought to the bitter end against the Tyranids, and on the cusp of their defeat, created an incredibly advanced genetic virus that "infected" the Tyranids and made it so as soon as the Hive Fleets reached a new galaxy, Tyranid bio-ships would first re-create the Zoats so they could start sabotaging the Hive Fleets' efforts as much as possible.
• Related in the Adaptation: In canon, the Laer and the Sslyth are (officialy) unconnected beyond the fact that they happen to both be snake-like xenos with multiple sets of arms. Here, they're the same species, with the Sslyth being the ones who made a run for it when the others started worshipping Slaanesh.
• Resignations Not Accepted: A rare heroic example with the Imperium — after the Great Crusade, the Imperium rarely, if ever, forces other nation-states to join them (unless things are bad enough that intervention is needed — in one case, the Imperium had to rescue the Tarellian race from a Tyranid Hive Fleet and inducted them afterwards). However, if said nation-states do join of their own will, they are in for good — whether they like it or not.
• Ring World Planet: In its heyday, Great and Bountiful Human Dominion created an immense ringworld, the Cthonian Ring, in the Regulus system. It's not entirely clear why they did it or why they picked that specific location, since Regulus is a four-star system and thus arguably one of the worst places to built a stellar megastructure in; some in-universe speculators figure that the Dominion, then at the height of its power, built just to prove to that they could. It was almost entirely destroyed during the Revolt of the Iron Men, when its star was induced to go nova and scoured its inner surface clean down to its neutronium foundations, and most of the construction on its outer side was destroyed by the rest of the weapons being thrown around. It has since remained a place of wonder for humanity; scavengers during the dark ages often braved journeys from nearby systems to pick through its ruins, and the modern Imperium has romanticized it as a symbol of what humanity once achieved and might achieve again; most Mechanicum facilities display sculptures of it on their premises, and art of the Emperor often depicts him with the Ring as a halo. There are plans to rebuild it someday, although the sheer scale of the project keeps them purely theoretical, and permanent population has established itself in the more intact portions to service the steady stream of scavengers, researchers, pilgrims, and just travelers and traders passing through.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: The first major action of the Human-Eldar alliance was to send in their best forces, including the likes of the Phoenix Lords, Space Marines, and Oscar the Steward/Emperor, into the Webway to rescue Isha.
• Scavenger Hunt: The Great Savlar Scavenger Hunt, the Savlar Order's preferred method of selling off the neutronium that they produce. Once their stockpile is full, they post a long list of items at their gate; this is invariably long, eclectic, and very specific in the precise methods and quantities of delivery. If, for instance, one item is a specific amount of Valhallan brandy in a specific number of arsenic bronze containers then you bring that much in that many containers, no more and no less and in no other manner. No rationale is given for the list's components, which change from occasion to occasion, but it's generally assumed to include necessary raw materials, plus food and items for personal use, plus random junk to throw off people (especially the Mechanicum) trying to figure out how to make neutronium. The first group or person to provide the whole list to the Order's satisfaction gets the whole stock of material to use or sell as they see fit.
• Secret Government Warehouse: Ganymede as a whole serves as this for the Imperium; whenever the Inquisition finds something that's too dangerous to leave alone but which cannot be destroyed and/or might come in handy someday, which happens often, it gets stashed on Ganymede behind layers of security. Among other things, the facilities there contain ancient Old One artifacts, two copies of a nanotech terror weapon, an imprisoned Daemon Prince, a bioengineered super-assassin, a set of lockpicks capable of opening literally anything, and a human preserved in amber several millions of years old. The Eldar think that the whole thing is a huge security risk, and they and the Inquisition tend to get into heated arguments over it whenever something breaks out or when some object or inmate becomes useful.
• Sensing You Are Outmatched: The Ork Warboss Ghazghull Mag Urak Thraka is stated to be a worshiper of the Ork gods Gork and Mork, but a large portion of the Ork race now serves and worships Chaos. While Ghazghull knows that most of the Orks would work for him if he promised enough fighting, he also knows he can't defeat the forces of Chaos in a straight fight, so he works with them. For now, that is...
• Shell-Shocked Veteran:
  • Isha is stated to at times have PTSD flashbacks to her time spent in Nurgle's garden.
  • Sly Marbo is still a legendary implacable badass of the Imperial Army, but he isn't well adjusted. After a mission to track down a rogue Imperial Colonel deep in enemy territory, Marbo came back deeply affected, and has been drifting from unit to unit in the front line of the Imperium's long war ever since.
• Shout-Out:
  • The opening cantos of the hymn of Ahriman's Daemon Breakers is simply the Ghostbusters theme song with more elaborate lyrics.
    Be thine world benighted by esoteric phenomena?
    And whose aid would you ask?
    Be you confronted by the unknown, and deem it horrific to look upon?
    And whose aid would you ask?
    
    Men of Ahriman fear no daemon!
    Men of Ahriman fear no daemon!
    Be you stricken with ghastly, coursing visions?
    And whose aid would you ask?
    Be your boudoir inhabited by wicked phantoms?
    Aye, and whose aid would you ask?
    Men of Ahriman fear no daemon!
    Men of Ahriman fear no daemon!
  • The Tau are referred to in side notes as having the same character arc that humanity did in Mass Effect — that of a growing power who wants to be part of the big table making the big decisions, but is only now just starting to see the true scope of the galaxy at large.
  • The Zoats here serving as a rebellious pseudo-herald of the devastating Tyranid Hive Fleets are openly compared to having a similar relationship to that seen between the Silver Surfer and Galactus in Marvel Comics.
  • The only known surviving member of the Ordo Cronos once turned up in the cargo hold of a rogue trader's ship with a mysterious blue box.
  • The first Tau diplomat to travel extensively through the Imperium and bring back an account of the wonders he had seen was named Por'O M'arc.
  • The mysterious aliens known as the Tindalosi are so named because a surviving eyewitness compared them to fictional creatures from an ancient Terran story.
  • The Emperor's given name is a stealthy one: he's a Man of Gold named Oscar. One piece of writing subtlely Lampshades this, with Oscar being named after the uncle of a member of the expedition that found him, a reference to an urban legend about where the Academy Awards' nickname came from.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Abbadon of all people (he's got Adaptational Heroism) gets this at the start of the first Black Crusade when Lady Malys gives her "Let the galaxy burn" speech, and he replies that those who threaten it will be the ones to burn.
  I send this message on behalf of the Imperium. Let those who threaten the galaxy burn.
• Sibling Team: An Orkoid fungal womb spewing out fraternal twins, one Gretchin and one Ork, is a very bad sign, as those two siblings are Brain Boyz; living hubs of the WAAAGH! who increase not only the competency of other Orks by an order of magnitude (and they are nothing to sneeze at sans Brains) but are extremely adept commanders themselves who will never betray each other and can easily pick up the slack if one falls.
• Space Age Stasis: Downplayed, as the technology of the Imperium is advancing... it's just at a very slow pace. On the one hand, Survivor Civilizations (groups that were already strong empires on their own before joining the Imperium, such as Ultramar, the Interex, or the Tau) are allowed to keep their own technology, and that tends to spread to the Imperium as a whole. On the other, the higher levels of the Mechanicus are absolutely terrified that the Void Dragon is influencing human society and technology (which it is) and want to make sure that any advancement made is absolutely safe.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • The Squats were besieged en masse by the Orks when the Imperium arrived with backup, were all too happy to join the Imperium when the dust settled, and have so far survived till the 41st millennium. It's also worth noting that the version of the Squats seen here are the "original" Squats before they were eventually Rewritten into the current Leagues of Votann.
  • A number of alien species and human civilizations that in canon were wiped out during the Great Crusade, such as the Kinebrach, Interex and Diasporex, still exist as members of the Imperium. The Olamic Quietude are also still around, as a deeply hostile pocket empire.
  • In canon, the Saruthi are utterly corrupted by Chaos, body and soul, down to the last individual and their very genetic code. Here, much the same was assumed in-universe until the 41st Millennium, at which point small squads of primeval, uncorrupted Saruthi started appearing out of nowhere, methodically and mercilessly destroying Chaos forces, and then vanishing again.
  • The Poctroon are barely more than a footnote in canon; they were the first species the Tau absorbed before they were wiped out by a plague. Here, the timely intervention of an Imperium Bio-Priestess saved 2% of their species—the Tau couldn't figure out how to do it on their own since the plague was created by Nurgle cultists and they had basically no knowledge of Chaos at that time.
• Stopped Caring: The Tau have a "problem", to say the least, with the Dark Eldar, who tend to raid their space whenever they're having issues. Especially with the Archon Klax of the Kabal of the Hand of Deft Spite. It's flat-out stated that normally the Tau see bounty hunting as essentially selfish greed, and that killing should be done for defense. With Klax, they just want him dead and no longer care how it's done.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: While most of the Imperium's factions are closer to Fire-Forged Friends, there's still issues in the alliance where this pops up.
• Time Abyss:
  • Be'lakor is the last of the Old Ones, and one of the oldest living things in the galaxy. He recalls the creation of each of the Gods of Chaos and the War in Heaven, saw the Earth when mankind's ancestors were rats scurrying underfoot, knew the Eldar when they were cave-dwelling primitives yet to be uplifted. Many of the setting's mysteries could be answered if weren't too much of a selfish jackass to share his wisdom.
  • The Imperium was, during a battle against the Tyranids, able to bring down a Hive Ship more or less intact and has spent the past few centuries studying it. When the technicians assigned to it were able to determine the thing's age — which they had to do using radioactive isotope dating of the kind normally used for rocks, as regular carbon dating doesn't work well for anything more than fifty thousand years old — they determined that the ship was around five million years in age. Not the Tyranid race, mind — just that one ship. The margin of error alone was larger than the history of human civilization.
• Token Good Teammate: The Void Dragon seems to have been the only C'Tan to actually care about the Necrontyr, and only helped turn them into the Necrons because it didn't realize that the soul was more than some sort of immaterial appendix (C'tan do not have warp presences). Apparently the reason it's currently pinned down on Mars is because it confronted its brethren about what they were doing to the Necrontyr and lost.
• Took a Level in Badass: While individual power levels are reduced somewhat, as a whole each faction is more powerful than its baseline counterpart, for various reasons.
  • The Imperium is much more organized and internally communicative and has an overall better grasp of its technology, as well as the aid of the Craftworld and Exodite Eldar (plus the occasional Dark Eldar defector), the Tau and their many client races, and a few of the Necrons.
  • Chaos has additional servants in the form of the Chaos Eldar and the corrupted Orks, and has also managed to recently recruit the Dark Eldar.
  • The Necrons have started to wake up en masse, and current estimates say that at least 60% of the Dynasties have awoken.
  • The Tyranids have truly arrived. As it turns out here, the Hive Fleets really were just the vanguard — and the main fleet Jormugandr has just made it to the Milky Way.
  • Orks are much more tactically minded as well as being the screaming berserkers that they are in canon, and a critical mass of them will result in the birth of Brain Boyz, who are not only some of the best natural commanders in the galaxy but amplify WAAGH! energy to the point where Orks are regularly known to weaponize moons.
• Transhuman: All over the place, but some examples deserve special mention:
  • The Adeptus Mechanicus, as in canon, make a religious doctrine out of steadily improving themselves through technological upgrades such as multifunction or additional limbs, ocular arrays capable of perceiving wider spectra and fields of vision than normal, memory and cognitive upgrades, and so on. The Adeptus Biologicus, an order formed from Old Earth's various genetic tinkerer societies and loosely folded into the AdMech proper, have a similar policy centered around biological upgrades. Belisarius Cawl is noted to still look remarkably human for an AdBio Magus of his age, and he has a visible mottling of photosynthetic patches on his skin, cephalopod-like eyes, and a variety of low-grade copies of Astartes organs worked into his body, including some straight upgrades to a lung and a kidney, a second heart, and blood modified to clot more readily when exposed to air.
  • The inhabitants of Fenris and the Fenrisian Colonies. One of the odder aspects of the Canis Helix (who make up the Space Wolves) in this canon is that, unlike the Adeptus Astartes, they aren't sterile and their traits can be (admittedly rarely) passed down to their children. This may not sound like a lot, but roughly ten millennia's worth of intermarriage between the Space Wolves and the peoples of Fenris and her colonies has resulted in them all being fairly resistant to the cold and Hot-Blooded.
  • In the later days of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, the line between humanity and machine became very blurred. Between purely organic humans and their various genetic offshoots and the Iron Men there were cyborgs of various degrees, positronic brains inhabiting vat-grown bodies, human minds uploaded into computers, and everything in between. Ruling over all this were the transsapient Iron Minds and the Men of Gold, artificial humans created with genetically-perfect tailored bodies interlaced with grown components of metal and plastic, undying and psychically powerful.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: The Emperor's full title runs Oscar, Last of the Golden Men, Emperor of the Throne, Servus Servorum Imperium, Emperor-Consort of the All-Mother and Defender of the Realms Uncounted.
• Underestimating Badassery: After the War of the Beast, Chaos initially thought the Imperium would be permanently crippled. They found out by the end of the First Black Crusade that they were wrong.
• Underwater City: A number of pressurized dome cities existed beneath what was left of Old Earth's oceans, inhabited by hardy folk who had to adapt themselves to life in an environment where even a small technical problem could cause a lot of deaths. The soldiers recruited from there during the Unification Wars, the Lucifer Blacks, were known for their iron discipline and for fighting in full-body pressure suits. During the Great Crusade, the Blacks and their descendants mostly settled ocean worlds reminiscent of their old homes.
• Unholy Matrimony: The Dark Wedding between Vect and Malys. They do apparently love each other, to the extent that they're capable of it.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation: The Primarchs, instead of being the Emperor's sons that he created from his own genetic material, are simply his twenty greatest generals. Due to this, the majority of them had more natural-ish lifespans and are long dead by the time of the forty-first millennium. While this did reduce the "sibling infighting" aspect greatly (as did the Emperor's increased honesty in this universe), this also has the effect of making many of them Demoted to Extra compared to their canon selves.
• Vetinari Job Security:
  • Whenever Lady Malys gets taken out, the Black Crusades she leads tend to fall apart real quick.
  • Oscar really doesn't want to take the Golden Throne, but, after the whole Goge Vandire debacle, Sebastian Thor convinced him that anyone else would inevitably screw it up.
  • There's a lot of politicking in Nemesor Zandrekh's weird independent Necron court, but the lord himself is immune to any backstabs because his Insanity Immunity is the only reason they still have their free will. If he goes down, everybody gets enslaved by the Silent King, and they all know it.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Humans have many strengths, but they're also the single most vulnerable sapient species to Chaotic corruption in the galaxy.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Zoats sometimes fall into this due to their single-minded focus on wiping out the Tyranids. It's noted that while they work with the Imperium since they also fight the Tyranids, they don't answer to or accept orders given to them by the Imperium either, and some of the actions they accomplish solely to "spite the 'Nids" can have pretty hellish consequences. Two specific examples given are the Zoats awakening a Necron Tomb World to wipe out a Hive Fleet (even though the Tomb World would then go on to ravage the entire sector) and also attracting a Chaos warband to attack a planet with a strong Genestealer cult.
• White Man's Burden: A deconstructed variant; part of the reason for why the Imperium of Man & Aeldari and resurgent Necron Star Empire hate each other so much is that the Imperials find the Condescending Compassion of the Necrons constantly reassuring them that the Necrons will educate them on how to become “properly civilized” after they are conquered & added into their empire to be immensely insulting and irritating.
• Wild Card:
  • The APEX twins are Alpha plus-tier human psykers on par with Oscar and Eldrad, and, while they're more or less on the side of the Imperium, they're somewhere between Chaotic Good and Chaotic Neutral at best.
  • While the Void Dragon seems to be fond of the Imperium, there's no total confirmation what side he will take if he's ever freed.
• Who Will Bell the Cat?: One reason Lady Malys keeps her position as Chaos Undivided's champion is because all gods have given her their favor, and they all know that, if one withdraws said favor without the others doing so too, she will still have enough power from the remaining three to completely wreck that one's power base. None of the Chaos Gods trust each other to all withdraw their powers at once, and nobody's willing to go first, so Malys retains her position.
• A World Half Full: By the end of the 41st millennium, most of the Necrons have awoken, the Tyranids are arriving en masse, Chaos is preparing for the 13th Black Crusade, and the galaxy is collectively "two minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock." However, the Imperium is still strong, its people will fight to the last breath to maintain their freedom and civilizations, and it still has hope in the form of the potentially-coming Starchild and the visions of Eldrad Ulthran, which both imply that it is very much possible for things to turn out good.
  Widening his gaze, the Farseer looked further into the future. Looking past all the potential timelines, withered and horrible, like decaying petals of a flower. Until he found the one he wanted. It was a vision of his granddaughter, the one whose face he had never seen, except in his visions. She was a young woman in his vision, standing on the edge of a harbor, a tiny creature on her shoulder. He knew she was waiting for someone, he never knew who, for the vision always ended before he could see. Behind her stood a cityscape that seemed to be constructed of wraithbone, of steel, of Earth Caste sculpture, yet none of these things, and around her walked humans, Eldar, and a hundred other races both alien and familiar. Eldrad could never tell what time it was in the vision, but he knew it in his heart. Dawn, the dawn so long awaited after the end of the long night.
  Eldrad had seen so many things, great and terrible, in his long life. Supernovae on the horizon. Shrieking forms of things that should not be clawing forth from the abyss. And yet, in his old age, this is what kept him going. Hope. He was always a good farseer, but this was to be his masterpiece. A future for the Eldar, free of despair, tyranny, and dark gods. Peace, in a galaxy that for so long had known only war. It was a long shot. He had only seen a few visions like these, on the order of billions to one.
  Eldrad smiled a half-smile. He always did like playing the long odds.
• Worthy Opponent: There are precisely two foes that Lucius the Eternal considers to have been worthy challenges to his skill: Vulkan and Lelith Hesperax. Vulkan was the immovable object to Lucius' unstoppable force, and was the only one to ever cleanly beat him in combat; Lucius respects him greatly and still drops by the Temple of the Flame on Nocturne from time to time to pay respects at Vulkan's grave. He and Lelith both consider their duel to be the best fight that they ever had and greatly look forward to a rematch.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: The Handmaidens, Isha's praetorian guard, wield swords named the Thorns of Isha that inflict wounds that do not heal.
• Yandere: Xun'Bakyr, Phaerakh of the Maynarkh Dynasty, is one for the Nightbringer. The Silent King had to take steps to both keep the Necrons' plan to kill the C'Tan a secret from her and then to ensure she was killed during the Great Sleep. It didn't work, and in fact, damaged her in a way that prevented her from being controlled by him, and she now seeks to wipe out all life in an attempt to get the Nightbringer to notice her.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The ancient Mon-Keigh, viciously predatory ogre-like aliens whose name would remain as an Eldar insult for perceived barbarians, used to serve as the Old Ones' Unwitting Pawns as a sort of engineered trial by fire — the Old Ones would subtly steer them towards an inhabited planet, and judge the locals' worthiness for uplifting based on whether they survived the Mon-Keigh's visit. Over time, as the War in Heaven grew increasingly fierce, the Mon-Keigh grew increasingly difficult to control and the Old Ones' shifting priorities during the War in Heaven made the indirect manipulations that the Mon-Keigh had been central to less and less important. The final straw came in the form of the creation of the Krork, which made the older species entirely obsolete; the Old Ones' first test for their new creations was to set them on the Mon-Keigh, who were nearly entirely eradicated.

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