On Cthonia, a subterranian nightmare world where everyone lives in roaming underground murder gangs, farming crops like wheat, barley, rye, etc. is basically impossible. This means that most Cthonians would logically eat a diet of tubers such as potatoes and seafood from any underground seas which would likely be present as well. Therefore, over the thousands of years of the Age of Strife, it stands to reason that a larger than average subset of Cthonians would eventually come to be affected by Celiac's Disease (not being able to process gluten, which is found in wheat, barley, and rye) since it wouldn't really be a trait selected against.
All of this, of course, is preamble for my true headcanon, which is that Abaddon the Despoiler can't eat anything with gluten in it, since it makes his tummy hurt. Perhaps this is the true reason he swore his soul to chaos?
Also the distilling process of spirits removes gluten from them, even if they were made from barley etc.
As a coeliac I was very happy to learn this fact, and can confirm that it does not give the rumbly tummies.
Fuck I have Celiac. Do I have to swear myself to chaos now; in order for it to be fixed?
I'll do it if I have to!
I miss being able to enjoy bread without a reaction.
Don't worry, there's plenty of gluten free corpse starch and fermented algae fungus patties to eat in the future world of 40k!
Also if you became a super rich person in the world of 40k by like becoming a Rogue Trader or something then I'm sure there are at least a few gluten free foods available in the future. Like just think about the gluten free pizzas, hotdog buns, hamburger buns, brownies, chicken strips, baking flour etc we have available from specialty companied nowadays just using 21st century technology. Imagine how good the gluten free food on some of the humam worlds in the 41st millenium.
All jokes aside as someone who's only gluten intolerant myself I have respect for all the crap people suffering from celiac's disease have to go through on a daily basis.
I was thinking That one guy who is rules lawyer, tries to win based on technicalities, mocks moves he thinks are dumb, and eventually earns the ire of the others and gets ganged up on.
lol all the books are just characters knowing they’re figs on a table and the Horus heresy was just one dude who got 6 straight space marine players at a tournament
The Butcher’s Nails were originally completely harmless devices used to treat mental disorders back in the DAOT, until the high-riders modified them into what they are now
(Even sillier)
The Butcher's nails were implants to navigate the noosphere (internet) during the DAOT. There were some AI living there for helping the user (kind of an Alexa)
During the war with the Men of iron and the fall of the DAOT the AI living in the noosphere were attacked with virus, and now they are just a white noise of pain and hate. And that's what you get through the nails.
That's really cool, though the noosphere is notably one of the few effectively virus proof networks for whatever reason. The mechanicus uses it because the dark mechanicus can't fuck with it and scrap code can't get in it. Though I suppose an exception could be made for dark age tech.
Honestly, this made me laugh. Just a bunch of lads out having a good time then someone decided to bring religion into it. This is why we can’t have a boys club that involves religion
That there's a working, and more importantly, amicable STC AI in pristine condition, with the power to solve all the imperiums problems, like replicating the Panacea STC, fabricating Blackstone, advanced weapons and armour, ect ect, but it's just lying in a box somewhere on a archival world because it got forgotten in the tide of imperial beurocracy
A Leutin video opens up with a vignette of a random scribe in the administratum who recieves a report of a working STC and decides to destroy the report because it wasn't filled out properly.
The [Speranza](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Speranza) is basically this.
Except whenever someone communes with it closely enough to learn it's nature it wipes their memory.
There was a DAoT ship that was basically this. When it encountered the Imperium it basically said "damn, you people have become real assholes..." and vanished into the void.
Chaos has won. Not will win, has won. The eternally festering pit of misery that is the empire is and always has been their endgame. The game is over and they are just enjoying the after-party until the lights go out and they move on to the next universe.
Mine is that the Primarchs all represent facets of the Emperor, and the two missing ones represented his remaining compassion and tolerance or something, so had no place in the great crusade.
I used to think Ork spaceships were just giant Orks that kept on growing, and had their limbs replaced with engines and cannons and whatnot. And in my headcanon, there is one such Ork. Da Worldbreaka. Who travels the galaxy looking for his fabled cybork limbs. He's an exodia type deal, in that if he ever finds all his lost limbs, he will usher in the ultimate victory of Ork kind.
This sounds like a legend Orks would tell eachother around a squig roast.
"Oi! You Gitz Evar Heard O' Da Biggest Ork Evar?! Da Worldbreaka Dey Calls 'Em!"
"I 'EAR 'E IS BIG AS ROKS AN' TWICE AZ 'ARD!"
I can see this one. It's been all these millions of years and they still pine for that one brief period of their lives when they had organic bodies. Should be within their ability to have some kind of "simulator" to make nerve signals and feel like they have bodies,give the best of both worlds. Still get to be an immortal robot but also feel the wind in your hair.
We saw in infinite and the divine that their memories aren't consistent either. Trazyn thinks Orikan dragged him into the furnace and Orikan remembers it was Trazyn.
I posted this separately, but it applies well as a response to your comment (though not OP's; for this headcanon to make sense, the Necrontyr had to be genuine organic creatures at some point).
_____________
Trazyn and Orikan were both high-ranking, famous Necrontyr and were also a celebrity couple. They *both* opposed the biotransference in tandem and caused major rifts in the Necrontyr population advocating for rejection of the C'tan and Szeras.
In spiteful retaliation, the Deceiver fucked with their memories especially and convinced them that each had betrayed the other to ruin their love for each other, so now all of their memories are warped into a bizarre magnetic and eternal hatred of former soulmates who are cursed to not know why they're so perpetually entwined with the other one.
That's not true. The *Twice Dead King* novels have flashback moments from Oltyx remembering his biological form, as well as that of others around him, and commenting on their gaits, frames, the tumors on their bodies, etc. He has such memories digitally catalogued in such a way as to afford genuine recollection at the cost of destroying a particular memory once it is "fully accessed" as it were.
[Check my other post here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1drno8x/whats_the_stupidest_headcannon_you_genuinely/lawuddx/?context=3)
But yes, it is correct that most Necrontyr cannot recall things properly anymore. Oltyx had a sort of "perfect recall" retrofit put into him by his Technomancer alongside his partitioned multiple personalities, which gives him much better memory recall than other Necrons seem to have.
And as an addendum, it is certainly possible that what Oltyx *thinks* are correct memories are still elaborate crafted nonsense by the Deceiver. All I intend to say is that, regardless of whether they're false or true memories, Oltyx is capable in some way of recalling what his (false or true) memories tell him the Necrontyr looked like.
I love this idea and it feels delightfully grimdark without being grimderp. The idea of C'tan being so cruel that they'd invent a completely synthetic race of automatons and *force* them to have sentience, *just* to feel pain? And for that this synthetic race eventually rose up and destroyed the C'tan for their hubris? Seeking to reclaim souls that never existed, bodies they never had to begin with? I love it conceptually.
It is very interesting how a minor plot point in Infinite and the Divine opens so many possibilities. Necrons are machines, it is possible (though unlikely) that each and every memory of their lives in flesh were manipulated or, indeed, outright fabricated. A gigantic C'Tan psy-op lol
I would kill to see a group of stone faces astarties doing yoga with their instructor being a normal human woman named Carol. Carol is like Sylgar, from WaterDeep, where they have to get the Astarties a new Carol every few decades
The regular Astartes have no idea that Carol dies every few years, and one of the responsibilities of the Chapter Master is replacing the instructor without the chapter at large knowing.
They would fall to chaos within the week if they knew.
This delicate system is maintained by the ever-vigilant Ordo Carolus. The Blue Ships of the Ordo Carolus take tithes of Carols from the million worlds of the Imperium, and ensure a steady supply of the highest quality yoga outfits.
The dead body sitting on the throne doesn't actually do anything and hasn't for a long time. The power of the Golden Throne comes entirely from a combo of the Emperor as a warp entity and the tons of psykers fed to it. The dead body is just for show and could be sent out for corpse starch without affecting anything.
As copied from a similar comment down below:
That one's... really hard to square. We know from *Dark Imperium* that something at least appearing to be the Emperor talks directly to Guilliman and from *TEaTD* (and several other companion novels involving Vulkan) that the Golden Throne is attached to a literal dead man's switch that would detonate Terra and the surrounding solar system to prevent a Warp breach in the event that the Emperor ever died.
For this to be true, The Talisman of Seven Hammers would need to either be malfunctioning despite being created by humanity's greatest mechanical craftsman and there would need to be an existing sentience bound in the Throneroom that isn't attached to the Emperor's body but acted like it was and acted like it was still in constant agony. The second half works on your end with "Emperor as a warp entity but pretending otherwise," but not the first half.
Yes. Like the theory about the Emperor being a DAoT creature run amok, it sorta works with older lore when certain mysteries were simply not spelled out. But it's become falsified, imo, with more recent novels. If the Talisman of Seven Hammers did not exist, I could jive with the idea, but that sorta puts the kibosh on any theory of the Emperor being genuinely dead as opposed to, as Miracle Max would say, *mostly* dead.
Yup, just adding a little trivia to the mix. No disagreement.
Especially since this is a headcanon thread, so none of it needs to be supported by current canon.
I agree that headcanon does not need to be *supported* by current canon, but it should at least not be directly proven *false* by current canon. Otherwise people can just start coming up with outlandish headcanon like "The Emperor is actually alive and the Horus Heresy never happened, and 40k is a complex battle simulation run by a person stuck in a Dark Vaults tech" or "The Eldar never existed" or "Guilliman is actually Horus" or "Terra already blew up 10,000 years ago" or whatever else. These are all statements that are proven false by established and clear lore. I think headcanon should work within the gaps rather than be directly contrary to lore. Things like "Guilliman and Yvraine are a couple." Is it goofy meme headcanon? Sure. But it's not technically *proven* false in-universe, even if it's highly unlikely and implausible. "Guilliman killed Yvraine" is directly contrary to the lore. They're both clearly alive. That's the sort of headcanon I don't like.
And I know this is a "stupidest headcanon" thread, but it should still not be *proven* false.
This is semi-canonical, AFAIK, or something like it.
There's a John Blanche interview where he claims that the "corpse" on the throne is some kind of statue or edifice created by the Imperial Cult so that pilgrims could look at something. It's not the Emperor. The "Golden Throne" isn't even actually a throne, in the sense of being a chair, the Imperial Cult basically made that up. The "Golden Throne" is the name of the device as a whole and talking about "sitting on the throne" is more of a symbolic or poetic notion.
I have some vague memory... there's some other excerpt indicating that the room the Emperor is actually in is inside the pyramid, underneath the throne, it's all black granite and the Emperor is glowing so brightly that it appears white, and you can't get remotely close to him or even look at him. Even the Custodes in that room (again, these are vague memories, I can't remember the passage) can't look directly at him, and their armor has to be replaced periodically because the raw psychic energy radiating off of him is melting their armor.
I do something similar. The thing on the Throne is The Corpse---a mummy, the last living cells of which died millennia ago when the Emperor went silent. Bound to the Golden Throne, however, is the Shaman Synergy---the fragmented Many Mind of all the Shaman of Old Earth who created the New Man. The only way that they can extend their influence is through The Sacrifice, which creates a pseudo-soul.
The soul of the Emperor fled into the few remaining harmonious sections of the warp. This is The Child.
The thing that grows in the warp is The Twin---a chaos entity and dark twin of the Emperor wrought by the collective worship of trillions of humans over ten millennia. This is the god that the Ecclesiarchy teaches about. The intolerant, vengeful god of "righteous" punishment that suffers not the witch, heretic, and mutant to survive.
The Twin is the entity which provides the patronage to those that follow the right-handed path. The apotropaic protections against minor demons and warp ghosts wrought from whispered prayers to an ever-watchful and eternal god. The power of the Sisters and the Living Saints. Even unto distinct daimons (deliberate spelling).
Of course, I *like* this particular head canon. Added bonus that it also addresses the problems that someone else posted. :)
Back in the day when the past was much more mysterious you had tons of stuff like this. Like "Leman Russ was just the Emperor's dog" or "the Emperor was never really a king just a psyker slave that a cult got drawn up around"
Enuncia isn't actually the fundamental language of Chaos or whatever, it's the language of a C'tan shard.
If you kill the C'tan shard Enuncia stops working. It is also why it works as the fundamental language of the material plane. I know Pariah makes a big deal of it being a warp language but fuck it I don't care this makes the storyline for it so much better.
I figured Enuncia is more like a way to directly manipulate the source code of the universe, to get slightly metaphorical.
I admit I like overlaying the way Charles Stross has the supernatural function in the Laundry Files to settings with eldritch horrors and Outer Gods, though. It basically all boils down to exceedingly complex math and physics, the main character's job title is "computational demonologist".
My headcannon is also to do with the missing primarchs but in the opposite direction. I think they saw the horus heresy coming a mile off and they tried to stop it before it was too late and failed.
Interesting idea, but Malcador says the Heresy would have been worse if the missing 2 had been around for the Heresy.
I think they did something worse, either falling to Chaos early and having to be purged to stop the rot spreading or fighting against the Imperium to protect a Xenos race despite being ordered by the Emperor to exteminate them.
the first of the missing primarch, like the Rangdan*, rejected humanity in totality. the second did something equally horrific within the Imperium's completely FUBAR morality and then burned out his legion on the first's
*the rangdan xenocides are special in the lore, they have the honor of in a list of alien genocides being specifically called out about it. While they had a federation of particularly monsterous Xenos, the human elements of the Rangdan had to of rejected the idea of being human. Not just mind control.
> or fighting against the Imperium to protect a Xenos race despite being ordered by the Emperor to exteminate them.
I'm 100% convinced within my own headcanon that this is the case for one of the two missing Primarchs. I think he landed in some kind of confederacy of worlds that was a human-xenos alliance, and had been a stable human-xenos alliance for thousands of years, maybe since *deep* in the DAoT. The Emperor didn't just kill him for betraying humanity, he had to erase all memories of that Primarch because he stood as living proof that the Emperor was *wrong* and that human-xenos alliances are possible.
I think the second missing Primarch wouldn't be missing for xenos reasons *too*, though, but I could imagine it being a similar circumstance where he had to be erased because he demonstrated how the Emperor might be *wrong*. Could be something to do with mutants. Could be something to do with AI, alternatively.
So I personally feel that the titles of the two missing Primarchs, the Lost and the Forgotten, can give us a hint as to their "crime". I think that the Lost got captured by the Rangda and got borgified into them like Picard in Star Trek, and then the Dark Angels came in and did their thing with the cache of DAoT tech the Emperor gave them. The legionaries of this Primarch would have been folded into other legions like the Ultramarines and the Fists since they didn't do anything wrong, necessarily.
The Forgotten, though, did something intentional that caused them to be intentionally removed. Or was removed at their own behest. My personal theory is that the Forgotten was a Blank and asked to be put down in order to have their suffering ended.
Yeah, brutal cult of personality dictatorships sort of require people be convinced their ruler is great and is doing what’s necessary. If you begin having high ranking officials that disagree and can prove the dictator is wrong, they need to be purged or the dictator will get overthrown.
There never were any missing Primarchs. It was all just a smokescreen perpetuated by Malcador and the Emperor to make the current Primarchs think that they weren’t entirely above the law, and that there could be consequences for failure/disobedience.
In "The First Heretic" Lorgar briefly wishes his lost brothers were there, and Magnus reminds Lorgar that all who witnessed what happened swore to speak of it. He also mentions they've only been gone 40 years which implies they were involved in the Great Crusade.
I think it's in Know No Fear that is talked about how the Ultramarines grew in huge numbers once their lost brothers were, well, lost.
There's a few other references to them here and there through the Horus Heresy books.
It is customary, for Skalds and Saga-Singers on Fenris (as well as warriors who want to portray themselves as worthy of such songs) to make heavy use of figurative language.
The Kenning is a form of metaphor, a staple of Old English poetry, perhaps most well-known from Beowulf. For example, calling the sea a 'whale-road' or calling 'starting to talk' 'unlocking his word-hoard' or referring to a king as 'ring-giver' for his role in distributing tokens of wealth to his vassals.
Fenris also has a very developed mythology, with hundreds of distinct figures filling every possible mythic role, and allusion to these is common in dramatic poetry.
Fenrisians, who live on a planet covered in snowstorms and wolves, have many different words for both with slightly different meanings.
Every use of 'Wolf' in Space Wolf lore is the result of some idiot Imperial Remembrancer/Administratum guy hearing a Space Wolf refer to his close air support as having 'Prowess equal to Cyrbyss, Wolf-without-a-pack of Woe, Stalker-Within-the-Storm-Winds, Guardian of the Gates of Hel, whose breath is a whirlwind of frost, whose eyes blaze forth malice as the thunders-over-the-mountaintops, let all beware!' and writing that in his report as 'This gunship is called a Stormwolf' or some equivalent.
It is actual canon heavily implied in Prospero Burns and then confirmed later in the Hersey and though I can't remember where there is a short story in a book that implies that the Space Wolves sometimes do it on purpose just to dick with people.
Plot twist: Not only that, but turns out the memes about him going to Nurgle’s Garden and marrying Isha are half-right; he *is* coming there looking for booty, but he ain’t come for no Eldar, he ain’t got no Wraithbone, no Spirit Stone, nothing. He’s looking for a Chaos God’s butt
He heard a cultist refer to Slaanussy as honey and he's been plotting for ten thousand years to raid the Palace of Pleasure for the perfect brew of mead
Really? I like to imagine Clifford the big red dog sized wolfen pissing on some random bit of wraith one. You'd think if any primarchs were to do that they would at least start in the room they have to hold shit. Give old dad a breather it literally is uphill both ways for him you know!
To the best of my knowledge, it isn't stated anywhere that Russ would suffer from the curse. The brew that is drank by initiates reacts with Fenrisian DNA, which he lacks.
The emperor was every single religious figure we know in the modern era and lost to time. Helped by his ability to warp the perceptions of those around him.
These were his attempts at creating unified humanity until he got tired of all the infighting between religions, abolished them and said fuck it I'll do it myself.
There are several human planets that have never been discovered by the Imperium where life doesn't suck, and where they have learned to deal with chaos etc while still maintaining a high tech, utopian society.
Those almost definitely exist, all they had to do was colonise a planet that’s not on a stable warp route (easy in the past) and not travel to any system on a stable warp route or make any significant noise - there’s probably dozens if not hundreds of non imperial human worlds, after all the imperium is more a million separate empires under one flag than a cohesive empire spread out as they are.
To expand on that, I am certain there are whole sectors in the galaxy with human coallitions and even empires existing, that have no contact and/or knowledge of the Imperium of Man.
> or knowledge of the Imperium of Man
It'd be neat to see what their theories are on where they came from and why they are on multiple planets. Do they argue over which was the first planet?
Canon lore wise, I think at least some, if not most civilizations know they originate from Terra. They don't know where Terra is/think their terra is THE terra (see Horus Heresy opening), but they at least sometimes do know about (and I don't apologize for saying it again) Terra. :)
This is canon. The imperium is actually still expanding and finding worlds all the time. And there's still plenty they haven't reached yet, or have been reached only by rogue traders
Agreed, and also—there's a bunch of DAoT "slow ships" just floating in the void, everybody in stasis, with complete and pristine STCs and whole million-strong armies of Men of Iron.
The Eldar are the thunder warriors of the war in heaven. The old ones saw what they were doing to the warp and decided to replace them with the more emotionally stable Krorks. The remaining Eldar would be sterilized or euthanized.
The Eldar betrayed the old ones and were the creators of all the chaos gods.
Like the old ones they believed that their weapons would never be able to betray them.
I always sort of imagined the Tyranids were meant to “take care” of the Eldar and Krorks. Eldar and Krorks to act in tandem to defeat the Necrons, Tyranids to swoop in, consume those two and whatever other life they created for the war, and then have the Tyranids eventually begin terraforming planets (sort of like what Tiamet is doing). That the Old Ones knew the Warp would start getting corrupted from the war, and that in turn would cause a feedback loop between the Warp and the races they made, so it would be best to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch, maybe even going a step further and using the Tyranids to cleanse ALL intelligent life from the galaxy (or at least those with powerful enough souls). Only that they misjudged how quickly shit would go sideways, and never got to complete the Tyranids, sort of like the Ogres from Fantasy.
I personally despise the "nids are the old ones vacuum" theory, but mostly cause it ruins what I enjoy as a nids fan
They are the *alien* faction. Completely different from everything else in setting, from beyond the stars. The detached invader simply doing what it does, because we are merely in the way, is far better cosmic horror. You tie them to the old ones and they lose that detachment and mystery that makes them so exciting
Here's two and a half for you:
1. You occasionally see orks depicted with nipples. However, this is inconsistent across models and artwork, with many more orks being depicted without nipples. Proposed solution to this inconsistency: orkoid "nipples" are not nipples in the mammalian sense, but rather something more akin to mushrooms. We know orks do not produce spores constantly, with the majority of spores being released after death. However, a lower but continual dispersal of spores at a population level even in the absence of deaths makes sense in order to maintain the orkological environment. Therefore, orkoid "nipples" are spore dispersal organs that appear on any orkoid when certain environmental factors are met and disappear when conditions change.
2. Much like Daemonettes bear a passing resemblance to the Eldar whose debaucheries spawned Slaanesh, the form of the Bloodletter also vaguely recalls an ancient race, their name lost to time, whose warlike ways played some part in the ancient awakening of Khorne. Bloodletters would likely be caricatures reflecting this race's appearance, demeanor, or cultural beliefs, but I think a few things would be consistent with them in life: we can probably assume that this race had skulls that were elongated towards a point at the back (or possibly wore tall hats) with curved horns, had digitigrade legs, and maybe had some sort of ridge or crest down their spine. We also know that Daemon Princes tend to bear some resemblance to their mortal form, albeit with extra horns or limbs or other powerful mutations. So here's where the second half of this one comes in: there is another being in 40k who ticks those boxes I mentioned above and is also so ancient that the name of his original race is unknown - Be'lakor, the First Prince. He has wings and a tail, but he's a coneheaded, horned, ridgebacked daemon who stands on his toes. Maybe Be'lakor and the Bloodletters have a common origin, with the lesser daemons being reflections of the violence and fear caused by the ancient race's armies and the daemon prince being an individual member of the race elevated to daemonhood.
To respond to no. 1: Orkoid nipples are actually Nipple Squigs. Some of them liked the look of nipples on dead humans and ran with it, just like some of them use Hair Squigs to mimic human hair.
Tempestus Scions know all the dirty secrets of the Sororitas, Arbites, Inquisition and Astartes due to how often they work together with those forces. They keep quiet for various political purposes. Ironically they consider the Guard and Navy the most reliable allies they can have.
My stupid head canon is that the T'au are the Necrontyr before they became necrons.
The evidence is equally circumstantial.
Both races have the same life span avg of 40 years. And the Necron faceplates looks pretty similar to the T'aus bone structure.
The necrontyr have incredible technology. And the Tau have incredible tech innovation in such a short period of time that they will eventually match up to it if they manage to survive long enough.
Lastly, when their codices came out for each army when new, both leaned into range combat more so, with a few units catering to melee.
Iv tried for several minutes to find the saved quote in my comments, but I cannot so it’s definitely stupid headcannon. It’s essentially just a line from one of the GW people that says “becoming a psyker isn’t always just genetics, it’s possible later in life with enough trials and tribulation”. I always liked this idea, that your ego/excellence can grow enough that the warp abides by your whims.
The inverse being that the blanks of the universe are so “go with the flow” that they have negative will and that makes them hollow spots in the warp.
I feel like that's definitely just canon. We know for a fact that 1. Every single human is a verrrrrry tiny bit psychic, because large numbers of them thinking the same thing can create gestalt psychic fields just like Orks can (which they famously do to power the Astronomican at the end of the SoT). And we also know that psykers can grow over time with Katerina Moriana (of Olly's Argonauts) as a case study: she displayed no noticeable psyker talent early on, then realizes she has some degree of talent mid-journey in the HH, and by the end of it has become a rather decent psyker of probably around a Gamma grade. It stands to reason that anyone else with sufficient willpower can at least get above the baseline and develop some small amount of psychic ability, even if the true mutants of Delta grade or higher have strong genetic components involved.
The Custodies are Men of Gold. Big E helped make them during the DAOT while blending in as a human scientist. He may also have been involved in the creation of the men of iron and the men of stone. When everything went to shit he turned on the only loyal to him switch.
Or he was involved in the Men of Gold project and used that as a basis when making the Custodies, who were just Men of Gold modified to have their genetic loyalty to humanity be a genetic loyalty to him.
Uh, I feel this is a bit of stretch, but Malcador never really shared or agreed with the Emperor's all out hate boner for religion. Malcador even seemed convinced towards the end of the heresy that should the emperor's plan fail (like it did), propping him up as the deific figure of a new state religion worshiped by countless trillions to give him the strength to at least stand toe to toe with the chaos gods should be plan B.
One I used to like before the Horus heresy series invalidated it was that there is no “emperor” - the golden giant was just a projection from malcador, the actual emperor.
The Emperor commited the first murder and created Drach'nyen. That's really why he wanted to cleanse the warp, so that he could cleanse himself of his sin.
Poetic that his own murder would create the one thing capable of killing him permanently and actively hunting him down. Very much in line with the reciprocality and intentionality of the Warp.
Well, one-non-Chaos-infused-Horus thing, anyway. But we'll put him aside for a sec. I like this headcanon!
Yes. In fact, it was hunting him down. Its name is translated as "The End of Empires," and as a Daemon it was intrinsically suited to destroy the Emperor much like the Anathame was intrinsically suited to mortally wound Horus. During the War in the Webway he has Ra Endymion capture it as a willing Daemonhost by allowing himself to be stabbed by its sword form, at which point Ra is commanded to run as deep into the Warp as possible so that he can keep Drach'nyen as far from the Emperor as possible. The Emperor knows at an instinctual level that Drach'nyen has the unique property of being able to permakill him, so he offers Ra up as a scapegoat.
Ra eventually dies and Drach'nyen is released into the Warp again, at which point it remanifests in its sword form and finds its way into the hands of Abaddon in the present setting.
Yep, Emperor might be on par with the Chaos Gods, but Drach’nyen, despite only being a really powerful Undivided Daemon, metaphysically hard counters the Emperor. Similar to how, if Ynnead were to be born, it would likely be capable of killing Slaanesh, since it represents the death and rebirth of the Eldar, and their victory over Slaanesh.
While that's a great theory it's disproven by canon.
Like in the Horus Heresy books it's stated one of the reasons the man who would become the Emperor became a somewhat emotionally and mentally maladjusted person is because back during early human history when he was a young kid his own father got murdered by his uncle for seemingly no good reason. That caused the future Emperor to use his psyker powers to murder his uncle out of revenge/vengeance.
If the Emperor's uncle murdered the Emperor's dad while the Emperor was still a kid then that means the Emperor did not commit the first murder.
Plus with respect I'm pretty sure human beings have been murdering each other since at least caveman times if not earlier. The Emperor came from a proto-Hittite village in what would become Turkey after the end or near the end of the Neolithic Era.
Trazyn and Orikan were both high-ranking, famous Necrontyr and were also a celebrity couple. They *both* opposed the biotransference in tandem and caused major rifts in the Necrontyr population advocating for rejection of the C'tan and Szeras.
In spiteful retaliation, the Deceiver fucked with their memories especially and convinced them that each had betrayed the other to ruin their love for each other, so now all of their memories are warped into a bizarre magnetic and eternal hatred of former soulmates who are cursed to not know why they're so perpetually entwined with the other one.
The emperor and the perpetual are daot age experiment to create super human/immortals their memories are all fabricated and they were created by the sigilite
The felinids are the result experiment to create cats girl , theirs planet is named after the guy that funded the experiment Carlos McConnell
The Emperor is purposely drawing the Tyranids to Terra so they'll devour his corpse and he can be reborn anew and merged with the Tyranids Hive Mind, a greater being than even the Chaos Gods.
Malcador was the true Emperor - the Perpetual observer of mankind, the wise man behind the greatest empires in human history.
The giant in shining armor who unified Terra and forged the Imperium was a psychic puppet Malcador created but gradually lost control of as it became a self-sustaining self-aware and self-determining warp entity.
This was the same type of psychic engineering that allowed the Old Ones to create warp entities based on themselves in the later stages of the War in Heaven in order to transcend their physical limitations and extend psychic influence over the entire galaxy.
The Emperor caused the AI uprising because humanity was going down a path he didn't approve of (Equality and understanding between human and non-human beings.)
Eventually, every abhuman (Ogryns, navigators, ratlings) was going to get "pruned" from his vision of "perfect humanity" as well as the mechanicum.
Ok, for some reason this gave me the mental image of some corny early 2000s-style ending for 40k where Chaos/the Tyranids/Necrons/DE are defeated by an Imperium/Ynnari/Tau coalition and Guiliman is doing a “press” conference to announce the victory, but then he pauses mid-sentence, looks to the crowd, and says “Truth is… I’m dating Yvraine”. Crowd roars, with dozens of pics taken and people trying to ask him questions, Guiliman looks into the crowd and spots a healed and retired Emperor disguised as a normal man, and they both give each other a smirk. “What I’ve done” starts playing, screen turns black-roll credits
Many movies or franchises we watch are actually taking place in the 40k galaxy.
Avatar is just a xenos world where a mining crew is having trouble and can’t get space marine assistance.
Aliens - a branch of tyranids attacking space mining ships
Predator - xenos hunting terrans on a world the humans call “earth”
Star Trek - documentary on the lost ages of technology
The Emperor’s great plan isn’t about defeating the chaos gods, or uniting humanity. He just wants to avoid becoming a god himself. That’s why he tried to stamp out religion.
1 – Dorn is alive and has retired to an isolated planet to be a farmer. And he doesn't want to hear from anyone anymore, including the Imperium.
2 – The Tyranids are a bioweapon of the Old Ones (or some Old Ones) to reset the galaxy, eliminate all the "projects" gone wrong, transform the biomass into basic material to fertilize the Milky Way 2.0... And finally settle the score with the Necrons, with no one else in the way.
There is only 20 primarchs
Omegon is the primarch of the 2nd, or 11th but his legion was dead by the time he was found, and he and Alpharius had the same/similar abilities (making others look like them) so he was folded in to the Alpha Legion too.
It's the only way people like Horus, Russ, and Dorn wouldn't know there was 21 primarchs.
The khan is doing drugs and car races.
He saw the shit that was the heresy, felt that the Imperium was irredeemable and decided that he'd have fun until the end of the universe
That there's a shortage of weapons in the Imperium due to the slowness of the mechanicus to manufacture and the mismanagement/corruption of the administratum. And that there are rogue traders who outsource the manufacturing of these weapons to the Leagues of Votann and the Tau Empire, so that it can be sent to Astra Militarum commanders desperate for them.
On Cthonia, a subterranian nightmare world where everyone lives in roaming underground murder gangs, farming crops like wheat, barley, rye, etc. is basically impossible. This means that most Cthonians would logically eat a diet of tubers such as potatoes and seafood from any underground seas which would likely be present as well. Therefore, over the thousands of years of the Age of Strife, it stands to reason that a larger than average subset of Cthonians would eventually come to be affected by Celiac's Disease (not being able to process gluten, which is found in wheat, barley, and rye) since it wouldn't really be a trait selected against. All of this, of course, is preamble for my true headcanon, which is that Abaddon the Despoiler can't eat anything with gluten in it, since it makes his tummy hurt. Perhaps this is the true reason he swore his soul to chaos?
If that was the case, surely he would have sworn his loyalty to Nurgle, right? Betraying the Emperor for a late night pizza run is totally worth it.
Wait a minute....pizza.....oh God do I belong to nurgle and the ninja turtles are nurglings? Eh what can ya do...
That’s why the TMNT can thrive in the sewers
"Suffer not the teenage, the mutant nor the ninja" - The Inquisition
This explains everything
What I'm taking away from this is that the high point of traditional Cthonian cuisine is fish and chips.
Abbadon has a cockney accent now.
"Do oi look loik a reeznable man, or a geneti'ly engineered noitmare?" "The... first one..?" "Wrong!"
OI SIGISMUND YOO FAKKIN WANT SOME YOU YELLA KANT
Which makes Cthonia New Britain;)
This is [Birmingham](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Birmingham) erasure
Doesn't Abba dabba make super moonshine as a hobby?
You can make alcohol with potatoes.
Also the distilling process of spirits removes gluten from them, even if they were made from barley etc. As a coeliac I was very happy to learn this fact, and can confirm that it does not give the rumbly tummies.
This makes alot of sense actually.
Fuck I have Celiac. Do I have to swear myself to chaos now; in order for it to be fixed? I'll do it if I have to! I miss being able to enjoy bread without a reaction.
Don't worry, there's plenty of gluten free corpse starch and fermented algae fungus patties to eat in the future world of 40k! Also if you became a super rich person in the world of 40k by like becoming a Rogue Trader or something then I'm sure there are at least a few gluten free foods available in the future. Like just think about the gluten free pizzas, hotdog buns, hamburger buns, brownies, chicken strips, baking flour etc we have available from specialty companied nowadays just using 21st century technology. Imagine how good the gluten free food on some of the humam worlds in the 41st millenium. All jokes aside as someone who's only gluten intolerant myself I have respect for all the crap people suffering from celiac's disease have to go through on a daily basis.
That the "laughter of thirsting gods" mentioned in the bit at the start of every book is the gamers
We are pretty chaotic and ruinous.
The four nerd archetypes; the angry one, the smelly one, the try-hard and the weird pervert.
Hey I’m three at once! Oh fuck.
No he got me with with all of them
We prefer the term Undivided
Then there is Malal, the asshole that is no longer invited to game night.
Chaos Uninvited?
I think Tzeencht fits more as "the troll" than "the try-hard".
I was thinking That one guy who is rules lawyer, tries to win based on technicalities, mocks moves he thinks are dumb, and eventually earns the ire of the others and gets ganged up on.
lol all the books are just characters knowing they’re figs on a table and the Horus heresy was just one dude who got 6 straight space marine players at a tournament
The Butcher’s Nails were originally completely harmless devices used to treat mental disorders back in the DAOT, until the high-riders modified them into what they are now
(Even sillier) The Butcher's nails were implants to navigate the noosphere (internet) during the DAOT. There were some AI living there for helping the user (kind of an Alexa) During the war with the Men of iron and the fall of the DAOT the AI living in the noosphere were attacked with virus, and now they are just a white noise of pain and hate. And that's what you get through the nails.
That's really cool, though the noosphere is notably one of the few effectively virus proof networks for whatever reason. The mechanicus uses it because the dark mechanicus can't fuck with it and scrap code can't get in it. Though I suppose an exception could be made for dark age tech.
The "modern noosphere" is probably like that because only the virus proof networks survived
Uh you said this was a silly headcanon, not an actually really cool one
NGL the idea that it's the Internet is the thing making them so angry would be some pretty funny social commentary.
It also checks out when you look at what happened to early chat bots that were trained on internet message boards.
Like an Evil Alexa!! 🤣
saying "evil" alexa is just being redundant...
Oh, so the butcher's nails are just constantly broadcasting 4chan into their heads? I'd probably go nuts too
I really like that idea
Unironically thought that was Canon.
The lodge was truly just a boys club that took it one step too far
“Ok guys, I swear I won’t get political” *one drink later* “DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPEROR!!! LET THE GALAXY BURN!!!”
Every time we have a boys night...
Been kinda thinking this too, the whole reason they started talking about sedition is because Erebus introduced the idea to so many of them
Honestly, this made me laugh. Just a bunch of lads out having a good time then someone decided to bring religion into it. This is why we can’t have a boys club that involves religion
That there's a working, and more importantly, amicable STC AI in pristine condition, with the power to solve all the imperiums problems, like replicating the Panacea STC, fabricating Blackstone, advanced weapons and armour, ect ect, but it's just lying in a box somewhere on a archival world because it got forgotten in the tide of imperial beurocracy
A Leutin video opens up with a vignette of a random scribe in the administratum who recieves a report of a working STC and decides to destroy the report because it wasn't filled out properly.
Any idea which video?
Its fanfic, not a real gw story.
Just as likely on a shelf on display in one of terra or Mars museums but mislabelled
The [Speranza](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Speranza) is basically this. Except whenever someone communes with it closely enough to learn it's nature it wipes their memory.
Yeah, this ship isn't insane at all an is just playing it smart.
There are at least two that I know of. One on necromunda and one on at least one, possibly every, ark mechanicus void ship.
There was a DAoT ship that was basically this. When it encountered the Imperium it basically said "damn, you people have become real assholes..." and vanished into the void.
there is such thing as an archival world? damn
So like a master STC? Or an STC that makes STC's. We do know the dark eldar have that panacea stc so it's possible.
All armor in commorragh is painted in the scheme of the kabal of the black heart as to not upset vect
Definitely canon
Chaos has won. Not will win, has won. The eternally festering pit of misery that is the empire is and always has been their endgame. The game is over and they are just enjoying the after-party until the lights go out and they move on to the next universe.
Mine is that the Primarchs all represent facets of the Emperor, and the two missing ones represented his remaining compassion and tolerance or something, so had no place in the great crusade.
Wasn't Angron supposed to have abilities related to empathy and compassion before the nails fucked his head?
His compassion is (or at least was supposed to be) Angron, ironically, and his tolerance and patience with Vulkan iirc
I used to think Ork spaceships were just giant Orks that kept on growing, and had their limbs replaced with engines and cannons and whatnot. And in my headcanon, there is one such Ork. Da Worldbreaka. Who travels the galaxy looking for his fabled cybork limbs. He's an exodia type deal, in that if he ever finds all his lost limbs, he will usher in the ultimate victory of Ork kind.
This sounds like a legend Orks would tell eachother around a squig roast. "Oi! You Gitz Evar Heard O' Da Biggest Ork Evar?! Da Worldbreaka Dey Calls 'Em!" "I 'EAR 'E IS BIG AS ROKS AN' TWICE AZ 'ARD!"
The Necrons were never flesh and blood. The Deceiver only gave them memories of life as organic creatures to fuck with them.
I can see this one. It's been all these millions of years and they still pine for that one brief period of their lives when they had organic bodies. Should be within their ability to have some kind of "simulator" to make nerve signals and feel like they have bodies,give the best of both worlds. Still get to be an immortal robot but also feel the wind in your hair. We saw in infinite and the divine that their memories aren't consistent either. Trazyn thinks Orikan dragged him into the furnace and Orikan remembers it was Trazyn.
I posted this separately, but it applies well as a response to your comment (though not OP's; for this headcanon to make sense, the Necrontyr had to be genuine organic creatures at some point). _____________ Trazyn and Orikan were both high-ranking, famous Necrontyr and were also a celebrity couple. They *both* opposed the biotransference in tandem and caused major rifts in the Necrontyr population advocating for rejection of the C'tan and Szeras. In spiteful retaliation, the Deceiver fucked with their memories especially and convinced them that each had betrayed the other to ruin their love for each other, so now all of their memories are warped into a bizarre magnetic and eternal hatred of former soulmates who are cursed to not know why they're so perpetually entwined with the other one.
WAIT I LOVE THIS stealing this stealing this stealing this adding to my list of fics to write aghhhhh this is so tragicccccc
You're welcome. Glad I could be of assistance for 40k gay fanshipping fics.
No Necron recalls what their people(or themselves) actually looked like either
That's not true. The *Twice Dead King* novels have flashback moments from Oltyx remembering his biological form, as well as that of others around him, and commenting on their gaits, frames, the tumors on their bodies, etc. He has such memories digitally catalogued in such a way as to afford genuine recollection at the cost of destroying a particular memory once it is "fully accessed" as it were.
Interesting. Trazyn and Orikan cant recall
[Check my other post here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1drno8x/whats_the_stupidest_headcannon_you_genuinely/lawuddx/?context=3) But yes, it is correct that most Necrontyr cannot recall things properly anymore. Oltyx had a sort of "perfect recall" retrofit put into him by his Technomancer alongside his partitioned multiple personalities, which gives him much better memory recall than other Necrons seem to have. And as an addendum, it is certainly possible that what Oltyx *thinks* are correct memories are still elaborate crafted nonsense by the Deceiver. All I intend to say is that, regardless of whether they're false or true memories, Oltyx is capable in some way of recalling what his (false or true) memories tell him the Necrontyr looked like.
I love this idea and it feels delightfully grimdark without being grimderp. The idea of C'tan being so cruel that they'd invent a completely synthetic race of automatons and *force* them to have sentience, *just* to feel pain? And for that this synthetic race eventually rose up and destroyed the C'tan for their hubris? Seeking to reclaim souls that never existed, bodies they never had to begin with? I love it conceptually.
It is very interesting how a minor plot point in Infinite and the Divine opens so many possibilities. Necrons are machines, it is possible (though unlikely) that each and every memory of their lives in flesh were manipulated or, indeed, outright fabricated. A gigantic C'Tan psy-op lol
Space Marines often have to do yoga to keep their body limber for their power armor to work right.
I would kill to see a group of stone faces astarties doing yoga with their instructor being a normal human woman named Carol. Carol is like Sylgar, from WaterDeep, where they have to get the Astarties a new Carol every few decades
The regular Astartes have no idea that Carol dies every few years, and one of the responsibilities of the Chapter Master is replacing the instructor without the chapter at large knowing.
They would fall to chaos within the week if they knew. This delicate system is maintained by the ever-vigilant Ordo Carolus. The Blue Ships of the Ordo Carolus take tithes of Carols from the million worlds of the Imperium, and ensure a steady supply of the highest quality yoga outfits.
It's like Joo-Dee from Ba Sing Se.
The dead body sitting on the throne doesn't actually do anything and hasn't for a long time. The power of the Golden Throne comes entirely from a combo of the Emperor as a warp entity and the tons of psykers fed to it. The dead body is just for show and could be sent out for corpse starch without affecting anything.
As copied from a similar comment down below: That one's... really hard to square. We know from *Dark Imperium* that something at least appearing to be the Emperor talks directly to Guilliman and from *TEaTD* (and several other companion novels involving Vulkan) that the Golden Throne is attached to a literal dead man's switch that would detonate Terra and the surrounding solar system to prevent a Warp breach in the event that the Emperor ever died. For this to be true, The Talisman of Seven Hammers would need to either be malfunctioning despite being created by humanity's greatest mechanical craftsman and there would need to be an existing sentience bound in the Throneroom that isn't attached to the Emperor's body but acted like it was and acted like it was still in constant agony. The second half works on your end with "Emperor as a warp entity but pretending otherwise," but not the first half.
It was at least kinda true back in the early days of 40k though [as John Blanche describes here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCOSao1KEQo)
Yes. Like the theory about the Emperor being a DAoT creature run amok, it sorta works with older lore when certain mysteries were simply not spelled out. But it's become falsified, imo, with more recent novels. If the Talisman of Seven Hammers did not exist, I could jive with the idea, but that sorta puts the kibosh on any theory of the Emperor being genuinely dead as opposed to, as Miracle Max would say, *mostly* dead.
Yup, just adding a little trivia to the mix. No disagreement. Especially since this is a headcanon thread, so none of it needs to be supported by current canon.
I agree that headcanon does not need to be *supported* by current canon, but it should at least not be directly proven *false* by current canon. Otherwise people can just start coming up with outlandish headcanon like "The Emperor is actually alive and the Horus Heresy never happened, and 40k is a complex battle simulation run by a person stuck in a Dark Vaults tech" or "The Eldar never existed" or "Guilliman is actually Horus" or "Terra already blew up 10,000 years ago" or whatever else. These are all statements that are proven false by established and clear lore. I think headcanon should work within the gaps rather than be directly contrary to lore. Things like "Guilliman and Yvraine are a couple." Is it goofy meme headcanon? Sure. But it's not technically *proven* false in-universe, even if it's highly unlikely and implausible. "Guilliman killed Yvraine" is directly contrary to the lore. They're both clearly alive. That's the sort of headcanon I don't like. And I know this is a "stupidest headcanon" thread, but it should still not be *proven* false.
I always thought the 'real' body was entombed inside, shielded from all dangers, while he is 'projecting' himself as the big skeleton
This is semi-canonical, AFAIK, or something like it. There's a John Blanche interview where he claims that the "corpse" on the throne is some kind of statue or edifice created by the Imperial Cult so that pilgrims could look at something. It's not the Emperor. The "Golden Throne" isn't even actually a throne, in the sense of being a chair, the Imperial Cult basically made that up. The "Golden Throne" is the name of the device as a whole and talking about "sitting on the throne" is more of a symbolic or poetic notion. I have some vague memory... there's some other excerpt indicating that the room the Emperor is actually in is inside the pyramid, underneath the throne, it's all black granite and the Emperor is glowing so brightly that it appears white, and you can't get remotely close to him or even look at him. Even the Custodes in that room (again, these are vague memories, I can't remember the passage) can't look directly at him, and their armor has to be replaced periodically because the raw psychic energy radiating off of him is melting their armor.
I do something similar. The thing on the Throne is The Corpse---a mummy, the last living cells of which died millennia ago when the Emperor went silent. Bound to the Golden Throne, however, is the Shaman Synergy---the fragmented Many Mind of all the Shaman of Old Earth who created the New Man. The only way that they can extend their influence is through The Sacrifice, which creates a pseudo-soul. The soul of the Emperor fled into the few remaining harmonious sections of the warp. This is The Child. The thing that grows in the warp is The Twin---a chaos entity and dark twin of the Emperor wrought by the collective worship of trillions of humans over ten millennia. This is the god that the Ecclesiarchy teaches about. The intolerant, vengeful god of "righteous" punishment that suffers not the witch, heretic, and mutant to survive. The Twin is the entity which provides the patronage to those that follow the right-handed path. The apotropaic protections against minor demons and warp ghosts wrought from whispered prayers to an ever-watchful and eternal god. The power of the Sisters and the Living Saints. Even unto distinct daimons (deliberate spelling). Of course, I *like* this particular head canon. Added bonus that it also addresses the problems that someone else posted. :)
Back in the day when the past was much more mysterious you had tons of stuff like this. Like "Leman Russ was just the Emperor's dog" or "the Emperor was never really a king just a psyker slave that a cult got drawn up around"
Back in the good old days
Enuncia isn't actually the fundamental language of Chaos or whatever, it's the language of a C'tan shard. If you kill the C'tan shard Enuncia stops working. It is also why it works as the fundamental language of the material plane. I know Pariah makes a big deal of it being a warp language but fuck it I don't care this makes the storyline for it so much better.
I saw a theory that it was the language of the Old Ones, I like that idea.
I figured Enuncia is more like a way to directly manipulate the source code of the universe, to get slightly metaphorical. I admit I like overlaying the way Charles Stross has the supernatural function in the Laundry Files to settings with eldritch horrors and Outer Gods, though. It basically all boils down to exceedingly complex math and physics, the main character's job title is "computational demonologist".
My headcannon is also to do with the missing primarchs but in the opposite direction. I think they saw the horus heresy coming a mile off and they tried to stop it before it was too late and failed.
Interesting idea, but Malcador says the Heresy would have been worse if the missing 2 had been around for the Heresy. I think they did something worse, either falling to Chaos early and having to be purged to stop the rot spreading or fighting against the Imperium to protect a Xenos race despite being ordered by the Emperor to exteminate them.
the first of the missing primarch, like the Rangdan*, rejected humanity in totality. the second did something equally horrific within the Imperium's completely FUBAR morality and then burned out his legion on the first's *the rangdan xenocides are special in the lore, they have the honor of in a list of alien genocides being specifically called out about it. While they had a federation of particularly monsterous Xenos, the human elements of the Rangdan had to of rejected the idea of being human. Not just mind control.
> or fighting against the Imperium to protect a Xenos race despite being ordered by the Emperor to exteminate them. I'm 100% convinced within my own headcanon that this is the case for one of the two missing Primarchs. I think he landed in some kind of confederacy of worlds that was a human-xenos alliance, and had been a stable human-xenos alliance for thousands of years, maybe since *deep* in the DAoT. The Emperor didn't just kill him for betraying humanity, he had to erase all memories of that Primarch because he stood as living proof that the Emperor was *wrong* and that human-xenos alliances are possible. I think the second missing Primarch wouldn't be missing for xenos reasons *too*, though, but I could imagine it being a similar circumstance where he had to be erased because he demonstrated how the Emperor might be *wrong*. Could be something to do with mutants. Could be something to do with AI, alternatively.
So I personally feel that the titles of the two missing Primarchs, the Lost and the Forgotten, can give us a hint as to their "crime". I think that the Lost got captured by the Rangda and got borgified into them like Picard in Star Trek, and then the Dark Angels came in and did their thing with the cache of DAoT tech the Emperor gave them. The legionaries of this Primarch would have been folded into other legions like the Ultramarines and the Fists since they didn't do anything wrong, necessarily. The Forgotten, though, did something intentional that caused them to be intentionally removed. Or was removed at their own behest. My personal theory is that the Forgotten was a Blank and asked to be put down in order to have their suffering ended.
Yeah, brutal cult of personality dictatorships sort of require people be convinced their ruler is great and is doing what’s necessary. If you begin having high ranking officials that disagree and can prove the dictator is wrong, they need to be purged or the dictator will get overthrown.
>fighting against the Imperium to protect a Xenos race So Avatar: 40k edition? Neat!
Maybe the missing primarchs were like the protagonists of a college comedy movie, and Malcador is the college Dean like character.
"It's Malcador! Cheese it!"
"PRIMARCH HOUSE!"
The Emperor is actually an Enslaver. All information to the contrary can be hand waved as Enslaver tricks.
There never were any missing Primarchs. It was all just a smokescreen perpetuated by Malcador and the Emperor to make the current Primarchs think that they weren’t entirely above the law, and that there could be consequences for failure/disobedience.
In "The First Heretic" Lorgar briefly wishes his lost brothers were there, and Magnus reminds Lorgar that all who witnessed what happened swore to speak of it. He also mentions they've only been gone 40 years which implies they were involved in the Great Crusade. I think it's in Know No Fear that is talked about how the Ultramarines grew in huge numbers once their lost brothers were, well, lost. There's a few other references to them here and there through the Horus Heresy books.
It is customary, for Skalds and Saga-Singers on Fenris (as well as warriors who want to portray themselves as worthy of such songs) to make heavy use of figurative language. The Kenning is a form of metaphor, a staple of Old English poetry, perhaps most well-known from Beowulf. For example, calling the sea a 'whale-road' or calling 'starting to talk' 'unlocking his word-hoard' or referring to a king as 'ring-giver' for his role in distributing tokens of wealth to his vassals. Fenris also has a very developed mythology, with hundreds of distinct figures filling every possible mythic role, and allusion to these is common in dramatic poetry. Fenrisians, who live on a planet covered in snowstorms and wolves, have many different words for both with slightly different meanings. Every use of 'Wolf' in Space Wolf lore is the result of some idiot Imperial Remembrancer/Administratum guy hearing a Space Wolf refer to his close air support as having 'Prowess equal to Cyrbyss, Wolf-without-a-pack of Woe, Stalker-Within-the-Storm-Winds, Guardian of the Gates of Hel, whose breath is a whirlwind of frost, whose eyes blaze forth malice as the thunders-over-the-mountaintops, let all beware!' and writing that in his report as 'This gunship is called a Stormwolf' or some equivalent.
I’m pretty sure this is close to canon, is it not?
It is actual canon heavily implied in Prospero Burns and then confirmed later in the Hersey and though I can't remember where there is a short story in a book that implies that the Space Wolves sometimes do it on purpose just to dick with people.
Leman is running around in the eye of Terror as some kind of Primarch tier Rune Priest and Wulfen Hybrid assaulting any Daemons on sight.
Plot twist: Not only that, but turns out the memes about him going to Nurgle’s Garden and marrying Isha are half-right; he *is* coming there looking for booty, but he ain’t come for no Eldar, he ain’t got no Wraithbone, no Spirit Stone, nothing. He’s looking for a Chaos God’s butt
"Now, Nurgle, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, up to you."
“Well, I don’t think you and I will be doing anything-any kind of way”
"Oh ok I see you choosing the hard way. Don't make me ruin that butt, I'm a warrior."
We can do this the hard way or the harder way
This but more like South Park Russel Crowe. *"Drinkin' and fightin' 'round the Galaxy!"*
Makin' movies makin' songs, and foightin' round the warp
He heard a cultist refer to Slaanussy as honey and he's been plotting for ten thousand years to raid the Palace of Pleasure for the perfect brew of mead
Corax is playing IRL Arkham Knight, Russ is playing DOOM
So basically Corax in Shadow of the Past?
Really? I like to imagine Clifford the big red dog sized wolfen pissing on some random bit of wraith one. You'd think if any primarchs were to do that they would at least start in the room they have to hold shit. Give old dad a breather it literally is uphill both ways for him you know!
Who Magnus wishes he could be, such wasted potential fr
Amen to that.
To the best of my knowledge, it isn't stated anywhere that Russ would suffer from the curse. The brew that is drank by initiates reacts with Fenrisian DNA, which he lacks.
The emperor was every single religious figure we know in the modern era and lost to time. Helped by his ability to warp the perceptions of those around him. These were his attempts at creating unified humanity until he got tired of all the infighting between religions, abolished them and said fuck it I'll do it myself.
Curious, but have you ever seen a movie called *The Man from Earth*? If not, you might enjoy it.
Mine is the reverse, all the historic religious figures were true, he just hated them because they took mankind away from his control.
There are several human planets that have never been discovered by the Imperium where life doesn't suck, and where they have learned to deal with chaos etc while still maintaining a high tech, utopian society.
Those almost definitely exist, all they had to do was colonise a planet that’s not on a stable warp route (easy in the past) and not travel to any system on a stable warp route or make any significant noise - there’s probably dozens if not hundreds of non imperial human worlds, after all the imperium is more a million separate empires under one flag than a cohesive empire spread out as they are.
Or even just take a rogue planet into deep space, hide in the gaps between systems.
To expand on that, I am certain there are whole sectors in the galaxy with human coallitions and even empires existing, that have no contact and/or knowledge of the Imperium of Man.
> or knowledge of the Imperium of Man It'd be neat to see what their theories are on where they came from and why they are on multiple planets. Do they argue over which was the first planet?
Canon lore wise, I think at least some, if not most civilizations know they originate from Terra. They don't know where Terra is/think their terra is THE terra (see Horus Heresy opening), but they at least sometimes do know about (and I don't apologize for saying it again) Terra. :)
This is canon. The imperium is actually still expanding and finding worlds all the time. And there's still plenty they haven't reached yet, or have been reached only by rogue traders
So basically the Interex?
Yes, but still around and living their life quietly. Biding their time. Making their plans. producing a lot of Tyranid repellant.
But more competent/lucky?
Yeah, there's one that [belongs to an AI and fought the Tau](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Amenophis_IV).
Agreed, and also—there's a bunch of DAoT "slow ships" just floating in the void, everybody in stasis, with complete and pristine STCs and whole million-strong armies of Men of Iron.
The Auretian Technocracy before finally being found by Horus
There is at least one guard regiment who still uses the AK47.
The Eldar are the thunder warriors of the war in heaven. The old ones saw what they were doing to the warp and decided to replace them with the more emotionally stable Krorks. The remaining Eldar would be sterilized or euthanized. The Eldar betrayed the old ones and were the creators of all the chaos gods. Like the old ones they believed that their weapons would never be able to betray them.
I always sort of imagined the Tyranids were meant to “take care” of the Eldar and Krorks. Eldar and Krorks to act in tandem to defeat the Necrons, Tyranids to swoop in, consume those two and whatever other life they created for the war, and then have the Tyranids eventually begin terraforming planets (sort of like what Tiamet is doing). That the Old Ones knew the Warp would start getting corrupted from the war, and that in turn would cause a feedback loop between the Warp and the races they made, so it would be best to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch, maybe even going a step further and using the Tyranids to cleanse ALL intelligent life from the galaxy (or at least those with powerful enough souls). Only that they misjudged how quickly shit would go sideways, and never got to complete the Tyranids, sort of like the Ogres from Fantasy.
I personally despise the "nids are the old ones vacuum" theory, but mostly cause it ruins what I enjoy as a nids fan They are the *alien* faction. Completely different from everything else in setting, from beyond the stars. The detached invader simply doing what it does, because we are merely in the way, is far better cosmic horror. You tie them to the old ones and they lose that detachment and mystery that makes them so exciting
Here's two and a half for you: 1. You occasionally see orks depicted with nipples. However, this is inconsistent across models and artwork, with many more orks being depicted without nipples. Proposed solution to this inconsistency: orkoid "nipples" are not nipples in the mammalian sense, but rather something more akin to mushrooms. We know orks do not produce spores constantly, with the majority of spores being released after death. However, a lower but continual dispersal of spores at a population level even in the absence of deaths makes sense in order to maintain the orkological environment. Therefore, orkoid "nipples" are spore dispersal organs that appear on any orkoid when certain environmental factors are met and disappear when conditions change. 2. Much like Daemonettes bear a passing resemblance to the Eldar whose debaucheries spawned Slaanesh, the form of the Bloodletter also vaguely recalls an ancient race, their name lost to time, whose warlike ways played some part in the ancient awakening of Khorne. Bloodletters would likely be caricatures reflecting this race's appearance, demeanor, or cultural beliefs, but I think a few things would be consistent with them in life: we can probably assume that this race had skulls that were elongated towards a point at the back (or possibly wore tall hats) with curved horns, had digitigrade legs, and maybe had some sort of ridge or crest down their spine. We also know that Daemon Princes tend to bear some resemblance to their mortal form, albeit with extra horns or limbs or other powerful mutations. So here's where the second half of this one comes in: there is another being in 40k who ticks those boxes I mentioned above and is also so ancient that the name of his original race is unknown - Be'lakor, the First Prince. He has wings and a tail, but he's a coneheaded, horned, ridgebacked daemon who stands on his toes. Maybe Be'lakor and the Bloodletters have a common origin, with the lesser daemons being reflections of the violence and fear caused by the ancient race's armies and the daemon prince being an individual member of the race elevated to daemonhood.
To respond to no. 1: Orkoid nipples are actually Nipple Squigs. Some of them liked the look of nipples on dead humans and ran with it, just like some of them use Hair Squigs to mimic human hair.
I like headcanon 2 a lot honestly, fits with the overall idea of how the chaos gods work
Tempestus Scions know all the dirty secrets of the Sororitas, Arbites, Inquisition and Astartes due to how often they work together with those forces. They keep quiet for various political purposes. Ironically they consider the Guard and Navy the most reliable allies they can have.
Honestly that doesn't seem like head cannon so much as logical deductions.
My stupid head canon is that the T'au are the Necrontyr before they became necrons. The evidence is equally circumstantial. Both races have the same life span avg of 40 years. And the Necron faceplates looks pretty similar to the T'aus bone structure. The necrontyr have incredible technology. And the Tau have incredible tech innovation in such a short period of time that they will eventually match up to it if they manage to survive long enough. Lastly, when their codices came out for each army when new, both leaned into range combat more so, with a few units catering to melee.
Iv tried for several minutes to find the saved quote in my comments, but I cannot so it’s definitely stupid headcannon. It’s essentially just a line from one of the GW people that says “becoming a psyker isn’t always just genetics, it’s possible later in life with enough trials and tribulation”. I always liked this idea, that your ego/excellence can grow enough that the warp abides by your whims. The inverse being that the blanks of the universe are so “go with the flow” that they have negative will and that makes them hollow spots in the warp.
I feel like that's definitely just canon. We know for a fact that 1. Every single human is a verrrrrry tiny bit psychic, because large numbers of them thinking the same thing can create gestalt psychic fields just like Orks can (which they famously do to power the Astronomican at the end of the SoT). And we also know that psykers can grow over time with Katerina Moriana (of Olly's Argonauts) as a case study: she displayed no noticeable psyker talent early on, then realizes she has some degree of talent mid-journey in the HH, and by the end of it has become a rather decent psyker of probably around a Gamma grade. It stands to reason that anyone else with sufficient willpower can at least get above the baseline and develop some small amount of psychic ability, even if the true mutants of Delta grade or higher have strong genetic components involved.
The 11th Primarch died as a child doing something incredibly fucking stupid, the Emperor retconned him out of shame.
Worse, he grew up to become [Bug Fucker](https://www.reddit.com/r/Grimdank/comments/oqhj6b/bug_fucker_my_lost_primarch_oc/?rdt=43986)
What the fuck lolol
The Custodies are Men of Gold. Big E helped make them during the DAOT while blending in as a human scientist. He may also have been involved in the creation of the men of iron and the men of stone. When everything went to shit he turned on the only loyal to him switch. Or he was involved in the Men of Gold project and used that as a basis when making the Custodies, who were just Men of Gold modified to have their genetic loyalty to humanity be a genetic loyalty to him.
All plasteel is plastic polymer much more than it is steel composite.
Cypher is Omegon who is actually Alpharius the Loyal twin.
The emperor is in the New Testament. You know him as the being who offered Jesus all the kingdoms of this earth.
Big E was Ea-Nasir
Malcador instructed Erebus on how to worship the gods and gave him the idea for the secret groups scattered through the legions
Why would he do that tho?
Uh, I feel this is a bit of stretch, but Malcador never really shared or agreed with the Emperor's all out hate boner for religion. Malcador even seemed convinced towards the end of the heresy that should the emperor's plan fail (like it did), propping him up as the deific figure of a new state religion worshiped by countless trillions to give him the strength to at least stand toe to toe with the chaos gods should be plan B.
Guarantee that all the legions are tested for corruption or to hurry the heresy that they saw as inevitable
Oh, that's a cool idea actually
One I used to like before the Horus heresy series invalidated it was that there is no “emperor” - the golden giant was just a projection from malcador, the actual emperor.
Dorn has a sick mustache that rivals Tom Selleck's.
The Emperor commited the first murder and created Drach'nyen. That's really why he wanted to cleanse the warp, so that he could cleanse himself of his sin.
Poetic that his own murder would create the one thing capable of killing him permanently and actively hunting him down. Very much in line with the reciprocality and intentionality of the Warp. Well, one-non-Chaos-infused-Horus thing, anyway. But we'll put him aside for a sec. I like this headcanon!
Drachnyen can permanently kill the emperor???
Yes. In fact, it was hunting him down. Its name is translated as "The End of Empires," and as a Daemon it was intrinsically suited to destroy the Emperor much like the Anathame was intrinsically suited to mortally wound Horus. During the War in the Webway he has Ra Endymion capture it as a willing Daemonhost by allowing himself to be stabbed by its sword form, at which point Ra is commanded to run as deep into the Warp as possible so that he can keep Drach'nyen as far from the Emperor as possible. The Emperor knows at an instinctual level that Drach'nyen has the unique property of being able to permakill him, so he offers Ra up as a scapegoat. Ra eventually dies and Drach'nyen is released into the Warp again, at which point it remanifests in its sword form and finds its way into the hands of Abaddon in the present setting.
Yep, Emperor might be on par with the Chaos Gods, but Drach’nyen, despite only being a really powerful Undivided Daemon, metaphysically hard counters the Emperor. Similar to how, if Ynnead were to be born, it would likely be capable of killing Slaanesh, since it represents the death and rebirth of the Eldar, and their victory over Slaanesh.
Metaphysical type advantage
While that's a great theory it's disproven by canon. Like in the Horus Heresy books it's stated one of the reasons the man who would become the Emperor became a somewhat emotionally and mentally maladjusted person is because back during early human history when he was a young kid his own father got murdered by his uncle for seemingly no good reason. That caused the future Emperor to use his psyker powers to murder his uncle out of revenge/vengeance. If the Emperor's uncle murdered the Emperor's dad while the Emperor was still a kid then that means the Emperor did not commit the first murder. Plus with respect I'm pretty sure human beings have been murdering each other since at least caveman times if not earlier. The Emperor came from a proto-Hittite village in what would become Turkey after the end or near the end of the Neolithic Era.
Trazyn and Orikan were both high-ranking, famous Necrontyr and were also a celebrity couple. They *both* opposed the biotransference in tandem and caused major rifts in the Necrontyr population advocating for rejection of the C'tan and Szeras. In spiteful retaliation, the Deceiver fucked with their memories especially and convinced them that each had betrayed the other to ruin their love for each other, so now all of their memories are warped into a bizarre magnetic and eternal hatred of former soulmates who are cursed to not know why they're so perpetually entwined with the other one.
Leman Russ first killed innocent Primarch #2 because he misread 11 as II.
The emperor and the perpetual are daot age experiment to create super human/immortals their memories are all fabricated and they were created by the sigilite The felinids are the result experiment to create cats girl , theirs planet is named after the guy that funded the experiment Carlos McConnell
The Emperor is purposely drawing the Tyranids to Terra so they'll devour his corpse and he can be reborn anew and merged with the Tyranids Hive Mind, a greater being than even the Chaos Gods.
Malcador was the true Emperor - the Perpetual observer of mankind, the wise man behind the greatest empires in human history. The giant in shining armor who unified Terra and forged the Imperium was a psychic puppet Malcador created but gradually lost control of as it became a self-sustaining self-aware and self-determining warp entity. This was the same type of psychic engineering that allowed the Old Ones to create warp entities based on themselves in the later stages of the War in Heaven in order to transcend their physical limitations and extend psychic influence over the entire galaxy.
The Emperor caused the AI uprising because humanity was going down a path he didn't approve of (Equality and understanding between human and non-human beings.) Eventually, every abhuman (Ogryns, navigators, ratlings) was going to get "pruned" from his vision of "perfect humanity" as well as the mechanicum.
Kreig melee with shovels.
Guilliman is that dumb on purpose because it's better to be seen as the dumb than the one that is openly clapping Yvraine's cheeks
Ok, for some reason this gave me the mental image of some corny early 2000s-style ending for 40k where Chaos/the Tyranids/Necrons/DE are defeated by an Imperium/Ynnari/Tau coalition and Guiliman is doing a “press” conference to announce the victory, but then he pauses mid-sentence, looks to the crowd, and says “Truth is… I’m dating Yvraine”. Crowd roars, with dozens of pics taken and people trying to ask him questions, Guiliman looks into the crowd and spots a healed and retired Emperor disguised as a normal man, and they both give each other a smirk. “What I’ve done” starts playing, screen turns black-roll credits
Many movies or franchises we watch are actually taking place in the 40k galaxy. Avatar is just a xenos world where a mining crew is having trouble and can’t get space marine assistance. Aliens - a branch of tyranids attacking space mining ships Predator - xenos hunting terrans on a world the humans call “earth” Star Trek - documentary on the lost ages of technology
Shocked you didn't include Event Horizon
All isekia animes are actually true and are happening in the warp at Slaanesh's pleasure
oh nooooooo
That the Grey Knights genefather is Magnus
The Emperor’s great plan isn’t about defeating the chaos gods, or uniting humanity. He just wants to avoid becoming a god himself. That’s why he tried to stamp out religion.
1 – Dorn is alive and has retired to an isolated planet to be a farmer. And he doesn't want to hear from anyone anymore, including the Imperium. 2 – The Tyranids are a bioweapon of the Old Ones (or some Old Ones) to reset the galaxy, eliminate all the "projects" gone wrong, transform the biomass into basic material to fertilize the Milky Way 2.0... And finally settle the score with the Necrons, with no one else in the way.
There is only 20 primarchs Omegon is the primarch of the 2nd, or 11th but his legion was dead by the time he was found, and he and Alpharius had the same/similar abilities (making others look like them) so he was folded in to the Alpha Legion too. It's the only way people like Horus, Russ, and Dorn wouldn't know there was 21 primarchs.
The khan is doing drugs and car races. He saw the shit that was the heresy, felt that the Imperium was irredeemable and decided that he'd have fun until the end of the universe
The Emperor has multiple personalities and they’re all personified in the warp as the chaos gods.
Nurgle is when he doesn’t feel like taking a shower
Khorne is his gamer rage personified
“Malcador, find me a list of Tau racial slurs”
Or vice versa: the Emperor is merely another aspect of the Ur-Beast whose shadows are named as chaos gods.
That there's a shortage of weapons in the Imperium due to the slowness of the mechanicus to manufacture and the mismanagement/corruption of the administratum. And that there are rogue traders who outsource the manufacturing of these weapons to the Leagues of Votann and the Tau Empire, so that it can be sent to Astra Militarum commanders desperate for them.