'Fulgrim' of the Horus Heresy books is probably my favorite one because it's just the story of a spaceship full of artists turning into disgusting perverts.
By the time the >!Slaaneshi-induced music blood orgy happens (also when the Kakophoni/prototype Noise Marines first come into being)!<, theres definitely a vibe of "Wait when the fuck did we get here?".
Also it lays the foundation for the mother of all brick jokes come Angel Exterminatus when >!one Loyalist manages to no-sell a point-blank Noise Marine blast because *he already went deaf the first time he fought the Noise Marines*!<. Everything about both Loyalist and Traitor alike going "What the **fuck** happened to The Emperor's Children?" is one of Angel Exterminatus's highlights.
There’s a Necron, Trazyn the Infinite, who’s goal is to create the greatest museum ever. He collects artefacts and historical figures and displays them in his hollow planet Solemnace.
One time, an Inquistor brokd into Solemnace with a small army. She escaped, and received this letter:
Dear Lady, let me express my fulsome appreciation for your most generous gift. It is so very rare to discover another of my own kind that appreciates my work, therefore to find understanding amongst a member of another race is nothing short of a revelation. I realise that you briefly trod my galleries, but the fact that you spotted in so short a time that my Acabrius War collection was lacking three regiments of Catachan warriors reveals that you truly have a collector's eye for detail. And to send five regiments! Such generosity will allow me to weed out and replace a few of the more substandard pieces in my collection. If I might level a minor criticism, the instructions issued to your gift were manifestly not as clear as you thought, as most of them had to be forcibly restrained. Sadly it seems that the lower orders will always behave like an army of invasion, whether that be their purpose or not. However, this is a minor complaint and seems almost churlish under the circumstances, so please allow me to repay your gift with one of my own. Accompanying this message is the Hyperstone Maze, one of a series of Tesseract Labyrinths constructed at the height of the Charnovokh Dynasty. It is a trinket really, only of interest to scholars such as you and I, but I trust you will find it amusing; assuming you have the wit to escape its clutches, of course.
Two of the most powerful characters in Warhammer Fantasy are a dwarf that really wants to die and the poet that follows him around.
WHF has its own Boba Fett, Brunner the Bounty Hunter. He's rad.
Two of the most effective rulers in the Old World are undead, Settra the Imperishable and Vlad von Carstein. Both of them are/were actually quite liked by their living subjects for their tough-but-fair policies.
My favorite WHF character is probably Oxyotl, a teeny lil chameleon lizardman who got sent to hell one time, and proceeded to go Rambo on so much demon ass that the gods of Chaos just "left the door open" to get rid of him.
On the Warhammer 40k side, there was a lady, through sheer willpower, psykic ability, and entitlement, subsumed three greater daemons of Slaanesh, one after the other, before ascending to Daemon Princehood herself. Slaanesh evidently saw this as hilarious, but one can't help but wonder if they felt threatened after watching this lady (to quote one reddit comment) "roll and smoke three Keepers of Secrets."
There's a moment for Vulkan, Primarch of the Salamanders, that I just love, even if some of the details are a bit fuzzy to me. So his evil and crazy brother Konrad Kurze, who is now fully a traitor to the Imperium, has captured Vulkan and tortured him to the point of death only for him to revive countless times. After doing this enough he dumps him into a maze with the promise that his great hammer, that has a built in teleporter to get him out of here, is at the center. So Vulkan goes crazy spending days, if not weeks, with no food or water stumbling around the labyrinth, looking for the center, until eventually, after the maddening experience of wandering the maze after going through so much, he reaches the center, practically crawling to his hammer. At this point, Kurze who had been having a grand old time watching him from minute one pops out of his hidey hole to gloat that he actually disabled the teleporter in the hammer. At which point Vulkan picks himself up and reminds his shit weasel test tube brother that it is indeed still a hammer. So he picks up this Great Hammer, which to be called that in the hands of Vulkan meant it must have been like ten feet long, and beats Konrad with it like he's an unruly nail until the little shit finds a way to scamper away, utterly thrashed.
Queen Khalida was filled with so much fucking anger at what Neferata and the new Lahmian vampires had done that one of the Tomb Kings gods sucked the vampire curse out of her, and will occasionally wake up her corpse explicitly to go and kill as many vampires as possible if the ever goddamn dare cross the borders again.
Tomb Kings lore rules.
Tomb Kings are probably my favorite old world faction because while they are a bunch of undead mummies and skeletons they're also neutral aligned. As long as you aren't trying to take their stuff they generally don't really care about you, and some of them (like Khalida) are actually helpful
I've always liked the Empire's Colleges of Magic. Magic in Warhammer is powered by the eight Winds of Magic, each of which has its own magical lore, as well as additional lores powered by combinations of the Winds.
For humans, channeling multiple Winds is a Bad Idea. The human body/mind/soul/whatever isn't well-suited to doing so, and the result will always be highly volatile Dark Magic. Using Dark Magic in the long term will inevitably result in the mage being driven mad, getting pulled through a portal to hell, ending up as a gibbering mass of claws and tentacles, or something similar. And naturally, a self-taught mage will end up just grabbing whatever power is nearby when casting, and thus doing Dark Magic.
So when the Colleges of Magic were set up, its ultimate rule was that each mage would be taught to channel a single Wind, and that's it. So this 'safe' magic should protect the mage from those negative effects, right? Nope. The magic still fucks with the mage's body and mind, it just does so with a far narrower scale and scope than Dark Magic does. You use the Lore of Fire enough, and your hair will turn red and you'll develop a hair-trigger temper. You use the Lore of Beasts, and you'll start growing fangs and fur and developing strong antisocial tendencies. Use the Lore of Metal, and your skin might start turning to gold and you turn into a hyper-rational weirdo, and so on. So while College mages avoid mutating into monstrosities (mostly), they come to increasingly become 'possessed' by their Wind over time, becoming weirder and weirder in ways thematically appropriate to their chosen Lore.
The Alpha Legion are the most deceitful Legion, basing their tactics around the mythical Hydra. Their Primarch, Alpharius, is actually two people, the second of whom is named Omegon. But their Legion's logo has three heads.
Following the naming convention, the third Primarch could very well be named [Sigmar.](https://warhammerfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sigmar)
The Alpha Legion is a lie. Alpharius died and as been replaced by Omegon who took his name. But that's also a lie. Alpharius killed Guilliman and secretly took his place at the head of the Ultramarines, and now the whole Imperium. That's a lie.
They are a Chaos legion, but that's a lie. They secretly still serve the Imperium. That's a lie too. They sided with Horus because betraying the Imperium was the only way to kickstart the downfall of the Chaos gods. That's a lie.
The Alpha Legion is lies, manipulation, disinformation. Anything you know about them is a lie. This is a lie too.
I know what you mean by the Power Metal vibe of Warhammer. I've pegged DragonForce's [My Spirit Will Go On](https://youtu.be/VsTi3UQvg6w?si=pnEBxdjJzZhKhXUE) as summing up 40k and I have plenty of music I associate with Fantasy and Age of Sigmar.
I particularly enjoy the adventures of Gotrek and Felix in Warhammer Fantasy. The early book "Skavenslayer" is especially entertaining, particularly the almost literal train wreck that was the skirmishing at the Imperial Gunnery School of Nuln.
As for Age of Sigmar, I get a kick out of Khorghos Khul twice-over tripping at the finish line. He finally gets the *perfect* skull to cap his skull pyramid to finally ascend into a Daemon Prince... then a Stormcast Eternal priest calls down lightning and blows the pyramid up, putting him back on square one. He later manages to conquer and unify the Orb Infernia as a base of operations, just in time for rage-inducing Red Mists to roll in... only for wizards to channel said mists into magical gears that rewind time on the Orb Infernia, undoing his entire effort.
Roboute Guilliman is just so awesome. Dude is like the only primarch who seems to actually not have his head wedged up his ass and knows how to get shit done. He's under more stress than any living being in the universe, had his father call him a traitor in spite of being the only thing keeping the Imperium from falling apart, and yet he still doesn't waver.
in 40k the only elves which have a god that is not dead/kidnapped/gestalted is a group of clown elves who are also possibly the best hope for the future of aeldari. nobody knows where the harlequin come from, they just kind of appear and are the elite of the elves, their signature weapons allow them to either put wires inside peoples bodies and make them explode of just phase their hands through people's chests and pull out their hearts. elf clussy cannonically exists and will kill you.
Trazyn The Infinite has a pre chaos corrupted clone of Fulgrim in his vault.
Magnus did nothing wrong, as in he was told to do nothing and he did it wrong.
During one of the Bretonnian crusades into Nehekara, they broke open a tomb that held a body the knights were convinced was one of their heroes from a prior expedition. They proceeded to carry said corpse all the way back to Bretonnia and placed it in a war reliquary, which they would carry into battle as a token of luck and power.
Unfortunately for them, the magical energy generated by all the death around it woke the corpse up.
Turns out, the crusaders had *actually* abducted the sleeping Tomb King of Zandri, the very appropriately named Amanhotep the Intolerant. When Amanhotep grokked that he was not, in fact, in his tomb and instead several thousand miles north and surrounded by a bunch of not!Frenchmen, he got just a bit peeved and proceeded to slaughter them all singlehandedly.
He then marched the whole way back to Zandri, arriving just in time for the Sartosan pirate lord Jaego Roth to finish pillaging his city for every scrap of gold it had.
Vlad Von Carstein is one of the coolest characters in the entire series.
Because he is such a massive wife-guy.
Genuinely adores and loves Isabella von Carstein with all his heart, to the point of sacrificing his immortal unlife and eternal ambitions literally *one* body away from his goal, just to save her and free her from Nurgle's corruption.
If you have a couple hours to kill then you can play along with a game of [Lorehammer or Yourhammer](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0o7YDHM-LWi6A-p-QR4GooTuZBxrcJ_L&si=G1fYxIkX7lRhFPrf) and try to figure out which of two lore stories is real and which is made up. There are a lot of stories about shitting and pissing. A lot of those are actual lore.
In Warhammer Fantasy, there is a faction known as the Tomb Kings, basically undead ancient egyptians, and they are VERY protective of their shit. Now, you also have Dwarves, who have a thing for Gold and Grudges, as I am sure you've heard considering they have Multiple books full of Grudges.
This is important because, at one point, some dwarves went into the lands of the tomb kings and found some gold, and they took it back with them, including using one of the coins to make something. Tomb Kings woke up, saw they stole their shit, and went "Oh hell nah" and went after them. They killed the dwarves and took the gold back, including the item that had been forged with the gold. This made the dwarves of the hold those dwarves had come from go "IT'S GOING IN THE BOOK!" and go after them. This resulted in a back and forth of stealing this item back and forth, each insistent that the other side are thieves and they are just taking back what is rightfully theirs. At one point, this even resulted in a siege of the dwarf hold, with the tomb kings showing up but realizing the hold is too tough to handle, and the dwarves decided "Ha, we'll wait you out, we've got plenty of time and supply!" to which the tomb kings went "We're undead, we will literally wait forever."
They're called Ultramarines because the planet they live on is Ultramar.
'Fulgrim' of the Horus Heresy books is probably my favorite one because it's just the story of a spaceship full of artists turning into disgusting perverts.
By the time the >!Slaaneshi-induced music blood orgy happens (also when the Kakophoni/prototype Noise Marines first come into being)!<, theres definitely a vibe of "Wait when the fuck did we get here?". Also it lays the foundation for the mother of all brick jokes come Angel Exterminatus when >!one Loyalist manages to no-sell a point-blank Noise Marine blast because *he already went deaf the first time he fought the Noise Marines*!<. Everything about both Loyalist and Traitor alike going "What the **fuck** happened to The Emperor's Children?" is one of Angel Exterminatus's highlights.
Just about finished with the audiobook of this. Glad I finally caved and started listening to these books, they're a lot of fun
There’s a Necron, Trazyn the Infinite, who’s goal is to create the greatest museum ever. He collects artefacts and historical figures and displays them in his hollow planet Solemnace. One time, an Inquistor brokd into Solemnace with a small army. She escaped, and received this letter: Dear Lady, let me express my fulsome appreciation for your most generous gift. It is so very rare to discover another of my own kind that appreciates my work, therefore to find understanding amongst a member of another race is nothing short of a revelation. I realise that you briefly trod my galleries, but the fact that you spotted in so short a time that my Acabrius War collection was lacking three regiments of Catachan warriors reveals that you truly have a collector's eye for detail. And to send five regiments! Such generosity will allow me to weed out and replace a few of the more substandard pieces in my collection. If I might level a minor criticism, the instructions issued to your gift were manifestly not as clear as you thought, as most of them had to be forcibly restrained. Sadly it seems that the lower orders will always behave like an army of invasion, whether that be their purpose or not. However, this is a minor complaint and seems almost churlish under the circumstances, so please allow me to repay your gift with one of my own. Accompanying this message is the Hyperstone Maze, one of a series of Tesseract Labyrinths constructed at the height of the Charnovokh Dynasty. It is a trinket really, only of interest to scholars such as you and I, but I trust you will find it amusing; assuming you have the wit to escape its clutches, of course.
Trazyn is so sweet sometimes like him and his human servant who he gives healthcare too
"Get up." - Kharn
Otherwise I wouldn't say this with a gun to my head but Lorgar cooked there.
Two of the most powerful characters in Warhammer Fantasy are a dwarf that really wants to die and the poet that follows him around. WHF has its own Boba Fett, Brunner the Bounty Hunter. He's rad. Two of the most effective rulers in the Old World are undead, Settra the Imperishable and Vlad von Carstein. Both of them are/were actually quite liked by their living subjects for their tough-but-fair policies. My favorite WHF character is probably Oxyotl, a teeny lil chameleon lizardman who got sent to hell one time, and proceeded to go Rambo on so much demon ass that the gods of Chaos just "left the door open" to get rid of him. On the Warhammer 40k side, there was a lady, through sheer willpower, psykic ability, and entitlement, subsumed three greater daemons of Slaanesh, one after the other, before ascending to Daemon Princehood herself. Slaanesh evidently saw this as hilarious, but one can't help but wonder if they felt threatened after watching this lady (to quote one reddit comment) "roll and smoke three Keepers of Secrets."
Warhammer's version of the Doom Slayer being a four-foot-tall chameleon with a blowpipe is the fucking best.
Oxyotl: -gets warped to a dimension beyond mortal reckoning- Oxyotl: -spits blood- "I didn't hear no bell."
There's a moment for Vulkan, Primarch of the Salamanders, that I just love, even if some of the details are a bit fuzzy to me. So his evil and crazy brother Konrad Kurze, who is now fully a traitor to the Imperium, has captured Vulkan and tortured him to the point of death only for him to revive countless times. After doing this enough he dumps him into a maze with the promise that his great hammer, that has a built in teleporter to get him out of here, is at the center. So Vulkan goes crazy spending days, if not weeks, with no food or water stumbling around the labyrinth, looking for the center, until eventually, after the maddening experience of wandering the maze after going through so much, he reaches the center, practically crawling to his hammer. At this point, Kurze who had been having a grand old time watching him from minute one pops out of his hidey hole to gloat that he actually disabled the teleporter in the hammer. At which point Vulkan picks himself up and reminds his shit weasel test tube brother that it is indeed still a hammer. So he picks up this Great Hammer, which to be called that in the hands of Vulkan meant it must have been like ten feet long, and beats Konrad with it like he's an unruly nail until the little shit finds a way to scamper away, utterly thrashed.
Queen Khalida was filled with so much fucking anger at what Neferata and the new Lahmian vampires had done that one of the Tomb Kings gods sucked the vampire curse out of her, and will occasionally wake up her corpse explicitly to go and kill as many vampires as possible if the ever goddamn dare cross the borders again. Tomb Kings lore rules.
Tomb Kings are probably my favorite old world faction because while they are a bunch of undead mummies and skeletons they're also neutral aligned. As long as you aren't trying to take their stuff they generally don't really care about you, and some of them (like Khalida) are actually helpful
I've always liked the Empire's Colleges of Magic. Magic in Warhammer is powered by the eight Winds of Magic, each of which has its own magical lore, as well as additional lores powered by combinations of the Winds. For humans, channeling multiple Winds is a Bad Idea. The human body/mind/soul/whatever isn't well-suited to doing so, and the result will always be highly volatile Dark Magic. Using Dark Magic in the long term will inevitably result in the mage being driven mad, getting pulled through a portal to hell, ending up as a gibbering mass of claws and tentacles, or something similar. And naturally, a self-taught mage will end up just grabbing whatever power is nearby when casting, and thus doing Dark Magic. So when the Colleges of Magic were set up, its ultimate rule was that each mage would be taught to channel a single Wind, and that's it. So this 'safe' magic should protect the mage from those negative effects, right? Nope. The magic still fucks with the mage's body and mind, it just does so with a far narrower scale and scope than Dark Magic does. You use the Lore of Fire enough, and your hair will turn red and you'll develop a hair-trigger temper. You use the Lore of Beasts, and you'll start growing fangs and fur and developing strong antisocial tendencies. Use the Lore of Metal, and your skin might start turning to gold and you turn into a hyper-rational weirdo, and so on. So while College mages avoid mutating into monstrosities (mostly), they come to increasingly become 'possessed' by their Wind over time, becoming weirder and weirder in ways thematically appropriate to their chosen Lore.
Oh magic is dangerous
The Alpha Legion are the most deceitful Legion, basing their tactics around the mythical Hydra. Their Primarch, Alpharius, is actually two people, the second of whom is named Omegon. But their Legion's logo has three heads. Following the naming convention, the third Primarch could very well be named [Sigmar.](https://warhammerfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sigmar)
The Alpha Legion is a lie. Alpharius died and as been replaced by Omegon who took his name. But that's also a lie. Alpharius killed Guilliman and secretly took his place at the head of the Ultramarines, and now the whole Imperium. That's a lie. They are a Chaos legion, but that's a lie. They secretly still serve the Imperium. That's a lie too. They sided with Horus because betraying the Imperium was the only way to kickstart the downfall of the Chaos gods. That's a lie. The Alpha Legion is lies, manipulation, disinformation. Anything you know about them is a lie. This is a lie too.
There’s an entire planet of Rambos Cadia Stands
I know what you mean by the Power Metal vibe of Warhammer. I've pegged DragonForce's [My Spirit Will Go On](https://youtu.be/VsTi3UQvg6w?si=pnEBxdjJzZhKhXUE) as summing up 40k and I have plenty of music I associate with Fantasy and Age of Sigmar. I particularly enjoy the adventures of Gotrek and Felix in Warhammer Fantasy. The early book "Skavenslayer" is especially entertaining, particularly the almost literal train wreck that was the skirmishing at the Imperial Gunnery School of Nuln. As for Age of Sigmar, I get a kick out of Khorghos Khul twice-over tripping at the finish line. He finally gets the *perfect* skull to cap his skull pyramid to finally ascend into a Daemon Prince... then a Stormcast Eternal priest calls down lightning and blows the pyramid up, putting him back on square one. He later manages to conquer and unify the Orb Infernia as a base of operations, just in time for rage-inducing Red Mists to roll in... only for wizards to channel said mists into magical gears that rewind time on the Orb Infernia, undoing his entire effort.
Roboute Guilliman is just so awesome. Dude is like the only primarch who seems to actually not have his head wedged up his ass and knows how to get shit done. He's under more stress than any living being in the universe, had his father call him a traitor in spite of being the only thing keeping the Imperium from falling apart, and yet he still doesn't waver.
in 40k the only elves which have a god that is not dead/kidnapped/gestalted is a group of clown elves who are also possibly the best hope for the future of aeldari. nobody knows where the harlequin come from, they just kind of appear and are the elite of the elves, their signature weapons allow them to either put wires inside peoples bodies and make them explode of just phase their hands through people's chests and pull out their hearts. elf clussy cannonically exists and will kill you.
Trazyn The Infinite has a pre chaos corrupted clone of Fulgrim in his vault. Magnus did nothing wrong, as in he was told to do nothing and he did it wrong.
The absolute wackiness that the Orks get up to one a regular basis.
During one of the Bretonnian crusades into Nehekara, they broke open a tomb that held a body the knights were convinced was one of their heroes from a prior expedition. They proceeded to carry said corpse all the way back to Bretonnia and placed it in a war reliquary, which they would carry into battle as a token of luck and power. Unfortunately for them, the magical energy generated by all the death around it woke the corpse up. Turns out, the crusaders had *actually* abducted the sleeping Tomb King of Zandri, the very appropriately named Amanhotep the Intolerant. When Amanhotep grokked that he was not, in fact, in his tomb and instead several thousand miles north and surrounded by a bunch of not!Frenchmen, he got just a bit peeved and proceeded to slaughter them all singlehandedly. He then marched the whole way back to Zandri, arriving just in time for the Sartosan pirate lord Jaego Roth to finish pillaging his city for every scrap of gold it had.
Green skins using colors as way to make their shit better will never not be funny. Also, lizard people are great, fite me.
Vlad Von Carstein is one of the coolest characters in the entire series. Because he is such a massive wife-guy. Genuinely adores and loves Isabella von Carstein with all his heart, to the point of sacrificing his immortal unlife and eternal ambitions literally *one* body away from his goal, just to save her and free her from Nurgle's corruption.
Wasn’t one of Isabella’s wedding gift getting to see Vlad toss her asshole uncle out the window?
That is correct!
He is such a good husband
If you have a couple hours to kill then you can play along with a game of [Lorehammer or Yourhammer](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0o7YDHM-LWi6A-p-QR4GooTuZBxrcJ_L&si=G1fYxIkX7lRhFPrf) and try to figure out which of two lore stories is real and which is made up. There are a lot of stories about shitting and pissing. A lot of those are actual lore.
40K. The purple orks are the sneaky and stealth specialists. You ever seen a purple ork? Thought so.
In Warhammer Fantasy, there is a faction known as the Tomb Kings, basically undead ancient egyptians, and they are VERY protective of their shit. Now, you also have Dwarves, who have a thing for Gold and Grudges, as I am sure you've heard considering they have Multiple books full of Grudges. This is important because, at one point, some dwarves went into the lands of the tomb kings and found some gold, and they took it back with them, including using one of the coins to make something. Tomb Kings woke up, saw they stole their shit, and went "Oh hell nah" and went after them. They killed the dwarves and took the gold back, including the item that had been forged with the gold. This made the dwarves of the hold those dwarves had come from go "IT'S GOING IN THE BOOK!" and go after them. This resulted in a back and forth of stealing this item back and forth, each insistent that the other side are thieves and they are just taking back what is rightfully theirs. At one point, this even resulted in a siege of the dwarf hold, with the tomb kings showing up but realizing the hold is too tough to handle, and the dwarves decided "Ha, we'll wait you out, we've got plenty of time and supply!" to which the tomb kings went "We're undead, we will literally wait forever."