An Age of Ignorance - READ FIRST

The Basics

The 41st Millennium is a Dark Age. Humanity's empire of the stars has long passed its prime and has entered a millennia-long backslide into a regressive culture that values ignorance and banality over knowledge and creativity.

You don't need to have an exhaustive knowledge of Warhammer 40K canon to play. Lack of understanding is part of the in-game experience. Reading just one canon novel will give you more information then the average Imperial citizen is taught in a lifetime.
We have made some changes to 40K canon. The major ones are covered in "Our Setting" below.
Most of the popular 40K stories haven't happened yet, or if they have they are too distant from our setting to be important. Most of the stories of the main setting take place within the last 200 years of M41, while our story takes place in the middle years of that millennium.
You don't have to read the whole wiki. We have made some suggestions in Reading the Wiki to guide you, but this page covers the majority of what you need to know about the setting.

In general we do not expect you to read any other source material. This wiki contains everything you should know about the universe, if it isn’t here - it isn’t certain to be true or useful, either because it hasn’t happened yet, or because it has no direct impact on our narrative. “Well Educated” Imperial Citizens know enough to allow them to fulfill their functions, and very little else - even those placed high in the social structure know very few ‘truths’ about their world, especially the past.

When something comes up in play that isn’t mentioned here, then being surprised by it is the best response - even if you OC recognise a reference, your character probably doesn’t.

Our Setting - Useful Facts

The following generally ‘universally true’ facts are widely known by characters in our setting. Some of these do not have a solid answer in the base setting, so we have adopted them for our bootleg universe. Some of these are things we have accepted as statements of principle.

Space Marines can be any gender - as good a boilerplate for ‘please fuck off if you have a problem with this’ as any. This is simply the way things are in our universe.

Representation across the Imperium is diverse - over the years various long-forgotten pieces of canon have been held up by 40k fans who are not welcome at DuD justifying the lack of representation in the main universe and its model line. This is simply treated as false in our setting. The only place you will not find diversity in the Imperium is the Adepta Sororitas, who in our setting accept only recruits who identify as female. If you are wondering why we haven’t done the same for the Sororitas that we have done to Astartes - that is because we believe that erasing the only faction that gave female representation in the universe for years is vastly more problematic than helpful.

Deviation from gender and sexual norms of the 21st century is not a sign of Chaos Corruption - much can be said of the endless issues with how the main universe has used sexual activity, especially where certain fetishes are involved, as a sign of ‘evil’ and ‘corruption’. We explicitly do not associate sexual behaviour with corruption. Please don’t make this association in your roleplay. We are sex positive and do not approve of kink-shaming or indeed any tropes associating sexual preference with ‘evil’. Chaos has weirder things to worry about then what you do in the bedroom.

The Imperium is mechanically regressive - one of the strange notes about the Imperium is its largely universal fear of computers and thinking machines. This is an odd fear propagated even within the technologically advanced Machine Cult - it means that in many things humans are often used where one might think some kind of automaton might best be served, with whole work-crews operating the reloading processes on gigantic weapons where it seems woefully inefficient.

The Imperium is surprisingly biotechnologically advanced - perhaps one of the freakish and disturbing factors of Imperial engineering is that it takes its reliance on the human component to the grotesque extreme - it would not be unusual to find brain matter, or indeed the entire head of a human or some other biological lifeform worked into the components of an Imperial machine. The Imperium has a great deal of veneration for the surety of human flesh where it lacks it in computers. While these homunculi or ‘Servitors’ as they are commonly known are a common punishment carried out on criminals in the Imperium the need for them is far greater than those bodies that can be served up by criminal justice. To meet their needs, the Imperium vat-grows millions of such creations daily - this need for biological components has left the Imperium incredibly masterful of biological sciences and while it has experienced regression in its knowledge it is still incredibly capable. The growing of children within an artificial womb is a trivial act allowing same-sex unions to produce offspring with little effort. And, although it has not quite found the secret of -eternal- life rejuvenat treatments can extend a natural human lifespan to nearly four hundred years, after which cybernetic augmentation of failing organs and biological components can, in theory, extend lives almost indefinitely.

The Age of Ignorance - Mid-M.41

There is a single phrase that is repeated again and again amongst the upper echelons of the Imperium:

“Blessed are the Ignorant for they lack the burden of knowledge...”

This is not simply philosophy, but doctrine: the Imperium believes that its Citizens should not know more than it permits them to know. A mid-level Administratum Scribe doesn’t need to know about the worlds that the petitions for aid that cross their desk come from; they don’t need to interpret or make objective judgements - that strays far too close to independent thought. No matter how good a judgement they apply, the failure to assess something according to the standards of the Administratum can result in sanction rather than praise. The majority of the Imperial Citizenry are cogs in a machine: they fulfill a role, menial or otherwise, and they are worked hard. Eleven hour shifts are the norm; they are kept too tired to think and too tired to question. Their exposure to the world beyond their factories is in Sermons from the Imperial Cult or Propaganda Reels shown on communal vid-screens on rare occasions as a reward.

Most Scholams (Schools) in the Imperium are places where children are indoctrinated and trained for a life spent in servitude, not places of education as humans in earlier ages of humanity would understand it. Education, and indeed free thought and creative expression, are often the markers of an outsider. Higher Birth, Service to the Upper Class, Outlaws - all these individuals find themselves on the outside of the masses, unable to easily reintegrate after stepping outside the blinkered life of the common citizen. This is why even those taken into the service of the Imperium’s galactic forces, the Imperial Navy and Imperial Guard, rarely fit in if they are lucky enough to ‘retire’ from the service. Many choose the horrors of extensive cybernetic augmentation to repair war-wounds to keep them fighting until their death in service, over trying to live a civilian life again.

If you want to know in-depth details about life in Mid-M41 then we recommend reading the Life in the Imperium section of the Wiki - this page and its sub-pages contain the bare bones details to make it as easy to consume as possible.

The Imperium Eterna and the Creation Myths of the Imperium

The majority of Imperial citizens believe that it has always existed. The Imperium is obsessed with the past eras of its history, presented in vast mythological cycles featuring Demi-Gods and Heroes, but very rarely the common human. Yet at the same time, the Imperial Government has invested an impressive amount of time to redacting, suppressing and deliberately falsifying the history of the Imperium. Not that anyone knows this: the majority of Imperial citizens might not fully believe the mythological histories of the Imperium, but they know no more reliable stories.

Stagnancy is not just a sign of humanity's waning, it is doctrinal: so long has the Imperium stood, that many who lead it have come to believe that reform and change are heresies in themselves. This is often embodied in the phrase Imperium Eterna and supported in the creation myths of the Imperium. There has always been the Imperium, the idea that humanity had a history before it is considered a falsehood. Historian is a term that exists in the lexicon of the Imperium, but such a role does not exist - the practice of teaching history is the dominion of the Priesthood of the Imperial Cult, and history is recorded according to political directives, not research.

The Imperial cult is a melting pot of local beliefs and cults, so there is no point replicating any one creation myth of the Imperium, but the following points are universally found in all of them:

The God-Emperor, Master of Humanity (though masculine terms are used here, Their gender varies depending on local doctrine and personal perspective) created the Imperium, forging a grand empire. There are mixed opinions on whether the God-Emperor created humanity, but many believe it so. Everyone agrees that the Emperor forged this eternal Imperium in a series of often outlandish, acts.

The God-Emperor begat Nine Offspring, the Holy Primarchs. These Demi-Gods were Their right hand in leading the armies of the Imperium in a great undertaking to take the entire Galaxy for humanity, as is humanity's divine right. From this Offspring they created the Adeptus Astartes, the Angels of Death, peerless warriors made from the blood of the Primarchs by the Emperor, who would form the Emperor’s Legions. This undertaking was the Great Crusade, a massive military campaign that spread the Imperium to the furthest reaches of the Galaxy.

Many myths disagree at what caused it, but at some point chaos erupted in the galaxy the Great Enemy disrupting the Great Crusade, starting a period of history known as the Great Heresy or Horus Heresy. The Archdemon Horus, one of Nine Demons, sometimes confusingly referred to as the Archtraitor, was the greatest threat that the Imperium had ever faced. This great tragedy was weathered, however, and the God-Emperor faced down Horus, slaying the demon and saving the Imperium, before They sat upon the Golden Throne in victory to contemplate Their great work and to protect the souls of humanity.

Following this period the Primarchs completed many Great Works and accomplished many acts. Though few local cults would claim that their world was ever visited by the God-Emperor, those Imperial worlds old enough to believe they existed in this time of myth often have some local myth that one of the Primarchs visited their world in this age. (These accounts are often contradictory if too closely examined). In time, these Demi-Gods passed the Imperium over to the Senatorum Imperialis - the so-called High Lords of Terra, human politicians entrusted with the sacred right of leading the Imperium by divine mandate.

Beyond this point, myths become increasingly localised retellings of planetary and sector histories, usually justifying the heritage of local rulers by tracing them back to mythological figures from humanity's past.

Returning Characters

The level of ignorance described above doesn't apply to characters who have already set foot in the wider Prosperitas Sector. Characters who have already played games are not expected to ‘reset’ their knowledge - what they have learned in play they keep for life.

Depending on your level of Lore and education, your character may begin play with a greater understanding of the truths of the Imperium's history. If in doubt, you can always Contact the game team to help calibrate what your character does and doesn't know when entering play.