Damn dude, that’s comprehensive as fuck.
Maybe you can confirm if I have some other stuff down that you didn’t mention? I poked my head down some wiki rabbit holes, and I love a good origin story so I started looking waaay back.
So the Warp is an alternate dimension affected by the thoughts and emotions of sentient beings from this one, and also apparently a place souls do or would go before being reincarnated? As we evolved and started having more of us and more complex negative emotions, these eddies in the Warp coalesced into Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle.
Earth’s shamans (proto-psykers?) start to notice their fellows aren’t reincarnating so much anymore and figure out the chaos gods are nomming them up in the Warp when they die. They get every shaman on earth together in a council, and decide on a Jonestown Voltron plan, whereby they’ll all kill themselves at once, fuse into a mega-soul in the Warp, and give the chaos gods good wallop to send them running for awhile.
That shaman Voltron soul incarnates in 8000 BCE as the boy that will one day be the Emperor.
Emps just kind of does the Vandal Savage thing on Earth until we get a spacefaring civilization rolling. He starts leading shit, allies with the Mechanicus on Mars and founds the Imperium in the late 30th millenium.
Unrelated and around the same time, the Aeldari (hedonistic space elves) have a rave orgy so good they cause Slaanesh to form and simultaneously fuck open that hole to the Warp someone mentioned.
Yadda yadda yadda space crusade Yadda yadda yadda Horus Heresy Yadda yadda “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”
Is that more or less on-point? I haven’t looked into most xenos too much besides the Aeldari waking Slaanesh. I think the T’au are the galactic newbies and kinda space dwarves? And the Nekrons were far far away genetically engineering slave races while Emps was still shitting his loincloth?
TJDetweiler@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
You’ve pretty much got it. I’ll reiterate some points below.
The warp, or the sea of souls, is an alternate dimension in which the soul of nearly every living being goes when its corporeal form dies. It is a place that is theorized to have always existed, although for much of it’s history, was a relatively peaceful and dormant place. As sentient species, particularly humanity, spread across the galaxy, it made the warp more tumultuous. Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle have probably always existed in some lesser form, but as events transpire within real-space, they begin to grow in power. The cycle of life, death and decay fuels Nurgle, while Khorne grows more powerful as wars are waged. Tzeentch feeds on betrayal, schemes, plots, and change. These themes have been around since time immemorial, and so have these warp creatures that formed into the current day chaos gods.
The outlier is Slaanesh, who, as you noted, was pretty much murder-fucked into existence. Her birth was so catastrophic that she instantly killed most Eldar and and all their gods, and ripped open the galaxy in the heart of the Aeldari empire, which is why we now have the eye of terror.
Before I talk about Eldar, I need to talk about souls real quick. All souls reflect in the warp, and nearly every living thing has a soul. A plant probably isn’t going to show up in the warp, but a human soul will, though a human soul is barely a candle flicker. A human psyker however, will be a strong flame and be much more noticeable to daemons. An Eldar soul is a bonfire, and a delicacy for Slaanesh. Since the birth of Slaanesh, she saps the Eldar of the souls over time. If an Eldar’s soul is unprotected, over time, Slaanesh will turn that Eldar into a soulless husk. Each Eldar faction has a way of handling that problem, which I’ll explain below.
Now this part may be kind of dense because Aeldari get a lot of representation within Rogue Trader. They come in several flavours - 3 main factions I can think of, but I’m sure there are more smaller ones: Eldar (Aeldari), Dark Eldar (Drukhari), and Harlequins.
Eldar
After the birth of Slaanesh, some Aeldari believed they must renounce their hedonistic ways, which are your regular Aeldari you see today. They fly around on their craftworlds and generally refrain from murder fucking. They keep soulstones on them so that if they die, their soul can be captured by the stone before it departs to the warp and inevitably consumed by She Who Thirsts. These soulstones are placed into the craftworld itself, which forms a sort of Eldar-only purgatory called the Infinity Circuit. These fallen Eldar can be called upon for council, or even for war, as they can inhabit war constructs made of wraithbone, which is a psychoactive building material that Aeldari society relies on heavily. It’s essentially condensed warp matter that Bonesingers can form into shapes. If you’re curious, a wraithlord is an example of what I’m talking about.
Dark Eldar
The twisted kin of the Eldar took a different path after Slaanesh’s birth. Instead of protecting their soul using soulstones, Dark Eldar “steal” the souls of other. They perform massive raids on sentient species from their dark city of Commorragh deep within the webway. The webway is a sort of pocket dimension. It exists outside of realspace, and also outside of the warp. Typically anything within the webway is safe from Chaos, but you’ll find there are exceptions to that. Anyway these Dark Eldar leave their city, raid a human planet, steal a bunch of humans, and take them back home. Once home, they pretty much torture the living shit out of these poor souls. In doing so, they replenish a bit of their own soul that Slaanesh has fed off of. Much of Dark Eldar society is built around torture, and so they have massive these coliseums in which thousands will gather to have their souls replenished during some fucked up gladiatorial event where captives will have to fight and be tortured. Dark Eldar also have extremely advanced technology and can essentially keep their victims alive indefinitely. They are also able to regrow themselves. Haemonculi, which are a sort of chirurgeon, are able to regrow a Dark Eldar body from a small piece. If a finger is left over, that may be enough to bring a Dark Eldar back. So essentially, they don’t protect their soul like Eldar, they replenish it by way of torture as Slaanesh is constantly feeding off them.
Harlequins
These are a pretty mysterious and secluded third faction. They are soothsayers, story tellers, fate weavers, and mystics. They also live in the webway, are keepers of the Black Library, and don’t partake in hedonistic acts. To protect their souls, they utterly devote themselves to the (likely) last remaining Aeldari god Cegorach. When a Harlequin dies, Cegorach snatches the soul before Slaanesh can. Not much is known about what actually happens with the soul or how Cegorach manages to protect and hide it from Slaanesh. Cegorach will try to do this for other non-harlequin Aeldari whose souls enter the warp, but it’s not guaranteed he can save their soul.
Ok that’s enough Eldar backstory, and should give a sufficient basis of knowledge in regards to the game.
The earth shaman story is the most likely theory, but it isn’t confirmed, or maybe rather it’s confirmed through an unreliable source. Anyway, there are other theories about how the emperor came into being, such as the Sigilites creating him. I won’t get into that theory here, but yes, the running theory is that a bunch of Shamans killed themselves simultaneously so their souls could coalesce and form the Emperor. I don’t think the Emperor ever gave the Chaos Gods a wallop, but he did deceive them and steal their power for his own plans, which is why we have the Primarchs. For what it’s worth, there are many references in both Warhammer Fantasy and 40k that state the Chaos gods are always playing their great game, vying for power among one another. The split seconds they look away from their great game is when calamity falls upon humanity, but a vast majority of time (not that it exists within the warp) is spent fighting each other. If the Chaos gods actually teamed up and spent more than a fraction of their power on wiping out the galaxy, they could do it. This however will never happen, as if the galaxy does not exist to feed the warp, they will cease to be as well.
Now, assuming the shaman theory is true, the Emperor guided humanity in the shadows for tens of thousands of years until he made himself known and created the imperium of man. The rest is as you say, space crusade, horus heresy, internment on the golden throne, blah blah blah. You’ve got it.
The rest of the Xenos factions don’t get a ton of representation in Rogue Trader. I won’t say what, I’ll leave you to discover it yourself, but I can quickly touch on Tau and Necros below as you mentioned them
Tau
Yep, galactic newbies, and a small empire. They are rapidly advancing, but are nowhere near anything that could be considered a threat to the imperium. They live simply due to the slow bureaucratic processes that prevent the imperium from properly mustering the miniscule amount of strength it would take to wipe the Tau off the playing field. If you take what they say at face value (which you probably shouldn’t), they might be the only faction that can be considered the “good” guys. I wouldn’t really call them space dwarves, that’s more Leagues of Votann.
Necrons
Necrons are pretty much (imo) the biggest xenos threat to the galaxy, aside from arguably Tyranids. Their technology is so advanced it is akin to magic by the imperiums understanding. They have devices that can simply delete planets from existence. Their basic gauss weapons rend organic matter down to atoms. The only reason why they haven’t dominated the galaxy at the current time is that they are still awakening after millions of years in slumber. A small fraction of the race is currently active and awake, while the vast majority still rests within their tomb worlds. In the early days, the Necrons killed their gods and turned them into batteries. I cannot emphasize how powerful this xenos faction is. To clarify your last sentence, they aren’t genetically engineering other races. They believe in racial supremacy. Necrons dominate, lesser races serve. They are the ones who were genetically engineered by their gods (the C’tan) in the early days. Once, Necrons were humanoid, made of flesh and bone. Their homeworld revolved around an irradiated sun. The Necrontyr (their name before they became robots) were highly advanced, but their lifespans were short due to their sun essentially killing them. Their goal was to seek immortality, something the Old Ones had figured out. Necrons waged war with the Old Ones in an attempt to learn these secrets, but were unsuccessful. As the Necrontyr were pushed back and driven towards extinction, they struck a deal with the C’tan. The C’tan promised immortality in exchange for alliance with the Necrontyr, as they told the Necrontyr they were also once at war with the Old Ones. This was a lie. The C’tan simply wanted something to feed on. Anyway a bunch of shit happened, the Necrontyr went through a biotransference process, ate a bunch of Necrontyr souls, and now you have Necrons. More advanced Necron forms have retained a larger portion of their soul, so your run of the mill necron warrior is essentially a soulless automaton, while overlords retain much of their former self.
I’d recommend reading the wiki on the C’tan if you want to know more. It’s quite a good read.
warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/C'tan