I started playing WH40k Rogue Trader and I'm digging it, but I know virtually nothing of Warhammer. Any super basic world info I should know going in?

Submitted ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Apeman42@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

I know a little about Orks and their weird group psychic thing where painting their ships red to go fast really makes them faster, and their tech only works because they think it should. But then I guess Orks aren’t even in this game.

I get that it’s a violent, black-vs-grey universe. I think it’s the originator of the term grimdark? The emperor is some immortal Mr House asshole who’s worshipped as a god, which powers some of their tech and protects them from chaos via his psyker shit? And he’s kind of a fascist, but it’s that or bloody chaos?

Rogue traders seem like somewhere between a privateer and a baron, plundering tithes in their castle-ships and acting as an arm of the Imperium in backwater space?

There are more wizards than I expected. Not sure if these mechanicus dudes are pulling “Temples of Syrinx” thing, or they know how the tech works but not why so they worship it? Or if it’s actually machine spirits?

Anything super foundational that I’m missing?

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Ketram@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Everyone else covered stuff pretty well. I guess I want to elaborate more on the writing style of 40K:

The reason why 40K grimdark stuff is so fascinating and not just depressing is because humanity has spread so far, to countless untold worlds being found and re-found as the warp fucks up space travel etc. that the value of a human life is essentially NOTHING.

They live in such horrible fascist, imperialist control, surrounded by countless incredible enemies and dangers that most imperialist groups just wipe out groups of people (or even planets) that seem corrupted, or straying, or whatever else.

I think understanding the level of oppression for these people is tantamount to understanding the morality and characters of rogue trader. As a rogue trader, you are one of the only wildly privileged people in the galaxy. Everyone else is so used to existing in this deeply fucked hierarchy in this deeply fucked universe, that to understand them you need to accept this is how their lives are.

Sorry if that was too vague, but it is important context, I think. This is a universe where the value of a human life is infinitesimal.

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TJDetweiler@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I guess it’s probably helpful to know what a rogue trader actually is. I think the game explains it somewhat, but just in case, here’s a (not so) quick rundown on some major components of the lore and game.

A lot of people think that rogue traders are just the captain of a big ship. They are not. They command nearly unimaginable power within the imperium. They have a warrant of trade sealed with the blood of the emperor from a time when he walked among men. It is both a holy relic, and a hall pass to do whatever the fuck they want mostly. They are pretty much outside the bounds of imperial law. They can recruit xenos and worse into their crew. They can befriend, dominate, subjugate, and exterminate entire systems if they wish. Not even the Inquisition can really boss them around, but Lord inquisitors are probably the only authority to actually influence a rogue trader. A rogue trader wouldn’t want to piss off a lord inquisitor and vice versa.

It is the duty of rogue traders to navigate unexplored space and claim worlds for the imperium. The world’s they claim are theirs by right of their warrant of trade, but those worlds are required to pay tithe to the larger imperium, which is non negotiable. The tithe is usually set by the high lords of terra or the administrators that work underneath them.

As for wizards/magicians, they do and don’t exist. They are called psykers, and their “magic” is derived from the warp, the nightmarish parallel reality inhabited by daemons and their respective gods. Using warp energy is extremely dangerous, and can cause the veil between realities to thin. If it thins, tears open up, and daemons can burst forth. This is usually a one way street, as anything non-daemon entering, or even seeing the warp, will pretty much instantly go insane, turn into a chaos spawn, or worse. There are very few exceptions, but they do exist. There is a lot more to the warp, I’d recommend looking into it deeper if you’re interested. Leutin09 on YouTube is a great source.

Now that we know what both rogue traders are and what psykers are, we can talk about navigators, which are a really important part of the game and lore. They are human, but mutated. They have a genetic trait that gives them a third eye on their forehead. They use this eye to see into the warp. It’s not perfect, but it can help ships travel through the warp, which is humanity’s form of faster-than-light travel. Pretty much every warp capable craft will have one. Ones that don’t take extreme risks even doing the smallest warp jumps. Without navigators, the imperium is screwed. It’s why they are one the very sanctioned abhumans.

As for the mechanicus, machines spirits, and the god they worship, it’s somewhat complex. The mechanicus at its height was technologically progressive, and significantly more advanced than the contemporary version. They understood how to create and innovate. During the age of strike, they lost much of their knowledge. Creations they once built, they have lost the knowledge to rebuild, repair, enhance, and sometimes even maintain. When dark age technology is lost, it is usually lost for good, which makes it so valuable. The current day mechanicus has stagnated, and are afraid to progress as innovation has caused problems in the past (see Age of Strige and men of iron).

The modern day mechanicus warships the omnissiah, which is essentially the avatar of the machine god, which they believe is the emperor. In a roundabout way, they do workshop the emperor, which is relatively in line with the imperial creed. The mechanics is technically separate from the imperium per the treaty of Mars that the emperor signed, which gives the mechanicus religious freedoms and rights to technological finds, such a STC fragments. I’m not going to talk about STCs here. Mechanicus likes the fragments. They struck a deal with big E, and now they are an allied faction to the imperium. For all intents and purposes, you can consider them a joint faction, but they are technically distinct.

As for machine spirits, they do exist. I think of it kind of like how orc psychic manifestions work, though, to be honest I’m foggy on the details as machine spirits did exist during humanity’s enlightened phase. Technology does have machine spirits, and the more powerful the machine, the more powerful the machine spirit. Tech priests sometimes must commune with and appease machine spirits. Angry machine spirits can cause their host machine to misfire, break down, malfunction, etc. Appeased machine spirits can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the machine they are bound to, with some spirits being so powerful they can control aspects of a machine, such as advanced targetting systems, defensive capabilities, etc.

You’ve got the gist of the foundation of the lore down, so my breakdown above is a little more comprehensive. Feel free to ask any more questions or DM me. I also wrote all this at 2am in the dark so if there are typos, inconsistencies, or things that need further clarification, I apologize and in advance.

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- Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  
  The modern day mechanicus warships the omnissiah
  
  A typo, but honestly a very fitting one
  
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CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The Emperor of Mankind preached the Imperial Truth: Atheism, Logic, and Humanity. There are no gods. Which is a lie because gods do exist.

Then he was betrayed, mostly killed, and enshrined on the Golden Throne where 10,000 psychics are sacrificed per day to keep him alive.

And then his empire started preaching the Imperial Creed: That he is the God Emperor. A title he tried desperately to avoid.

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arudesalad@piefed.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
All you really need to know for rogue trader is that there is a reality parallel to our own called the warp and it’s where daemons and chaos gods live. It’s where wizards (psykers) pull their power from so they are very dangerous and you also need to travel through it to go anywhere. Most things will be explained to you by mousing over the orange text while you are playing.

If you haven’t yet, you should listen or read (reddit link, only one I could find) an intro to the dark millenium. It’s not relevant to rouge trader but sets the scene for the universe the game takes place in very well.

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ooterness@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You’ve got the important foundational elements. The other big event is the Horus Heresy, where about half of the Emperor’s sons fell to Chaos and started a huge civil war that left the Emperor in his current half-dead state, but the imperial bureaucracy keeps on chugging.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the world of Warhammer 40k has been evolving over decades of novels, tabletop games, and video games made by multiple authors. As a result, the canon is vast and occasionally self-contradictory.

If you want to know more, I highly recommend the Ciaphas Cain books (novels with a comedy streak) and a silly fan series called If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech device.

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- ViatorOmnium@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  As a result, the canon is vast and occasionally self-contradictory
  
  “Record keeping is shit and we aren’t even sure what year it is any more so don’t take anything at face value " is the new canon, so the canon being a mess is canon now.
  
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- wissenisstmacht@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I second reading or listening to the Ciaphas Cain books, since they bring that pinch of satire with them.
  
  You also get to explore most races from the 40k universe quite quickly.
  
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  - Delphia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Quite quickly?
    
    I would say with almost unseemly haste
    
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elbucho@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You’ll see a lot of brutal shit like servitors (lobotomized humans turned into mechanical servants). The origin for that is that AI was once very much in use, but the computers rose up and threatened humanity’s survival, so they made it very illegal. They now use “AI”, or “Abominable Intelligence”: living humans who have been turned into computers.

Another thing that’s interesting is that humanity’s been in the dark ages for so long that nobody has any idea how their shit works anymore. So they have people, called “tech priests” who dedicate their lives to learning voodoo bullshit to keep the machines running. Essentially, they believe that the machines are imbued with souls and they have to perform certain rituals to keep the machine spirits happy. All the giant military hardware they have is thousands of years old because nobody has any fucking clue how to manufacture it anymore. Same thing for most of their computer systems.

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aaaa@piefed.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Every faction is evil

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- CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Are the Tyranids actually evil? They’re horrific from our point of view but do they even have the concept of evil? They’re just hungry.
  
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  - rainwall@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    They are at best neutral, on the way q hurricane or volcano is neutral.
    
    They destroy all in their path in a way that seems indescriminate, but no one knows what the hive mind thinks. They may be evil beyond all knowing.
    
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ajmaxwell@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Bricky on YouTube has a good series of videos talking about the lore of WH40K

youtu.be/zPB3Q59vjR8 youtu.be/xCGKPRiJp84 youtu.be/Y6jnsX77TCU youtu.be/Ae2Beeleswc

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- Malix@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Bricky is entertaining and laces the lore with memes. Easy entry to the lore, if a bit wrong at times - or so I’ve been told. “Close enough”, imo.
  
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wissenisstmacht@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I think reading the opening text on any book fully gives you a good grasp. Often it’s abbreviated to „in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war“ All the other lines explain quite well, why humanity would be so inhumane in this scenario and why there can be only war. Basically all factions but especially humans live in different flavors of fascism in 40k. Orks might be a bit of an outlier here. Warhammer is a fun tabletop game and has awesome pc games and books. The lore is (or used to be) very critical and satirical on where humankind might end up in a science denying, fascist dystopia (basically the opposite of Star Trek)

Despite all criticism and satire, Warhammer itself is difficult on misogyny (e.g. only men can be space marines ™ because of genes), toxic masculinity & warrior culture, queer (with some positive exceptions) and trans topics (again, genes and also demons get mixed up here). Sadly the lore wise intergalactic xenophobia and racism also seems to be an open door to neo-nazis who turn the hobby into their racist fantasy. (Something I didn’t grasp but quickly realized looking at some armies of other players on tabletop and them talking).

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wesker@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Go down the rabbit hole on Youtube of Warhammer world lore and history. It’s pretty wild and fascinating.

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mech@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The humans are not the good guys and the God-Emperor is actually completely dead.

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SmoothOperator@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The chaos factions are devoted to passion, life, knowledge and pleasure, and the Imperium are devoted to the corpse of a lying megalomaniac telling everyone they are forbidden from having a good time.

Anything else you hear is propaganda.

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- Delphia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Sharpens Shovel
  
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HornedMeatBeast@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
More dakka.

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sober_monk@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The others already said and linked good stuff, here’s a very brief summary of the most basic info on thr Imperium.

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Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That Ork stuff is a meme. Their tech works, they’re not powered by imagination.

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- ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Are there orks in rogue trader? I’ve been waiting for all the dlcs before I replay it.
  
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  - Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    No idea, I was responding to their first paragraph.
    
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