Ruinous powers: Warhammer 40k Chaos factions guide To make things easier, we’ve split the 20-odd total factions into three separate articles, of which this is the first – introducing the armies of the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man.įor those who prefer to venture beyond the warmth of the Emperor’s holy light, feel free to commit heresy by reading our Chaos guide below – and, if you prefer a few extra arms, check out our guide to 40k’s Xenos armies. You’re really going to need a few cups of tea for this one. But be warned – it’s impossible to cover all the armies in this sprawling game without going on a bit.

We’re going to break it down to much more palatable chunks, don’t worry.

They’ll tell of how the various institutions within the grand Imperium of Man jostled for primacy over 10,000 years of total war how the capricious tinkerings of the Chaos gods raised entire civilisations over millennia, only to annihilate them at a stroke how Ork economies function on the basis of smashing out and then exchanging their own teeth, and on, and on… It can be a time-consuming endeavour. Ask a 40k lore aficionado to briefly list the factions at play in Warhammer 40,000 and they will laugh heartily at your fresh-faced naivete, before gratefully launching into a breathless, multi-hour lecture. Today, it boasts an extended universe of lore, history, characters, politics, metaphysics and, of course, warfare which easily dwarfs most other fantasy franchises, and which continues to live in profitable harmony with the tabletop miniatures game and its family of digital adaptations.īut that huge library of lore can be a forbidding mountain to climb for new initiates to the game. And boy, oh boy, what a big, horrible and altogether complicated war it can seem sometimes! The borders of 40k have grown exponentially over the three decades since Games Workshop released its first edition of the game (then called Rogue Trader) in 1987. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war – this is one of few fundamental laws in the vast, intoxicating, gothic sci-fi setting of Warhammer 40k.

40k imperial guard colour schemes