HereForTheBeer: Sooo, it's about removing the months-old biology experiments from my refrigerator?

sunshinecorp: You make him sound so cool! You know, considering he now requires a thousand human sacrifices per day to keep going. :D

Tarm: Grimdark.

As I said. Everything goes to shit.

Ok I'll elaborate. :)

There's the real material world and then there's another dimension consisting of pure energy that is affected by emotions from the material world. Also it's where souls go after death.
A thousand something before BC a group of shamans noticed souls wasn't being reborn from the warp (The immaterium. The energy dimension.). They gathered it was because the warp was in turmoil because of the constant violence everywhere. So they committed mass suicide, did a soul group hug in the warp and out from that plorped The Emperor into the material world. Dunno if he was born or what. He plorped into being and that have to do as an explanation.
Now he is vastly wise and powerful because all the shaman souls powers etc. Also he's a psyker which means he can manipulate warp energies into the material dimension.
His overall mission is to calm the warp again and make both dimensions safe for mankind.

So he didn't find much to do for millenniums as humankind trudged on. Got a golden age, explored and conquered the stars, invented a lot of nice stuff and had a grand time.
Until the warp started to go haywire. The way humanity travels between the stars is that they take brief shortcuts through the warp and when there are warp storms they cant do that. There were storms all over the place so humankinds empire crumbled. As a bonus suddenly there plopped up psykers everywhere that exploded all sorts of things and also acted as portals for the warps demons to get to the material world. Yeah the living races (Humanity ain't alone by a longshot in the galaxy.) had by now messed up the warp with all their twisted emotions that it got to be literally hell.

So everything went belly up and earth got back to some sort of Mad Max state.
"I gotta do something!" said The Emperor. So he became the meanest bastard on devastated Terra and created genetically modified supersoldiers to do that.
"What now?" he thought. Suddenly it dawned on him. "Let's go on the mother of all crusades! Whip the rest of the galaxy into shape with Humans as dictators!" :D
Humming by himself he created 20 Primarchs, superdupersoldiers to lead his supersoldiers. The genetically altered ones.
That was around 30,000 BC.

Chaos (That's what the warp powers/gods are called. There are a couple of them and they're ridiculously powerful and all want to do their own thing. The Emperor wants order and they want chaos.) teleported away the primarchs to random places in the galaxy.
The Emperor said "Fine I'll just play hide and seek then!", started the crusade and ran across a primarch here and there that he picked up.

Everything was going fine with the genocides, oppression, feudalism, planet destroying, vassal creation etc etc. Just your normal crusade in a whole lot of bigger scale.
Until Chaos corrupted a powerful primarch which backstabbed The Emperor by starting a civil war. Half the Empire fought the other half.
The Emperor won but was mortally wounded so they stuck him in a golden food dispenser and shit remover throne. There he sits unable to do anything at all and humankind and its empire are ruled by some lords that mostly get along. The Empire is made as inefficient as possible so no person can again get as much power as that backstabbing betrayer asshole. Which means that everything is tightly controlled, science is nonexistant because new inventions can be dangerous and so on. It's like Mad Max mixed with terminator (No AI. That's forbidden.) technology in all sorts of hellish environments like massive cities that are just apartments tucked onto factories or the like.

It's now 40,000 BC, everything is going backward with the society and various aliens and chaos thingies are attacking The Empire from everywhere. Grimdark.

Phew!

johnnygoging: that was actually a really good and concise introduction to this nonsense. you covered pretty all the big points.

granny: Basically:

It's about a fascist, brutal, all encompassing state being the lesser evil for mankind to choose. It's about defiance in the face of oblivion. It's about courage, and sacrifice, and extremism. It's about zealotry being the only counter for zealotry. It's about the long, drawn-out suicide of civilisation. And it's about aliens, demons, and genetically modified supermen kicking the crap out of each other.

sunshinecorp: So, Saturday night out with the guys.

Blackdrazon: I'll give it a shot. One paragraph, huh? Would you mind giving me one for the real-world side?

The Warhammer 40,000 setting is the science-fiction spinoff of the original Warhammer setting. Both were heavily supported in the early days by roleplaying magazine White Dwarf, which is now a 100% Warhammer magazine, but gave the games a lot of its early fanbase. Suffice to say, the fandoms are very large. Both settings are primarily home to tabletop strategy games where two armies battle one another, but have also been host to roleplaying games, skirmish games, and even esoteric silliness like Blood Bowl.

I'll cover Warhammer itself first, if that's all right. The Warhammer setting is a world geographically like our own, but with fantasy races and set in an age bordering the late medieval and early renaissance. The primary moving factor in Warhammer are the forces of Chaos. Chaos is a demonic force that frequently strikes from the north and impacts virtually everyone's lives. Every race has their own internal politics and feuds, but Chaos presses down on all of them. The Empire is the game's central, human setting, but there are also elves fighting civil wars, dwarves fighting infinite orcs and goblins on their border, mutated rat-men tunnelling under all the cities of the world, various kinds of undead, and worse. In short, it's an established, if someone generic, fantasy setting that largely distinguishes itself by its fatalistic tone: everyone in the Warhammer World is going to be wiped out by its evils one day, they can only fight to delay it.

Warhammer 40 000 is the sci-fi equivalent. It is also about the fight against Chaos and the inevitability that everyone will lose, but where the fantasy story has some hope of delay, the Warhammer 40k setting is already corrupt and dying. The primary "heroes" are the totalitarian Empire, with its nearly soulless procedures, strange apocalyptic religion, and its implacable metal storm troopers. A few other races exist mirroring other Warhammer species, including the Eldar (elves), but it's mostly terrible human beings versus an even worse outside forces. The Orks are still around (you can't stop them forever), Chaos exists in space as well (in a nice crossover bit, the demons of Chaos are identical in both settings), and there are worse things out there as well, like the robotic Necrons and the Alien-like Tyranids. In short: everyone is going to die eventually - so die fighting.

Personally I'm more a fan of fantasy but everyone's going to like their own thing.

tinyE: I was thinking WWE Monday Night Raw.

granny: It's about a fascist, brutal, all encompassing state being the lesser evil for mankind to choose.