Warhammer 40K Fluff Discussion XVI: Where the Ordnance is Hand-Delivered!

[Amechra]

-the Sisters of Battle have a history of frequently being depicted as either losing or falling into chaos.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the Sisters are notable for not falling to Chaos. Sure they lose, but canonically Sisters are pretty resistant to corruption.

[Voidhawk]

For whom is the Imperium "best" and "good", though? There's no sense in which it can be considered the strictly best possible option for the class of underhivers and abhumans it violently exploits, and without whom it would collapse. That's as canon as the external threats of the setting. Even if it were an interesting idea, as a thought experiment, to try to justify a setting where fascism is the solution (which, as LCP says, why would you get your kicks out of doing this?), that doesn't address the issue that even as presented, the Imperium is not a good thing for the average human in the setting – it's the greatest evil they are ever likely to know. Teeming trillions of human lives would be better if the project failed, regardless of the external threats; the utilitarian argument simply doesn't work.

Note that I never said anywhere that the Imperium was "good" or "the good guys". 40k is a horrible, tragic place because the rules of the setting explicitly state no good guys are permitted to exist. That's the core meaning of Grim Dark. The Eldar understand this, and it's why so many of them are mopey, sad, and frustrated. The Orks also understand somewhat, but their moral system is so far from our human one that they find it hilarious.

The Imperium is still the best available option for the underhivers though. Why? Because believing in the Emperor gives a slim chance of not getting your soul eaten/tortured forever by daemons. Every other option? Leads to eternal horrible daemon torture. That's the premise of the setting. And anytime you find a route out of the death-maze, a route that doesn't lead to horrible daemon torture? The setting is changed to remove it. The setting is flexible, and will tie itself in knots to return to the central premise that the Imperium, as mind-meltingly horrid as it is, is the best that a human can get.

To reiterate the first thing we all read about 40k:

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
- Attributed to Vulkan, Primarch of the XVIII Legion

[Cheesegear]

Actually, I'm pretty sure the Sisters are notable for not falling to Chaos. Sure they lose, but canonically Sisters are pretty resistant to corruption.

Only one Sister has ever Fallen willingly to Chaos.
Lots of Sisters Fall unwillingly.

[LCP]

Every other option? Leads to eternal horrible daemon torture. That's the premise of the setting

I don't agree that that's the premise. There's another outcome which is: being brutally repressed by the Imperium. The Imperium is a hegemony, it is the only way because it suppresses and destroys other ways. It's trivial to imagine ways you could make life better for people in the 40K universe without triggering an immediate chaos-pocalypse (life is complex and there's lots of ways to live it!). The Imperium doesn't keep things the way they are because it has discovered the one razor-thin tightrope to survival - if that were true then it wouldn't be so bloated with comical inefficiencies. The Imperium keeps things the way they are because that is what keeps the powerful people who control it in power.

Sure, the Imperium is the best a human can get - because there's only one galaxy, and the Imperium crushes anyone who presents an alternative. It's the same as saying Walmart is the best you can get when Walmart has driven all the other shops in town out of business - technically true, but not saying that Walmart is the best there could be.

[Forum Explorer]

Only one Sister has ever Fallen willingly to Chaos.
Lots of Sisters Fall unwillingly.

Do you have any sources for that? I haven't heard anything about Sisters falling, though the fluff I've read for Sisters is pretty sparse.

[Cikomyr2]

Do you have any sources for that? I haven't heard anything about Sisters falling, though the fluff I've read for Sisters is pretty sparse.

There's the ones brainwashed by Warmaster Varan "The Purple Man" a. K. A. "Killgrave "

[The Glyphstone]

There were the SoB bodyguards the Chaos warlord had enslaved with his mind-control powers in Cain's Last Stand, but I'm not sure if they count as 'falling'.

EDIT: Yeah, him. The short evil guy with the funny mustache and abnormally convincing speeches who totally wasn't a dig at any historical figure whatsoever.

[hamishspence]

Traitor Sisters (as opposed to Chaos Sisters) have their own Mortifier Penitent Engine variant (Anchorite), with an armoured coffin designed to keep the Sister alive for a very long time:


https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Mortifier


Ephrael Stern gets a mention in the new SOB codex, which may imply that her adventures are "canon". And early on in those, there were Chaos-corrupted Sisters.

[LansXero]

Lorgar was Faithful to the Emperor. The Emperor rejected his Faith. Lorgar took his Faith elsewhere. At no point, was Lorgar ever going to stop being a fanatic.

I always took that brief moment of total depression, right before Kor Phaeron and Erebus sank his teeth into him, to be a last possible turning point for Lorgar. Had he not filled his Legion and his inner circle with Chaos cultists, maybe Monarchia would've cured him of the need for worship?

I don't agree that that's the premise. There's another outcome which is: being brutally repressed by the Imperium. The Imperium is a hegemony, it is the only way because it suppresses and destroys other ways. It's trivial to imagine ways you could make life better for people in the 40K universe without triggering an immediate chaos-pocalypse (life is complex and there's lots of ways to live it!). The Imperium doesn't keep things the way they are because it has discovered the one razor-thin tightrope to survival - if that were true then it wouldn't be so bloated with comical inefficiencies. The Imperium keeps things the way they are because that is what keeps the powerful people who control it in power.

Your life lasts what, 60 - 100 years at best? And then depending on your soul's tastyness you get to suffer a few centuries as the plaything of something in the warp. Is the chain of endlessling dancing people circling the equator of Nurgle's planet still canon? Or people who cling to hope spawning as weeds in his garden? Emperor worship has a debatable effect on your mortal life, but a tangible, confirmed effect on your afterlife (as depicted in the fictional works that make up the fictional setting).

Moreover, the bit everyone forgets about the Imperium is that humanity hasnt exploded in rogue psykers because of the black ships and the constant behind-the-scenes culling of the psychic population they conduct. Colonies DID die and get turned to demon hellpits before the great crusade, hell, Prospero itself was in the verge of extinction due to psychic predators lured to the world by the increasingly psychic population. So with no Emperor to soulbind psykers and to curtail the influence of daemons, your progressive utopia gets turned into pandemonium.

Finally, as mentioned before, the avenues that are not the Imperium have been explored in the imaginary setting's imaginary story. The Dark Age of Technology was a period of prosperity, enlightnment and advanced social justice... that ended in tragedy. Technology brought the Men of Iron and freedom brought the Long Night due to rampant unchecked psykers. Terra and the Unification Wars didnt happen because the Emperor assaulted a peaceful, prosperous humanity to stomp on them, it was just another conflict between brutal warlords and their bands of gene-altered soldiers, he just was the best of them all. Eugenics, concentration camps, gene experiments and other atrocities were the common fare of manking before the Emperor took over. So without the Imperium humanity had already decided on its own that it wanted nothing to do with freedom, justice or the rights of the lower class.

[Destro_Yersul]

Sure, the Imperium is the best a human can get - because there's only one galaxy, and the Imperium crushes anyone who presents an alternative. It's the same as saying Walmart is the best you can get when Walmart has driven all the other shops in town out of business - technically true, but not saying that Walmart is the best there could be.

The Imperium is the best a Human can get, because the original Tau were better, and the writers went 'can't have THAT!' and changed the Tau to be just as bad or worse. To use the Walmart analogy, Walmart isn't driving the other people out of business, the other people are being cosmically retconned to be worse than Walmart.

Of course the Imperium isn't the best option there could be. There's lots of ways to improve it. But it is the best option allowed by the writers.

[LCP]

I've never seen anything that says that Emperor-worship is a guaranteed ticket to some kind of nice afterlife, nor anything that says that not being 'claimed' results in 'centuries' of torture (what does a unit of time even mean in the Warp?) - that seems like it's conflating real-world Christian theology with the Christian-looking trappings of the Ecclesiarchy. Liber Chaotica and some other sources from around the time seemed to imply that most 'souls' dissolve into warp-stuff on a fairly quick timescale once they're no longer linked to a living body, and the ones that stick around are the exceptions. Heck, the Emperor didn't even want to be worshipped - you'd think if that was the only ticket out of semi-eternal damnation he'd have been less against it.

Finally, as mentioned before, the avenues that are not the Imperium have been explored in the imaginary setting's imaginary story. The Dark Age of Technology was a period of prosperity, enlightnment and advanced social justice... that ended in tragedy.

Right, we have a sample size of 1, so we can safely claim that every possible experiment has been tried and no further innovation is possible. As we know from history, given enough time humans will explore every possible social arrangement, and not just repeat the same mistakes over and over. And as we know from statistics, if something fails once, that means it will always fail, every time, whereas if something hasn't failed yet, that means it's failure-proof.

EDIT: also... the tragedy that the DAoT ended in is the Imperium. Like the quoted rulebook blurb, "the cruellest, most bloody regime imaginable". A state where large numbers of people are turned into lobotomised slaves through invasive surgery, where peoples' skulls are turned into floating Roombas, where people who express mildly different religious beliefs are stitched into permanent torture machines and turned into suicide weapons, where the rich live in palaces above the clouds and the poor live in toxic subterrannean waste dumps eating food made from recycled corpses. The Imperium didn't do anything to end the horror, it just consolidated it all under one banner. It's even Imperial policy that they don't mess with the local civilisation when they absorb a human-populated world, unless they need to do some kind of heavy resource extraction: they just work with whatever system of local government already exists, and demand a tithe.

[LansXero]

I've never seen anything that says that Emperor-worship is a guaranteed ticket to some kind of nice afterlife

I think Im mixing 40k and fantasy to an extent; however if Living Saints and Legion of the Damned are imaginary real things that imaginarily exist, then that means the Emperor currently does have a warp presence that does protect selected subjects in the afterlife. Same with the Sister's causing miracles, although thats more like a waagh field I guess.

Right, we have a sample size of 1

We have a sample size of 40 000 years of humanity
- where is that written?
Its in the name, Warhammer 40000

so we can safely claim that every possible experiment has been tried and no further innovation is possible. As we know from history, given enough time humans will explore every possible social arrangement, and not just repeat the same mistakes over and over. And as we know from statistics, if something fails once, that means it will always fail, every time, whereas if something hasn't failed yet, that means it's failure-proof.

The thing is, the Imperium or humanity dont exist in a vaccum. The current AdMech is a consequence of Mars betraying the Emperor the same way the progroms and flesh pits were a consequence of long night. Once something fails, it doesnt just close to the door on being tried again, it damages infrastructure, burns resources and shuts off many other possible avenues by virtue of becoming unafordable.

EDIT: also... the tragedy that the DAoT ended in is the Imperium. Like the quoted rulebook blurb, "the cruellest, most bloody regime imaginable". A state where large numbers of people are turned into lobotomised slaves through invasive surgery, where peoples' skulls are turned into floating Roombas, where people who express mildly different religious beliefs are stitched into permanent torture machines and turned into suicide weapons, where the rich live in palaces above the clouds and the poor live in toxic subterrannean waste dumps eating food made from recycled corpses. The Imperium didn't do anything to end the horror, it just consolidated it all under one banner. It's even Imperial policy that they don't mess with the local civilisation when they absorb a human-populated world, unless they need to do some kind of heavy resource extraction: they just work with whatever system of local government already exists, and demand a tithe.

Yes, the Imperium is horrible and tragic, nobody is disputing that (except people who somehow think its fascist propaganda). The Imperium improved the quality of life on Terra tremendously, and then the Emperor died. The Imperium improved the quality of life on Tizca, on the 500 worlds, on many failed colonies, liberated enslaved enclaves from under alien warlords or brought the Emperor's mercy on people who couldnt be saved like the nephilim mindlsaves. And then the Heresy happened and the Imperium can only try and not fall apart all at once, but its blatantly evident its failing and crumbling away by bits.

Whats a free-thinking, progressive regime going to do about Genestealer Cults, for example? If even with thought police and heavy handed repression you cant always crack down on them before they throw the planet into sedition and then the maws of a hive fleet, can you imagine how much easier it would be when everyone is allowed their privacy and are free to do and think and proselityze as they wished? The arbites, sisters and deathwatch keep uprooting cults and rebellions all the time, with some of course filtering through, but without them?

[LCP]

We have a sample size of 40 000 years of humanity

Which contains a grand total of 1 catastrophic collapse on account of "not being Imperial enough" (supposedly).

Here's another point: why is stability the only metric of what's good? A bad state can be stable. A good state can require energy to maintain, can become destabilised and require work to return to. Does that mean it's not worth the work? Sitting in the bottom of a well is more stable than climbing out: the fact that you could fall back in doesn't mean it's not worth the climb.

The "burnt resources" thing could be true for us today, locked to one planet where we've already extracted many of the easily accessible rare resources. It seems a bit of a stretch to believe it's true for a civilisation that's spread across an entire galaxy and is building Lunar-Class cruisers by the week.

Whats a free-thinking, progressive regime going to do about Genestealer Cults, for example? If even with thought police and heavy handed repression you cant always crack down on them before they throw the planet into sedition and then the maws of a hive fleet, can you imagine how much easier it would be when everyone is allowed their privacy and are free to do and think and proselityze as they wished? The arbites, sisters and deathwatch keep uprooting cults and rebellions all the time, with some of course filtering through, but without them?

(1) there's plenty of real-world research that shows that the strongarm techniques the Imperium uses aren't actually very effective, but that's getting far into banned topics for this forum I think.

(2) let's take all this as a complete given, that the massive militarisation and oppression are necessary. There's still a ton of things the Imperium is doing ridiculously badly, because the well-being of its citizens is simply not a concern. Not secondary to their safety, not tertiary to their safety, just not considered at all. I'm not gonna list them because if you think about it for a minute you should be able to come up with a dozen examples yourself.

[LansXero]

Which contains a grand total of 1 catastrophic collapse on account of "not being Imperial enough" (supposedly).

Terra's seas boiled long before the DOAT. The Men of Iron happened before Long Night. Its not just 1 catastrophic collapse.

Here's another point: why is stability the only metric of what's good? A bad state can be stable. A good state can require energy to maintain, can become destabilised and require work to return to. Does that mean it's not worth the work? Sitting in the bottom of a well is more stable than climbing out: the fact that you could fall back in doesn't mean it's not worth the climb

Thats where the external threats enter the equation. If it gets destabilized enough, it gets crushed by orcs / enslaved by dark eldar / slaughtered by Necrons / eaten by Tyranids / offered to Chaos as tribute, or all at once. Its not about 'requiring energy to maintain', the war footing isnt optional because the other option is extintion. You have to do your ruling and statesmanship with the cost of the war in mind, not besides it.

The "burnt resources" thing could be true for us today, locked to one planet where we've already extracted many of the easily accessible rare resources. It seems a bit of a stretch to believe it's true for a civilisation that's spread across an entire galaxy and is building Lunar-Class cruisers by the week.

And yet thats how it was. Most colonies lost the ability to manufacture even basic firearms while mantaining Imperial Knights because it was just rite and repetition without the knowledge base to keep the industrial level. Others regressed to barbarism, while a handful prospered or were erradicated. So at large, mankind did lose the ability to deal with things and to make new things; its not interpretation, its plainly stated as being what happened.

Again, 30k Terra was not the StarTrek Earth; it was madmax+, a rad-blasted hellhole with no seas where people murdered each other over scraps. Whatever you feel it should've been, the stablished canon says it lost access to even its closest neighbour Mars, let alone far off systems. its not until after Unification that the Emperor reunites them, and thats only through trickery into making himself the head of the Omnissiah cult he had seeded there centuries ago.

(1) there's plenty of real-world research that shows that the strongarm techniques the Imperium uses aren't actually very effective, but that's getting far into banned topics for this forum I think.

So we have real-world research on psychic bonds and gene-bonded loyalty? Because Genestealers are not rebels, terrorists or demagogues. They are joined on a weird genetic / psychic fashion with no real world counterpart. They wont be dissuaded by an improved quality of life or more liberal agendas because their endgame is to get eaten.

(2) let's take all this as a complete given, that the massive militarisation and oppression are necessary. There's still a ton of things the Imperium is doing ridiculously badly, because the well-being of its citizens is simply not a concern. Not secondary to their safety, not tertiary to their safety, just not considered at all. I'm not gonna list them because if you think about it for a minute you should be able to come up with a dozen examples yourself.

And on that we agree. But as hellhole hive cities exist so do Agriworlds, Shrineworlds, Guard worlds, Space Marine tributaries and all manners of things. Yes the crapsack vision of a serf chained to the production line until it dies to be replaced with another barely alive cog is part of the setting, but so are the many other parts of it that arent downright depressing and dreadful. There is courage, solidarity, selflessness and care in all stations of the Imperium, even if its only to make the rest of it even more dreary by contrast. It IS a failed utopia, and an entirely undesireable state of being.

[Cikomyr2]

.

Finally, as mentioned before, the avenues that are not the Imperium have been explored in the imaginary setting's imaginary story. The Dark Age of Technology was a period of prosperity, enlightnment and advanced social justice... that ended in tragedy.

Waiiiiit

Do you know of any "period of prosperity, enlightenment and advanced social justice" that didn't end in tragedy?

If anything, the DAoT is the single greatest success of the history of mankind. A 10,000 year golden age where people lived happy. Yhea it ended, but.. What doesn't?

The Imperium will end too. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a thousand years, maybe later. But it will end, and the question will be what it will have done during its time that was worth remembering. What wonders the Imperium will have brought to Mankind, what legacy it will have on the human civilization.

Technology brought the Men of Iron and freedom brought the Long Night due to rampant unchecked psykers.

And the Imperium brought the Primarch and the Astartes and the Dark Mechanicum, all responsible for as much suffering as the above plagues.

Terra and the Unification Wars didnt happen because the Emperor assaulted a peaceful, prosperous humanity to stomp on them, it was just another conflict between brutal warlords and their bands of gene-altered soldiers, he just was the best of them all. Eugenics, concentration camps, gene experiments and other atrocities were the common fare of manking before the Emperor took over. So without the Imperium humanity had already decided on its own that it wanted nothing to do with freedom, justice or the rights of the lower class.

It was a period of divided earth, and records point to a few tyrants, but hardly the entire earth was under the rule of one tyrant or another. Some even sided with the Emperor, with the Achaemenid Empire being described as "wealthy tribe"

The Unification Wars are clouded in myth, but the end result is that the entire humanity fell under the swell of a fascist government that pushed the entire planet to join into its Glorious War Machine meant to conquer the entire galaxy. Those who did not wanted to join were disposed of.

[LCP]

So we have real-world research on psychic bonds and gene-bonded loyalty?

No, I'm talking about things like e.g. the fairly well-researched fact that torture doesn't work. (You can invent sci-fi handwavium to make it so that it does, but again that gets into the territory of why are you doing that), or that "guilty until proven innocent" procedures like witch hunts and secret police tend to end up being inundated with people settling grudges against their neighbours.

Anyway, I think that the point-by-point discussion of individual stuff is leading in circles (and also down tangents where we don't necessarily disagree). I also said I'd butt out already so I should really stop. All I think it comes down to is that there are two interpretations of the setting here:

1. The Emperor was a god-like being, and therefore his plan had to be good, and therefore the Imperium's way (minus this and that detail that wasn't part of the Emperor's design) must be the best way in the context of the setting - even if it walks like a fascist dystopia and quacks like a fascist dystopia. The aesthetic and language of real-world regimes and power structures that the Imperium uses is not intended to have any kind of deeper meaning, it's just there.

2. Just because the Emperor had god-like powers doesn't mean he was necessarily superlatively wise or moral - as a gestalt representation of humanity, he's equally capable of embodying humanity's worst side. His ideology is explicitly the ideology of an imperialist, authoritarian, racial supremacist, his actions can all be explained as the product of his ideology rather than some kind of 4D species survival chess, and all the trappings of the Imperium that mirror real-world regimes are a way that the setting is telling you that, and telling you that the whole project - not just the details around the edges - is being implicitly criticised. You don't have to find a way that it's right because it doesn't have to be right - in 40K (and in stories generally) there doesn't have to be a good guy.

Neither (1.) nor (2.) can be proven or disproven by pulling this or that 'fact' out of a published source. The published material largely tells us what happened, to who, and what they thought about it, not gods-eye-view judgements of why it happened or whether it was for the best. They're interpretations, and I hugely prefer interpretation (2.) because I think it's saying something more interesting, and interpretation (1.) skirts unpleasantly close to "let's imagine a world where the fascists are right, just for escapism's sake, honest". If you disagree, that's your prerogative.

[Renegade Paladin]

No, I'm talking about things like e.g. the fairly well-researched fact that torture doesn't work. (You can invent sci-fi handwavium to make it so that it does, but again that gets into the territory of why are you doing that), or that "guilty until proven innocent" procedures like witch hunts and secret police tend to end up being inundated with people settling grudges against their neighbours.

As has been said multiple times: Because the setting is a thinly veiled excuse to provide reasons why everybody fights everybody all the time in a tabletop wargame. The Imperium needs to be dysfunctional because if it isn't the setting doesn't account for Imperial armies fighting each other in the game, which happens all of the time. That's all the explanation you're going to get because that's all the explanation there is. Of course the Imperium is an awful system of government; if it wasn't, you wouldn't have Inquisitors trying to wipe out Guard regiments and Space Marines killing each other over slights of honor. That doesn't make it good for its citizens and literally nobody is saying that it does; it does, however, make it fulfill its function of justifying the wargame.

[Forum Explorer]

I do want to point out something here, the Imperium does try to improve itself and sometimes the reason it fails is because of the rest of the universe being crappy. Like it rediscovered the STC called Panacea which would basically cure all conventional sickness in the Imperium. And it gets stolen by Dark Eldar because they are jerks. The STC is now a trophy, and the person who stole it got a lovely dinner out of the war she waged.

[The Patterner]

...Dark Eldar because they are jerks.

Not gonna lie, this made me laugh.

[Cheesegear]

From the OP...

argue the morality of the setting yet again (Oh, how we wish you wouldn't)

...My God, it's full of stars.

Everytime.

[LansXero]

Well, I never imagined there'd be people who took the Imperium as propaganda of anything. I mean, who looks at attrition rates in the millions and goes "I wants me some of that!"

[Haruspex_Pariah]

Not every work of fiction has to represent an ideal. Post-apocalyptic fiction is especially bleak and cynical, but the POV is of those individuals who have no choice but to live in that world. Simplicity arises from the lack of choice; you do what it takes to live, or you die. There's a definite appeal in that, even for people who in reality wouldn't last a day in that kind of world. Nobody actually wants to be put in a situation where everything has fallen apart and their life is in constant danger, but it's appealing to think that you could be in that situation and not only survive but thrive; that's the escapism.

I think it's fair to consider 40k post-apocalyptic, if we take the Cybernetic Revolt as the apocalyptic event and extend the scope to contain the entire galaxy. Humanity had achieved epic levels of technology, spreading across the stars, etc. And then bam, it all comes tumbling down.

There's nothing desirable about any of it. It's ordinary people trying to deal with millennia of cumulative screw-ups. In that light I consider the geopolitical and social elements of 40k to be as much part of the environment as the ash wastes of Armageddon. It's a bad thing that the characters have to deal with.

Sure, Space Marines are epic. But they have to be. They are not on some galaxy-conquering rampage, that's in the backstory. On the scale of individual conflicts, they certainly whoop alien and heretic butt. But on the galactic scale they are desperately holding back the tide (sometimes offense is the best defense), and the situation looks bleaker every time.

That's my take on it anyway.

[Cheesegear]

Not every work of fiction has to represent an ideal.

Well, it does. Every narrative has a moral imperative, and a code by which the characters in the story operate, some characters might even operate under different moral imperatives, and that creates conflict. Oooh. A main wedge in a lot of fiction - including 40K - is when characters act under moral imperatives that the reader doesn't agree with, and thus can't engage with or relate to...

"I don't like this story, because I don't like the main character, because they did actions that I wouldn't do."
...wat

What you really have to look out for, is whether the author(s) is/are trying to influence the audience. Which is currently all the rage in TV and Movies. In Books (not including Comics)? Not so much.

I don't think anyone is writing a 40K novel saying "This is the best and most stable form of government." Y'know, especially given all the times in-narrative that it specifically says it's not the best government and that it's very unstable.

[hamishspence]

If anything, the DAoT is the single greatest success of the history of mankind. A 10,000 year golden age where people lived happy. Yhea it ended, but.. What doesn't?

10,000 years is something of an overestimate - using M.15 as the start and M.25 as the end. It was somewhat shorter. The war with the Iron Men kicked off in M.23 and the daemonic incursions from psykers issue may have begun as early as M.22.

Similarly, the Warp Drive was not invented till M.18, and the Dark Age of Technology itself (as opposed to the Golden Age) may have begun as late as M.21.

So, using the shortest possible interpretation, the Dark Age Of Technology itself, may have only been M.21 to M.23.

[Amechra]

That just reminded me of how painfully stretched the time frames are for WH40k. Seriously, if Daemonic incursions started 3,000 years before the collapse of DAoT society, they obviously weren't that big of a problem.

You know, the Imperium is canonically unsure of what date it actually is... maybe someone did add a '0' at the end of all of the dates by accident, and they're actually only 2,000 years in the future.

[hamishspence]

Having the first incursions take place in M.22 and the collapse take place in M.25 is a high-end estimate for "Duration of Daemon Problem"

It is also possible that psykers and daemons did not appear in large numbers until M.25, with the collapse occurring then.

Or, they could have appeared in large numbers for the first time in M.23, with the collapse occurring then.

The dates are so broad, that there's many interpretations of the nature of the daemon problem as long and drawn out, or short and vicious.

Having the daemon problem proliferate in M.23, the war with the Iron Men take place in M.23, and total collapse also take place in M.23 rather than M.25, allows for them to be a big problem, and for the Dark Age to be short, if considered to have began in M.21 - basically a 2000 year golden age followed by everything going wrong at once.

[Wraith]

Having the first incursions take place in M.22 and the collapse take place in M.25 is a high-end estimate for "Duration of Daemon Problem"

It is also possible that psykers and daemons did not appear in large numbers until M.25, with the collapse occurring then.

The appearance of psykers was based on evolution and genetic mutation, which always begins with only a very small number of subjects before they proliferate.

So in this case, "the first incursions" of daemons would have been one event followed by 200 years of nothing until another similar mutation arose, accelerating to become more and more common as more psykers are born and mature and then procreate until the 'critical mass' broke civilisation at the end of M25.

I like this theory because a) it makes as much biological sense as we're going to get from a story about space wizards, and b) implies that human suffering was spread out over a long and terrifyingly random period of time, which is exactly the sort of thing that 40k likes to go for.

[hamishspence]

The Eldar's activities causing massive warp storms to roll in and cut every world off from one another, would also have been a factor.

[DataNinja]

The Eldar's activities

Oh, is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?

[snowblizz]

I don't think anyone is writing a 40K novel saying "This is the best and most stable form of government." Y'know, especially given all the times in-narrative that it specifically says it's not the best government and that it's very unstable.

Now I really want someone to seriously try that. Maybe not as in seriously they believe that but give it an honest attmept. It would be a novel idea at least.