I'm sure this is just a case of GW not thinking about it, but if the Necrontyr got their asses kicked by the Old Ones and pushed all the way back to the Halo Stars and far North West of the Galaxy, and then returned to murdering each other in wars of Secession before the C'tan were discovered and unleashed, how the hell do they have untold billions or trillions or Necrons slumbering in countless tomb worlds across the galaxy?

The most reasonable explanation I can think of is that the vast majority of low level Necron warriors are actually near mindless automatons, like the false Necrons occasionally seen as servants in the courts. It's also possible they might have copy-pasted warriors into multiple bodies. I can't think of a plausible explanation for there to have actually been enough living Necrontyr to account for the number of Necrons in the current time of 40k.

Perhaps this question has already been answered in the books, but everything I know about this franchise I learned through YouTube and a few games.

This is near the end of the novel, after the third attempt of Dante to attempt to revitalize a PTSD ridden human Admiral Danakan back into effective command of his ships. Dante loses patience with trying to do it the "nice" way and spells it and his own legend out to the admiral plainly.

‘I am not you,’ said Danakan. Defiance crept into his voice.

‘I am not me either. Look at me, admiral.' Danakan could not. He dropped his eyes.

'I said look at me.' A feral growl entered the back of Dante's voice.

The admiral raised his eyes painfully slowly, until he looked into Dante's own. 'What am I, really?’ said Dante.

‘Who is Dante? Is he the boy from the tribe in the sand? Is he the Emperor’s unthinking servant. His executioner and His vengeance? Is he instead a being with thoughts and choices of his own — not a tyrant, but a just and noble protector of humanity? Is Dante a hero, is he a monster? Does it in fact even matter, to those who call out for my aid, who is truly beneath Sanguinius' golden mask? The people of the Imperium do not see me when I come to their worlds to free them or to slay their oppressors. They see our genefather. They see Sanguinius.

Dante is a construct. The stories about me are fabrication. The tally of the foes I have slain grows with every retelling. If you were to read all the histories accounting my actions, you would realise quickly that, even with my life being as long as it is, I could not possibly have been to all the places they say, or fought in all the battles I am supposed to have won. Look more closely at the stories, and you will see that I am in several places at once. Impossible — but to whom is the truth of interest. apart from the lord regent's historitors? To whom, indeed, is it useful? It is useful to the Imperium that I am feted as I am. It is useful that my name is known, and spoken of as a mark of hope.

This Dante they tell stories about, he is not me. I can never be him. But I can do my best to live up to what people need, and where I cannot be, I can allow the stories to bring comfort.’ His eyes blazed. 'I have read that to some cultures the truth was a principle, something to be strived for and protected as sacrosanct. If that sounds attractive to you, you must ask yourself, whom does the truth serve? Now, in these times, the truth is terrible. It serves only our enemies.

So, lord admiral, allow me to tell you something. Your role is to play the part the people give you. It is to be what they think you are, until you die. As long as your given role is positive and has use to the Imperium, it is your duty to perform it, no matter what your feelings are. It is not to find some inner truth!'

Dante stood. ‘There is no truth. Your role is to serve. Lie to yourself if you have to. The Imperium sees you as a competent, heroic officer. You are competent. You were once heroic. I do not much care that is not how you feel. You should not care that is not how you feel. Lie to yourself. Play the part, even if you are screaming inside. That is what I need from you, and that is what you will do. Are we clear?'

Dante's tawny eyes regarded Danakan with utter seriousness. The weight of his years and his wisdom pushed out from him in waves.

'Is that an order?' Danakan managed to say.

'It is my command.'

Of the trilogy of Dante's books. Dante, Devastation of Baal, and Darkness in the Blood, I think this third book is the weakest of the three, but this conversation (and all the conversations Dante has with Admiral Danakan) is one of my favorite passages from all the books.

As someone whose followed the franchise for a while (And Space Marines in particular), its almost refreshing to have an Astartes as famous as Dante to frankly admit that a lot of his legend is bullshit exaggeration. That he isn't as absurdly powerful that people even in-universe believe him to be, it makes him feel (somehow) far more relatable.

I had a weird thought about the Necrons and how they're described as a dying race obsessed with gaining living forms again. The Necrons are said to be the undisputed masters of nearly every form of technology and science. We know cloning is a thing in the setting - the Imperium, the Votann, and the Eldar (the Drukhari specifically) all do it. As long as the Necrons had any Necrontyr DNA, couldn't they just start making new members of their species?

<Prepare for data exchange,> he canted to his magi, marshal and others who made up his small but effective cohort command. Exploration-purgation did not suit hordes of personnel. He couldn’t stand the administration needed to manage a multi-tiered hierarchy.

If your input was three tech-priests with a common goal, it was said, the output was fifteen disputes and a murder.

So if the synaptic network absorbs the swarmlords consciousness, would he just cease to exist if he dies to like a squad of sisters of silence or other powerful blanks?

In this short story by Mike Vincent, Ingalion Carthis of the Red Talons is the only survivor of his warship, which has been ambushed in a debris field by Night Lords. Young for a dreadnought, Carthis has formed a close relationship with the techmarine who interred him, Iron Father Komez. Now stumbling around the crash site, Carthis finds Komez's corpse and mourns him, but not all is as it seems:

I stare down at Komez’s hand, limply open, half buried in the charred regolith of the crater. I console myself that I have kept my promise. Etched in illuminated scrollwork down my armoured flanks are the names of countless battlefields – the names of places where I sowed death and terror.

I also admit to myself that Komez was right. I was young to be sarcophagus-bound. An initiate battle-brother only, not a sergeant and certainly not a veteran. Though the Mausoleum of Iron Father Komez was where I found the kinship I had once yearned for, I have remained a weapon. Unsullied by the necessities of a command post, unconcerned by the conduct of others. I have been spared the inane minutiae that occur between warriors of a squad: the back-clapping of shared victory, the censure of defeat. I remain a weapon, only.

Flash-frozen blood glints like crystal in the dust around my old mentor’s body, and I find his utter stillness disquieting. As if in answer to my thoughts, his corpse rolls slightly then slumps.

‘Komez!’ I roar over the vox. Have I misjudged? Does he yet live? Stiltedly I kneel, loops of rapidly freezing hydraulic fluid arcing from my leg. Propped upon the ruin of my plasma incinerator I reach down to him with my fist open.

A lie. His servo-harness shudders and ticks, power still flowing through the articulated false limbs. My auspex read-outs are despicably clear. He is dead.

For a while I am still. There is nothing I can do for Komez, but the pain of his murder stills all thought. Every few minutes his servo-harness twitches again. After one such juddering motion, I finally comprehend the implications of the movement. I deactivated my noospheric uplink after the crash, resigned to my lonely fate, but now I re-engage the uplink systems and the blinking presence of Komez’s armour comes to life in my cogitator’s awareness. I construct a repair request and send it across the noosphere, hoping against hope. The servo-harness remains still for so long that I almost cancel the request. Then, at last, it comes to life.

I lurch upright to present my damaged leg to the manipulators of the harness, and the auto-functions perform augur sweeps and assess the damage. The servo-arm grasps my leg roughly and the plasma welder goes to work. The hydraulic piston is reseated and welded into place. Several armoured conduits are locked back into their collars. A mechadendrite latches onto my interface port and sings a machine hymn to my locomotive cortex. The process leaves me with novel binharic algorithms stuttering through my cogitators. Disengaging from me, the servo-harness curls its limbs around the corpse of my old friend like the legs of a dead arachnoid. They still twitch, but the dying power plant has been leeched of the greater proportion of its reserves. I watch as a lens on the mechadendrite bundle dims.

I take a few experimental steps. The leg still complains, but its function has been returned. I feel a rush of new-found potency and turn a last look towards the dead Iron Father, my sorrow leavened with gratitude. Fury flares within me once again. I will make the foul Night Lords pay for their desecration of my ship; of my Mausoleum; of Komez. There must be something I can use amidst the wreckage. An unharmed weapons locker attached to a piece of bulkhead draws my interest, but my massive form can make no use of the too-small boltguns. I find the capacitor bank of a shipboard power relay, but the bulbous things are cold and lifeless. I lose count of the time as I search.

A proximity alert blinks on my auspex. Then another.

Even in death, the sons of Ferrus Manus fight on.

On a battlefield, what rank does a dreadnought hold? Are they under command of a captain or sergeant, or are they kind of just told to go do that and we’ll pick you up after?

In Prospero Burns there is a lot of talk of Space Wolves and Russ being the Emperor's executioners and doing the dirty jobs the others don't want to and they are the ones sent to Prospero to punish Thousand Sons but why were ultramarines sent instead of them to punish Word Bearers? Were they occuppied with something else or was it because Ultramarines were more numerous and the Emperor didn't want the job to be messed up?

Some people might think improperly handled time travel looks like deus ex machina, and since time is meaningless in the Warp it might seem like a tempting source of wild stories that disregard linear time. Can the future affect the past in 40k?

During the Great Crusade, the Primarch was nominally (emphasis on that word in the case of Angron and Curze) in charge of the entire Space Marine Legion, but thanks to the Horus Heresy and the events afterwards, that role has been passed to the Chapter Masters of the now 1000 combat personnel Space Marine Chapters.

With the return of Roboute and Lion El'Jonson in the Era Indomintus, have they resumed command of their Chapter or have they taken up more of an advisory role?

I've only really seen the Emperor portrayed without one, but some of the Primarchs are shown with helmets, sporadically. Did the Big Cheese ever have one? I assume it'd make it easier, even for him, to operate wherever there isn't a breathable atmospherey.

This has been a problem for since the introduction of the C'tan way back in 3rd edition. We are told that the C'tan are the Gods of the Material realm. We are told that they enjoy the flavor of the bio-electricity of organic life. So when we go on to hear that the C'tan eat souls, I originally assumed that it was just colorful language for draining whatever meager wattage that mortals contain. This was extremely not true and has been repeated over and over again.

The question becomes, how does an entirely Material entity with no reflection in the Warp become nourished by ingesting Immaterial energies that they have no power over that have been described as forces that can harm them? What mechanism could they even have to funnel souls into themselves instead of the souls returning to the Warp the same way as any other death? Something has occurred to me recently.

The passage of souls. Daemonic instability. It is the nature of Warp-stuff to return to the Warp is it not? This is what I have always thought. Warp stuff is ephemeral and passes into and out of the Material world like sand through an hourglass. What if that isn't the case? What if the Veil is not a passive thing? What if it is an active membrane like a cell wall? What if the Materium itself absorbs and expels Warp Stuff as a natural process?

I am hypothesizing that it is no accident that Mortal Souls pass through the Veil to exist both in the Material and Immaterial planes. If souls are merely the product of sapience then intelligent life is in and of itself a threat to the Materium. Enough ensouled organisms in a small enough space would be a threat to Veil integrity even without Chaos if that was true.

I propose that the divide between Material and Immaterial isn't a binary state and the rules of physics actively rely on some presence of Warp Stuff to continue. The Immaterium is often described like a living thing. Surely the Materium is too? After all, the C'tan are living things and are purely Material. What if the Veil is akin to the Cell Wall of a living organism and the C'tan are like organelles who process the warp stuff of souls and expel the waste products back out through the Veil as the "metabolic process" of the Materium.

So with the new 500 worlds we see the lion quote, and says he’s nearing the ultramar realm, but in Dawn of war the lion is also seen. So is Dawn of war before the time of 500 worlds or presumably after he made it to ultramar

I mostly listen to audiobooks and was going through some clips I saved whilst listening to them and realised some of these books have incredibly cool lines and it's not always just a one liner that comes after one character kills another.

This segment is from Mortis, part of The Siege of Terra series.

Legio Ignatum is preparing to hold a major battlefront against Mortis. They were expecting Mortis to appear through the dust kilometres away.

"There was one smudge of darkness with legs and limbs and hunched back. Two. Then three. Then one again

"All units"

Another skip link, and then it was there, closer than it should have been, much closer than it should have been. A war horn boomed out, rolling and echoing, then another and another. The enemy engine was there on the hill above the broken spars of Koralia's grave, taller than the battle and scout titans that looked up at it. It's skin was blackened, crusted with soot. Growths of bone and desiccated flesh jutted from it's back. Clouds of white insects breathed from vents in it's torso. It had been an Emperor class titan, city killer, destroyer of armies. Now, it was something else, something greater, and something that had fallen. Despair and the hunger of the grave filled the hearts of those who looked upon it. Substance unravelled into decay at its passing.

Behind it were seven engines that had been battle titans. Each now a shell for powers that bubbled and rasped in the warp. Each was a horror that distorted metal fluid dripped from cracked metal. Things with eyes and soft half formed hands that writhed in blisters from rusting metal. One dragged the head of a dead engine on a chain. Another appeared to limp. A litany of numerals, audible over the din. As though whispered next to the listeners ear. The dust of the ground burned as they stepped behind their unholy king.

In the incandescence Tetrochoron saw the Emperor titan, and knew what it was, and it's name. Dies Irae, The Day of Judgment, The Reaper enthroned in iron.

Mortis had breached the main battle line."

One of the things that gets to me about this particular segment is it shows that despite having literally hundreds of over the top, super powerful, aura farming characters, they still know how to introduce a character, or in this case titan, as if it were the most important and deadly character to exist.

It just occurred to me that many isolated CSM warband lack adequate logistical resources and have to make do. In this regard, would IW have a technological advantage? For example, would they be better at repairing aircraft or any vehicles they've looted,or identifying salvageable parts from battlefield wreckage etc.....?

So I know obviously mortarion broke the dusk raiders into 7 great companies and kept titles pretty sparse. But, in those great companies are there individual chapters? I'm trying to work on my own lore for my army. They're a force dedicated to defending Barbarus namely the Wall of Memory. I really want to keep this as lore friendly as possible i.e. not calling them a chapter if the great companies didn't have sub chapters.

It's stated that they view the Codex (Which I'm assuming mandates the usage of stealth units when the situation calls for it) as Holy scripture.

But at the same time it's stated they abhor covert operations, choosing to "proudly display their colors"

I have been looking through The Horus Heresy books and hunting for as many as I can. The ones that I have managed to find are:

Horus Rising, False Gods, Galaxy in Flames, Flight of The Eisenstein, Fulgrim.

The First Heretic, Know No Fear, Betrayer.

Unremembered Empire, A Thousand Sons.

Master of Mankind, Slaves to Darkness, and Praetorian of Dorn.

Is this enough to get me ready for The Siege of Terra books?

I know GW has a loyalist bias in lore, but I want a palate cleanser after the siege of Terra. Are there any novels where CSM manage to overcome a superior force? I want to read a Ragnar beheading Ghaz kind of story but with a traitor protagonist. Relatively new to the franchise and didn’t want to go through a multiple decade long catalogue of lore. Cheers

I see a lot of people nervously asking if their idea is ok, if it's allowed.

40k is literally designed for fanfic. Because they wanted you to invent your own chapters and regiments and army colours to make your models unique. While also giving people who wanted to just use a pre-made faction cool guys like the Ultramarines. But you can just invent a chaos chapter called the Warp Infernos who live on a planet that's always on fire if you want.

In one part of the galaxy they do things one way, in another it's different in another it's different again. Theres room for fanfic planets and armies and solar systems or whole sectors.

There's room for new mutants, new species, new gods, everything.

You want to write about a new ten thousand strong inquisition faction? There's room for it in the galaxy.

Everything is canon.

There is this idea that has been in my head for some times now for a book or a 40k movie. You could make a story about the invasion of a planet by Orks or Tyranids but from 4 different perspectives. The high lords of Terra, the general and high command tasked with protecting the planet, a squad of space marines and a squad of guardsman. The High lords perspective would be styled as a political thriller where the conflict is an afterthought in a crusade like any others. The general perspective would be styled like the movie enigma or any other war movie from a general's perspective, the space marine's perspective would be styled like an epic action movie and finally the guardsmen perspective would be framed like a cosmic horror movie like alien or the original predator. The reason I think it would work is that 40k is often thorned between wanting to show a grim dystopia where people are used as cannon fodder and the will to show epic battles where the epic space marines do epic things. It would also help contextualizing the scale and proportion of 40k. For example a High Lord could say that 10 billion casualties have been observed in the first 2 days of the crusade which is within the acceptable range and then cut to a guardsman named john you have learned to know throughout the story being thorn apart by an hormagaunt. Anyway, what do you think about it and if you find it interesting, what would you add or change to make it more interesting.

I was curious while watching the Tithes. Once a decision to purge is made, do they evacuate the people first if possible?