Races

Old Ones (presumably deceased)

An old race with high psychic powers and advanced technology. They expanded through the stars and dominated the cosmos for millennia. They crafted multiple warp gates and dimensional corridors to travel faster than light without incurring in the dangers of the Inmaterium. The remnants of those labyrinth dimensions are known as the Webway.

They fought against the alliance of the Necrons and C’than in a war called the ‘War in Heaven.’

In that war, they gave birth to several psychic sensitive races, such as the Aeldar and the antecessors of the Orks, to fight off the technological Necrons and energy beings that ruled them, the C’than gods.

The massive amount of psychic energies deformed the Warp into a chaotic and dangerous place. They allowed a race of warp creatures, the Enslavers, to assault the galaxy.

All those wars and enemies proved too much for them to withstand.

They are believed to be either extinct or having fled the galaxy.

Necrons

The Necrontyr race was born near a star that irradiated their planet with high levels of radiation, turning them into a weak and ill race. They created a culture that praised the dead and built monuments and dynasties - akin to the old Pharaohs of Earth. They started to expand through the stars and conquered part of the galaxy.

When they met the Old Ones, and older and much more advanced sentient race, they felt jealous of their technology and long lifespans, that seemed to reach immortality. The Necrontyr tried to get those secrets to cure their weak and ill bodies, but the Old Ones did not give it to them. They started a war and tried to defeat the Old Ones, but it proved too much of a challenge. The mystique energy and psychic powers of the Old Ones beat them to losing their empire and were thrown back to their homeworld.

After millennia of resentment and growing hate to the Old Ones and every other race in the galaxy, they met the energy and star-devouring beings known as the C’than. They were god-like figures and promised them revenge and new, undying bodies.

The C’than turned the Necrontyr race into the now known Necrons, through a process of biotransference. They lost their emotions and empathy. They felt no more pain and had lasting, seemingly immortal lifespans. But they lost their souls in the process, and no joy nor happiness could be felt in their cold, living metal bodies.

The C’than devoured the souls and gained unprecedented energy, and started a massive war against the Old Ones, the War in Heaven. They used the Necrons as warriors against the psychic and genetically advanced races of the Old Ones.

The Necrons forged pylons to stop the psychic races and tried to separate reality from the Inmaterium, severing the psychic powers from reality. Yet the plague known as the Enslavers hit the Old Ones and their new races, weakening them.

After defeating the Old Ones in the war known as the ‘War in Heavens,’ the Necrons turned against the C’than and broke their bodies in shards. Their society was tired after the war and their rebellion against their treacherous gods. The Necrons then closed themselves in Tomb Worlds for the Galaxy to calm down, and have been sleeping for over 60 million years.

The Necrons have started to wake up to take over their old galaxy empire, and crush any lower race.

Aeldari Empire (Eldar, Drukhari, Harlequins, Exodite worlds)

The Aeldar race was a highly psychic race engineered by the Old ones to fight the Necrons. They took over the Galaxy after the Necrons slumber and expanded through the stars for millions of years with their powers and advanced technology and began the Aeldari Empire. As a highly psychic race, they believed in a pantheon of gods through their beliefs.

They conquered the galaxy with the help of the Webway, the project the Old Ones used for faster-than-light travel. After millennia of calm, they started to get obsessed with emotions and extreme sensations, hedonism, and decadence, which proved to be their downfall. After millennia of excess, they birthed the Chaos God Slaanesh. Its birth collapsed the empire and killed billions of Aeldar. The remains are known as the Eye of Terror.

The Eldar were part of that race that survived the collapse of their empire fleeing away in vast continent-sized spaceships known as Craftworlds. They protect their souls by controlling their emotions and using soul stones to capture their souls were they to die.

The Drukhari are part of the decadent old race that hid in a secret city in the Webway, Commorragh. Known as the Dark City, it is a place where anarchy, terror, and pain are ever-present. They need to feed on emotions such as pain and desperation to survive. They are treacherous, wicked, and cruel.

The Harlequins serve the Laughing God of the Aeldar. They see art and war as the same, and seek to keep the legend of the Fall of the Aeldar alive through their performances. They are a secretive and secluded force that follows their god and explores their agendas.

The Exodites are Eldars living on newly terraformed worlds that exiled themselves from the excess and hedonism that was bringing down their race. They were viewed as alarmists, puritans, or fanatics obsessed with misery and self-denial. They are survivalists.

Orks

They descend from the Krork, an engineered race by the Old Ones created to fight the Necrons.

They are a violent, salvage, and warlike race that can withstand absurd levels of punishment. Orks reproduce through spores, that exude during their lifespan and especially at their death.

Such spores grow all the members of their race, as Gretchins and Snotlings, that help build ecosystems for greater Orkoids to be born. There is also a sub-species that serves as an all-purpose herd, the Squigs.

The Orks are a race that thrives in battle and has a collective psychic consciousness that drives their race to seek enemies to fight. That psychic powers also affect their beliefs, with weird things just as red things go faster, or yellow ones are more explosive. It somehow works.

Once their psychic field grows strong enough, or when a particular Ork is big enough, it can trigger a WAAAGH!, a war campaign of enormous proportions that encompasses all Orks on a world or several worlds. The bigger Ork, the Warboss, leads it to conquer, destroy, and fight. Equal parts war, genocide as well as pub brawl, a WAAAGH! It is a massive and dangerous event to any other nearby races that wish to survive the Greenskin menace.

Their genes are coded with the knowledge to create machinery and technology that only their race can use and build-out of scraps of metal or parts of metal.

They fight against every other race in the galaxy, and if there are none, against themselves, just for fun. Orks are tribalistic in nature and grow more prominent the stronger they are.

Humans

Currently living in the Age of the Imperium, humankind is the most significant unified force in the galaxy.

Humanity moved through different ages, the Age of Progress (M1-M14), Dark Age of Technology (M15 - M24), Age of Strife (M25 - M29), Unification Wars (M30), Great Crusade (798M30 - 005M31), Horus Heresy (005M31 - 014M31), Age of the Imperium (M30 - M42)

After expanding through the stars and acquiring substantial technological advancements, they started to develop through the stars. After they unlocked the first Warp drives at the Age of Technology, a massive expansion through cosmos began.

The technology managed to create Standard Template Construct (STC), extensive database systems that allowed humans to unlock many technological advancements stored in it. But technology turned into a menace as humanity had to fight a terrible war against their own AIs and several humanoid machines that rebelled and lead to a terrible war.

After such war, Humanity entered a phase of slumber for 5 thousand years (M25-M29) as warp stormes grew stronger due to the impending fall of the Aeldari Empire. It all ended once the Chaos God Slaanesh was born in the first years of the 30th Millenium.

Under the Emperor of Mankind, a man born as the collective inheritor of all the old psykers of humanity, humans expanded through the starts for millennia, conquering their old worlds, and gathering many new ones.

The Emperor engineered a bio-enhanced army of super-human warriors, the Space Marines Legions, to fight the hard wars, and to lead them, he created the greatest of its warriors, 20 Primarchs, that embodied different aspects of his psyche and abilities. They were lost though the Galaxy due to Chaos intervening. As they were later found, each one was given a Legion to command with tens of thousands of Space Marines at their orders.

Together with the Tech-priests of Mars, which followed the Mechanicus Cult, they began a glorious crusade to unify the humans scattered through the cosmos.

Two Primarchs were erased from Imperial history by their acts, and are known as the lost and forgotten, its destiny unknown.

The Emperor wanted to destroy the Chaos Gods and created the Imperial Truth; it had reason and science as its pillars. Yet he banned the creation of artificial intelligence, remembering the terrible wars that humanity had fought millennia ago.

Yet an immense civil war was brewing as half of his Primarch and many of the troops they lead, betraying the Emperor and Mankind as they thought he was using them and turned to serve Chaos. It turned into a devastating war lead by Horus, the greatest of all the Primarchs and his first 'son.'

As it ended, the Imperium was devastated, the Emperor mortally wounded, and his dreams collapsed. He had to enter the Golden Throne, an old artifact that served as a way to maintain whatever was left of his life and also produce a vast beacon to let the warp navigators traverse the cosmos with relative safety.

He has been enclosed for over 10 thousand years on the throne, which is slowly failing, needing thousands of psykers to be sacrificed every day to keep the light illuminate the imperium.

To avoid another civil war of such scale, the remaining Space Marines Legions were split into chapters of a thousand units, and no one has the authority to call for hundreds of thousands to millions of units individually as in the Horus Heresy.

Another significant change has been the creation and push of simple human soldiers to fight the wars as the main armies, letting the Space Marines some breathing space to fight and give support at necessary times at critical battles and wars for the Imperium.

Since his fall, the Imperium has stagnated and morphed into a decadent, obscure, and fanatic place where he is treated as a god-like figure. Meanwhile, the galaxy keeps at war with many Xeno races threatening every world of the Imperium. Many other menaces exist, such as the heretics, cultists of chaos that try to bring down humanity to their dark masters.

Tau

The Tau are one of the youngest and most naive races of the galaxy. They are blue-skinned, humanoid, with small frames and short lifespans. They have nearly no presence in the Warp, attracting little attention from the Chaos gods.

During the M35th, the Tau lived as several primitive tribes on their homeworld. Each one specializing in a different area, such as hunting, building, sending messages, etc.

They were almost destroyed by civil war, yet some saint-like figures descended and started to teach them a new philosophical way through diplomacy. The Ethereals, as they were known, looked like them, but their words resonated at a deep level, and the race stopped their wars.

The ideas that spread were the Greater Good, and they managed to turn the primitive tribes into a caste system with the Ethereals as their leaders.

Each caste would work in a different field.

The Fire cast as the military forces, highly disciplined soldiers, turned into professionals since birth.

The Earth caste members are the most numerous ones and work as artisans, engineers, and scientists to enhance the technology and wonders of their race.

The Air caste members work as messengers and pilots, leading their spaceships through the stars.

Water caste members work as merchants, administrators, and diplomats.

Lastly, the Ethereal caste works as spiritual and political leaders and rule the rest of the castes. They are believed to produce some pheromone suggestion effect that leads the rest of the castes to obey their words without being able to deny them.

For six thousand years, they have progressed and advanced and turned into a highly technologically advanced society and one rising power in the galaxy.

They proved masters of tactics and worked as one unified race to stop many Ork invasions, Tyranid hive fleet, and managed to stop the Imperium at the Damocles Gulf Crusade.

They have accepted and assimilated into their empire dozens of lesser races through diplomacy and commerce. But when words could not convince other races of their ways, they have frequently invaded and even exterminated populations to keep their expansion.

Tyranids

Tyranids are one of the latest, yet more dangerous species to have entered the Galaxy. They form vast swarms of hundreds of hive fleets and millions or billions of insectoid and grotesque organisms that serve different roles such as recognizance and infiltration, assault, and heavy support or absorption. Each of them, working as a cog to allow the race to advance.

Individuality has no meaning in their race, as they all communicate through telepathy orders and coordinate their efforts in battle as one colossal organism, each little creature nothing more than a cell in the bigger frame of their war efforts. They are thought to be lead by what is known as the Great Devourer, a massive accumulation of Tyranid minds that leads the race through the cosmos.

They excel at biotechnology and bioengineering to build adaptable and better organisms to consume worlds and use living ships to travel through space.

The Tyranids are depicted as a voracious race of locusts sometimes. Yet, they work as a highly complex individual, trying to find new strands of DNA, enhance their evolution path, and adapt to any threats in their way.

As the Tyranids grow in number, they create a psychic nullifying effect, the Shadow in the Warp, that isolates Imperial worlds as a Hive fleet approaches.

Humanity has discovered three major hive fleets so far, High Fleet Behemoth (745M41), High Fleet Kraken (993M41), and High Fleet Leviathan (997M41).

The real terror is yet to be understood, as even in defeat, the remnants of a hive fleet might splinter and turn into new hive fleets.

Even worse, is the Genestealer threat, bring by Hive Fleet Kraken. These creatures are skilled at deception and infiltration. They spread like a disease, and form hidden secret organizations under seemingly peaceful worlds, leading them through Patriarch figures.

Through the last centuries, they have grown several Genestealer Cults, that thrive in Imperial Hive Cities and, with time, turn a world into widespread civil unrest, and may attract nearby Hive Fleets.

Chaos

As the Old Ones discovered, the psychic aware races affected the Inmaterium with their emotions and turned the Warp from a mystique place to the demon-like hell it is now.

From that pool of emotions, the Chaos Gods were born. Three of them were born during the middle age of humanity. The last one was born from the Fall of the Eldar.

Chaos forces may be human or Xeno, but some of the most powerful mortal beings to serve the Chaos gods are the mighty Space Marines, turned to Chaos during the Horus Heresy, or other events.

From the warp, demons lurk and desire to possess psykers and enter realspace to cause havoc and massacre.

They are Khorne, the god of Blood and Skulls, that encompasses all aspects of close combat battle, carnage, and violence.

Tzeentch is the chaos god of Fate and Changer of Ways, and he thrives when plots and treason take place. He is the patron of mystiques and knowledge seekers, and usually alters the paths of mortals.

The third god is Nurgle, the Grandfather of Diseases and Pestilence; also Death and Decay. He believes his ‘gifts’ are to be enjoyed by mortals and brews deadlier and worse plagues to bring to reality and be spread.

The last one is Slaanesh, God/dess of Pleasure, Decadence, and Excess. It was born from the massive fall of the Aeldari Empire.

Each god encompasses several aspects of emotions and feelings, some even positive, as bravery, knowledge, resilience, and pleasure, to name a few.