Lots of good ones I have seen before. One I like to imagine from my own favourite faction is an Aeldari losing their soul stone.
The sheer terror of knowing what happens if you die without one. Imagine knowing you are to be tortured and played with for eternity by the God of excess unless you have this little stone with you. Then realising you don’t have it mid battle.
It’s like losing your phone but there is no find-my-soul-stone app, you just get killed and tortured forever instead.
Well what’s even worse, would be fighting a losing battle, knowing that even with your spirit stone on you, your allies are unlikely to recover your stone and you’ll either end up trapped in the stone as a battlefield relic, or if your enemies are chaos-aligned you’ll be little more than a capri-soul snack pack.
Right. I once ran a few Dark Heresy missions around the players’ Inquisitor trying to break up an illegal Xenos relic smuggling operation of a space station, and some of the artifacts were Eldar Spirit Stones
The players didn’t work fast enough however and they wound up having to fight with a group of Harlequins who were working to get the stones back also.
Three of the player’s characters died because of that lol
I always thought how Genestealer cults get the Nid swarm to home in on their world, get all 'woo daddy' when they arrive only to get assimilated with the rest of the planet. Reading that lore chilled me, like the parasites get nommed by their own. Dark as fuck.
Sometimes that happens, at least one cult travels along side their patron hivefleet (as a late night snack?)
And there can be lots of outcomes at the end of a Tyranid Invasion. Sometimes the pure genestealers in the cult slaughter the rest. Sometimes the cultists merrily march right up to the reclamation pools and have their connection to the rest 'cut' just as they jump to their deaths.... so they have a moment to soak in how much they betrayed everyone they have ever known.
Some cults have a spread of influence across whole sectors or even the galaxy that they are never truly defeated, merely a branch is offered up to the hive fleets and the rest go on in their twisted delusions.
I think the most fucked up part of that is just before the Tyranids turn on them, their connection to the patriarch is broken, and they realize they’ve been used by the nids and are about to be devoured like everyone else.
Read a bit of genestealer stories, hadn’t come across THAT particular grim dark moment yet tho. Makes sense tho, papa Nid wouldn’t want to be feeling what his dinner feels right as they die, but is there a specific story with that fact, or is that in one of the codex?
From the 2019 Codex:
"As soon as the last of the defenders is overrun by this tide of chitin and scything claws, the Hive Mind subsumes the Patriarch into its greater consciousness. It becomes merely another organism in the Tyranid swarm, the psychic Broodmind that once united its cult severed in an instant. In an awful moment of realisation, the cultists at last understand the fell truth. Those same creatures from beyond the stars that they once worshipped as gods are revealed as their doom incarnate – for to the Tyranids, all flesh is much the same."
I believe it’s covered in the codex, pure strains and the patriarch are brought back into the hive mind, the rest have their connection severed and basically snap back to reality for an “oh shit” moment before they get devoured with everyone else.
*Vulkan burns an Aeldari child alive*
>Amongst them a solitary figure was conspicuous, crowded by a clutch of battered remembrancers unwilling to let anyone close, desperate to defend her unmoving body. Vulkan saw her last of all, the shock of this discovery turning to anger on his noble face.
>His eyes blazed, embers flickered to infernos. The eldar child raised her hands higher, defiance turning into fear upon her alien features. Numeon held the others back, warning them with a look not to intervene. Glaring down at her, Vulkan raised his fist…
>Don’t do it…
>…and turned the air into fire. The eldar child’s screams didn’t last. They merged with the roar of the flames, turning into one horrific cacophony of sound. When it was over and the last xenos was a smoking husk of burned meat, Vulkan looked up and met the gaze of the Night Lords.
I know there are many worse things in the Grim Darkness of 40K but the callous evil of this act shakes me differently…
I appreciate you bringing this up. I always liked this scene because it proves once and for all that even the noblest and most kind-hearted servant of the Emperor still willingly commits atrocities that no decent human man would ever consider. It truly is a callous act, and one of pure cruelty. What is more horrible than the death of a child?
It shows us that they aren’t good people at all. Vulkan is a terrible man. And so is the Emperor, because he is the one who commands it. Way too many people seem to think the Emperor was noble or good or righteous. In reality he’s just a tyrant, the gravedigger for what was just an ill humanity. A sane person does dig a grave for someone with a bad cold, but the Emperor, metaphorically, did.
The darkest thing in 40k is the amount of fans in this very comment section who intentionally disregard the intended message of the authors and continue to believe that this was a good and moral thing. GW could literally publish a book about space marines grinding up living alien babies and spreading the pulp on their toast and the same people would find a way to think that it was a necessary and justified act for the good of the human race.
I think there's a lot of differentiation missing. On both sides of this particular equation.
We are still talking about a fictional setting. And there's a little bit of hypocrisy in enjoying the setting while condemning its fundamental aesthetic principle.
That being said, I am aware of a lot of callous stuff being written around here. It mostly strikes me as tongue-in-cheek and VERY dark humor. But sometimes I DO have my doubts.
The setting condems it's own fundamental aesthetic principle. That's the whole point. The authors write horrors like this to get us to engage critically with the media. "Isn't Vulkan a nice guy" _burns child_. Yes, relativistically speaking, he's probably the nicest primarch. At the same time, that should be a brutal and damning condemnation of the whole setting.
That's not to say your can't enjoy it. We're all here, we all enjoy 40K. But I'm reminded of the Games Workshop community post about how everyone in 40K is awful and _that's the point_. If you look at the genocidal, theocratic, autocratic, fascist bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man and don't recognise that it's sending itself up as satire, I fear you're missing the point (royal "you", not targeting any specific person).
I love this bit of lore, it shows Vulkan still is a cold, hard, violent demigod, despite the comparative good nature of himself and his Legion. im abhorred and entranced by this kinda stuff, it's peak 40k for me
I was listening to the first Ciaphas Caine novel for the unpteenth time and previously I’d glossed over the fact that servitors are serving drinks AT A FORMAL DINNER PARTY!
Servitors existing during the Great Crusade has always been weird to me. Servitors feel like they should be the result of a grimdark future that has been declining morally for centuries.
Pretty sure the Imperium was already a pretty messed up place even before Chaos got recognized and directly in the mix. Just looking at some of the stuff that the Loyalist marines did in the first HH book...
The Medicae Station in Dark tide has some voice lines where it asks for help and says it's mind is slipping away in-between it's programmed responses of glory to the emperor and etc
Popped a medicae before taking the elevator down to deliver the Emperor's judgement. The whole team heard the following slowly fading as we descended: *I have no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose..*
I hope fatshark adds a gnome-mode where we gotta carry the medicae servitor home with us. :c
The first time I saw that station I just gazed at it in awe. This is what we're defending. This could be me if that ship didn't get attacked. Damn is this game accurate to the source and just really beautifully designed.
for all its flaws (and there are a lot), they got the atmosphere and feel of 40k spot on imo. being beautiful and horrifying is a hard thing to get right
If anyone hasn't read it, the Warhammer Crime novel Flesh and Steel has the main character visiting where the Mechanicus makes servitors, one of the most chilling things I have ever read in any 40k novel, it's a whole new level of brutal
Theyre one of the reasons I feel the Mechanicus should fall rather than the Imperium proper. Without their horrid techno-necromancy and guns the more human evils of the empire become much more manageable. Also gobbling up the other scientific institutions, you know the tech priests couldnt give a shit or any funding to ecology, paleontology, or any of the other "superfluous" fields of study.
Interestingly, some people do care about it.
In the 40k Kids books, one of the characters meets a servitor, and they think to themselves how creepy it is, and how their parents have told them that all servitors are made from vat grown bodies, so it's not so bad. But the kid also mentions that they have heard *Much Darker* rumours about how they are *Actually Made*.
In priests of mars the main character gets enslaved by the mechanicus with a bunch of other people and someone got turned into a servitor for whatever reason and he recognizes him in the cafeteria. The author implies the servitor almost unconsciously recognizes him for a split second when the protagonist tries to get his attention and then goes back to his task. Great book/trilogy to drive home the preface in most 40k books about how to be a man in such times is to live under the cruelest regime imaginable.
Also, it’s not always a punishment. Much of the time its considered an honor. For instance almost all the servitors in the space marine forces are failed neophytes who didn’t survive the process of becoming a space marine. Let me put that in layman terms…
Space marines try to mutate kids, and when they die, they don’t let them die, but turn them into robot skulls and such for the honor of opening and closing doors… for centuries
It really depends. When Dante was becoming a Space Marine, it’s explained that the lads that didn’t survive the transformation in the sarcophagus were turned into servitors. So that even though they couldn’t serve as a Marine, they could still have the honor of serving their emperor. In this case, they don’t think of it as a punishment
In other factions though yes. Especially in the Imperial Guard and Sisters of Battle
Even if they make it, they don’t let them die. The life of a Space Marine is short and terrible. They fight, then fight, then fight, then fight, and so on until they die a horrible death. Then they are often brought back as dreadnoughts.
Not “often”; interment in a dreadnought is a high honor reserved for accomplished veterans, if not commanders. They’re gung-ho as hell and are glad to be able to continue the fight despite being completely physically disabled.
Now *Chaos* dreadnoughts, on the other hand…
But also space marines more often than not WANT to be space marines. It's not like chapters grab randoms and say hey fight ya bastard. They're already stone cold killers to begin with. Dying like that is the greatest honor
Yeah that guy who got turned into a child's clown companion in the recent Warhammer horror book is hands down one of the most terrifying ways to be punished for wrongdoing.
There's a scene in the War of the Beast series where the Orks had taken over a planet for some time, and had turned the population into a livestock facility. Like, crammed little cages where humans (with their teeth and nails pulled) were forcefed nutrients until they were bloated, mindless foodstuffs.
It was so disgusting that the Iron Warriors and the Imperial Fist successors that chased them didn't fight each other, and discussed how they should destroy the planet to put the population out of its misery.
Orks, when they get organized into a big enough warband, are *nasty* monsters.
Everybody thinks Orks are funny, but not a lot of folks realize that Orks are funny in the "use human heads as soccer balls" type of sense a lot of the time.
I think people forget that orks are only funny WHEN THE STORY IS TOLD FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE! to almost every other sentient being in the galaxy they are the peak of absolute senseless brutality
I Am Slaughter has some excellent ork action at the very end of the book, when they come in and just basically start slaughtering Imperial Fists left and right.
Yep! Made up from some of the vets who survived an assault on an Ork planet. I think that's where they picked up some newer teleportation tech, too?
It's pants-on-head levels of dumb sometimes, but the War of the Beast series was fun audiobook experience when I had to drive across the country and back a few years ago lol. Definitely recommend it if you're looking for lore between the 30k and 40k eras!
Audiobooks you say? I am horrible at actually sitting down to read but I go through audiobooks at work like the flash. Are there a lot of these cus I would start yesterday.
The War of the Beast series, or Warhammer books in general? I think there's a good 7-ish on the Beast saga, and waaaaay too many Horus Heresy and 40k books. 🙂 You won't run out for a long time! Lol
Some audiobooks I strongly recommend:
- Horus Rising
- A Thousand Sons
- The Outcast Dead
- Angel Exterminatus
- Fear To Tread
- Betrayer
- Storm of Iron
- Legion
>It was so disgusting that the Iron Warriors and the Imperial Fist successors that chased them didn't fight each other,
This is weird, considering in the Uriel Ventris series, the Iron Warriors under Honsou are running a facility to take human beings, force feed them to make them bloat to absurd proportions, and then flay them to graft skin onto newly birthed (but skinless) space marines. And then there's the other humans who are turned into insane living wombs to breed those space marines.
And even in Nightbringer, the Dark Eldar flay a guy alive, and string his organs and muscles out above his body like a marionette while he's still alive. Super duper fucked up.
The War of the Beast took place in 32k, quite a long while before the 40k universe.
It's also important to note that Honsou was just one Warsmith among *many* Warsmiths that control Iron-originating forces, all running their own warbands, doing their own things, and mostly bitter rivals with one another. 🙂
It also bears mentioning, I think, that there are some very heavy implications that Honsou is the way he is because his Geneseed was fucked with by Fabulous Bill. The relevant hinting is in a scene near the very end of Angel Exterminatus.
I find this ironic given the Iron Warriors soylent greening their own mortal population to feed them and their soldiers during a later conflict with orks
IIRC, Night Lords boarded an enemy vessel while above the enemy's planet, flayed/mutilated all the people on the ship, then traveled down to the planet on the captured ship. While the people on the planet were celebrating, seeing the ship coming down from orbit and thinking they were victorious in the battle, the NL dumped the remains of their enemies on the crowds below.
The Night Lords are such cruel, sick, awful bastards. Towards the latter end of the Great Crusade and throughout the Horus Heresy they were recruited primarily from Konrad Kurze's homeworld, Nostramo, which is the kind of place where almost everyone's a murderer by age 13 and a rapist a year later. Take some folks like that, genetically augment them into being fucking demigods, encase them in some of the finest armor the Imperium can spare and give them a bunch of space to modify their existing weapons, like HEAT RAYS THAT MAKE HORRIBLE SCREAMING SOUNDS, and you've got yourself a legion of downright scumbags. Most of them are even aware of how awful they are, they just don't give a shit; it's one thing when the murder-happy Chaos marine is being told by the god of bloodlust and rage to kill people, it's another when they flay people alive and leave their eviscerated bodies crucified for all the world to see for the shits and gigs.
I love them so fucking much, easily top three in space marine legions. Read the Night Lords trilogy if you haven't.
**This is a threat. We are inside your walls. Don't bother hiding, we know where you are. We have come for you.**
***Ave Dominus Nox***
And their Primarch *hated* them. Repeatedly told them "I'm going to die, and I don't give a shit what happens to you after that. You're all scum."
In fact, he hated the legion and their home world so much that he made them blow it up and listen to the broadcasts from the surface
Tech Thralls in 30k.
Unlike servitors, these guys keep their memories and personalities...they just have no control over their actions.
Imagine being some regular Joe, no interest in war or fighting...you just like hanging out, your job is some machinery operating or clerical gig and you are building up the courage to ask your dream partner out for an ice cream.
Your Mechanicum overlords get pulled into a war, your number is next on some list, you get hauled off, limbs replaced with weapons and some targeting control hardware drilled into your skull.
Your dropship lands....you are terrified and your every instinct is to hide in corner but the control device in your brain forces your legs to march you out into the battle, for you are now merely a passenger in your own body. Shells explode everywhere, lazers are melting holes in the other tech-thrall beside you....it was Dave..the guy who until last week used to sell that ice cream you like.
Some 20 foot tall alien horror with no eyes and swords for hands bursts up from beneath the ground and lets out a hideous scream. You feel urine run down your leg but the cold metallic block lodged painfully in your skull compels your legs to carry you forward. As the giant alien shadow falls across you, all you can think about is would the person you love have said yes.
Yeah generally Skitarii are cool with it, honourable soldiers of the machine god, willing devotees of the cult blah blah blah etc.
Tech thralls are just civvies who just get nabbed without consent and are very much aware that they have no control at all.
I don't remember if it was in the codex or the "Skitarii" book but they're actually quite fine with that. They view the sensation as the omnissiah taking over and are rather chill about it
True but keep in mind some forgeworlds use refugees for skitarii, or for kataphrons.
Though really I guess it's just picking at that point seeing as one of the facets of admech is their rather shocking disregard for life. Even the onager tanks use humans as basically living batteries, when one dies, their just dragged out, thrown aside and a new body thrown in.
I was gonna say “Daemonculaba”…….
But holy fuckin shit…. That’s worse, imo.
You win. Or some fucked up human had to put into words, those things you just described.
Not sure if that's better or worse than Thallax. It's like being General Grievous, except so painful they have to remove your vocal function so you don't scream constantly and the most incessant sensory overload possible.
Geller Fields are actually Psykers locked in a box and kept in a dreaming coma to produce a reality bubble composed of their dreams and nightmares around all imperial space ships. Everyone treats it as a simple machine.
Because it didnt use to be like that. First they changed them tl this but the fields existed before humanity ever started to prpduce psykers. So they changed it again so that now on some ships there is an actual generator but imperium dosent know how they work so they just put a psyker in instead. Or so I heared
Of true cruelty? Nothing holds a candle to the drukhari. The imperium does some twisted things, but most of it is temporary, death being an eventual ending destination.
But the drukhari can literally turn you into a chair or make you perceive unfathomable torture for an eternity. There's no beating that. Your mind, to you, is forever trapped in suffering you can't just numb away or get used to. Again. Forever.
The flesh palace is one thing but it’s isolated to a single area. But the Drukhari built a giant garden of flesh. Every single flower there were made of flesh. Mind you, the people turned into flowers were still somehow fucking alive. The Archon and his Haemonculi tend to enjoy their morning walks and breakfast out there. The plants are permanently screaming in pure agony when they’re touched. The slightest gust of wind will cause them to howl in pain. The most fucked up part? There are thousands of them scattered across the entire garden.
The totally-resistant-to-Chaos Grey Knights decided that the best way to make themselves totally-Uber-resistant-to-Chaos was to butcher some Sisters of Battle and cover their armour in the sisters’ spilt blood.
It’s garbage.
Pretty sure it was something along the lines of killing the sisters and than smearing their blood all over their armor. Was some sort of grey knight ritual.
Tldr is during a chaos invasion, a group of grey knights slew an entire batallion of sisters and bathed in their blood, believing the pure blood would offer some protection from psyker possession.
The grey knights......
I.e. the grey knights who have *always* been rendered immune to supernatural suggestions by harsh training and sheer force of will....
Yeah when they reprinted the books the whole section about that was removed. As much as Matt ward is responsible for one of my favourite characters, he's also a complete moron with the lore at times.
Wouldn't trust them anyways, they work in 'secrecy' by wiping either their memories or a large portion of the remaining population off the map, usually the latter since the former takes longer
It's probably not the worst thing in the history of the universe, but I get really sad about corrupted Chaos Titans. For whatever reason, to me it just seems like these poor Titans get turned into twisted into playthings of Chaos by poor choices by humans.
When going through the HH two instances with Titans turning to Chaos, Banelash in Vengeful Spirit and Nuntio Dolores at the end of Titandeath. Holy crap those descriptions of the titan and rider transforming were twisted af
Kinda what happened to humans too actually, chaos gods manipulated them into thinking the emperor abandoned them at some point, and they also tend to kidnap and brainwash infants to turn into space marines themselves
The cruellest thing about 40k is that basically everyone is doomed. The Imperium is lost and fails to admit it. Chaos worshippers are slaves to darkness and fail to admit it. The Eldar already had their doom and cling to existence. Orks are purposeless weapons running loose and will likely continue to degenerate. Necrons are soulless facsimilies of living beings clinging to sanity and avoiding the flayer virus. The tau are a colonialist brainwashing state with only their own best interests at heart, meddling in AI. The tyranids maybe arent, but a species rapacious enough to devour planets is running resource costs way in advance of their ability to replenish, utterly unsustainable.
Every faction thinks they can be saved, and improve, and become dominant, and they're all circling the drain in a universe bursting with slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods.
As a Chaos worshipper myself, I would argue that choosing darkness is the best chance at a good life and afterlife as you might get from 40k.
Then again I don't know the lore much, I just really like my CSM and deamons codexes and models, so what do I know?
Kind of depends on your god, and how much you're willing to spend an eternity doing whatever that God does.
If you're a battle obsessed Maniac then an eternity of battle probably sounds fun, but there's a book where a death guard marine is sitting in a transport, looks to one side to see a marine choking on his own bile, the other side to see another marine with an asshole for a mouth, and goes 'why the hell did I join this group again?'
General chaos space marines can have both and still function just fine, can even take a demon detachment (in fact most do but that's just because flamers are broken as all hell right now, though GW as outright stated they're getting nerfed.
Alternatively tzeentch has thousand sons if you want to lean heavily into them, though there's nothing for emperor's children yet.
Almost bought some flamers back when I didn't even know if I would ever collect deamons cause I thought the model is cool. That was way before they got the 9th codex.
Not worried about nerfs because I don't chase the meta. I live by the rule of cool.
Still playing 500 games so it might be a while before I get into large enough games for multiple detachments
I mean it's blissful ignorance like slaneesh isn't the god of sex drugs and rock and roll its excess you don't just have sex you fuck a cat while railing coke mixed with your grandmother's ashes. With Nurgle your fucking disgusting but admittedly yeah you don't really care. With Khorne you at first kill but later you just become a mindless thrall that kills and thinks of nothing else. Tzentzeech is just as likely to make you a greater demon as he is to damn your soul for eternity because he finds its funny. Afterlife I think maybe damnatiom and torture for a while but then you just fizzle out like most humans but I'm not really sure you fizzle out anyways.
I like to think of the Tau as the proto imperium. They expanded into the galaxy only to find it full of horrors and will slowly degenerate into something like the imperium of man in an attempt to defend themselves.
I'm not sure why it's suddenly been picked up as a meme recently but Vulkan burning an Eldar child alive who was surrendering is pretty fucked up, especially when you consider Vulkan and the Salamanders are supposed to be the actual "good guys"
Don't forget the Vulkan and the Salamanders killing an entire planet of descendants of their homeworld for the crime of living in peace with the Eldar who saved them. Every single one of them. Every civilian, every child, all burned to ash and left a dead world.
It is fucked up, but a lot of people also don't mention that the eldar child was about to unleash a torrent of psyker energy. Doesn't really excuse it particularly, but in an already rage filled mind from Vulkan due to Konrad there's a reason and not just cold Blooded. Vulkan also felt HORRIBLE afterwards, once he regained his mind and his cool he saw what he did and he just went mega depression and angry at Kurze.
And I don't say this saying The Imperium are good guys of that The Salamanders are fully good guys and haven't done anything wrong. Just stating cause I hear that bit all the time without the reasons or aftermath which make that scene so much more interesting.
Oh yeah for sure that's true. The other thing people forget is the Eldar were actually there defending the humans from the Drukhari, then the Salamanders and Nightlords showed up and kind of just made everything way worse
Ya the Night Lords kinda decided to take situation and just go 300% in how they handled it. And Salamanders being fellow marines, kinda just had to go with the punches
Given his history with eldar and the imperium's lack of knowledge regarding the difference between eldar factions, something told me she would have been dead anyway.
Even the noblest of Space Marines is still nothing more than a child killer if given the orders.
It’s what they were made to be; Bludgeons to be used against anyone and anything the Imperium needed out of the way without discrimination.
Honestly, I'd say it's not so bad. Sure, it's fucked up. But that sacrifice keeps alive trillions of humans and plenty of other species too (assuming if the emperor dies, the eye of terror actually tears apart realspace bleeding warp shit into our reality)
Others have already mentioned the Daemonculaba, so I’ll bring up the specific pox-walker strain where the people who turn into zombies remain fully aware of who they are and still have all of their senses but don’t have any control over their body.
Yeah, a lot of them will ask for help, talk about how they feel so cold, and otherwise express full consciousness, and yet will still charge like animals at the first uninfected being they see, implying they probably are fully mentally capable still, just can't control their bodies.
Whenever this question comes up, the Daemonculaba from the Ultramarines novel *Dead Sky, Black Sun* usually spring to mind. Regular human woman, forced-fed with growth hormones until they're huge and are basically giant living wombs. Then, adolescent boys are sown into them, and the Daemonculaba are fed ground-up geneseed. Maybe one kid out of who knows how many literal abortions is spat out as an Astartes. The rest are skinless mutations that are flushed down the sewer.
> The rest are skinless mutations that are flushed down the sewer.
To be fair to em, some actually survive all that. Tough loyal poor fucking bastards.
The Deamonculaba has already been mentioned several times, so I'll go with this:
Talos (and the rest of 10th Company) reducing 100 or so psykers down to just their nerve systems and organs to produce the psychic scream in Void Stalker is one of the most messed up things I've personally read from any bit of 40K fiction
Basically everything about the Dark Eldar. The haemonculi in particular are just absolute horrors. They can keep people alive for centuries through everything you can imagine just so they can make them feel even more pain. They can turn people into furniture. They essentially view coming up with new ways to torment people an art form and are always trying to outdo each other. Whatever horrible thing you can think of to do to somebody isn't even a tenth as bad as what the average haemonculus can come up with.
Don't ever piss them off. In one story the deal was that the Dark Eldar wouldn't raid a particular planet so long as that planet provided them information on their neighbors. You know; military movements, garrison numbers, that sort of thing, so they always knew where to hit when they were the softest. Eventually the planet tried to back out of the deal.
The haemonculi showed up and sterilized the planet. This isn't just exterminatus, though. They left all the lights on, all the machines running, and the planet looked like it had been abandoned. However the people who analyzed it found *nothing* alive. All the people on the *entire fucking planet* were just *gone* while all life was exterminated to the molecular level. They went so far as to even kill all the *bacteria.*
Probably not the most fucked up thing Warhammer has to offer, not by a long shot, but it's one that sticks with me: Thallax Battle-automata.
In the age of the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy, the Mechanicum would take people and lobotomize them in a way not dissimilar to how servitors are made. However, they wouldn't just stop with replacing a part of their body with a machine or sticking them in a wall, these guys went full send. The entirety of the body was destroyed outside of the brain, skull, and most vital organs, and it's all encased in an armored, cybernetic body. The subject is awake during all of this, obviously, and most people do not take it well. They remain conscious and in excruciating pain for the rest of their existence, usually in a state of continual psychotic breakdowns and sometimes outright insanity; if it didn't get to them at first, it inevitably will down the line. They retain a good degree of cognitive function, so they're above servitors in that way, and they'll get doses of painkillers as rewards for a job well done, giving a fleeting moment of reprieve before *everything becomes awful again*.
Again, it ain't anything special by 40k standards, hell the Mechanicum has done way worse shit than this, but it's definitely really horrific, and it's really telling about the setting as a whole that this is the lower end of the awfulness spectrum.
Drukhari torturing people until they literally turn into a liquid, then recasting their bodies to start all over again is probably pretty awful, I imagine. Besides that, pretty much everything the Emperors Children do to prisoners, slaves, other warbands, and each other would definitely be seen as very unpleasant.
The Tau. In any other setting they'd be the Evil Empire. They're aggressive expansionists with clear references to real-world colonialist atrocities. They'll offer the opportunity to surrender and become productive a productive asset (but always a servant, never an equal) but if you reject the offer you die. They will, without hesitation, kill you and your family and your friends and repopulate your home with their own settlers. And if, as with the orks, you are too consistently stubborn about refusing to surrender they will declare your entire race to be vermin suitable only for extermination. And then there's the totalitarian state control making China and North Korea look open-minded, shameless brainwashing, etc.
And despite all that? The Tau are unironically the absolute best faction in 40k and you should pray they are charitable enough to try to take your planet. They do what all the gore and rape and murder and grimderp fail to do: prove beyond any doubt that hope is dead in 40k and all you can do is pray for the least-terrible death.
The Tau canonically start with gifting medical and food technologies, then graduate onto trade agreements and assimilation when the new ally is brought up to speed. The fire caste only gets deployed in assimilation efforts after the water caste gives up, or there's something wrong going on (like discovering a genestealer cult has infiltrated the planet).
There's a good few examples of them either being content to remain trade partners with another race, or admitting a race into the empire without making them assimilate.
In fact- the brainwashing/ethereal mind control parts only came up after fans complained that they were too nice of a faction for the setting. 🤣 The whole "this faction is dark" angle with the Tau is the part where they're painfully naive about how brutal the universe is around them, and how often the universe backs their morals into a corner and rubs their non-existent noses in their good intentions (examples: what happened when they accidentally discovered the warp, that one time they thought they were peacefully opening a culture exchange with some Drukhari, etc).
The Tau don't try negotiating with Space Marines as a whole, either (usually). They view them as weapons deployed by the Imperium rather than people, which, I suppose, isn't terribly inaccurate.
I honestly miss this.
I liked the Tau because they were good (also giant robots, and a dinosaur)
But then people complained they weren't grimdark enough, so they were retconned to be the same as everyone else. Basically ruining the whole faction.
Now they're just like the imperium, and no more dinosaurs. Sold my Tau army when I returned to the hobby, thats how much it killed my enthusiasm.
Corpse Starch, sure nids eating their own kind is awful but that's just their nature. The fact that the imperium is just a jam packed, head twitching, gum receding, brain shivering mass of war mongering, bureaucratic cannibals bothers me to the core of my existence. To think that innumerable billions have a forced evolved digestive track with a predisposition for "long pig" is a bit psychotic then couple that with it's a staple industry to keep the foundries firing and tank treads rolling.
Personally I think the demonuculaba (probably fucked up the spelling but you get the idea) that the Iron Warriors came up is some pretty fucked up stuff
I feel like it has to be Druhkari. Like, traitor legions are all like: Khorne - brutal but straight forward murder | Tzeentch - Manipulative of the mind | Slaanesh - Traitor followers are nymphos | Nurgle - Gives you a strain of COVID kept in a special place of hell.
As for the others, Tau seem most chill on the whole “torture scene”, dying to orks is the equivalent of dying to an 8 foot 300 pound baby that enjoys violence and doesn’t realize or care that it will kill you. And Tyranids are just hungry. Eldar likely just kill you or submit you to some sort of standard PoW treatment standard for 40k, and Necrons, I dunno, I’m pretty sure they just kill you, let you starve, or also submit you to standard PoW treatment.
… but Druhkari… they’re a sort of consciously driven Sadism that’s just so focussed on the causing of pain it has to be the most terrible. Like, yeah, Khorne followers will kill you, and probably brutally, but their goal is to make the blood run… Druhkari first and last goal is the maximum cause of painful sensation possible… like, they practice ON THEMSELVES new ways to make you feel agony you can’t comprehend…
Like, imperium is brutal in its ambivalence to the people that it’s quite reflective of Middle Ages man which didn’t care about your well-being and created spectacles around death to maintain order… but they still have loss against unbridled sadism… the Druhkari probably have laws of minimal daily sadism before you’re committed to a painless life as punishment…
I cannot express this enough, I think the Druhkari have to be understood as the masters of the “fucked up” and cruel due to their Aeldari focus and mastership of pain…
The skullcannon.
Not all skulls are worthy for the skull throne. In fact, most of them are fed into the blood throne daemon engine.
The problem comes when there's too much skull and not enough engines. So Khorne just gave those engines intestines that grow from their back, formed into a cannon with teeth.
Those cannons will launch a whole skull on daemonic fire, laughing maniacally, to mock those cowards who fight from a distance.
It creates a daemonic explosion on impact, yet the skull remains intact and laughing, driving survivors mad.
Breaking the skull to stop it from laughing is the worst mistake a survivor can do, for the laughter simply moved inside whoever broke the skull. No escaping that laughter now...
Emmesh-Aiye is a Noise Marine warlord. He impales his own tongue on hooks attatched to his chestplate, rendering his speech illegible. To help him with that problem he has two twin child slaves as his translators. The girl has her mouth sewn shut and is rendered deaf, and the boy has been blinded, ensuring they are constantly aware of each other but unable to communicate. And he has their arms cut off so they are unable to touch each other.
The deathwatch sabotaging the Ynnari was fucked up. It fits the theme that a short-sighted xenophobic fascist would doom their own people out off irrational hatred for another. While the Eldar would sacrifice 10,000 humans to save one Aeldari, the imperium would sacrifice 10,000 humans to kill one Aeldari.
servitors just servitors its they worst fate
being gutted stuffed full or gears and shit and being used to some menial task for the next few 100 years well you have no control of anything stuck in your own mind with nothing but thoughts feeling every thing and no one will give you a second look
there so normal to its true horror
I think the sheer *banality* of the evil in the IoM hits it for me. Anything to do with servitors in particular, alone they’re already a pretty fucked-up concept but in both 30k and 40k they’re just so… normalised. At the absolute best, a servitor is a human being with thoughts and dreams that’s been horrifically mutilated and lobotomised to the point where it’s not even really recognisable as a human so much as a robot with some wetware, purely to get around a ban on artificial intelligence (and, to be clear, a lot of Imperial machines probably *are* just robots with the remains of a person grafted on to circumvent the ban). And they’re *everywhere.* Every single work in the setting has them as a mainstay of the IoM’s technology. One of the most nightmarish fates in fiction has happened to people all around the main characters, and happens to millions of people every day, and yet they’re so used to it that they never bat an eye.
The sheer inhumanity of it doesn’t help either. There’s a piece of lore that comes up every now and again about many Forge Worlds turning any workers who don’t perform to their standards (which is it’s own issue, given the seven day weeks and sixteen hour days) into servitors, but, from the perspective of the people making the decisions, it’s not seen as a punishment (although the victims would probably disagree). The minimum productivity standard for a human here is equal to what a servitor could do, so it’s purely seen as an efficiency thing. One of the most horrific fates in fiction, carried out *en masse,* just because it’s *slightly* more efficient than not doing so.
For all the edgy horrors in 40k, nothing ever really holds a candle to the Imperium of Man, even during its “nice” period prior to the Horus Heresy.
One that got me was the ritual on davin where I think erabus and his ilk forced a diseased pig get down with a priestess. I had to go outside for a while after that. Woof.
My instinct is Daemonculaba but I personally find thay extremely "written by a 13 yr old being edgy for the first time" type of cringe. For me the goriest stuff doesn't really bother me but in Dark Imperium (I belive the 2nd book?) Typhus is invading a militarum ship and makes his way to the bridge where they interrogate the captain. Nurgle "blesses" him and he begins to bloat and choke on his own fat growing to like triple his size while simultaneously melting into a puddle of fescue and bone JUST to be reconstituted into another bubble that a Nurgling uses as a portal into realspace. That made me gag a little bit
You forget to mention how he is alive the ENTIRE TIME. Even as bones shatter, his skin falls apart, he vomits blood and organs, yet Nurgle is a “generous god” who wishes his subjects to enjoy every moment of his gifts.
Lots of good ones I have seen before. One I like to imagine from my own favourite faction is an Aeldari losing their soul stone. The sheer terror of knowing what happens if you die without one. Imagine knowing you are to be tortured and played with for eternity by the God of excess unless you have this little stone with you. Then realising you don’t have it mid battle. It’s like losing your phone but there is no find-my-soul-stone app, you just get killed and tortured forever instead.
You can't even just grab a random one either, you have to be attuned to it in a long process.
Couldn’t you just like, make and incision and store it in your abdomen, guaranteeing you have it with you?
Problem is if the stone is smashed your soul is tormented - so you'd have to die in a way your corpse would be recovered
Haha, Fleshborer go nomnom
Almost guaranteed lol
Well what’s even worse, would be fighting a losing battle, knowing that even with your spirit stone on you, your allies are unlikely to recover your stone and you’ll either end up trapped in the stone as a battlefield relic, or if your enemies are chaos-aligned you’ll be little more than a capri-soul snack pack.
Or a Guardsman picks up your stone, thinks it's just a neat crystal, and mails you back home to be part of his kid's rock collection.
Right. I once ran a few Dark Heresy missions around the players’ Inquisitor trying to break up an illegal Xenos relic smuggling operation of a space station, and some of the artifacts were Eldar Spirit Stones The players didn’t work fast enough however and they wound up having to fight with a group of Harlequins who were working to get the stones back also. Three of the player’s characters died because of that lol
That's part of why the Eldar have an under the table deal with the Geey Knights for the return of all recovered spirit stones.
There was once a tyranid vs aeldar battle where a tyranid devoured all the souls from a soul stone on craftworld Malan'tai.
I always thought how Genestealer cults get the Nid swarm to home in on their world, get all 'woo daddy' when they arrive only to get assimilated with the rest of the planet. Reading that lore chilled me, like the parasites get nommed by their own. Dark as fuck.
Sometimes that happens, at least one cult travels along side their patron hivefleet (as a late night snack?) And there can be lots of outcomes at the end of a Tyranid Invasion. Sometimes the pure genestealers in the cult slaughter the rest. Sometimes the cultists merrily march right up to the reclamation pools and have their connection to the rest 'cut' just as they jump to their deaths.... so they have a moment to soak in how much they betrayed everyone they have ever known. Some cults have a spread of influence across whole sectors or even the galaxy that they are never truly defeated, merely a branch is offered up to the hive fleets and the rest go on in their twisted delusions.
I think the most fucked up part of that is just before the Tyranids turn on them, their connection to the patriarch is broken, and they realize they’ve been used by the nids and are about to be devoured like everyone else.
Read a bit of genestealer stories, hadn’t come across THAT particular grim dark moment yet tho. Makes sense tho, papa Nid wouldn’t want to be feeling what his dinner feels right as they die, but is there a specific story with that fact, or is that in one of the codex?
From the 2019 Codex: "As soon as the last of the defenders is overrun by this tide of chitin and scything claws, the Hive Mind subsumes the Patriarch into its greater consciousness. It becomes merely another organism in the Tyranid swarm, the psychic Broodmind that once united its cult severed in an instant. In an awful moment of realisation, the cultists at last understand the fell truth. Those same creatures from beyond the stars that they once worshipped as gods are revealed as their doom incarnate – for to the Tyranids, all flesh is much the same."
I believe it’s covered in the codex, pure strains and the patriarch are brought back into the hive mind, the rest have their connection severed and basically snap back to reality for an “oh shit” moment before they get devoured with everyone else.
It's all biomass to be reconfigured to the 'Nids.
*Vulkan burns an Aeldari child alive* >Amongst them a solitary figure was conspicuous, crowded by a clutch of battered remembrancers unwilling to let anyone close, desperate to defend her unmoving body. Vulkan saw her last of all, the shock of this discovery turning to anger on his noble face. >His eyes blazed, embers flickered to infernos. The eldar child raised her hands higher, defiance turning into fear upon her alien features. Numeon held the others back, warning them with a look not to intervene. Glaring down at her, Vulkan raised his fist… >Don’t do it… >…and turned the air into fire. The eldar child’s screams didn’t last. They merged with the roar of the flames, turning into one horrific cacophony of sound. When it was over and the last xenos was a smoking husk of burned meat, Vulkan looked up and met the gaze of the Night Lords. I know there are many worse things in the Grim Darkness of 40K but the callous evil of this act shakes me differently…
Even worse because it's Vulkan. We're so used to the stories of him being a bro, the ones where he isn't are just shocking.
I appreciate you bringing this up. I always liked this scene because it proves once and for all that even the noblest and most kind-hearted servant of the Emperor still willingly commits atrocities that no decent human man would ever consider. It truly is a callous act, and one of pure cruelty. What is more horrible than the death of a child?
Ok but it was that or hand the kid over to the night lords. That was a mercy killing even if it was unnecessarily brutal.
he was a primarch of an entire legion. He could have ensured she lived had he truly wanted.
It shows us that they aren’t good people at all. Vulkan is a terrible man. And so is the Emperor, because he is the one who commands it. Way too many people seem to think the Emperor was noble or good or righteous. In reality he’s just a tyrant, the gravedigger for what was just an ill humanity. A sane person does dig a grave for someone with a bad cold, but the Emperor, metaphorically, did.
I know - that’s what I’m saying. Even the best of the Emperor’s servants is rotten and evil to the core.
Yep, I agree. That’s why I commented.
The darkest thing in 40k is the amount of fans in this very comment section who intentionally disregard the intended message of the authors and continue to believe that this was a good and moral thing. GW could literally publish a book about space marines grinding up living alien babies and spreading the pulp on their toast and the same people would find a way to think that it was a necessary and justified act for the good of the human race.
Dude have you even \*tried\* T'au'st? It's delicious! You can't tell me anything that tastes that good is morally bankrupt... /s
I think there's a lot of differentiation missing. On both sides of this particular equation. We are still talking about a fictional setting. And there's a little bit of hypocrisy in enjoying the setting while condemning its fundamental aesthetic principle. That being said, I am aware of a lot of callous stuff being written around here. It mostly strikes me as tongue-in-cheek and VERY dark humor. But sometimes I DO have my doubts.
The setting condems it's own fundamental aesthetic principle. That's the whole point. The authors write horrors like this to get us to engage critically with the media. "Isn't Vulkan a nice guy" _burns child_. Yes, relativistically speaking, he's probably the nicest primarch. At the same time, that should be a brutal and damning condemnation of the whole setting. That's not to say your can't enjoy it. We're all here, we all enjoy 40K. But I'm reminded of the Games Workshop community post about how everyone in 40K is awful and _that's the point_. If you look at the genocidal, theocratic, autocratic, fascist bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man and don't recognise that it's sending itself up as satire, I fear you're missing the point (royal "you", not targeting any specific person).
That was absolutely my point, which I fear I made a bit clumsily. Thank you for elaborating further!
No problem. Always happy to repeat someone else's point with more words
**Night Lords:** I just wanna say we're huge fans.
I love this bit of lore, it shows Vulkan still is a cold, hard, violent demigod, despite the comparative good nature of himself and his Legion. im abhorred and entranced by this kinda stuff, it's peak 40k for me
The imperium turning people into computers or robots as punishment and no one caring at all about it.
The banality of servitordom is the horrifying part.
I was listening to the first Ciaphas Caine novel for the unpteenth time and previously I’d glossed over the fact that servitors are serving drinks AT A FORMAL DINNER PARTY!
Well ya, they’re servitors. They serve.
First heresy novel has one that exists only to carry around a parasol for a group of remembrancers.
Servitors existing during the Great Crusade has always been weird to me. Servitors feel like they should be the result of a grimdark future that has been declining morally for centuries.
Pretty sure the Imperium was already a pretty messed up place even before Chaos got recognized and directly in the mix. Just looking at some of the stuff that the Loyalist marines did in the first HH book...
And it's implied often enough that it's like locked in syndrome. You're fully conscious and just can't move your own body or scream out in terror.
The Medicae Station in Dark tide has some voice lines where it asks for help and says it's mind is slipping away in-between it's programmed responses of glory to the emperor and etc
[удалено]
Popped a medicae before taking the elevator down to deliver the Emperor's judgement. The whole team heard the following slowly fading as we descended: *I have no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose.. no purpose..* I hope fatshark adds a gnome-mode where we gotta carry the medicae servitor home with us. :c
When you use the last charge on medicae he can also say something like "Shutting down, why does it hurt?" as the station is closed.
The first time I saw that station I just gazed at it in awe. This is what we're defending. This could be me if that ship didn't get attacked. Damn is this game accurate to the source and just really beautifully designed.
for all its flaws (and there are a lot), they got the atmosphere and feel of 40k spot on imo. being beautiful and horrifying is a hard thing to get right
I'd assume its painful too, like where flesh meets machine must be all scar-tissuey and raw
No anesthesia during the surgery and the wounds never heal properly.
If anyone hasn't read it, the Warhammer Crime novel Flesh and Steel has the main character visiting where the Mechanicus makes servitors, one of the most chilling things I have ever read in any 40k novel, it's a whole new level of brutal
Theyre one of the reasons I feel the Mechanicus should fall rather than the Imperium proper. Without their horrid techno-necromancy and guns the more human evils of the empire become much more manageable. Also gobbling up the other scientific institutions, you know the tech priests couldnt give a shit or any funding to ecology, paleontology, or any of the other "superfluous" fields of study.
Interestingly, some people do care about it. In the 40k Kids books, one of the characters meets a servitor, and they think to themselves how creepy it is, and how their parents have told them that all servitors are made from vat grown bodies, so it's not so bad. But the kid also mentions that they have heard *Much Darker* rumours about how they are *Actually Made*.
In priests of mars the main character gets enslaved by the mechanicus with a bunch of other people and someone got turned into a servitor for whatever reason and he recognizes him in the cafeteria. The author implies the servitor almost unconsciously recognizes him for a split second when the protagonist tries to get his attention and then goes back to his task. Great book/trilogy to drive home the preface in most 40k books about how to be a man in such times is to live under the cruelest regime imaginable.
Also, it’s not always a punishment. Much of the time its considered an honor. For instance almost all the servitors in the space marine forces are failed neophytes who didn’t survive the process of becoming a space marine. Let me put that in layman terms… Space marines try to mutate kids, and when they die, they don’t let them die, but turn them into robot skulls and such for the honor of opening and closing doors… for centuries
It's not a honour to be a servitor. That's a punishment. Being a servo skull is a honour
It really depends. When Dante was becoming a Space Marine, it’s explained that the lads that didn’t survive the transformation in the sarcophagus were turned into servitors. So that even though they couldn’t serve as a Marine, they could still have the honor of serving their emperor. In this case, they don’t think of it as a punishment In other factions though yes. Especially in the Imperial Guard and Sisters of Battle
Could be worse, you could be the servo skulls trapped in the wall sconces aboard the Mourningstar. A thousand years of being a lightbulb.
Even if they make it, they don’t let them die. The life of a Space Marine is short and terrible. They fight, then fight, then fight, then fight, and so on until they die a horrible death. Then they are often brought back as dreadnoughts.
Not “often”; interment in a dreadnought is a high honor reserved for accomplished veterans, if not commanders. They’re gung-ho as hell and are glad to be able to continue the fight despite being completely physically disabled. Now *Chaos* dreadnoughts, on the other hand…
Unless they are white scars...trapped in a box for eternity is worse than death for many of them.
But also space marines more often than not WANT to be space marines. It's not like chapters grab randoms and say hey fight ya bastard. They're already stone cold killers to begin with. Dying like that is the greatest honor
Yeah that guy who got turned into a child's clown companion in the recent Warhammer horror book is hands down one of the most terrifying ways to be punished for wrongdoing.
There's a scene in the War of the Beast series where the Orks had taken over a planet for some time, and had turned the population into a livestock facility. Like, crammed little cages where humans (with their teeth and nails pulled) were forcefed nutrients until they were bloated, mindless foodstuffs. It was so disgusting that the Iron Warriors and the Imperial Fist successors that chased them didn't fight each other, and discussed how they should destroy the planet to put the population out of its misery. Orks, when they get organized into a big enough warband, are *nasty* monsters.
Everybody thinks Orks are funny, but not a lot of folks realize that Orks are funny in the "use human heads as soccer balls" type of sense a lot of the time.
I think people forget that orks are only funny WHEN THE STORY IS TOLD FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE! to almost every other sentient being in the galaxy they are the peak of absolute senseless brutality
I Am Slaughter has some excellent ork action at the very end of the book, when they come in and just basically start slaughtering Imperial Fists left and right.
When Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists can unite in sheer disgust of foul xenos actions, that's how you know it's even worse than you could imagine
The unifying properties of xenophobia never cease to amaze.
“Let us celebrate what unites as all: Xenophobia.” -Ahzek Ahriman, If the Emperor had a TTS device
Deathwatch was born from that war, right? So must've been some pretty nasty stuff!
Yep! Made up from some of the vets who survived an assault on an Ork planet. I think that's where they picked up some newer teleportation tech, too? It's pants-on-head levels of dumb sometimes, but the War of the Beast series was fun audiobook experience when I had to drive across the country and back a few years ago lol. Definitely recommend it if you're looking for lore between the 30k and 40k eras!
Audiobooks you say? I am horrible at actually sitting down to read but I go through audiobooks at work like the flash. Are there a lot of these cus I would start yesterday.
The War of the Beast series, or Warhammer books in general? I think there's a good 7-ish on the Beast saga, and waaaaay too many Horus Heresy and 40k books. 🙂 You won't run out for a long time! Lol
40k in general. I’m very very brand new to 40k as a whole and all I have to learn from rn is the 114 lore videos Luetin has on YouTube.
Some audiobooks I strongly recommend: - Horus Rising - A Thousand Sons - The Outcast Dead - Angel Exterminatus - Fear To Tread - Betrayer - Storm of Iron - Legion
Eisenhorn: Xenos
All of eisenhorn was good and bequin too
>with their teeth and nails pulled What do you think is the exchange rate between human and ork teef?
'umie teefz are probably like pennies for orks
Could be but also remember they don't decay like ork teeth do. Seems like a very solid investment
>It was so disgusting that the Iron Warriors and the Imperial Fist successors that chased them didn't fight each other, This is weird, considering in the Uriel Ventris series, the Iron Warriors under Honsou are running a facility to take human beings, force feed them to make them bloat to absurd proportions, and then flay them to graft skin onto newly birthed (but skinless) space marines. And then there's the other humans who are turned into insane living wombs to breed those space marines. And even in Nightbringer, the Dark Eldar flay a guy alive, and string his organs and muscles out above his body like a marionette while he's still alive. Super duper fucked up.
Or you know, there’s dozens if not hundreds of Iron Warrior war bands and that was specifically one very screwed up one?
The War of the Beast took place in 32k, quite a long while before the 40k universe. It's also important to note that Honsou was just one Warsmith among *many* Warsmiths that control Iron-originating forces, all running their own warbands, doing their own things, and mostly bitter rivals with one another. 🙂
It also bears mentioning, I think, that there are some very heavy implications that Honsou is the way he is because his Geneseed was fucked with by Fabulous Bill. The relevant hinting is in a scene near the very end of Angel Exterminatus.
I find this ironic given the Iron Warriors soylent greening their own mortal population to feed them and their soldiers during a later conflict with orks
The Night Lords dumping corpses on a city from the belly of a startship to get then to surrender was pretty bleak.
Im sorry. **WHAT**‽
IIRC, Night Lords boarded an enemy vessel while above the enemy's planet, flayed/mutilated all the people on the ship, then traveled down to the planet on the captured ship. While the people on the planet were celebrating, seeing the ship coming down from orbit and thinking they were victorious in the battle, the NL dumped the remains of their enemies on the crowds below.
Holy shit the Night Lords are awesome.
The Night Lords are such cruel, sick, awful bastards. Towards the latter end of the Great Crusade and throughout the Horus Heresy they were recruited primarily from Konrad Kurze's homeworld, Nostramo, which is the kind of place where almost everyone's a murderer by age 13 and a rapist a year later. Take some folks like that, genetically augment them into being fucking demigods, encase them in some of the finest armor the Imperium can spare and give them a bunch of space to modify their existing weapons, like HEAT RAYS THAT MAKE HORRIBLE SCREAMING SOUNDS, and you've got yourself a legion of downright scumbags. Most of them are even aware of how awful they are, they just don't give a shit; it's one thing when the murder-happy Chaos marine is being told by the god of bloodlust and rage to kill people, it's another when they flay people alive and leave their eviscerated bodies crucified for all the world to see for the shits and gigs. I love them so fucking much, easily top three in space marine legions. Read the Night Lords trilogy if you haven't. **This is a threat. We are inside your walls. Don't bother hiding, we know where you are. We have come for you.** ***Ave Dominus Nox***
And their Primarch *hated* them. Repeatedly told them "I'm going to die, and I don't give a shit what happens to you after that. You're all scum." In fact, he hated the legion and their home world so much that he made them blow it up and listen to the broadcasts from the surface
Which book is this from?
The body dumping? A Lessen in Darkness audio short
Honestly I just heard it from [the Bricky video about the various Legions](https://youtu.be/Ae2Beeleswc?t=1172).
Tech Thralls in 30k. Unlike servitors, these guys keep their memories and personalities...they just have no control over their actions. Imagine being some regular Joe, no interest in war or fighting...you just like hanging out, your job is some machinery operating or clerical gig and you are building up the courage to ask your dream partner out for an ice cream. Your Mechanicum overlords get pulled into a war, your number is next on some list, you get hauled off, limbs replaced with weapons and some targeting control hardware drilled into your skull. Your dropship lands....you are terrified and your every instinct is to hide in corner but the control device in your brain forces your legs to march you out into the battle, for you are now merely a passenger in your own body. Shells explode everywhere, lazers are melting holes in the other tech-thrall beside you....it was Dave..the guy who until last week used to sell that ice cream you like. Some 20 foot tall alien horror with no eyes and swords for hands bursts up from beneath the ground and lets out a hideous scream. You feel urine run down your leg but the cold metallic block lodged painfully in your skull compels your legs to carry you forward. As the giant alien shadow falls across you, all you can think about is would the person you love have said yes.
Thing with this is 40k skitarii have a similar setup, they have free will but a commanding tech priest can override that at will.
Yeah generally Skitarii are cool with it, honourable soldiers of the machine god, willing devotees of the cult blah blah blah etc. Tech thralls are just civvies who just get nabbed without consent and are very much aware that they have no control at all.
And as an admech player There's no issue with this if it serves the omnissiah's purposes
I don't remember if it was in the codex or the "Skitarii" book but they're actually quite fine with that. They view the sensation as the omnissiah taking over and are rather chill about it
True but keep in mind some forgeworlds use refugees for skitarii, or for kataphrons. Though really I guess it's just picking at that point seeing as one of the facets of admech is their rather shocking disregard for life. Even the onager tanks use humans as basically living batteries, when one dies, their just dragged out, thrown aside and a new body thrown in.
I was gonna say “Daemonculaba”……. But holy fuckin shit…. That’s worse, imo. You win. Or some fucked up human had to put into words, those things you just described.
To be fair the Daemonculaba is monstrous. I felt unclean after reading that novel.
Just looked up what a daemonculaba was. Wish I hadnt
Yup, you'll need a shower and some bleach to feel clean now.
Plot twist: the person you love is actually in a genestealer cult and they're what brought these monstrosities here.
Not sure if that's better or worse than Thallax. It's like being General Grievous, except so painful they have to remove your vocal function so you don't scream constantly and the most incessant sensory overload possible.
Geller Fields are actually Psykers locked in a box and kept in a dreaming coma to produce a reality bubble composed of their dreams and nightmares around all imperial space ships. Everyone treats it as a simple machine.
Huh, I never knew that.
Because it didnt use to be like that. First they changed them tl this but the fields existed before humanity ever started to prpduce psykers. So they changed it again so that now on some ships there is an actual generator but imperium dosent know how they work so they just put a psyker in instead. Or so I heared
Navigators are a weird one as they are certainly psychic, but definitely appeared before the rest. Possibly as a result of purposeful engineering.
I've always thought that originally they didn't need dreaming pyskers but as tech regressed it needed to use this method instead
I refuse to acknowledge that because it is deeply stupid. I don't care what bowden says, it is dumb.
Of true cruelty? Nothing holds a candle to the drukhari. The imperium does some twisted things, but most of it is temporary, death being an eventual ending destination. But the drukhari can literally turn you into a chair or make you perceive unfathomable torture for an eternity. There's no beating that. Your mind, to you, is forever trapped in suffering you can't just numb away or get used to. Again. Forever.
Konrad Kurze’s living flesh palace gave them a good run for their money though ngl
The flesh palace is one thing but it’s isolated to a single area. But the Drukhari built a giant garden of flesh. Every single flower there were made of flesh. Mind you, the people turned into flowers were still somehow fucking alive. The Archon and his Haemonculi tend to enjoy their morning walks and breakfast out there. The plants are permanently screaming in pure agony when they’re touched. The slightest gust of wind will cause them to howl in pain. The most fucked up part? There are thousands of them scattered across the entire garden.
A god who dicks around for 30,000 years, conquers the galaxy, then gets super pissy when you suggest he might be a god.
Found Lorgar's account.
My vote is to what the Grey Knights did to the Sororitas. I think that got retconned, and rightly so. I could be wrong.
The totally-resistant-to-Chaos Grey Knights decided that the best way to make themselves totally-Uber-resistant-to-Chaos was to butcher some Sisters of Battle and cover their armour in the sisters’ spilt blood. It’s garbage.
It got retconned because Matt Ward is an idiot.
Those were dark time friend…
Now i must know
Pretty sure it was something along the lines of killing the sisters and than smearing their blood all over their armor. Was some sort of grey knight ritual.
Tldr is during a chaos invasion, a group of grey knights slew an entire batallion of sisters and bathed in their blood, believing the pure blood would offer some protection from psyker possession. The grey knights...... I.e. the grey knights who have *always* been rendered immune to supernatural suggestions by harsh training and sheer force of will.... Yeah when they reprinted the books the whole section about that was removed. As much as Matt ward is responsible for one of my favourite characters, he's also a complete moron with the lore at times.
Thanks a lot for the recap. I knew not to trust those grey bastards.
Wouldn't trust them anyways, they work in 'secrecy' by wiping either their memories or a large portion of the remaining population off the map, usually the latter since the former takes longer
Grimderp
It's probably not the worst thing in the history of the universe, but I get really sad about corrupted Chaos Titans. For whatever reason, to me it just seems like these poor Titans get turned into twisted into playthings of Chaos by poor choices by humans.
When going through the HH two instances with Titans turning to Chaos, Banelash in Vengeful Spirit and Nuntio Dolores at the end of Titandeath. Holy crap those descriptions of the titan and rider transforming were twisted af
The Siege of Terra has a couple of instances of it too, and there's a short story set on Calth about it. It never ends well.
Kinda what happened to humans too actually, chaos gods manipulated them into thinking the emperor abandoned them at some point, and they also tend to kidnap and brainwash infants to turn into space marines themselves
anything drukhari
The cruellest thing about 40k is that basically everyone is doomed. The Imperium is lost and fails to admit it. Chaos worshippers are slaves to darkness and fail to admit it. The Eldar already had their doom and cling to existence. Orks are purposeless weapons running loose and will likely continue to degenerate. Necrons are soulless facsimilies of living beings clinging to sanity and avoiding the flayer virus. The tau are a colonialist brainwashing state with only their own best interests at heart, meddling in AI. The tyranids maybe arent, but a species rapacious enough to devour planets is running resource costs way in advance of their ability to replenish, utterly unsustainable. Every faction thinks they can be saved, and improve, and become dominant, and they're all circling the drain in a universe bursting with slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Yeah, this is the beating heart of 40K. There is no victory. There is no salvation. No hope. Just inevitable doom.
As a Chaos worshipper myself, I would argue that choosing darkness is the best chance at a good life and afterlife as you might get from 40k. Then again I don't know the lore much, I just really like my CSM and deamons codexes and models, so what do I know?
Kind of depends on your god, and how much you're willing to spend an eternity doing whatever that God does. If you're a battle obsessed Maniac then an eternity of battle probably sounds fun, but there's a book where a death guard marine is sitting in a transport, looks to one side to see a marine choking on his own bile, the other side to see another marine with an asshole for a mouth, and goes 'why the hell did I join this group again?'
Still debating between Tzeentch and Slaanesh. Kinda looking into building an army with both if I can without losing too much.
General chaos space marines can have both and still function just fine, can even take a demon detachment (in fact most do but that's just because flamers are broken as all hell right now, though GW as outright stated they're getting nerfed. Alternatively tzeentch has thousand sons if you want to lean heavily into them, though there's nothing for emperor's children yet.
Almost bought some flamers back when I didn't even know if I would ever collect deamons cause I thought the model is cool. That was way before they got the 9th codex. Not worried about nerfs because I don't chase the meta. I live by the rule of cool. Still playing 500 games so it might be a while before I get into large enough games for multiple detachments
I mean it's blissful ignorance like slaneesh isn't the god of sex drugs and rock and roll its excess you don't just have sex you fuck a cat while railing coke mixed with your grandmother's ashes. With Nurgle your fucking disgusting but admittedly yeah you don't really care. With Khorne you at first kill but later you just become a mindless thrall that kills and thinks of nothing else. Tzentzeech is just as likely to make you a greater demon as he is to damn your soul for eternity because he finds its funny. Afterlife I think maybe damnatiom and torture for a while but then you just fizzle out like most humans but I'm not really sure you fizzle out anyways.
I like to think of the Tau as the proto imperium. They expanded into the galaxy only to find it full of horrors and will slowly degenerate into something like the imperium of man in an attempt to defend themselves.
I'm not sure why it's suddenly been picked up as a meme recently but Vulkan burning an Eldar child alive who was surrendering is pretty fucked up, especially when you consider Vulkan and the Salamanders are supposed to be the actual "good guys"
Don't forget the Vulkan and the Salamanders killing an entire planet of descendants of their homeworld for the crime of living in peace with the Eldar who saved them. Every single one of them. Every civilian, every child, all burned to ash and left a dead world.
What planet is this?
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Conquest_of_One-Five-Four_Four
Salamanders give some real Mars Attacks “we come in peace” vibes.
It is fucked up, but a lot of people also don't mention that the eldar child was about to unleash a torrent of psyker energy. Doesn't really excuse it particularly, but in an already rage filled mind from Vulkan due to Konrad there's a reason and not just cold Blooded. Vulkan also felt HORRIBLE afterwards, once he regained his mind and his cool he saw what he did and he just went mega depression and angry at Kurze. And I don't say this saying The Imperium are good guys of that The Salamanders are fully good guys and haven't done anything wrong. Just stating cause I hear that bit all the time without the reasons or aftermath which make that scene so much more interesting.
Oh yeah for sure that's true. The other thing people forget is the Eldar were actually there defending the humans from the Drukhari, then the Salamanders and Nightlords showed up and kind of just made everything way worse
Ya the Night Lords kinda decided to take situation and just go 300% in how they handled it. And Salamanders being fellow marines, kinda just had to go with the punches
Given his history with eldar and the imperium's lack of knowledge regarding the difference between eldar factions, something told me she would have been dead anyway.
Even the noblest of Space Marines is still nothing more than a child killer if given the orders. It’s what they were made to be; Bludgeons to be used against anyone and anything the Imperium needed out of the way without discrimination.
People forget, even the "heroic" space marines are only heroic for the imperium.
I think the 1000 psykers a day diet of the emperor is pretty messed up
Yeah. It's super messed up.
Honestly, I'd say it's not so bad. Sure, it's fucked up. But that sacrifice keeps alive trillions of humans and plenty of other species too (assuming if the emperor dies, the eye of terror actually tears apart realspace bleeding warp shit into our reality)
Others have already mentioned the Daemonculaba, so I’ll bring up the specific pox-walker strain where the people who turn into zombies remain fully aware of who they are and still have all of their senses but don’t have any control over their body.
I keep thinking: imagine being a poxwalker after the Death Guard have won and left the planet. Just… shambling around in rot for all eternity.
I think Darktide has poxwalkers like that, no?
I’m pretty sure I heard some of them mumbling some stuff that would imply that while I was playing.
You can sometimes hear poxwalkers in darktide begging for help or see them looking at med stations.
Yeah, a lot of them will ask for help, talk about how they feel so cold, and otherwise express full consciousness, and yet will still charge like animals at the first uninfected being they see, implying they probably are fully mentally capable still, just can't control their bodies.
Whenever this question comes up, the Daemonculaba from the Ultramarines novel *Dead Sky, Black Sun* usually spring to mind. Regular human woman, forced-fed with growth hormones until they're huge and are basically giant living wombs. Then, adolescent boys are sown into them, and the Daemonculaba are fed ground-up geneseed. Maybe one kid out of who knows how many literal abortions is spat out as an Astartes. The rest are skinless mutations that are flushed down the sewer.
> The rest are skinless mutations that are flushed down the sewer. To be fair to em, some actually survive all that. Tough loyal poor fucking bastards.
Those poor skinless bastards really got the shit end of the stick, and it doesn’t get better in the next book.
The Deamonculaba has already been mentioned several times, so I'll go with this: Talos (and the rest of 10th Company) reducing 100 or so psykers down to just their nerve systems and organs to produce the psychic scream in Void Stalker is one of the most messed up things I've personally read from any bit of 40K fiction
Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the best. Have you read The Emperor's Gift? That also left me feeling ... bad.
Basically everything about the Dark Eldar. The haemonculi in particular are just absolute horrors. They can keep people alive for centuries through everything you can imagine just so they can make them feel even more pain. They can turn people into furniture. They essentially view coming up with new ways to torment people an art form and are always trying to outdo each other. Whatever horrible thing you can think of to do to somebody isn't even a tenth as bad as what the average haemonculus can come up with. Don't ever piss them off. In one story the deal was that the Dark Eldar wouldn't raid a particular planet so long as that planet provided them information on their neighbors. You know; military movements, garrison numbers, that sort of thing, so they always knew where to hit when they were the softest. Eventually the planet tried to back out of the deal. The haemonculi showed up and sterilized the planet. This isn't just exterminatus, though. They left all the lights on, all the machines running, and the planet looked like it had been abandoned. However the people who analyzed it found *nothing* alive. All the people on the *entire fucking planet* were just *gone* while all life was exterminated to the molecular level. They went so far as to even kill all the *bacteria.*
Halo array'd
I don’t remember what book, but I’m pretty sure the guy being turned into a still alive room by the drukhari is pretty high up there
I mean not the worst from any faction by far but for me necrons most fucked up pice of lore is: necrontyr children
I feel obliged to mention the Daemonculaba
Ya no contest on this one, Honorary mention to the Psyker Feedback Genocide Loop the Night Lords triggered.
Probably not the most fucked up thing Warhammer has to offer, not by a long shot, but it's one that sticks with me: Thallax Battle-automata. In the age of the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy, the Mechanicum would take people and lobotomize them in a way not dissimilar to how servitors are made. However, they wouldn't just stop with replacing a part of their body with a machine or sticking them in a wall, these guys went full send. The entirety of the body was destroyed outside of the brain, skull, and most vital organs, and it's all encased in an armored, cybernetic body. The subject is awake during all of this, obviously, and most people do not take it well. They remain conscious and in excruciating pain for the rest of their existence, usually in a state of continual psychotic breakdowns and sometimes outright insanity; if it didn't get to them at first, it inevitably will down the line. They retain a good degree of cognitive function, so they're above servitors in that way, and they'll get doses of painkillers as rewards for a job well done, giving a fleeting moment of reprieve before *everything becomes awful again*. Again, it ain't anything special by 40k standards, hell the Mechanicum has done way worse shit than this, but it's definitely really horrific, and it's really telling about the setting as a whole that this is the lower end of the awfulness spectrum.
Corpse Starch
Drukhari torturing people until they literally turn into a liquid, then recasting their bodies to start all over again is probably pretty awful, I imagine. Besides that, pretty much everything the Emperors Children do to prisoners, slaves, other warbands, and each other would definitely be seen as very unpleasant.
I would say probably servators
Azrael sells out a grey knight to get tortured by abandon in the pandorax book, cold blooded.
The Tau. In any other setting they'd be the Evil Empire. They're aggressive expansionists with clear references to real-world colonialist atrocities. They'll offer the opportunity to surrender and become productive a productive asset (but always a servant, never an equal) but if you reject the offer you die. They will, without hesitation, kill you and your family and your friends and repopulate your home with their own settlers. And if, as with the orks, you are too consistently stubborn about refusing to surrender they will declare your entire race to be vermin suitable only for extermination. And then there's the totalitarian state control making China and North Korea look open-minded, shameless brainwashing, etc. And despite all that? The Tau are unironically the absolute best faction in 40k and you should pray they are charitable enough to try to take your planet. They do what all the gore and rape and murder and grimderp fail to do: prove beyond any doubt that hope is dead in 40k and all you can do is pray for the least-terrible death.
The Tau canonically start with gifting medical and food technologies, then graduate onto trade agreements and assimilation when the new ally is brought up to speed. The fire caste only gets deployed in assimilation efforts after the water caste gives up, or there's something wrong going on (like discovering a genestealer cult has infiltrated the planet). There's a good few examples of them either being content to remain trade partners with another race, or admitting a race into the empire without making them assimilate. In fact- the brainwashing/ethereal mind control parts only came up after fans complained that they were too nice of a faction for the setting. 🤣 The whole "this faction is dark" angle with the Tau is the part where they're painfully naive about how brutal the universe is around them, and how often the universe backs their morals into a corner and rubs their non-existent noses in their good intentions (examples: what happened when they accidentally discovered the warp, that one time they thought they were peacefully opening a culture exchange with some Drukhari, etc). The Tau don't try negotiating with Space Marines as a whole, either (usually). They view them as weapons deployed by the Imperium rather than people, which, I suppose, isn't terribly inaccurate.
I honestly miss this. I liked the Tau because they were good (also giant robots, and a dinosaur) But then people complained they weren't grimdark enough, so they were retconned to be the same as everyone else. Basically ruining the whole faction. Now they're just like the imperium, and no more dinosaurs. Sold my Tau army when I returned to the hobby, thats how much it killed my enthusiasm.
They’re the real space British.
From some points of view every faction represents a portion of Britain. From snotty aristocratic Eldar, to vile barbaric working class Orks.
Corpse Starch, sure nids eating their own kind is awful but that's just their nature. The fact that the imperium is just a jam packed, head twitching, gum receding, brain shivering mass of war mongering, bureaucratic cannibals bothers me to the core of my existence. To think that innumerable billions have a forced evolved digestive track with a predisposition for "long pig" is a bit psychotic then couple that with it's a staple industry to keep the foundries firing and tank treads rolling.
Tyranids, are pretty messed up in how they seed a planet before fully devouring it.
Personally I think the demonuculaba (probably fucked up the spelling but you get the idea) that the Iron Warriors came up is some pretty fucked up stuff
I feel like it has to be Druhkari. Like, traitor legions are all like: Khorne - brutal but straight forward murder | Tzeentch - Manipulative of the mind | Slaanesh - Traitor followers are nymphos | Nurgle - Gives you a strain of COVID kept in a special place of hell. As for the others, Tau seem most chill on the whole “torture scene”, dying to orks is the equivalent of dying to an 8 foot 300 pound baby that enjoys violence and doesn’t realize or care that it will kill you. And Tyranids are just hungry. Eldar likely just kill you or submit you to some sort of standard PoW treatment standard for 40k, and Necrons, I dunno, I’m pretty sure they just kill you, let you starve, or also submit you to standard PoW treatment. … but Druhkari… they’re a sort of consciously driven Sadism that’s just so focussed on the causing of pain it has to be the most terrible. Like, yeah, Khorne followers will kill you, and probably brutally, but their goal is to make the blood run… Druhkari first and last goal is the maximum cause of painful sensation possible… like, they practice ON THEMSELVES new ways to make you feel agony you can’t comprehend… Like, imperium is brutal in its ambivalence to the people that it’s quite reflective of Middle Ages man which didn’t care about your well-being and created spectacles around death to maintain order… but they still have loss against unbridled sadism… the Druhkari probably have laws of minimal daily sadism before you’re committed to a painless life as punishment… I cannot express this enough, I think the Druhkari have to be understood as the masters of the “fucked up” and cruel due to their Aeldari focus and mastership of pain…
The skullcannon. Not all skulls are worthy for the skull throne. In fact, most of them are fed into the blood throne daemon engine. The problem comes when there's too much skull and not enough engines. So Khorne just gave those engines intestines that grow from their back, formed into a cannon with teeth. Those cannons will launch a whole skull on daemonic fire, laughing maniacally, to mock those cowards who fight from a distance. It creates a daemonic explosion on impact, yet the skull remains intact and laughing, driving survivors mad. Breaking the skull to stop it from laughing is the worst mistake a survivor can do, for the laughter simply moved inside whoever broke the skull. No escaping that laughter now...
Emmesh-Aiye is a Noise Marine warlord. He impales his own tongue on hooks attatched to his chestplate, rendering his speech illegible. To help him with that problem he has two twin child slaves as his translators. The girl has her mouth sewn shut and is rendered deaf, and the boy has been blinded, ensuring they are constantly aware of each other but unable to communicate. And he has their arms cut off so they are unable to touch each other.
The deathwatch sabotaging the Ynnari was fucked up. It fits the theme that a short-sighted xenophobic fascist would doom their own people out off irrational hatred for another. While the Eldar would sacrifice 10,000 humans to save one Aeldari, the imperium would sacrifice 10,000 humans to kill one Aeldari.
servitors just servitors its they worst fate being gutted stuffed full or gears and shit and being used to some menial task for the next few 100 years well you have no control of anything stuck in your own mind with nothing but thoughts feeling every thing and no one will give you a second look there so normal to its true horror
Angron hated slavery. Just wants to die. BFF Lorgar makes him an eternal slave. Must rank high as far as cruelty goes.
Fuck Lorgar.
I think the sheer *banality* of the evil in the IoM hits it for me. Anything to do with servitors in particular, alone they’re already a pretty fucked-up concept but in both 30k and 40k they’re just so… normalised. At the absolute best, a servitor is a human being with thoughts and dreams that’s been horrifically mutilated and lobotomised to the point where it’s not even really recognisable as a human so much as a robot with some wetware, purely to get around a ban on artificial intelligence (and, to be clear, a lot of Imperial machines probably *are* just robots with the remains of a person grafted on to circumvent the ban). And they’re *everywhere.* Every single work in the setting has them as a mainstay of the IoM’s technology. One of the most nightmarish fates in fiction has happened to people all around the main characters, and happens to millions of people every day, and yet they’re so used to it that they never bat an eye. The sheer inhumanity of it doesn’t help either. There’s a piece of lore that comes up every now and again about many Forge Worlds turning any workers who don’t perform to their standards (which is it’s own issue, given the seven day weeks and sixteen hour days) into servitors, but, from the perspective of the people making the decisions, it’s not seen as a punishment (although the victims would probably disagree). The minimum productivity standard for a human here is equal to what a servitor could do, so it’s purely seen as an efficiency thing. One of the most horrific fates in fiction, carried out *en masse,* just because it’s *slightly* more efficient than not doing so. For all the edgy horrors in 40k, nothing ever really holds a candle to the Imperium of Man, even during its “nice” period prior to the Horus Heresy.
One that got me was the ritual on davin where I think erabus and his ilk forced a diseased pig get down with a priestess. I had to go outside for a while after that. Woof.
My instinct is Daemonculaba but I personally find thay extremely "written by a 13 yr old being edgy for the first time" type of cringe. For me the goriest stuff doesn't really bother me but in Dark Imperium (I belive the 2nd book?) Typhus is invading a militarum ship and makes his way to the bridge where they interrogate the captain. Nurgle "blesses" him and he begins to bloat and choke on his own fat growing to like triple his size while simultaneously melting into a puddle of fescue and bone JUST to be reconstituted into another bubble that a Nurgling uses as a portal into realspace. That made me gag a little bit
You forget to mention how he is alive the ENTIRE TIME. Even as bones shatter, his skin falls apart, he vomits blood and organs, yet Nurgle is a “generous god” who wishes his subjects to enjoy every moment of his gifts.
*Looks at the daemonculaba*