Now that the base concept is out of the way, let's talk about this guy. Colloquially we refer to him as Big E. There's other versions of that but it's kind of a nickname and also has a bit of snark because of what he is. One big reason for it thought is that we don't know his actual name. The lore (as far as I've read and per the wiki) does not give him a name, at least not yet.
Another concept that wraps around the story is Chaos. That's a whole 'nother universe that is trying to take over this one. That's important for story and game purposes. It's also known formally as the Immaterium and the shorthand version is the Warp. The Warp serves three functions in the game and lore:
- The source of physic powers
- Their way to do hyperspace travel
- To corrupt humanity so that there's bad and other bad guys fighting each other
Side note. If you've ever watched the movie Event Horizon it's mostly canon 40k at this point and the first time humans have encountered the Warp/Chaos. The writers were big 40k fans and after much fan discussion GW just gave in and said that sure, it's canon, go with that. The movie is pretty good so watch it if get the chance.
OK. I think we've got a setup going on here. If you're a lore person this would be the absolute barest introduction to one small section of the larger universe and the jumping off point for far more discussion than anyone into the game - and many who are - would not want to engage in if they had the choice. Because there's also a shit-ton of 30k lore that builds up to 40k lore. Lore enthusiasts who find each other tend to become bestest buddies. I'm an enthusiast and it probably explains why I can't get a date. But I digress.
The Emperor is considered the most powerful psycher (that's their term for someone who can use the Warp for psychic effect) in the universe, has the Perpetual gene so he's immortal, is stupid smart, has an expert understanding of genetic engineering, and doesn't actually give a rat's ass about humanity in general no matter what he says. He's got one friend who's been with him since the start of his real rise to power, who is also a powerful psycher but not immortal by nature. That guys name is Malcador the Sigilite but we won't get into him because he doesn't weave into the part of Big E's story that I'm going to focus on.
The Emperor was born in the Bronze Age of humanity. There's backstory on how he got the powerful psychic powers that's not really important but he knew early on he could do stuff with his mind. He also got the Perpetual gene and a taste for temporal power at the same time. Yes. The dude has been around since the Bronze Age. That gives you an idea how far back the lore goes.
Funny enough GW has been stingy with information about what happened with him between then and the current game era. There's been little throwaway short stories and throwaway references but in general he didn't do much visible stuff in all that time. There's reference to him occasionally showing up to lead parts of humanity but then he wanders off again. Personally I think he was biding his time until he could take complete control. He didn't see the point in being leader of one country because it would make him known to the world in general. It kind of makes sense when he knows he's not going to die any time soon and he's got Big Plans for the future.
Let's jump forward to another period of history that's left vague by GW - the Unification Wars. Earth is a mess, warlords are all over the place trying to grab as much as they can, and Big E finally saw his opportunity. As he worked his way around the planet and took over the various mini empires he also took the relatives of the defeated warlords, gene engineered each of them into his own private army, and moved onto the next.
He also did something not very cool. He made a foot soldier army called the Thunder Warriors. Consider them the Bic lighter version of his future gene engineered warriors known as the Space Marines that the game and lore is so well known for. There's not a lot known about the Thunder Warriors except that they were an experiment that the Emperor knew would be a short term project. After he won the Unification Wars and became the supreme leader, he killed almost all the Thunder Warriors. The official statement is that they died heroically in one last battle. The reality is that he had no more use for them and had them eliminated. A few survived and show up in short stories, etc. But in general they were made a footnote in the story of the empire he was building.
Dude. Not cool. But it's a very good example of his attachment to his creations.
Funny thing. He went into the Warp to learn his advanced genetic engineering and seems to have weaseled out of whatever bargain he made to get them. That matters in a bit in two ways.
So the guy is now top dog of Earth. What's left of Earth after centuries of decay and war but now he's got the power to try to repair that. To his credit he does start doing that, probably for selfish reasons because he wanted a pretty planet to be his home base. With Earth under his control it's time for the next phase in his plan - a universal Empire.
You do have to admit the guy had ambition and the power to back it up. By this time he had his personal guard of bespoke genetic engineered warriors to be his bodyguard and elite strike force. Note the term 'bespoke'. If you aren't familiar with it think 'custom made' since each one was individually genetically engineered using their original bodies.
This is where things get hinkey. He knew he needed to be in more places than one to build an empire and that he needed generals to do what needed to be done. Of course he went the genetic engineering route, using what he learned/stole from Chaos. This was not his finest hour.
Let's introduce Erda. She's not referenced much but she's generally considered the woman who contributed the necessary half of genetic material for the next project. She's also a Perpetual and once her role was done she shook Big E's dust off her feet and went .. somewhere. She's a Perpetual so she's probably still out there but doing her own thing but so far I haven't found anything that says what that is.
If you haven't guessed the lore deals almost entirely with men. This has caused much vitriol in the community. It doesn't help that the game itself started out advertising to teenage boys with their parents' credit cards. It's got a much broader customer base now that those kids have aged into adults with their own disposable income.
Anyway. Onward.
Picking up on his Galactic Empire project Big E decided to make brand new generals. Not just any generals but more or less superhuman generals. Big feckers. Each one of them would have unique qualities for specific areas of his new empire built into their DNA. Well. HIS DNA because of course all the generals were dudes. This time around he made them from scratch, using that nifty knowledge he stole. This was not a good idea.
He made 20 (or 21 depending on whether or not you count the 20th set of twins as one or two, in lore they're considered one) and created a special place where Chaos couldn't get to them. Yeah, right. Chaos got their mitts on them and flung them out into the universe. Now Big E had to find them. But first? He needed his army and this time he didn't want mistakes. The Space Marines were the new ones and while the were assembly line genetics each set was infused with some of the DNA from the Primarch who was going to lead them.
GW is big into pseudo-Latin. They call it Gothic. High and Low Gothic, depending on how formal they're being. There's a bunch of it scattered throughout the lore. Get used to it and if you know actual Latin be prepared to wince a lot.
So Chaos took the incubation pods and sent them to various and sundry worlds. Now the Emperor not only has to build his empire but he has to find these kids to do the jobs they were created to do. As he does he gives them the legion they were meant to head, all of which have already been fighting in the Crusade.
I think you can already see why lore discussion require people who get into the lore itself. It's a rich world that's been created but it's a lot of stuff. And this is just background, mind you.
The Primarchs are gathered up and each one has two things going on:
- They've all got a touch of Chaos in their makeup. Go figure, given how Chaos knowledge was used to make them
- They've all taken on qualities from the world where they grew up. Conveniently they went from infants in the incubation pods to adults in stupidly short periods of time
Cue the Galactic Crusade. As you can expect it goes pretty much like any crusade. They find a planet they like, they conquer it. then they remake the society to be what Big E has in mind and make them send resources to fund the Crusade, they move on to the next one. This was happening while the Emperor was looking for his lost sons.
Let's talk about 'sons'. The Primarchs all refer to him as their father. That makes sense given a broad definition of fatherhood. Canonically the Emperor considers them tools for his empire and indulges them by letting them call him father. He honestly doesn't care about them as individuals. It's something that's easily missed since he does call them 'son' when he talks with them so it would be easy to be fooled into thinking he cared about them beyond their usefulness to his wars.
He finds all the Primarchs. He gives each one their legion of Space Marines, all of which are renamed to match up with their new leaders. Then he makes a mistake. Yes, even all powerful guys make mistakes and this one is both valid and a reason for the rest of the lore. His mistake was to leave the Crusade to return to Earth and work on his long term project. He appoints the Primarch designed to be the best general in charge.
This went .. OK. The guy he appointed knew is stuff and with only some resentment the rest of the Primarchs accepted him as the new general. A handful thought they should be the one but overall they dealt with having someone they considered a peer elevated over them. BTW - in the cartoon the Emperor skips the one with the wings to tell him not to fight. That's because the guy with the wings is more or less totally good but still isn't a good guy. After that Big E goes back to Earth and the absolutely massive palace he's building to work on the Secret Project.
Now it's time to summarize because there's dozens upon dozens of books going over the 30k/Horus Heresy situation. Horus is the guy chosen to be general and because he's a fucking idiot he decides that he should rule the empire. One of the higher placed Space Marines has already been dabbling with Chaos and gets him to turn traitor. Fucking Erebus. We all hate Erebus. As part of turning traitor the most psychic of the Patriarchs is convinced he needs to tell the Emperor what's going on and does what he's been told specifically not to do - to use his psychic powers to take him to the palace.
See, the long term project is the remove the need for Chaos from Humanity. There's another way to get from place to place that an alien race has been using for pretty much forever and it's isolated from Chaos. Big E is working on a way to use that and one of his Primarchs was made to keep that way available. That would be Magnus the Red. Who was specifically told to do nothing with is psychic powers. In fact the use of psychic powers by anyone except the Emperor and his buddy Malcador are expressly forbidden. But, fuckin' Erebus.
This is where things go wrong. The Emperor's careful work to connect Humanity with the other way (the Webway) gets kinda borked by Magnus and it just happens to open a hole between the Webway and Chaos. The exact thing that the Webway was set up to avoid. Now more trouble happens since the Emperor has to mitigate that damage.
Wrapping up now. Horus is being very efficient at turning other Primarchs and their legions to Chaos then making war on them and various planets in the current Empire. The Emperor is stuck on Earth using all his psychic power to hold Chaos from coming through the hole Magnus made. And Horus is intent on taking over Earth/Terra from the Emperor.
Whew. That's a lot even as a summary.
Where was I going with this? Back to the Emperor. He's a true emperor in that he doesn't give a damn about the people he's ruling. He really doesn't. He doesn't care about the people living on the planets he conquered except that they pay their tithes. He doesn't care about his Primarchs, who consider him their father. He doesn't care about the Space Marines, leaving them to their Primarchs to handle. He doesn't care about the state of the Crusade he started.
His real concern seems noble - keep the forces of Chaos from meddling with/taking over Humanity. But even that is because he doesn't like Chaos. In theory they would take over Humanity if left unchecked. At least that's what he says. Now he's trapped by his own creation to never leave the control throne so the hole doesn't get breached. The empire he was building is still limping along but the Primarchs are gone (I haven't gotten to the books where most of them were removed - there's a few who have been killed in the 30k stuff). The Space Marines are all over the place, doing Space Marine stuff based on the nature of their Primarchs. Some are loyal, some are chaos, all hate anything that's not human.
The Emperor is stuck on the Golden Throne because he was almost killed in the battle with Horus and his minions dragged him to the throne to keep him alive, for a given definition of alive. He's been there for 10,000 years, holding the forces of Chaos at bay. Except for the ones that the heretic Space Marines have been playing with, and there's a few Primarchs who are over in the Warp being powerful and stuff. He needs a little help in that his priests feed 1,000 people with decent psychic ability to the cause. And literally feed since those 1,000 never come back out of the throne room.
During his (active) lifetime the Emperor denied being a god. He considered religion irrational in general and wiped it out of his empire. That caused some problems with one of the Primarchs but we're not getting into that. He kind of let the technicians on Mars consider him a sort of god so that he got access to all the cool things they were building but never really admitted or denied the whole thing. After he couldn't take an active part in the Empire the people deified him. So now he's a god whether he likes it or not.
Why did I bother to write all this out?
I have a bit of a fondness for the big guy. There's a ton of fanfic out there about what he did in all the time between the Bronze Age and after the Unification Wars. There's very little canon. Personally I think he laid low, maybe played kingmaker, and let things settle themselves until he saw the time to take the reins for everything. It would make sense since he needed technology to advance to the point to match what he wanted to do. And since he was the next best thing to immortal he could wait it out.
Let's have a brief chat about that immortality thing. He wasn't the only person who had that gene. I mentioned Erda. There's a few others (John Grammaticus! But he's not immortal anymore) that show up in the books/lore and he was friendly with at least one of those people. Being immortal could have a big impact on how he viewed humanity since they never stuck around for long. I'd say he never passed along the Perpetual gene into his creations but the first set of genetic engineered guys seem to last and at least one Primarch has survived well beyond anything someone should survive. The Primarchs are tough but they're not immortal.
More about immortality. It seems that it only goes so far. If the damage is bad enough, it can't stop death. The thing that seems to override it is severe damage to the spinal cord. There's far too many times someone was killed by being broken over someone's knee in general. Far too many. It's kind of a theme and heavy foreshadowing. That's how Horus almost killed the Emperor. Almost and it may have worked if the throne, with its life support capabilities, wasn't conveniently right at hand. Horus was also directly/indirectly responsible for the death of Malcador since he took the throne while the Emperor fought Horus and he wasn't nearly as powerful as Big E so he got sucked dry by the effort.
And what was the Emperor going to do once he carved a hole in the Webway for humanity to use and needed to keep it open? He built Magnus specifically to do nothing but sit on that throne and keep it open. For the rest of time. It's kind of ironic that Magnus did what he did and made it so the Emperor had to take that role. I think it serves the Emperor right.
Afterword
The 40k universe has been devoid of the Primarchs as active participants, has the Space Marine legions either loyal to the Emperor or fallen to Chaos, and alien races of various kinds have been around for all the legions to fight when they're not fighting each other. In lore the planets of the empire are treated pretty badly to the point of eliminating all life on them if someone thinks it's a good idea and they don't figure into the game at all except as an origin point for a couple of sub factions of human soldiers.
The current lore and game have Primarchs returning by various means. What that means for the whole thing I'm not sure about yet and I'm not sure how I feel about it. The Emperor also seems to be waking up so that's going to be a whole new kettle of fish when he finds out what's happened since he was plopped onto the throne. Funny enough the original Emperor's guard has been the biggest deterrent in the empire since they're still the same as when he was around even though they've had to replenish their ranks without him.
As for the various sizes of the groups I mentioned here's something that's vaguely considered canonical.
Attribution
The top artwork is uncredited because I can't find the original artist.
All the cartoons are the work of emwattnot and I dearly love those. However if you're not into the lore most of them won't make sense and/or be as funny. He uses current memes as a base for a lot of them, as you can tell.
The size reference is attributed to Tim Remin but he's not on Patreon anymore it seems.
I used the fan created Warhammer 40,000 Wiki for the bits and pieces where I needed to get things in order.
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