Greetings Readers,

…and welcome back!

So having got our discussion about the mechanics of the new edition of Warhammer 40,000 out of the way, it’s time to tackle the upheaval it’s brought to the metaplot of the setting.

Now, whilst I stated it clearly in part one, I’m going to restate it again for part two: this post WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. You proceed at your own risk, and I make no apologies for what you will find therein (including my terrible brand of humour).

So let’s get to it…

SETTING

“Who ripped the map? Own up!”

Now this really is a case of where to begin?

As I suspected off the back of the Gathering Storm sequence, the new edition of Warhammer 40,000 does indeed represent “[…]a true advancement of the metaplot beyond the 41st Millenium[…]” and has also ushered in the ‘dark new age’ promised at the end of Rise of the Primarch. To provide a brief précis of events, rather than getting mired in narrative detail, GW have skipped ahead 150 years from the events at the conclusion of the Gathering Storm, and the rulebook tells us that, despite the galaxy being split in half by a massive warp rift (the ‘Cicatrix Maledictum’), half of the Imperium falling off the map (Imperium Nihilus) and the rest being battered by resurgent Xenos, Heretics and other unsavoury types, Guilliman has made great inroads into clearing house: High Lords have been replaced, Planetary Governors removed, the Silent Sisterhood reconstituted, the Adeptus Custodes told to get off their backsides, the Imperial warmachine revitalised, and the Imperium generally given a damn good shake up by the avenging son (including Guilliman trying and failing to restart the Imperial Truth).

But even amidst these monumental changes, the most fundamentally important event of the last 150-odd years has been the Indomitus Crusade.

Essentially, this is the narrative platform for the introduction of Games Workshop’s new ‘Primaris’ Space Marines, and justification for the move to true scale marines. We are told that, on Guilliman’s orders, towards the end of ‘the Great Heresy War’ (which seems to be a new, catchy, catch-all phrase encompassing the Horus Heresy and the Scouring) Belisarius Cawl is packed off with as many of the Emperor’s notes as he can get his grubby little mechadendrites on and Guilliman can rustle up, and told to build a better marine. Despite his boss taking an overly long vacation, and registering as dead for several thousand years (possibly for tax purposes), Belisarius Cawl comes good and delivers Guilliman what amounts to a legion of these new, improved Space Marines, complete with equipment, forming Guilliman’s ‘Unnumbered Sons’ and providing him with the manpower to spend the next 150 years bolstering the flagging Imperium and stabilising the situation.

“He’s spending a year dead, for tax purposes.”

This is essentially the point at which the player rejoins the narrative and the rulebook does a sterling job of bringing us up to speed. HOWEVER, if you really want to get a feel for the new setting and the amount of work that has gone into, not only advancing, but maturing the metaplot, then you really need to get yourself a copy of Guy Haley’s Dark Imperium the novel which accompanies the game’s reboot-cum-sequel, and whose title is doubtless a nod to the original 2nd Edition expansion, Dark Millenium. And trust me, there is much nodding going on – To earlier editions, to the previous canon, to the Horus Heresy, the list is endless…

Such Dark. Much Grim. Wow.

Dark Imperium sees us joining Guilliman right at the close of the Indomitus Crusade, and despite all that he has achieved, Roboute is not a happy man. It’s going to sound incredibly odd considering that we’re talking about a genetically-engineered demigod, but where this novel truly comes into its own, and proves worthwhile in setting the scene, is in using Guilliman to provide the reader with a much-needed everyman character. Guilliman is us, whether it’s the new player trying to grapple with why the galaxy is such an unrelentingly grim place in the 41st millennium (and beyond), or the longer term adherent to the hobby catapulted right back to the heartbreaking slow-motion collapse of mankind’s dreams described so well by the earliest books in the Horus Heresy series. Guilliman’s continual dismay at what the Imperium has become echoes many of the sentiments expressed by the community at large (albeit with fewer memes).

If I had one criticism at this point, it would be that, whilst superbly handled, this does run the very tacit risk of drawing direct attention to just how tired the Grimdark trope has become, and both the rulebook and Dark Imperium leave you with the impression that they themselves, probably coupled with the next couple of years of narrative campaigns, are perhaps designed to dig us out of this narrative hole – I could be wrong…

The novel also provides a great deal of information concerning the Primaris Marines (which is to be expected); we have their initial constitution as a Legion-esque force, through to their ‘disbanding’ into elements designed to reinforce (and eventually replace) existing chapters and formulate new ones. Oh, and unfortunately the novel does make it very clear that the Primaris Marines are designed to replace the existing genus of Marines, so those doomsayers suggesting that, in hobby terms, in a few years ‘all will be Primaris’, appear to be right on the money.

As with many of the metaplot elements dealt with by the novel, there is also some clear setting up of future plot hooks as we learn that Guilliman does not really trust Belisarius Cawl, at one point refers to his (Cawl’s) Primaris Marines as blasphemies, sees them as tools (more on that a little later), and is engaged in an ongoing argument about whether or not to utilise ALL the available geneseed, including that of the Legions who turned traitor during the Heresy, as well as the lost 2nd and 11th Legions (yes you read that right).

For the Primaris’s own part, we also learn that many of them were inducted by Cawl during the closing stages of the Heresy/Scouring, that many have been in stasis ever since (meaning that Guilliman is not the only one dealing with a sense of dislocation) and that, by Guilliman’s deliberate design, there is a greater sense of unity amongst the disparate strains of Primaris, with tacit attempts being made to subsume the old, inter-chapter rivalries, and that the Primaris view their lesser kin with some degree of sympathy. There’s also a considerable degree of maudlin at work when viewing the interactions between Guilliman, the Primaris, and the previous iteration of Marines. Appearances by Uriel Ventris, Marneus Calgar and Cato Sicarius, whilst heroic, never managed to get out from under the fact that they are a failed legacy: Be it that time and reverence causes distance between them and a secular Guilliman, or that whatever their achievements, they were only ever stemming the tide, never turning it, and are thus failed legacies of the Great Crusade.

In continuing the theme of a disgruntled or disheartened Guilliman, we also learn of his arms length treatment of the Ecclesiarchy, distaste for the art, artifice and architecture of the ‘modern’ Imperium (Guilliman is also no fan of Grimdark), his own internal debate over the deification of the Emperor, and his generally mind-numbing, spirit-crushing disappointment with humanity and the Imperium at large, all of this against a backdrop of a schizophrenic empire that either wants to deify him as a shining beacon of the Emperor’s divinity made manifest, heard there might be heresy and got there as soon as they could, or has just realised the boss has come back from a very long cigarette break and caught them with not just their hands in the till, but both arms all the way up to the elbow…

And then there’s the Emperor.

The novel also does a great job of answering several key questions about the role of the big Kahuna in all of this: We learn that, whilst he hasn’t deigned to speak to anyone in 10,000 years or even bothered to have the Adeptus Mechanicus install a text-to-speech device, the Emperor is fully cognisant of his situation and still going strong, albeit in a stripped down, Humanity Lite™ version. We also learn that, whilst He was previously much better at hiding it, the Emperor never really viewed the Primarchs as His sons so much as master-crafted tools (yes, you can say it with me: Guilliman is a tool), which nicely parallels own Guilliman’s attitude to the Primaris Marines and the irony of the ‘Unnumbered Sons’ appellation.  In a similar vein, returning to the idea of built-in plot hooks, it’s also intimated that now Guilliman is back in play, the Emperor sees an opportunity to finally get off the pot, and I would not be at all surprised if, assuming the narrative continues its forward momentum, we don’t eventually see this occurring.

A touching reunion?

Along the way, we also get thrown in that Guilliman’s re-emergence has encouraged other of his (less savoury) brothers to once again take an interest in galactic affairs, learn for instance that (up until recently) Mortarion spent most of his 10,000 years chasing, imprisoning and torturing the soul of his Xenos ‘father’ from Barbarus, that Big Blue really just wants to reconstitute the 500 worlds as they were before Erebus messed it all up then copy/paste to the rest of the Imperium, and gain some answers to the perennial question, “What would Roboute Guilliman make of the Codex Astartes, 10,000 years later?

One word, ‘Rewrite’.

…which actually brings me neatly to the last tidbit of information that can be gleaned from the Rulebook and Dark Imperium. Almost as an aside, and in a plot-twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, we learn that we might never have actually been in the 41st Millennium at all. It turns out that due to the constant Inquisitorial retcons, civils wars, religious shenanigans, and other myriads of catastrophes that have befallen the Imperium since Guilliman’s heyday, the Imperial Calendar is just the last in a long line of casualties; the margin of error when it comes to dating the current epoch potentially being in the order of thousands of years. Naturally, Guilliman hates this idea and has set up a small, but burgeoning department to recover the lost history of the Imperium, but it has to be said this is much to the chagrin of pretty much every Imperial institution, not least the Inquisition (cue further potential conflict plot-hooks).

So, long story short?

Everything is awful, Guilliman feels awful, and you should feel awful too. Welcome to Warhammer 40,000.

Or is it 39,000?

Or 41,000?

Or…

*Sigh*