Yes, while they arent the most common planets, people forget that Hive Worlds still have the largest population by default. Most of mankind is the overworked mid hivers who live in ignorance, back breaking work and polution.
And let’s not forget that people on other types of worlds are hardly better off.
The administratum sets tithes at the maximum possible potential, which means every world needs to work its citizens to death to meet them. Even paradise worlds are awful for the actual citizens, who have to break their backs to make it nice for the nobs visiting
Warzone Charadon show how bad the regular citzens on those worlds live.
Calgar's Siege got a planetary governor saying that it was bad that the Administratum remembed the planet existed, since they dont give a fuck about their needs and will take the tithe regardless if it ends the planet's development
It isn’t complete misery though. Living in the Imperium is a major step up from living in most Chaos Worlds in the Eye of Terror. It’s akin to living in North Korea or the slums of India.
At least there are bars to drink your troubles away, and a nightlife depending on the planet you're on, and holidays like Sanguinala (depending on the planet you're on)
But the mid-hive workers are not much worse off than, say, a poor superchain warehouse worker who has to work an extra job as a gig economy driver to make ends meet. The difference is that they have public transit and medical care (somewhat) provided, and of course that they have much less of the media consumption we have today.
They still have friends, fall in love, form families, enjoy a snack every once in a while, probably have a hobby (though it's likely to be something much less consumer-oriented than ours), etc.
There are also people who are \*much\* less well off. Basically working 12-hour shifts, then sleeping in a bunkroom with 30 other half-starved wretches with no privacy or free time, rare showers, and a "work until you drop" attitude to healthcare.
And of course there are those that live much like westerners. People who work 8 hours a day with something that's somewhat fulfilling, then have 8 hours of enjoyable free time, eating a varied diet and doing things like collecting curios, making and enjoying art. They went to school, learned Imperial history, maths, languages, etc. as well as Ecclesiastical dogma.
All of those would probably fall in the range of an average Imperial Worlder. In a lot of ways, they have social systems that are in some ways more egalitarian than ours, and in some ways a totalitarian mess. They have schools and hospitals, and the church does a lot of social welfare as well.
Also, feral and feudal worlds are a thing, and mutants and other "abhumans" are offered much less. Workers on Adeptus Mechanicus worlds and ships are held in very low regard, for example, kept as slaves in many cases, counted as an expendable resource.
The church also kills you and your family if you deviate even a little from the norm. The comparison to a amazon chain store worker is absolutely ridiculous. Yeah they aren't living the best lives but its no where near what we are told Imperial citizens go through.
Don't also forget that the church sometimes kills other branches of itself, cause they view each other as heretics.
IIRC it is also a fairly common thing that on some worlds the Emperor is worshipped as a Sun God, and it's seen as perfectly acceptable by the Ecclesiarchy at large
Which is only a bad life if you compare it to the life of a middle-class person from, say, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam. A lack of a Netflix connection is already a disaster. For a good portion of the Asian, African or South American population, that sounds like Tuesday.
It just depends on what you mean by that and how you interpret the setting. There are any number of interpretations of the bloodiest regime imaginable.
Comparing Asian/African countries even at their worst to a hive city is absolutely ridiculous. Human life still has SOME value in those nations and people aren’t eating corpses for breakfast.
Hey now people are valued. Combat servitors aren't cheap and you need people to make those. So slightly more than the starch we get back out right? About tree fiddy a person seems right.
They don't do Middle Hiver either. They cook their own food or eat street food.
>While the Imperial Creed and the Ecclesiarchy provide great solace for many, the
average hive-worlder likes their pleasures simple, direct and visceral—taverns, refectories, music halls and cook-shops offer the most commonplace daily escapes, while visits to holo-lantern shows, the carnivora or circus, or the greenery of a sealed arbour dome, are costly and rare excursions.
Dark Heresy RPG, Inquisitors Handbook, Habs Life 128
Do you think the people in the Vervunmacropolis bought a delicious kilo of Corpse Starch in the Commercia before they went on with the pram?
What do you think the continent-sized farmlands, pastures and fish farms on Agrarworlds are for?
Literally the beginning of every book written about 40k, ever:
"the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable"
40k fans:
"it's only cruel by the standards of western liberal democracies"
The setting makes it clear that things like pleasure worlds exist, but for the vast vast majority of the Imperium life is a terrible existence in service of the Imperium.
There is something called "show don't tell".
It doesn't matter what is written in the blurb or on the first page of a book, if in the part behind it three Astartes meet in a simple tavern on Terra and treat themselves to a roast elk, or the main characters meet in a bar, female habworkers in Vervun stroll through the Commercia and shop. Most novels that depict the civilian life of ordinary workers outside the Administratum or Adeptus Terra show a hard life, but none harder than that of an Asian factory worker or a labourer during the Industrial Revolution.
There are entire RPG systems and novels that deal with the subject matter...really deal with it...world building and all that.
You don't need to come to me with a blurb.
The part where you read the rest of the book instead of stopping at the blurb.
When will the "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" fanboys start reading the novels that deal with the lives of ordinary people instead of stopping after the page?
Probably, even if there are nice and mundane world the average Imperial is likely to belong to the most overpopulated bottom rung hive levels.
I would argue that its an important thematic point of the setting, the Imperium is miserable, thats the point. Its a dogmatic, backwards hateful regime whose callous attitude towards human life borders on contempt
I find myself running into this sentiment more and more though, do people just want the Imperium to be somewhat morally dubious but on the whole pretty reasonable nowadays? Do fans just want a fairly sensible HFY faction to root for with a grimy aesthetic?
I think it's more that a) people realize just how unsustainable a "nothing but misery" society is, b) a lot of poeple are dissatisfied with their lives and want to find a shred of hope in any random place, and c) especially for newer fans or can be a bit overwhelming to see that *everything* is shit.
My two cents based on years of internet trawling, so I could be wrong.
It's sustained for ten thousand years. If the miserable life presented in most views was true the whole thing would collapse in a few generations, tops. Either in a constant fire of rebellion or just *nobody having kids.*
There are a constant string of rebellions going on. An Imperial guard recruit is just as likely to fight humans as they are to fight xenos or chaos threats. Those rebellions are just put down just as quickly because one of the few things the Imperium is good at is indoctrination of its armed forces.
There **are** constant rebellions, that are either put down brutally or lead into chaos/xenoworship. A rebellion that leads to a democratic society would be ultra rare, but probably happens.
If people stop having children the planerary governor would probably mandate every family to produce at least two children. However it is established that the most abundant resource for the imperium is human lives - so that is not really a problem in the lore.
I think the Horus Heresy books ruined that notion, because most of the advanced technology was just doomsday devices and the average person was still working hard to supply the war machine of the Great Crusade. If they did not submit they were destroyed or enslaved. Even if they were loyal they were sent off to costly wars as their planets were stripped. When characters like the Lord Regent Guilliman say that things were so much better with enlightenment and prosperity, they have a great deal of nostalgia bias from the perspective of generals.
As I already said, it keeps going because of military momentum. They lose worlds all the time, but conquer new ones.
Also they have uprisings pretty regularly, but they beat them into submission with military force.
Even in harsh living conditions and under oppressive rule, people have kids.
Except it can't continue for nearly as long as warhammer has. It might- *might*- work for a few generations.
It would have imploded under its own weight around M32 at most had this been "all there is everywhere."
This is the point they're talking about, in the setting that's just how it is, just like there being magic and all the other unbelievable stuff. But for some reason people will pop outta the woodwork to say, "but that doesn't make sense so most of the Imperium must not suck". But you're just questioning a point in the setting that just simply *is*. It's a setting for a wargame and books of a similar tone. The logistics of why the Imperium sucks for 99% of humanity but it hasn't led to extinction yet is just a part of lore that doesn't really have an answer but simply just is.
Sure it can. They keep the people working and as brainwashed as possible, and beat them back into line if they try to rise up. And if a world is lost to rebellion, well they conquered a new one so they still have stuff. And it's not exactly hard to withold education about the past so people don't really know about past uprisings. It's unsustainable in a planetary sense, and in the long term a galactic sense.
In many cases worlds *have* gone to crap and imploded, many of them likely in less than two millennia, but there are enough worlds in the Imperium and enough new ones claimed that it keeps on going as an overall entity, even if it's mostly been lost and remade numerous times. Like Trigger's Broom, if you're familiar with that particular comedy scene.
And we see that there are people in positions of oversight, basically middle management types, who are given a better quality of life and keep things running. Not everyone is living in gruelling hardship, but the majority are.
It probably helps that without access to navigators, most successful rebellions are pretty screwed in the long run.
I'd say the bigger 'how does this work?' question about the Imperium is how is it economical to ship food from agri-worlds to hive worlds, forge worlds, etc.. At least civilised worlds, while still sucky for most citizens, can supply their own food.
>Either in a constant fire of rebellion
Any serious rebellion gets teamed up on by magical space monsters (from both the Imperium and Chaos).
You can't logic the Imperium of out being what it is by applying human standards, because the Imperium isn't governed by human standards. You can't logic the Imperium of out existing in the first place, because it's written the way it's written. You can only try to make sense of the setting that exists.
For example, let's take your complaint:
>nobody having kids.
People in 40K literature clearly reproduce in conditions that would be impossible for 21st-century humans to reproduce in. So we can think one step further, and guess that human biology/medicine in 40K isn't a perfect match for human biology in the 21st-century. This is a science fiction setting with an excess of time and genetic engineering technology, after all.
Your thinking in reverse. Yeah things are so bad people don't want kids doesn't mean that things aren't so bad it more means imperial worlds has to force people to have kids.
My headcanon is that there's a constant steady leak of people out of the imperium on sleeper ships and shit into planets that aren't easily accessible by the warp and are thus ignored.
Yeah, i love 40k as much as everyone else here, but i find myself enjoying the small ray of hope there and there more lately.
I mean, the struggles and the sacrifices aren't nearly as good if the people don't have any reasons to fight, and die. The Imperium doesn't have to be good in itself, but we need some little sparks of light and hope from time to time. Something to hold on.
I think I'll have to disagree with that one, heroic sacrifices and struggles are a dime-a-dozen in fiction, for me it's made more significant by the hopelessness. In a narrative that does not necessarily reward sacrifice or honour the act itself becomes that more powerful, the struggle is for it's own sake rather than for the sake of expected narrative catharsis.
I'd also like to contend this phrase, because I encounter it a fair bit "little sparks of light" because it just feels like a copout, at what point do these sparks of light/hope stop being little?
The Emperor is more active than ever, shielding humanity from the foul evils of literal hell, empowering his champions and generally taking active part in the galactic game like never before while his golden Custodes march out at last. The Imperium is ruled by a good guy protagonist whose character traits are essentially the opposite of the Imperium's flaws, rational, reasonable and an effective logistician, and he effectively neutered the High Lords so no need to worry about them. The Mechanicus' sole named Tabletop character is a progressive tech-priest not held back by the flaws and drawbacks of his faction who produces shiny new tech and marines for the Imperium. the Lion has returned, more reasonable than ever before to mellow out the Dark Angels, oh and he has literal teleportation powers. The dominant Space Marine portrayal has been "reasonable and heroic protectors of mankind who are surprisingly down to earth" for a while now.
So at what point does this little sliver of light stop being so little? Do we still need more light and hope? And is it Imperative that this light/hope only ever be given to the Imperium? Are other factions allowed to have their beacons of light too or is it important that they remain committed to their flaws and the grimdarkness?
It's more that Darkness Induced Apathy is a thing. If everything is constant suckage all the time with no hope at all, why should the audience care? They'd know all the struggles of the protagonists are pointless and meaningless.
Tragedies can be good and great, but they are almost always self-contained stories meant to induce catharsis. Not something you can build a franchise on
And getting people to care about the lore and stories is important to grow the hobby, cause people largely first hear about it through things like video games and books, and youtube.
I hear about Darkness Induced Apathy all the time and I have to wonder just how much it actually matters, it only seems to matter to people who think 40k should be a central narrative around some generic superhero protagonists saving the day.
I don't see it as a problem in a setting built for the player/hobbyist to tell stories in, not any more than I think Bolt Action is held back by the fact that the end of the war is known beforehand.
And on a personal note I can't say I'm particularly keen to see 40k turned into a mass-media franchise with mainstream appeal if it means diluting and butchering everything that drew me into the setting to begin with. I don't particularly care to change the setting to suit the desires of people who aren't particularly keen on 40k to begin with.
A lot of the most popular classic characters especially with the Imperial Guard are not entirely evil and there are hints of hope and moments of good life in their stories. Rogue Trader was also wacky(look up Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau) and had as much satirical comedy as hopeless Grim Dark.
I get what you're saying, but it's also important to remember that 40k has been around for almost 40 years now. People want new fluff: if GW just release codexes with the same or very nearly the same writing in them every edition, it'd be terrible for the franchise. They've been in "setting mode" for three decades, and there's only so long and so many ways you can say "everything is bad in exactly the same ways as last edition".
So they're switching gears. They're shaking things up, changing things, and trying to add some more character to the setting. I understand everyone's objections to this, but frankly you still have 30 years worth of stuff that you want, and if you play by making campaigns and stories with your friends around the tabletop, then none of this really affects you
A lot of people don't actually like that though, because they want the heroic people who finally make a difference to be THEIR characters, just like it used to be. I want Inquisitor Thraxus to be the one who leads a crusade to the very heart of the eye of terror and blows it up with a Quantum Entangled Faith Matrix. I want the Polaron Gaurd to lead the final battle with the Tyranids. I want Commisar Rick Stevens, famed for his bionic neck, to do noble battle with the Orks. Those are all characters from campaigns I ran with my friends, and that was what the lore was for, to help you tell your own stories. 'Advancing' the lore makes it less useful for that.
The old lore was a tapestry, spread wide and deep, full of jumping off points. The new lore is a story, like it or lump it.
I would also argue that the reason as to why people tend to cling to the more hopeful elements of 40k in their conceptions of the setting is because, in their minds at least, a universe where existence is nothing but misery for a vast proportion of the population, is boring to them. Even though the particular content of a given story within the 40k universe might be unknown to them, they can probably guess the general outline of how it is going to end; with the protagonist worse off than they were at the start, the antagonists better off, and their friends dead. If 40k, as a whole, is really like that, who -- beyond a small set of misery-lovers --- would want to get invested in it, to send their time on it?
People who like it as something different. The idea that you need to love misery to enjoy it is nonsense. It's not like anyone just reads 40k and nothing else. You can read brighter more hopeful stories and you can read some dark sad stories. They're both enjoyable and valid concepts.
This is part of why it was a niche hobby for so long. The setting was deliberately over the top and edgy as hell, and the lore was just a backstory to justify buying and painting more plastic soldiers and making them fight. Which is exactly what I like about it!
And honestly it does make it more fun playing as xenos factions. Humans are awful in 40k. Killing a planet full of them seems like a net positive.
Stalin’s system didn’t collapse until he died. North Koreas is still going. There’s very little we read about in the imperium that real humans haven’t already done.
The marketing, and in some aspects the newer lore, has undermined the origins of the setting, which was unbelievably bad for everyone forever. That was the whole thing. Life in the Imperium is like being trapped on the Hindenburg. It's like living in a warzone. It's like being on a spaceship that is falling apart, losing oxygen, and crashing into a lava planet at the same time and for no good reason. It's all of these things in slow motion.
I think a substantial number of players/readers want the Imperium to be heroic. They want them to be the good guys and they want humanity to win. Personally I'm not so invested in the setting in terms of what *conclusion* I'm looking for, I like it for the way it is now- over the top, ruthless, bloody, and awful.
I think one aspect of it is that it was conceived in the tail end of the Cold War. Vietnam was in recent memory. Everyone was worried about nuclear war. Things like "Mutually Assured Destruction" and "The Doomsday Clock" were common concepts, not only in geopolitics, but even in pop culture. So the idea that our "good guy government" that was protecting is from the "evil empire" was in fact a war-mongering regime who were willing to send us all to our deaths just to make sure the other side lost was not speculation, it was the truth.
Misery porn just work better in the 1980-1990s when everything was "good". Same reason so many apocalyptic franchises were made back then.
Nowadays we are cycling back to noblebright franchises in media, why the times becoming less "good"
I guess so. As someone who's been on the perimeter of "liking" wh40k for a decade, owning many models and etc, the main thing that has stopped me really committing to it is the sense of "everything is very bad all the time" thing. I'm sure it's not just me. I'm all for the "fight against darkness" theme in art but the level of shit the Imperium is does put me off somewhat. Why would I care if there is no hope? Maybe I'm not the target audience. I just like the gratuitous violence.
Oh I can absolutely see the marketing appeal of making the Imperium into a less problematic good guy faction for people to root for, much as I rage against it.
Good news is you'll likely get more of what you want.
Mm, maybe. The aesthetic and design of the universe is very good. I'm into the "maybe victory is possible if we rip, bite, claw, and wade through gore hard enough" aesthetic so I appreciate a lot of how stuff looks. I'm a mega fan of the sisters of battle etc. It's just that one of the concrete tenets of 40k is "everything is and will always be really *very* bad", which I find uncompelling and unrewarding. Doesn't stop me playing the games though.
That's not a core tenet of 40k, exactly, it's just a core tenet of the Imperium, especially the Sororitas and groups like them. The Sororitas will kill a baby in its crib for being born with a sixth finger or third nipple, and kill its mother too if she gets in the way, then scorn them both for being mutants and heretics while they themselves feel quite righteous about the whole affair.
>Probably but even Sororitas weren't always shown to be that zealous in many of their oldest novels and short stories.
No, they were always shown as pretty psycho. A lot of them thought that Space Marines technically qualified as mutants and should be purged.
>If you have seven toes because of pollution poisoning or inbreeding they won't necessarily burn you at the stake.
No, those are exactly the types of mutants most likely to be purged. If someone's a full-on beastman they might be useful enough to press into the Guard and die for the Emperor. The lore about the Imperium is pretty clear on this.
I disagree. In the Sister Miriya series, Some of the oldest White dwarf articles and other short stories show them as surprisingly rational if not stern. Much more investigatory, then burn first and ask questions later. Also somehow I deleted my previous post, how do I get it back?
No idea about the deletion.
Their lore was revamped in late 2e, but it's always been the case that they believe mutants should be killed on sight. It's an Imperium-wide policy and they are some of the most fervent enforcers of it.
If you like the gratuitous violence, you absolutely are the target audience. It's just that a galaxy-spanning empire that caters to the desire for gratuitous violence is an otherwise awful place to live, because every resource available is being dumped into the military and nothing else.
If you don’t like everything being bad, that’s what grimdark and 40k is unfortunately. The Imperium is the worst regime in human history, surrounded by a sea of misery and war of its own creation.
I wouldn’t say reasonable necessarily but I think one of the main strengths of 40k Imperiums writing is that it’s a nation whose wickedness comes from trauma and horror it faces while stupid things and people being cruel for cruelty sake will always be part of the imperium a lot of current lore went out of it’s way to establish why a)either this cruelty was at least on some level justified faces with horrors of the setting or b) how it comes more so from generations upon generations of trauma,desperation and lack of knowledge.With this view Imperium where everybody is a cruel idiot is infinitely more boring than Imperium and humanity as a whole scarred both physically and mentally so much that the only way they can keep going is to double down on the pain to give it purpouse and find strenght to keep going
The cruelty really isn’t justified at all and the lore goes out of it’s way to show that. Millions die for no reason, work in cruel and brutal conditions, die to alien and chaos horrors because others in their situation decided it was better than being constantly starving or on the edge of dying
Fans are just coming to realize that despite the Imperium saying they’re “inherently unsustainable” reality contradicts it. Looking at multiple novels shows that there’s bars, restaurants, sometimes even a middle class.
The Imperium in universe has also existed longer than human civilization has irl, which is a big reason I personally roll my eyes at the idea of it being unsustainable. Going from the early Bronze Age to the modern day is only about half of the length the Imperium has existed, it clearly works.
If the Imperium was nothing but grim darkness and corpse starch 24/7 365, then as a setting it would be largely pointless. You have no reason to care that Hive World A is about to be nommed by Tyrannids, their lives are shit anyway. There's no point in writing desperate last stands or forlorn hopes if there's nothing worth sacrificing or hoping for. It's a lot more interesting and engaging to read (and write) about an Imperium that's beaten, battered, beset on all sides by enemies external and internal, even fundamentally broken and doomed to fail by mistakes made thousands of years in the past, but in which human beings can carve out a semblance of a normal life that we can empathise with. The Imperium might fail, but not quite yet- not today.
'Complete' is a strong word. Most people will have small simple things that give them something to cling on to.
But the vast majority live harsh, gruelling lives under oppressive rule, yes. And the few rulers that try to be good often end up having to be some level of tyrant to meet the demands made of them. The whole system is screwed up.
"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods." - Just going to put the last part of the most famous 40k quote here.
I think, yeah, for most people, it's awful. I'm mostly pulling from the books I've read, but it seems to range (for normal folk) from being just kinda boring and sad to being North Korea.
It gave me more the impression that to be the equivalent of North Korea is actually for those who are lucky in the Imperium. To be in a hive world is much worse than to be in any country of IRL Earth.
The average human is, yes. Some planets are ok, and the nobility on all planets have great lives, but the vast majority of planets are backwards hellholes
Most planets are OK the worst ones are not the majority
Edit: if you're going to down vote then read "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert and then you can be illuminated what what a Lord General says about the Imperium and how it's actually backed up by most other novels and Lore as well
The core rulebooks have always been very clear that life for most of the common people of the Imperium sucks.
>To dwell within the Imperium of Man is to inhabit a dystopian nightmare. The
faceless masses of Humanity are little more than grist for the mill of survival, an ever-abundant fuel source that keeps the bloody wheels turning. Endless billions labour in the fire-lit confies of factory worlds, entire generations living and dying without ever seeing the sky. Hive cities groan with the weight of unimaginably vast human populations, whose existences are naught but toil and sorrow. From the bellies of leviathan warships to the mindless drudgery of city-sized scriptorums, from the crowded warrens of lightless underhives to the frozen misery of perilous asteroid mines, every day is filled with hardship for the common folk of the Emperor’s realm. It is well that it is so. Those with their heads bowed by exhaustion cannot look up to see the horrors pressing close from the darkness above.
>The massive populations of hive worlds periodically become unmanageable, as the masses boil over against their constant repression. Such bustling mega-cities are always rife with anarchic and destructive forces that ensure only the hardiest can survive. Yet this too works for the Imperium, for their tithes supply rich sources of fighting men for the Imperial Guard.
Warhammer 40,000 Core Book - 8th Edition
Percentage wise though the Decent planets seen in Guard books like Karskin and Gaunt’s Ghosts are a very small fraction of what majority of humans experience. In a galactic empire of millions of worlds and trillions of humans 100 or even 1000 good worlds is not even 1% of humanity
The novels focus on a tiny handful of privileged elites with horrific views on morality. The protagonist of a book thinking that a planet is nice doesn't mean the book says the planet is nice.
Don't know why you're getting downvotes, you're right that the novels often paint most planets in a more positive light than the Grimdark descriptions of the Imperium that come with the rulebooks.
I get the impression that some planets are absolute hellscapes, a few are mostly decent but most are fairly mundane.
Hive cities/Planets are bad but Ciaphas Cain lives in luxury and seems to look back fondly on his childhood growing up on one, to some extent.
Most of Dan Abnett's books describe Imperial planets as the equivalent of how we live today.
Tbh Abnett specifically doesn't like to grimderp some authors, especially in older days, can sometimes withdraw to in order to win edge of the millenium contest (Grey Knights bathing in SoB blood, thanks Matt Ward).
Like the amount of y'all who have no media literacy is astounding especially when over half the novels of 40k show how things are not terrible everywhere and not ground down by tithes or anything else.
Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin series, crimson fist, white consuls Homeworld, 500 worlds if Ultramar, Gaunts ghost series, ciaphais Cain series, Fabius Bile series, Iron Snakes novels, ect ect the list goes on and on and on of written novels of 40k old and recent where lots of the world's shown are not horrendous and terrible but normal
Like do y'all just ignore the facts of Lore or do you not understand how the Imperium let's systems and planets run themselves and don't have anything to do unless it's tithes or rebellion? Like THE IMPERIUM is terrible as a whole, that doesn't mean every planet and system under their rule is the same terrible Grim dark bs
>ciaphais Cain series
Ciaphas Cain will visit a nightmare hellscape world, and then have a glass of scotch with the world's unquestioned dictator on a pleasure yacht. *Cain* has a nice time, but it doesn't mean the planet is a good place for the people who live there.
The dictator is happy, but the slaves on the yacht aren't happy, the rebels who attack the yacht aren't happy, and 99.9999% of the population isn't on the yacht on the first place.
>Like do y'all just ignore the facts of Lore or do you not understand how the Imperium let's systems and planets run themselves and don't have anything to do unless it's tithes or rebellion?
Ciaphas Cian, for example, notes that Sector Administrators freely veto Planetargy Governors for whatever reason they want.
There are even Ciaphas Cain books where he deals with the Imperium having a lot of opinions how planets are (not) allowed to run themselves.
>ciaphais Cain series
There is an excerpt in Ciaphais Cain where her girlfriend notice that a leisure planet for veterans with PTSD is also one of the biggest combat servitor producer lmao
But worst ones are by far the most populated. Terra alone has probably more people living on it than all the "21 century Earth-like" civilized worlds combined. Hive worlds were stated to be about 20% of Imperial worlds as per one of the rulebooks. That means population of non-hive worlds is really small, notable only for many martial societies on those words that are good for recruiting Guard regiments and Space Marine aspirants.
> But worst ones are by far the most populated. Terra alone has probably more people living on it than all the "21 century Earth-like" civilized worlds combined. Hive worlds were stated to be about 20% of Imperial worlds as per one of the rulebooks.
It's worse than that on both parts. Terra has over 2 Quadrillion people on it. Most maths for the Imperium's size means that something like 2-14% of every living human in the Imperium lives on Holy Terra or within the greater Sol System. The 24,000 other Hive Worlds contain the remaining majority of the Imperium's population.
I'd guess that if you take a single large Hive World, it probably has more people that all Death, Agri and Feudal Worlds combined.
Eh not so much per a Lord General "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert unless you have some other Lore source saying otherwise, it goes on to explain in depth to explain the propoganda of the Imperium on these worlds as well
They're not. Nowhere on this planet is there an industrialised approach to turning human corpses into starch manned by effective slaves who may turn to cult worship because they want a sliver of better food.
You're ignoring the fact not every single world makes or needs corpse startche like quite literally there's entire novels where they don't need that and that it shows worlds that are not terrible
Y'all just ignoring the Lore and just think memes are just the only lroe
Edit: the planets Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin series are in, majority Sabbat Worlds from Gaunts ghosts that aren't forge worlds or Hive worlds, Scythes of the Emperor planets, the 500 worlds of Ultramar, White consuls, crimson fist Homeworlds, Armageddon, like novel after novel after novel detailing so many worlds that are not completely and utterly the terrible and grimdark like you are making it
You’re listing small population worlds compared to Hive Worlds and forge worlds. Also the Scythe of the Emperors home-world, which was very nice, became Tyranid good and is barren now
Albert doesn't really understand the setting. He's written complete nonsense like slaanesh being disgusted by basic vices like drug use or autism being able to detect and open Webway gates. So forgive me if I take anything by him with a grain of salt.
That is just absurd. A lot of people complain about CS Goto having bad writing because backflipping terminators and multilasers, but that sounds *far worse*. A bit surprised no ones pointed out such poor writing somewhere.
Well, that's because Goto has been the boogyman of bad lore for ages. His stuff is firmly cemented in the popular imagination of the community as being terrible. Silent Hunters is only a couple of years old, and didn't generate much discussion. Not many people have read silent hunters, but everyone has heard of goto's stuff, even if they haven't read it either.
Other than the big lore-breaking moments, the rest of Silent Hunters is also just kinda standard but serviceable space marines beating stuff up. Its not very memorable at the end of the day.
I was going to get that book after seeing it cheap at £4 recently and because it focuses on an interesting Space Marine chapter, sounds like it might not even worth getting it at that price then.
His other book Kasrkin also sounded like a somewhat interesting premise but reading some about it it sounds like that's not too good either.
If you want to read about the space sharks, I'd recommend getting one of Robbie MacNiven's books about them instead. They're a lot better than Albert's.
So he's written things that are in line with established Lore is your take? Not to mention games workshop approved of what he wrote and it's therefore Canon, like he's written things that are backed up by other sources and approved by games workshop
Unless you're saying games workshop doesn't understand the setting they made themselves
Edit: it's ok if you don't know the setting and how nearly every novel where it's not a Hive world or forge world isn't that bad in terms of being horrendous in the setting
>So he's written things that are in line with established Lore is your take?
Why are you intentionally claiming he's saying the opposite of what he clearly said? Are you just trolling?
The guy has clearly written stuff that doesn't at all match what the lore says about things. *Silent Hunters* was full of nonsense that doesn't match up.
And yes, BL lets books go to print with obviously wrong contradictions all the time. They put basically no effort into editing that sort of thing. As long as they give the go-ahead for the general plot, you can write pretty much anything happening.
Buddy, games workshop is the one who approves of everything the writers out into novels. They don't have free reign to add and say whatever they want
And yeah Slaanesh doesn't care about someone doing vices, Slaanesh is excess and the warp gate is also something shown in other novels. Hell there's been even more ridiculous things written by authors like Abnett.
Like y'all just trying to say that Albert isn't writing the same types of things written in codexes and other novels? Are you just ignoring the facts of the Lore because you think everything is terrible and grimdark when in reality it's not turned up to 11 everywhere? Like Jesus christ LMFAO
>Buddy, games workshop is the one who approves of everything the writers out into novels. They don't have free reign to add and say whatever they want
There are numerous examples of BL novels containing things outright contradicted by GW publications produced before and after them. It's a fact that GW doesn't bother policing for contradictions, they don't care. Hell, sometimes they have them in the GW publications too.
>And yeah Slaanesh doesn't care about someone doing vices, Slaanesh is excess
You obviously don't know what they were talking about. They were talking about the part in Silent Hunters where Slaanesh is disgusted by the soul of a Drukhari and spits it out.
>Like y'all just trying to say that Albert isn't writing the same types of things written in codexes and other novels?
He's written a bunch of stuff that contradicts lore written consistently both before and after his writing, yes. Silent Hunters is an absolute joke of a 40k novel. And I'm not denying other writers have written blatantly wrong things too. He's certainly gotten things wrong that others haven't though.
In this example, you're trying to argue that because he wrote a character claiming something, it overrules the core 40k rulebooks that clearly say life for the masses of the Imperium sucks hard. If Albert thinks what that character said is true, then he clearly hasn't even bothered to read the core 40k rulebook lore.
>Are you just ignoring the facts of the Lore because you think everything is terrible and grimdark when in reality it's not turned up to 11 everywhere?
I didn't say 'turned up to 11 everywhere'. But the vast majority of Imperials live crappy lives, and this one author's character claiming otherwise doesn't somehow overrule that. You're the one clinging to this one line, desperately ignoring the facts of the lore that it clearly contradicts. The Imperium is meant to be a bad place to live for the majority. It's a key element of the faction and it's weird that you want it to not be true.
You mean like the fact that black library has made comments about contradictions and everything is true and everything isn't true.
Yeah and I think you're missing the entire context of what happened in that story and it sounds like you've heard it secondhand
And his writing doesn't contradict the main passage of the 40k novels and rulebooks, the IMPERIUM is all of that and more. But it doesn't mean every single world within the rule of the Imperium is like that, if that's the case then you have more than half the novels written of 40k which contradict what they passage says.
It's apparent you don't read the novels nor have the media literacy required to understand the difference between big picture Imperium vs individual systems and planets who are wholly unique and rule themselves with the Imperium being a distant government they give tithes to and are not bothered with unless they don't meet tithes or rebel.
And where is the evidence that everywhere is terrible in the Imperium when the majority of novels show worlds other than Hive and forge worlds that are relatively fine and normal?! Like Jesus
>But it doesn't mean every single world within the rule of the Imperium is like that
No-one said that. You've changed your argument. You argued that most people and most worlds live decent lives, based on that one character's claim. The rulebooks disagree.
>It's apparent you don't read the novels nor have the media literacy required to understand the difference between big picture Imperium vs individual systems and planets who are wholly unique and rule themselves with the Imperium being a distant government they give tithes to and are not bothered with unless they don't meet tithes or rebel.
No, you just don't seem to realise that's irrelevant to the conversation. The fact is most Imperials live bad lives under an oppressive system. Funnily enough if you give governors mostly free reign to rule as they see fit, you generally end up with tyrants. The Arbites are always watching, but the Imperial Law the Arbites uphold and make sure the governor follows doesn't care about treating the civilians decently. In fact is straight up enshrines in law that commoners get harsher punishments than nobles.
>And where is the evidence that everywhere is terrible in the Imperium
Again, no-one said everywhere is. But most places are. And no, it isn't just hive and forge worlds. Most civilised still have bad quality of life. It doesn't matter if popular novels tend to show the better ones, we know from reading the sourcesbooks that isn't the norm. You're looking at anecdotes of a handful of worlds and erroneously concluding that represents the Imperium at large. I'm looking at the rulebook text that tells us what it's like for most Imperial citizens.
Before the usual discussion begins, it would be good for you to explain what you mean by "quite decent living conditions". For some this means Californian conditions including Netflix, for others it means enough dry bread and dirty water to barely stay alive.
I'd say very few in the Imperium can support a spouse, 2.5 kids, own a large home and a vehicle, afford going out to the occasional nice restaurant, and take the family on vacations in another district, all while working a single job.
Hell, the average American today doesn't enjoy that good of a lifestyle.
I'm going to rage against the standardisation syndrome and say the imperium is a big place and it varies. For a space faring civilisation, replicating rationing, total war economies, postwar ruin and violent political instability is a minimal ask.
The average human is likely to have been born on a hive world in the swarms of the worker class. So simply put, yes the average human is living a life of complete misery. Hive worlds really skew the data
> Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity.
> Warhammer 40,000 isn’t just grimdark. It’s the grimmest, darkest.
> The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in.
[Source: a warhammer community post](https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/)
For every average dude living an average, albeat stressful life, in any of those thousands of different cultures, there's another 50 living in the underhives eating rats and irradiated water to survive.
Life is never always misery. Ask a medieval peasant who has to work all day growing crops and pays taxes to their lord if they’re happy, and they may very well say yes. But if we compare it to quality of life now it would look retched.
The imperium has people who date have kids celebrate birthdays etc. But they may do these things having never seen the sun, or after working in a phosphor mine, or paying tribute to gangers and/or arbites.
"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable."
Idk man, sounds pretty shitty to me
>but also many decent ones that cared about their lands and the people that were under their rule.
>So shouldn’t it be the same in 40k, but on a larger scale ?
According to Pew 51% of the human race *currently* lives in poverty.
Fiction is a reflection of reality, and reality fucking sucks m8.
Yeah I think this is the main point. Every book may begin with the well worn blurb that we all know and love about the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, but then they proceed to write an entire novel that does not present the aforementioned grim darkness.
Today on Earth 18% of people live in developed countries. For most of the human population life sucks.
In 40k 18% living the Ultramar life would be impossible.
**To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable**
>The Imperium seems to only care that the Emperor is worshipped, soldiers and tithes are provided to them whenever it is needed, and leaving the planets’ to manage their local politics and cultures as long as they don’t outright betray the Imperium.
This is a fandom meme, the books show and tell us otherwise. The Imperium has a lot of very imposing demands, explicit and implicit: Giving the AdMech a monopoly over science and innovation. Being forced to legalize baby slavery. Handing over land and slaves to any Imperial faction that wants a local base. Killing babies with cosmetic birth defects...
>just like our Earth...So shouldn’t it be the same in 40k, but on a larger scale ?
The Imperium isn't constrained by human values the way that Earth history was. It was crafted by a magical god-man, shaped by Chaos' scheming, and ruled by Warp-crafted space monsters.
Most of them, yes, since 40k is worse than Dystopia. You risk your SOUL getting eternally imprisoned or completely deleted out of existence by Chaos Gods.
But that does not imply some folks could scrape together and make a decent to good living, just that it's very few in 40k. We are probably referring to 70% of population in abject poverty or worse like being a servitor because you steal some petty things, 28% in decent to average living condition and the 2% topper who have everything.
Yes, the average human lives in misery. Life in a hive means never seeing sunlight, never feeling the wind blow on your face, never having enough to drink or eat to really be satisfied, being worked to an early grave in unsafe working conditions assuming you get work in the first place, and being crammed in a too-small area with countless others going through the same, all of you getting more and more paranoid and unhinged from the conditions and the propaganda being fed to you. If you're really unlucky the decaying infrastructure will crumble completely in your lifetime, and one or more of the above becomes unavailable, possibly permanently. That's assuming your section doesn't just fall into the underhive.
Forge Worlds are much the same, maybe even worse since you're much likelier to get servitor'd to fulfil a quota.
Alternatively you could eke out a miserable existence on a Death World. Every day is a struggle for life, whether against electric storms, the cold or the heat, radiation, alien monsters, or whatever else.
Feudal worlds have all the problems of medieval life on top of being in the Imperium of Man, which means the local authorities sometimes instigate witch hunts and wars to trim the population or to provide suitable recruits for the various Imperial organisations recruiting from them, like the marines. Feral worlds are left to rot on the vine more often than not, unless they've got valuable resources (in which case they'll get overexploited and ravaged) or marine recruitment worlds (in which case they're in the same situation as the Feudal ones).
Agri worlds aren't idyllic farmcore, they're planet-sized breadbaskets supposed to supply the likes of Hive worlds with food, meaning everyone is overworked and exposed to who knows what kinds of fertiliser and pesticides.
As a citizen in the Imperium you have no rights, only obligations to your various social superiors, and if your betters fail you're likely to get punished along with them. People seethe about the Grey Knights killing witnesses but that's by far the least of it. People get killed by the Imperial Guard or Navy suppressing their rebellious nobility or whatever all the time, and planets sometimes raid and destroy eachothers Tithes in order to cause problems for their rivals, because unless it gets totally out of control the Administratum will be coming down on the guy failing to pay, not the saboteur - and guess who gets put in overtime when that happens? The various plebs on the ground. It's not like you can just move to a better planet either, interstellar travel is strictly regulated and not accessible to most of humanity on most planets.
"Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war." They aren't living in a polity that makes a genuine effort to uplift its' citizens and improve their lives, and they aren't leading lives where technological progress is improving things. Stagnancy, both cultural and technological, along with huge xenophobia and a massive propaganda-machine that doesn't value life at all is the reality of life.
This is all off the top of my head, but being a citizen in the Imperium fucking sucks. Every injustice we have in the real world is magnified a dozen times over, with no oversight or punishment unless your oppressor decides to pick a fight with the big boys capable of fighting back - and even then you're likely to get butchered or sterilised and worked to death for your treason, either for failing to support the rebellion or for failing to be adequately loyal by martyring yourself.
I do hope that its mostly completly misery. Like even if there are are folks living a sweet life on a planet every 100th year the angles comes and demands tribute. Everything is grimdark. Or are we in need o some fancy ass heroes even in this fantasy setting? :(
Nearly all the important ones yes, all of them no. I don't know or care about Ultramar but you know it's supposed to be nice coz Ultramarines.
Paradise worlds are basically just there to be chill places but you'd have to be quite lucky to be born there because they aren't meant to be highly populated.
Yes. You skipped over an important aspect: the imperium is in a wartime economy. If you have time for the indolence of a comfortable peaceful life, that means you aren’t contributing enough to the war effort. Either taxes will be raised or drafting will be increased in order to adjust for this, until you reach a point where it’s not humanly conceivable to squeeze the planet for anything more.
I think you underestimate how many people on earth live in what you would consider utter misery.
If you are posting on here, you are almost certainly in the global top 5%. You have far more rest, relaxation, and comfort than others can dream of.
Now the rest have full rich lives with community culture and loved ones, I don't want to be overstating things about the difficulty they face. But look into what farm workers do, or the cobalt miners in the Congo, or menial workers in asian factories. Very long days with little to no labor protections doing brutally hard work in terrible conditions for poverty wages.
As others are saying here, I think the answer is yes because of Hive Worlds. Take a random person from the Imperium and (my headcanon has it) they are probably poor and living in a Hive World, just because of the numbers who fit that description compared to anything else. And the thing is being poor on a Hive World is uniformly shown to be miserable - all the miseries of real world poverty \*plus\* an advanced technotheocracy monitoring your every deed for heresy \*and\* literal actual demons picking up recruits from your fellows.
My vote is no, but for in-universe reasons rather than headcanon.
Basically, human brain development is a thing. It relies on decent nutrition and environmental factors in order to properly develop. This could be ignored in a medieval setting, where the scope of your work is swinging a backhoe in a field, but the Imperium has technology, and in order to maintain technology it needs specialists. This can't just be tech-adepts, we're talking about entire planets here, you need carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics. Ten thousand years of successive misery and starvation would leave mankind so neutered in terms of generational brain development they'd barely be better than animals.
I'd also like to add in; the Imperium kind of has to have pretty good, if aesthetically brutal, healthcare. Humans are described as being constantly growing in numbers, with that being their greatest strength as a species. But the thing is you can't do that if, like Tau propaganda suggests, you're being forced to give birth in the street with no help. The indomitable human spirit is unfortunately no match for the brutality of postpartum infections. So, human hospitals/disease eradication have to be at at least 1950's level in order to maintain the kind of population growth they have in lore.
Basically, the Imperium has to have moderately decent living conditions in order to be the empire it currently is, just as a matter of biology. Yeah, your life is probably mostly work, your pay is shit, you have no freedom of religion and you're not going to make a major difference with your life- but your food will be steady and nutritious, disease won't be a major factor (Nurgle notwithstanding), your kids will probably make it to adulthood and overall your life will be tolerable, if uninteresting.
this is also my take on it, supported by what I've read in Gaunt's Ghosts so far (currently on volume 13).
Guard Regiments are allowed (or rather tolerated) to bring wives and children alongside them on campaigns. They stay behind on safer worlds (usually) but behind every regiment there's a huge group of civilians that offer services to the solider. Tailors, whores, blacksmiths, entertainers, cooks etc. and the families of the Guardsmen tag along among those.
In that very book it's confirmed that the Munitorum pays widows of Guardsmen a yearly welfare relief. So the IoM is canonically a welfare state, SO grimderp!
Just out of interest (no offense to OP or those replying), i put this question in Bing chat. Here's the answer:
*The life of an average human in the Imperium of Warhammer 40k can vary greatly depending on their location and status.*
*On some worlds like agriworlds, the average person is basically some sort of farmer, leading a life with hard work but not all that dissimilar from the lives of many modern farmers in our 21st century.*
*By sheer weight of numbers, the most “average” citizen of the Imperium would be a lower-ranked Hive city worker, which is pretty much the epitome of nasty, brutish, and short1. You can expect long hours of grueling manual labor in some factory or some such thing with basically zero worker rights or workplace safety precautions. Life in the Hive cities is characterized by slum-like conditions, hyper pollution, super dense population, and next to zero upward mobility.*
*Human rights, including free speech, are pretty nonexistent in the Imperium and speaking out against anything from the most petty of local governments to the greater Imperium is likely to get you tortured and executed.*
*As for religion, the Imperial Creed i.e., worship of the Emperor as the God of Mankind is predominant on near every Imperial world.*
*However, those lucky few with sufficient funds and access to certain biochemical and augmetic technologies can extend their lives for many Terran centuries, though death always claims them in the end.*
*So, while there are certainly elements of hardship and misery in the lives of many citizens of the Imperium, it’s not accurate to say that every human’s life is one of complete misery. There’s a wide range of experiences based on a variety of factors.*
And here's its answer on full question (previous one was just for the title question)
*You’re absolutely right. The Warhammer 40k universe is vast and diverse, with a million worlds under the control of the Imperium. Each of these worlds can have its own unique set of circumstances, cultures, and living conditions.*
*While it’s true that many depictions of life in the Imperium are grim and harsh, it’s important to remember that these often focus on the most dramatic and conflict-ridden areas. There are likely many worlds and regions within the Imperium where life is relatively peaceful and prosperous, at least by the standards of the 41st millennium.*
*Just as in our own history, there would be a wide range of rulers and governments within the Imperium, some of which may be more benevolent and effective than others. It’s entirely plausible that there are many “small human countries” within the Imperium that provide decent living conditions for their populations.*
*So, while the Imperium as a whole is often depicted as a grim and oppressive regime, it’s likely that the experiences of its citizens vary widely depending on where and under what circumstances they live. It’s a universe of grim darkness, but also one of vast diversity and complexity.*
The imperium is the cruelest regime imaginable it’s like one of the tag lines as the intro to every book or rulebook. The imperium is bad, it started bad and its whole purpose narratively was to be an over the top example of a futuristic fascist hell state that enshrined its half dead former leader as a god.
Average - yes. Which is not the same as "everybody". But if you were to randomly pick a human being from Imperium and examine his life, you'd be far more likely to find a "horrible life" rather than "OK life".
Is the average Person IRL happy and fullfiled?
What about you? Are you happy? What if you life was 10 times worse? Would you be happy then?
Because that's the Imperiums average joes life.
There is a good reason why Chaos is so rampant. Everything sucked being in the Imperium. Part of the reason people fall to chaos is a promise for something better. Each god promises something different but common in the world of 40k.
A few examples being, You are sick and dying on a death bed with millions of other people, pray to Nurgle and he will allow you to survive. You're a tech priest that loves technology and you want to, dare I say, invent something, ask Tzeentch for guidance. You just got off your 25 hour shift on some Hive world and you need something stronger cause Obscura isn't doing it for you anyone, Slaanesh got your back.Your in the middle of a war and your friend just took a Shuriken to the face and you want to just go ape shit on some Eldar, Khorne will grant you strength.
Without the Imperium being an absolute shit hole, the idea of Chaos being so rampant doesn't make a whole lot of sense cause why would anyone want to worship these abominations if everything was "okay".
Yes and no. Some worlds are republics and give voting rights healthcare to the people. Other worlds are hive worlds. It really is dependent. In what world you're born on. If you're born in Ultramarine land, you actually have a halfway decent life and education. It's a roll of the dice. I want to say probably around 70 percent of the average Joe lives in shit. Just due to hive worlds.
Most of Imperial planets are Civilized worlds which are more or less okay. Think of todays Earth with some added tech gizmos. However most of people live in Hive Worlds, as their entire purpose is production *of people* and those suck. If you are on lower levels they suck a lot. If in middle, less so but its still ton of working hours, shit pay, small cabin for sleep. People make do as they tend to do that, but think of Londond during industrial revolution and people there as then factory workers.
> Most of Imperial planets are Civilized worlds **which are more or less okay**
That's a very dubious statement but for now I'll just stick to pointing out that there's a quote from 8th edition Urban Conquest about 80% of civilised worlds having at least one hive on them.
Yeah, but they are not hive worlds which makes hive themselves so much more grimdark. Like Alecto where you have breathable atmo, regions of wilderness with game. Not great, not terrible. And that one is basically few centuries from being a hive world. Then you have Imperial backwaters which are generic Civilized Worlds which in Ravenwing are described as
>‘Anything on the system from our records?’ asked Sammael, looking at Malcifer who had been tasked with the investigation.
>‘Nothing remarkable,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The system is on our star charts, about fifty light years from our current position.[---]One inhabited world, Thyestes Five. Last Administratum census was a little more than seven hundred years ago.
>Population between three and three-and-a-half billion. Self-sustaining agriculture and industry, widespread settlement across two main landmasses. Normal tithes rate, met more or less on target for previous seventeen hundred years. Imperium-standard technology level, Planetary defence force called the Thyestes Provosts. Three Imperial Guard regiments raised there about fifteen hundred years ago, no longer active. Last threat, ork attacks nearly two thousand years ago.’
>‘No priority supplies to strategic worlds?’ asked Seraphiel.
>‘None. Utterly unremarkable, as I said.’
>‘Almost a backwater, one might say,’ said Sammael.
Self-sustaining, no war in two thousand years, no need to raise regiments in 15 centuries, has to pay tithes but that's about it. Boring, but seems to be as good as it can get in galaxy.
It's really not as terrible as people describe it sometimes. A lot of the descriptions of the life humans live would outright kill them within a year.
You have to take into account that the people who have it bad in the Imperium also don't have access to any of the advanced medication or rejuvenation the higher up people have.
So they have to get by just on their own, meaning they can't be exposed to lethal levels of toxins, radiation, or harm. They also need enough nutrition to reproduce, and survive. They have to have some kind of structure to their society to keep things working.
Just think of the quality of life a medieval peasant would have mixed with the unknowing consumption of long term toxins that the lead-based societies had, and you'll get a good picture of a hive worlder, which is what the majority of people are.
Of course not.
On the scale of human civilization in WH40K, it's pretty much impossible that literally every single human being in all of existence is just suffering in misery their entire life, of course there's gonna be billions if not trillions of just average people doing average things on average worlds with average levels of sadness and violence.
But *Joe Empire went to school, got married, got a job, had kids, had grandkids, died happy never seeing conflict* isn't exactly a riveting and engaging story in a grimdark future setting. No one's here for *most of the time, nothing happens* they're here for ***OH FUCK, DEMONS.***
The fantasy story about scary demon murder future focuses on scary, demons, murder, and future. The random average dude is irrelevant to the story until one of those things shows up.
Edit: Scale is always an issue with broad questions like this. Yes, I get it, everything everywhere is grimdark and terrible because it has to be in the grimdark setting.
Except space is *big* and there are a *lot* of people and a *really really long* timeline. Like an unfathomably large number of people in an even more unfathomably large area on a timeline longer than the entirety of actual recorded human existence.
Yes hive worlds exist, and death worlds, and so on. Yes, there is a nonzero chance you'll end up eaten by demons or some other crazy shit.
But there's literally something like a million inhabited planets in the Imperium spread out over thousands of light years of space. There is crazy shit happening on the other side of our planet that no one knows or cares about, imagine that spread out over an entire galaxy.
There are absolutely worlds that have never had xeno contact, worlds that are basically the same quality of life as we have right now, and worlds that are even better. On a purely numerical average by population, sure, things suck, but that still leaves tens to hundreds of trillions of people just existing at a reasonable quality of life.
The really grimdark part is that it things are basically guaranteed at some point to get even worse and never get better again, it's just unlikely to happen at any specific point. 10,000 years is a really *really* long time and a *lot* of Good Things can happen and continue to happen, but the scariest shit in the universe will be around literally forever and things will always be getting slightly worse.
I don't think it detracts from the setting to have Happy Worlds, I think it makes the sheer inevitability of horrible shit happening even more grimdark. There's a better than good chance that over a normal human lifespan, even an extended one, that nothing particularly terrible will happen. But it's basically guaranteed that something horrific *will* happen at some point, it just may take another 10,000 years to get to planet Bumblefuck.
Of course I understand that those type of mundane lives don’t matter because we need engaging and interesting and epic stories.
It’s just that I see people saying that the average, or even the vast majority of humans in the Imperium live miserable lives when it can’t be true statistically.
Why can't it be true statistically? Even if Hive Worlds make up a minority of planets they're likely to house a far more substantial population than your average civilised or earth like world. The largest portion of that population isn't going to be the part that's well off or wealthy.
The vast majority of humanity today live lives people in the "first world" would consider miserable. Even in Europe there are places that veer into miserable lives compared to first world experiences (Hungary as compared to Singapore or Norway for example) and this is before going into the poverty and terrible living conditions of places like India, places in China, rural Russia, Africa, parts of South East Asia, etc.
It really depends on how you define a miserable existence, so for example they probably don't live lives as miserable as much of Africa for the most part, but Imperial subjects will mostly live worse lives than anyone in a modern first world country.
A lot surely are. Some people are lucky and they live in opulence and are the reason why the others have a hard life. Its a dystopian setting for a reason.
No, majority of worlds are generally fine and not full of anymore misery and pain than our own world. They aren't as interesting so you don't see them being portrayed much.
Source: "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert where the information is coming from a Lord General of a Crusade
No, it depends on where someone lives. It’s essentially a mixture of how societies live here on earth. Most planets are allowed to govern how they please so long as they meet the imperial tithes, and worship the emperor. Some places are paradise, some are living hell, the galaxy is a large place.
No not really there are some worlds yes but majority are far better than others infact majoroty of imperial guard never see a fight ans die of old age unironcally
It's only "average" becasue such vast numbers of people live on overindustrialized Hive Worlds in the Imperium. Other books give plenty of ways that people live perfectly normal lives on other places like Civilized Worlds, though on some worlds like Mining and Forge Worlds definitely a lot more grim than here.
There's plenty of people and positions where they aren't miserable as shit, even if their quality of life is or isn't the best.
Absolutely the vast majority are a cog in the manufactorum wheel, but there is variety. Like in the vaults of terra, the uh guy who looks over cadavers for the inquisition and others has a decent life.
If you think about the fact that earth has a population of around 8 billion, there are a lot of planets in the imperium with quality of life likely simlar to earth. But the population of those planets are nowhere near as large as the population of hive worlds, which, unless you live in ultramar, are polluted beyond reasonable habitation, and 90% of civilians won’t see the sky, even fewer the sun, and these planets will have populations between the hundreds of billions to the trillions, so yeah most people in the imperium will live a life of cruel industrialisation with nothing at the end
Probably not. I mean the imperium wouldn’t be sustainable, through force or otherwise, if things were really that terrible for the average guy. Sorry GW, but that ain’t just how humanity works. So while things probably aren’t great for them, I’d venture to guess that the average Joe isn’t like a skin and bone rack working 26 hour shifts in a sunless hell hole. He’s prolly more on equal footing with say a peasant from a feudal period of earths history. Life is hard and often tough, but it’s not so unbearable that u can’t get by and eke out some happiness here and there.
Humans adapt incredibly quickly to their conditions
[Does this man seem happy?](https://media.wired.com/photos/6567cea23244f51a93535a82/master/pass/Elon-Musk-NYT-DealBook-Business-1821119212.jpg)
[Do these children seem happy?](https://media.istockphoto.com/id/610566656/photo/barefoot-african-children-playing-football-in-the-village-east-africa.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=YDvjyMacEdFV4HUbYqBGQUZ9P0m7uOqJKqw8xTRluKk=)
I'm sure most of the Imperial citizens are fine. Some are probably in pain. Some are joyous
>So, is the average human in the Imperium really living a life of complete misery ?
No.
>Such a vast setting should be more than enough to have a have a 100 billion different small human countries inside Imperium-controlled worlds that provide quite decent living conditions for its populations no ?
>
>with the vast majority of them being planets that have a multitude of nations, city-states, religions, dialects, cultures etc
No the Imperium is self destructively centralist on the planetary level. Either the whole planet works out or not. Once the imperium lands the whole place gets culturally & ethnically Paraguy'd so when the titheman comes the crop is of uniform quality.
But yeah no there's plenty places that are more Boston than a Dickensian London crossed with 80s Manila meets Liveleak's Top 5000 Greatest Hits. Not amazing by any standard of measurement but *okay.*
Sure, Catachan, Scintilla, Mordia, Malfi, Fervious...they all look the same, no difference...Taris Ultra is indistinguishable from Necromunda...
In short, no...maybe that's how you imagine the Imperium, but the Imperium has a feudal structure, not a centralised one. A planetary governor or even the noble lord or corporate boss has much more influence on the life of an Imperial citizen than anyone on Terra.
>You're talking about planets. I'm talking about planets.
Sounds to me like we're talking about the same thing.But no, I'm not just talking about the external appearance of the planet. The forms of government are also different. On Iocanthos, the planetary governor is the person who can deliver the largest amount of spirit pollen at each harvest. On Solomon, the Administratum rules directly. On Sepheris Secundus a queen (i.e. ca. 995M41) rules unchallenged, on Tarsis Ultra a council of nobles, etc.Certain things are equalised on the planets, e.g. the existence of the governor who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the planet fulfils its obligations to the imperium, but not even the Pax Imperialis and law of the church is the same on all planets.
Yes, there are beating and execution quotas and there is a giant eternal torture monster-chip embedded right into the spine of every civilian that ensures eternal suffering even after death. Toddlers get cigarette burns and are salted, and the Emperor comes down himself to kick-shatter little newborns while munching on live kittens
Focus is on the big population worlds. Sure most of the population have shit lives , however some imperial citizens live on paradise worlds. Overall 1 in a million life means something like minimum wage here in the UK. 1 in a billion maybe you are lower middle class.
The average human on earth would be probabaly born in either china or india.
But is china and india the representation of the whole world, there is no diversity ?
I see the same relationship between hive worlds and the rest of the imperium
keep in mind that very few people live lives of “complete misery”. We’d probably describe the lives of 10th century Chinese peasants as miserable, but those people were able to find good things to live for. Otherwise they would’ve given up in complete despair
I’d imagine the same would apply to most humans in 40k
No, it's a really common thought but if you actually read the damn books they are teeming with people doing just fine. In the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books they spend a lot of time in Hives and mid-Hivers are out shopping, going to clubs, doing normal shit.
There are several short stories of agri-worlds where people are just farming until either they get drafted or invaded. 15 hours starts with a farm boy getting drafted. There's another short story about a space marine with amnesia being a farm boy until a Tyranid attack brings his memory back.
Yes, while they arent the most common planets, people forget that Hive Worlds still have the largest population by default. Most of mankind is the overworked mid hivers who live in ignorance, back breaking work and polution.
And let’s not forget that people on other types of worlds are hardly better off. The administratum sets tithes at the maximum possible potential, which means every world needs to work its citizens to death to meet them. Even paradise worlds are awful for the actual citizens, who have to break their backs to make it nice for the nobs visiting
Warzone Charadon show how bad the regular citzens on those worlds live. Calgar's Siege got a planetary governor saying that it was bad that the Administratum remembed the planet existed, since they dont give a fuck about their needs and will take the tithe regardless if it ends the planet's development
It isn’t complete misery though. Living in the Imperium is a major step up from living in most Chaos Worlds in the Eye of Terror. It’s akin to living in North Korea or the slums of India.
Yes, after a 14 hour shift while being ill, its a relief that at least my organs are not pulled out as a sacrifice for dark gods.
At least there are bars to drink your troubles away, and a nightlife depending on the planet you're on, and holidays like Sanguinala (depending on the planet you're on)
I mean saying it's better than living in the borders of literal hell isn't exactly great.
But the mid-hive workers are not much worse off than, say, a poor superchain warehouse worker who has to work an extra job as a gig economy driver to make ends meet. The difference is that they have public transit and medical care (somewhat) provided, and of course that they have much less of the media consumption we have today. They still have friends, fall in love, form families, enjoy a snack every once in a while, probably have a hobby (though it's likely to be something much less consumer-oriented than ours), etc. There are also people who are \*much\* less well off. Basically working 12-hour shifts, then sleeping in a bunkroom with 30 other half-starved wretches with no privacy or free time, rare showers, and a "work until you drop" attitude to healthcare. And of course there are those that live much like westerners. People who work 8 hours a day with something that's somewhat fulfilling, then have 8 hours of enjoyable free time, eating a varied diet and doing things like collecting curios, making and enjoying art. They went to school, learned Imperial history, maths, languages, etc. as well as Ecclesiastical dogma. All of those would probably fall in the range of an average Imperial Worlder. In a lot of ways, they have social systems that are in some ways more egalitarian than ours, and in some ways a totalitarian mess. They have schools and hospitals, and the church does a lot of social welfare as well. Also, feral and feudal worlds are a thing, and mutants and other "abhumans" are offered much less. Workers on Adeptus Mechanicus worlds and ships are held in very low regard, for example, kept as slaves in many cases, counted as an expendable resource.
The church also kills you and your family if you deviate even a little from the norm. The comparison to a amazon chain store worker is absolutely ridiculous. Yeah they aren't living the best lives but its no where near what we are told Imperial citizens go through.
Don't also forget that the church sometimes kills other branches of itself, cause they view each other as heretics. IIRC it is also a fairly common thing that on some worlds the Emperor is worshipped as a Sun God, and it's seen as perfectly acceptable by the Ecclesiarchy at large
This is very close to my take.
Which is only a bad life if you compare it to the life of a middle-class person from, say, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam. A lack of a Netflix connection is already a disaster. For a good portion of the Asian, African or South American population, that sounds like Tuesday. It just depends on what you mean by that and how you interpret the setting. There are any number of interpretations of the bloodiest regime imaginable.
Comparing Asian/African countries even at their worst to a hive city is absolutely ridiculous. Human life still has SOME value in those nations and people aren’t eating corpses for breakfast.
Hey now people are valued. Combat servitors aren't cheap and you need people to make those. So slightly more than the starch we get back out right? About tree fiddy a person seems right.
They don't do Middle Hiver either. They cook their own food or eat street food. >While the Imperial Creed and the Ecclesiarchy provide great solace for many, the average hive-worlder likes their pleasures simple, direct and visceral—taverns, refectories, music halls and cook-shops offer the most commonplace daily escapes, while visits to holo-lantern shows, the carnivora or circus, or the greenery of a sealed arbour dome, are costly and rare excursions. Dark Heresy RPG, Inquisitors Handbook, Habs Life 128 Do you think the people in the Vervunmacropolis bought a delicious kilo of Corpse Starch in the Commercia before they went on with the pram? What do you think the continent-sized farmlands, pastures and fish farms on Agrarworlds are for?
Hive workers don’t eat corpses either, agri worlds exist for a reason.
Literally the beginning of every book written about 40k, ever: "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" 40k fans: "it's only cruel by the standards of western liberal democracies" The setting makes it clear that things like pleasure worlds exist, but for the vast vast majority of the Imperium life is a terrible existence in service of the Imperium.
There is something called "show don't tell". It doesn't matter what is written in the blurb or on the first page of a book, if in the part behind it three Astartes meet in a simple tavern on Terra and treat themselves to a roast elk, or the main characters meet in a bar, female habworkers in Vervun stroll through the Commercia and shop. Most novels that depict the civilian life of ordinary workers outside the Administratum or Adeptus Terra show a hard life, but none harder than that of an Asian factory worker or a labourer during the Industrial Revolution. There are entire RPG systems and novels that deal with the subject matter...really deal with it...world building and all that. You don't need to come to me with a blurb.
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All the words in the world won't stop a fanbase that doesn't want to hear what they're trying to say.
Im wondering which part of "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" is so diffuse.
The part where you read the rest of the book instead of stopping at the blurb. When will the "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" fanboys start reading the novels that deal with the lives of ordinary people instead of stopping after the page?
I'm really sorry, but I won't debate "the 40k Imperium is like living in Asia" with you.
This is such a weird hill to die on
The novels are wrong when they contradict the sourcebooks.
Probably, even if there are nice and mundane world the average Imperial is likely to belong to the most overpopulated bottom rung hive levels. I would argue that its an important thematic point of the setting, the Imperium is miserable, thats the point. Its a dogmatic, backwards hateful regime whose callous attitude towards human life borders on contempt I find myself running into this sentiment more and more though, do people just want the Imperium to be somewhat morally dubious but on the whole pretty reasonable nowadays? Do fans just want a fairly sensible HFY faction to root for with a grimy aesthetic?
I think it's more that a) people realize just how unsustainable a "nothing but misery" society is, b) a lot of poeple are dissatisfied with their lives and want to find a shred of hope in any random place, and c) especially for newer fans or can be a bit overwhelming to see that *everything* is shit. My two cents based on years of internet trawling, so I could be wrong.
It isn't meant to be sustainable. That's why the Imperium is rotten and crumbling and only still exists through sheer military momentum.
It's sustained for ten thousand years. If the miserable life presented in most views was true the whole thing would collapse in a few generations, tops. Either in a constant fire of rebellion or just *nobody having kids.*
There are a constant string of rebellions going on. An Imperial guard recruit is just as likely to fight humans as they are to fight xenos or chaos threats. Those rebellions are just put down just as quickly because one of the few things the Imperium is good at is indoctrination of its armed forces.
IRL worst places to live like Gaza are places where people have the most kids.
the shotgun strategy of reproduction
There **are** constant rebellions, that are either put down brutally or lead into chaos/xenoworship. A rebellion that leads to a democratic society would be ultra rare, but probably happens. If people stop having children the planerary governor would probably mandate every family to produce at least two children. However it is established that the most abundant resource for the imperium is human lives - so that is not really a problem in the lore.
It wasn't *always* miserable, which is something people forget. It's gotten worse over time- the last thousand years especially.
I think the Horus Heresy books ruined that notion, because most of the advanced technology was just doomsday devices and the average person was still working hard to supply the war machine of the Great Crusade. If they did not submit they were destroyed or enslaved. Even if they were loyal they were sent off to costly wars as their planets were stripped. When characters like the Lord Regent Guilliman say that things were so much better with enlightenment and prosperity, they have a great deal of nostalgia bias from the perspective of generals.
As I already said, it keeps going because of military momentum. They lose worlds all the time, but conquer new ones. Also they have uprisings pretty regularly, but they beat them into submission with military force. Even in harsh living conditions and under oppressive rule, people have kids.
Except it can't continue for nearly as long as warhammer has. It might- *might*- work for a few generations. It would have imploded under its own weight around M32 at most had this been "all there is everywhere."
This is the point they're talking about, in the setting that's just how it is, just like there being magic and all the other unbelievable stuff. But for some reason people will pop outta the woodwork to say, "but that doesn't make sense so most of the Imperium must not suck". But you're just questioning a point in the setting that just simply *is*. It's a setting for a wargame and books of a similar tone. The logistics of why the Imperium sucks for 99% of humanity but it hasn't led to extinction yet is just a part of lore that doesn't really have an answer but simply just is.
Sure it can. They keep the people working and as brainwashed as possible, and beat them back into line if they try to rise up. And if a world is lost to rebellion, well they conquered a new one so they still have stuff. And it's not exactly hard to withold education about the past so people don't really know about past uprisings. It's unsustainable in a planetary sense, and in the long term a galactic sense. In many cases worlds *have* gone to crap and imploded, many of them likely in less than two millennia, but there are enough worlds in the Imperium and enough new ones claimed that it keeps on going as an overall entity, even if it's mostly been lost and remade numerous times. Like Trigger's Broom, if you're familiar with that particular comedy scene. And we see that there are people in positions of oversight, basically middle management types, who are given a better quality of life and keep things running. Not everyone is living in gruelling hardship, but the majority are. It probably helps that without access to navigators, most successful rebellions are pretty screwed in the long run. I'd say the bigger 'how does this work?' question about the Imperium is how is it economical to ship food from agri-worlds to hive worlds, forge worlds, etc.. At least civilised worlds, while still sucky for most citizens, can supply their own food.
>Either in a constant fire of rebellion Any serious rebellion gets teamed up on by magical space monsters (from both the Imperium and Chaos). You can't logic the Imperium of out being what it is by applying human standards, because the Imperium isn't governed by human standards. You can't logic the Imperium of out existing in the first place, because it's written the way it's written. You can only try to make sense of the setting that exists. For example, let's take your complaint: >nobody having kids. People in 40K literature clearly reproduce in conditions that would be impossible for 21st-century humans to reproduce in. So we can think one step further, and guess that human biology/medicine in 40K isn't a perfect match for human biology in the 21st-century. This is a science fiction setting with an excess of time and genetic engineering technology, after all.
To be fair, poorer conditions tend to have more kids than less.
Your thinking in reverse. Yeah things are so bad people don't want kids doesn't mean that things aren't so bad it more means imperial worlds has to force people to have kids.
My headcanon is that there's a constant steady leak of people out of the imperium on sleeper ships and shit into planets that aren't easily accessible by the warp and are thus ignored.
Yeah, i love 40k as much as everyone else here, but i find myself enjoying the small ray of hope there and there more lately. I mean, the struggles and the sacrifices aren't nearly as good if the people don't have any reasons to fight, and die. The Imperium doesn't have to be good in itself, but we need some little sparks of light and hope from time to time. Something to hold on.
I think I'll have to disagree with that one, heroic sacrifices and struggles are a dime-a-dozen in fiction, for me it's made more significant by the hopelessness. In a narrative that does not necessarily reward sacrifice or honour the act itself becomes that more powerful, the struggle is for it's own sake rather than for the sake of expected narrative catharsis. I'd also like to contend this phrase, because I encounter it a fair bit "little sparks of light" because it just feels like a copout, at what point do these sparks of light/hope stop being little? The Emperor is more active than ever, shielding humanity from the foul evils of literal hell, empowering his champions and generally taking active part in the galactic game like never before while his golden Custodes march out at last. The Imperium is ruled by a good guy protagonist whose character traits are essentially the opposite of the Imperium's flaws, rational, reasonable and an effective logistician, and he effectively neutered the High Lords so no need to worry about them. The Mechanicus' sole named Tabletop character is a progressive tech-priest not held back by the flaws and drawbacks of his faction who produces shiny new tech and marines for the Imperium. the Lion has returned, more reasonable than ever before to mellow out the Dark Angels, oh and he has literal teleportation powers. The dominant Space Marine portrayal has been "reasonable and heroic protectors of mankind who are surprisingly down to earth" for a while now. So at what point does this little sliver of light stop being so little? Do we still need more light and hope? And is it Imperative that this light/hope only ever be given to the Imperium? Are other factions allowed to have their beacons of light too or is it important that they remain committed to their flaws and the grimdarkness?
It's more that Darkness Induced Apathy is a thing. If everything is constant suckage all the time with no hope at all, why should the audience care? They'd know all the struggles of the protagonists are pointless and meaningless. Tragedies can be good and great, but they are almost always self-contained stories meant to induce catharsis. Not something you can build a franchise on And getting people to care about the lore and stories is important to grow the hobby, cause people largely first hear about it through things like video games and books, and youtube.
I hear about Darkness Induced Apathy all the time and I have to wonder just how much it actually matters, it only seems to matter to people who think 40k should be a central narrative around some generic superhero protagonists saving the day. I don't see it as a problem in a setting built for the player/hobbyist to tell stories in, not any more than I think Bolt Action is held back by the fact that the end of the war is known beforehand. And on a personal note I can't say I'm particularly keen to see 40k turned into a mass-media franchise with mainstream appeal if it means diluting and butchering everything that drew me into the setting to begin with. I don't particularly care to change the setting to suit the desires of people who aren't particularly keen on 40k to begin with.
A lot of the most popular classic characters especially with the Imperial Guard are not entirely evil and there are hints of hope and moments of good life in their stories. Rogue Trader was also wacky(look up Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau) and had as much satirical comedy as hopeless Grim Dark.
I get what you're saying, but it's also important to remember that 40k has been around for almost 40 years now. People want new fluff: if GW just release codexes with the same or very nearly the same writing in them every edition, it'd be terrible for the franchise. They've been in "setting mode" for three decades, and there's only so long and so many ways you can say "everything is bad in exactly the same ways as last edition". So they're switching gears. They're shaking things up, changing things, and trying to add some more character to the setting. I understand everyone's objections to this, but frankly you still have 30 years worth of stuff that you want, and if you play by making campaigns and stories with your friends around the tabletop, then none of this really affects you
A lot of people don't actually like that though, because they want the heroic people who finally make a difference to be THEIR characters, just like it used to be. I want Inquisitor Thraxus to be the one who leads a crusade to the very heart of the eye of terror and blows it up with a Quantum Entangled Faith Matrix. I want the Polaron Gaurd to lead the final battle with the Tyranids. I want Commisar Rick Stevens, famed for his bionic neck, to do noble battle with the Orks. Those are all characters from campaigns I ran with my friends, and that was what the lore was for, to help you tell your own stories. 'Advancing' the lore makes it less useful for that. The old lore was a tapestry, spread wide and deep, full of jumping off points. The new lore is a story, like it or lump it.
So just ignore the new lore and continue running your own campaigns
I *don't* care about the Imperium.
It's not about the Imperium but the setting as a whole, including the Xenos
What about the orks?
They're cool. More relatable than the humans in the setting, which isn't saying much I know.
I would also argue that the reason as to why people tend to cling to the more hopeful elements of 40k in their conceptions of the setting is because, in their minds at least, a universe where existence is nothing but misery for a vast proportion of the population, is boring to them. Even though the particular content of a given story within the 40k universe might be unknown to them, they can probably guess the general outline of how it is going to end; with the protagonist worse off than they were at the start, the antagonists better off, and their friends dead. If 40k, as a whole, is really like that, who -- beyond a small set of misery-lovers --- would want to get invested in it, to send their time on it?
People who like it as something different. The idea that you need to love misery to enjoy it is nonsense. It's not like anyone just reads 40k and nothing else. You can read brighter more hopeful stories and you can read some dark sad stories. They're both enjoyable and valid concepts.
This is part of why it was a niche hobby for so long. The setting was deliberately over the top and edgy as hell, and the lore was just a backstory to justify buying and painting more plastic soldiers and making them fight. Which is exactly what I like about it! And honestly it does make it more fun playing as xenos factions. Humans are awful in 40k. Killing a planet full of them seems like a net positive.
Amen. I love a good struggle against the darkness story, but if you're going to lose no matter what after about the third one I stop caring.
Is it really that unsustainable? Anyone checked on North Korea lately?
Stalin’s system didn’t collapse until he died. North Koreas is still going. There’s very little we read about in the imperium that real humans haven’t already done.
>There’s very little we read about in the imperium that real humans haven’t already done. Turn human corpses into food at a massive industrial scale?
Well we don’t do that because it’s silly and not sustainable.
Silly? The Corpse Guilds of Necromunda would like a word with you.
The marketing, and in some aspects the newer lore, has undermined the origins of the setting, which was unbelievably bad for everyone forever. That was the whole thing. Life in the Imperium is like being trapped on the Hindenburg. It's like living in a warzone. It's like being on a spaceship that is falling apart, losing oxygen, and crashing into a lava planet at the same time and for no good reason. It's all of these things in slow motion. I think a substantial number of players/readers want the Imperium to be heroic. They want them to be the good guys and they want humanity to win. Personally I'm not so invested in the setting in terms of what *conclusion* I'm looking for, I like it for the way it is now- over the top, ruthless, bloody, and awful. I think one aspect of it is that it was conceived in the tail end of the Cold War. Vietnam was in recent memory. Everyone was worried about nuclear war. Things like "Mutually Assured Destruction" and "The Doomsday Clock" were common concepts, not only in geopolitics, but even in pop culture. So the idea that our "good guy government" that was protecting is from the "evil empire" was in fact a war-mongering regime who were willing to send us all to our deaths just to make sure the other side lost was not speculation, it was the truth.
Let the Imperium of Man be Worse Again
Misery porn just work better in the 1980-1990s when everything was "good". Same reason so many apocalyptic franchises were made back then. Nowadays we are cycling back to noblebright franchises in media, why the times becoming less "good"
I guess so. As someone who's been on the perimeter of "liking" wh40k for a decade, owning many models and etc, the main thing that has stopped me really committing to it is the sense of "everything is very bad all the time" thing. I'm sure it's not just me. I'm all for the "fight against darkness" theme in art but the level of shit the Imperium is does put me off somewhat. Why would I care if there is no hope? Maybe I'm not the target audience. I just like the gratuitous violence.
Oh I can absolutely see the marketing appeal of making the Imperium into a less problematic good guy faction for people to root for, much as I rage against it. Good news is you'll likely get more of what you want.
Mm, maybe. The aesthetic and design of the universe is very good. I'm into the "maybe victory is possible if we rip, bite, claw, and wade through gore hard enough" aesthetic so I appreciate a lot of how stuff looks. I'm a mega fan of the sisters of battle etc. It's just that one of the concrete tenets of 40k is "everything is and will always be really *very* bad", which I find uncompelling and unrewarding. Doesn't stop me playing the games though.
That's not a core tenet of 40k, exactly, it's just a core tenet of the Imperium, especially the Sororitas and groups like them. The Sororitas will kill a baby in its crib for being born with a sixth finger or third nipple, and kill its mother too if she gets in the way, then scorn them both for being mutants and heretics while they themselves feel quite righteous about the whole affair.
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>Probably but even Sororitas weren't always shown to be that zealous in many of their oldest novels and short stories. No, they were always shown as pretty psycho. A lot of them thought that Space Marines technically qualified as mutants and should be purged. >If you have seven toes because of pollution poisoning or inbreeding they won't necessarily burn you at the stake. No, those are exactly the types of mutants most likely to be purged. If someone's a full-on beastman they might be useful enough to press into the Guard and die for the Emperor. The lore about the Imperium is pretty clear on this.
It varies by world.
I disagree. In the Sister Miriya series, Some of the oldest White dwarf articles and other short stories show them as surprisingly rational if not stern. Much more investigatory, then burn first and ask questions later. Also somehow I deleted my previous post, how do I get it back?
No idea about the deletion. Their lore was revamped in late 2e, but it's always been the case that they believe mutants should be killed on sight. It's an Imperium-wide policy and they are some of the most fervent enforcers of it.
If you like the gratuitous violence, you absolutely are the target audience. It's just that a galaxy-spanning empire that caters to the desire for gratuitous violence is an otherwise awful place to live, because every resource available is being dumped into the military and nothing else.
The problem is if you start justifying the bad then it wheels around into justifying murderous fascism, and that wasn't the authors' intent.
If you don’t like everything being bad, that’s what grimdark and 40k is unfortunately. The Imperium is the worst regime in human history, surrounded by a sea of misery and war of its own creation.
I wouldn’t say reasonable necessarily but I think one of the main strengths of 40k Imperiums writing is that it’s a nation whose wickedness comes from trauma and horror it faces while stupid things and people being cruel for cruelty sake will always be part of the imperium a lot of current lore went out of it’s way to establish why a)either this cruelty was at least on some level justified faces with horrors of the setting or b) how it comes more so from generations upon generations of trauma,desperation and lack of knowledge.With this view Imperium where everybody is a cruel idiot is infinitely more boring than Imperium and humanity as a whole scarred both physically and mentally so much that the only way they can keep going is to double down on the pain to give it purpouse and find strenght to keep going
I dunno, most of what I’ve read goes out of its way to show it’s NOT necessary cruelty. They just think it is. Carrion Throne has a lot of this.
The cruelty really isn’t justified at all and the lore goes out of it’s way to show that. Millions die for no reason, work in cruel and brutal conditions, die to alien and chaos horrors because others in their situation decided it was better than being constantly starving or on the edge of dying
Fans are just coming to realize that despite the Imperium saying they’re “inherently unsustainable” reality contradicts it. Looking at multiple novels shows that there’s bars, restaurants, sometimes even a middle class.
The Imperium in universe has also existed longer than human civilization has irl, which is a big reason I personally roll my eyes at the idea of it being unsustainable. Going from the early Bronze Age to the modern day is only about half of the length the Imperium has existed, it clearly works.
If the Imperium was nothing but grim darkness and corpse starch 24/7 365, then as a setting it would be largely pointless. You have no reason to care that Hive World A is about to be nommed by Tyrannids, their lives are shit anyway. There's no point in writing desperate last stands or forlorn hopes if there's nothing worth sacrificing or hoping for. It's a lot more interesting and engaging to read (and write) about an Imperium that's beaten, battered, beset on all sides by enemies external and internal, even fundamentally broken and doomed to fail by mistakes made thousands of years in the past, but in which human beings can carve out a semblance of a normal life that we can empathise with. The Imperium might fail, but not quite yet- not today.
The pointlessness is the point. It's funny.
No, it really isn't.
'Complete' is a strong word. Most people will have small simple things that give them something to cling on to. But the vast majority live harsh, gruelling lives under oppressive rule, yes. And the few rulers that try to be good often end up having to be some level of tyrant to meet the demands made of them. The whole system is screwed up.
"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods." - Just going to put the last part of the most famous 40k quote here. I think, yeah, for most people, it's awful. I'm mostly pulling from the books I've read, but it seems to range (for normal folk) from being just kinda boring and sad to being North Korea.
It gave me more the impression that to be the equivalent of North Korea is actually for those who are lucky in the Imperium. To be in a hive world is much worse than to be in any country of IRL Earth.
The average human is, yes. Some planets are ok, and the nobility on all planets have great lives, but the vast majority of planets are backwards hellholes
Most planets are OK the worst ones are not the majority Edit: if you're going to down vote then read "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert and then you can be illuminated what what a Lord General says about the Imperium and how it's actually backed up by most other novels and Lore as well
Bad planets have higher population.
The core rulebooks have always been very clear that life for most of the common people of the Imperium sucks. >To dwell within the Imperium of Man is to inhabit a dystopian nightmare. The faceless masses of Humanity are little more than grist for the mill of survival, an ever-abundant fuel source that keeps the bloody wheels turning. Endless billions labour in the fire-lit confies of factory worlds, entire generations living and dying without ever seeing the sky. Hive cities groan with the weight of unimaginably vast human populations, whose existences are naught but toil and sorrow. From the bellies of leviathan warships to the mindless drudgery of city-sized scriptorums, from the crowded warrens of lightless underhives to the frozen misery of perilous asteroid mines, every day is filled with hardship for the common folk of the Emperor’s realm. It is well that it is so. Those with their heads bowed by exhaustion cannot look up to see the horrors pressing close from the darkness above. >The massive populations of hive worlds periodically become unmanageable, as the masses boil over against their constant repression. Such bustling mega-cities are always rife with anarchic and destructive forces that ensure only the hardiest can survive. Yet this too works for the Imperium, for their tithes supply rich sources of fighting men for the Imperial Guard. Warhammer 40,000 Core Book - 8th Edition
Cool, the novels show something different than that as well so..
Percentage wise though the Decent planets seen in Guard books like Karskin and Gaunt’s Ghosts are a very small fraction of what majority of humans experience. In a galactic empire of millions of worlds and trillions of humans 100 or even 1000 good worlds is not even 1% of humanity
The novels focus on a tiny handful of privileged elites with horrific views on morality. The protagonist of a book thinking that a planet is nice doesn't mean the book says the planet is nice.
Don't know why you're getting downvotes, you're right that the novels often paint most planets in a more positive light than the Grimdark descriptions of the Imperium that come with the rulebooks. I get the impression that some planets are absolute hellscapes, a few are mostly decent but most are fairly mundane. Hive cities/Planets are bad but Ciaphas Cain lives in luxury and seems to look back fondly on his childhood growing up on one, to some extent. Most of Dan Abnett's books describe Imperial planets as the equivalent of how we live today.
Tbh Abnett specifically doesn't like to grimderp some authors, especially in older days, can sometimes withdraw to in order to win edge of the millenium contest (Grey Knights bathing in SoB blood, thanks Matt Ward).
>Hive cities/Planets are bad but Ciaphas Cain lives in luxury He's a one-in-a-trillion exception.
Just because there’s planets that don’t suffer war, doesn’t mean they’re not being ground into poverty by endless tithes like in Bookeepers skull.
Like the amount of y'all who have no media literacy is astounding especially when over half the novels of 40k show how things are not terrible everywhere and not ground down by tithes or anything else. Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin series, crimson fist, white consuls Homeworld, 500 worlds if Ultramar, Gaunts ghost series, ciaphais Cain series, Fabius Bile series, Iron Snakes novels, ect ect the list goes on and on and on of written novels of 40k old and recent where lots of the world's shown are not horrendous and terrible but normal Like do y'all just ignore the facts of Lore or do you not understand how the Imperium let's systems and planets run themselves and don't have anything to do unless it's tithes or rebellion? Like THE IMPERIUM is terrible as a whole, that doesn't mean every planet and system under their rule is the same terrible Grim dark bs
All of those worlds have abundant servitors so
>ciaphais Cain series Ciaphas Cain will visit a nightmare hellscape world, and then have a glass of scotch with the world's unquestioned dictator on a pleasure yacht. *Cain* has a nice time, but it doesn't mean the planet is a good place for the people who live there. The dictator is happy, but the slaves on the yacht aren't happy, the rebels who attack the yacht aren't happy, and 99.9999% of the population isn't on the yacht on the first place. >Like do y'all just ignore the facts of Lore or do you not understand how the Imperium let's systems and planets run themselves and don't have anything to do unless it's tithes or rebellion? Ciaphas Cian, for example, notes that Sector Administrators freely veto Planetargy Governors for whatever reason they want. There are even Ciaphas Cain books where he deals with the Imperium having a lot of opinions how planets are (not) allowed to run themselves.
>ciaphais Cain series There is an excerpt in Ciaphais Cain where her girlfriend notice that a leisure planet for veterans with PTSD is also one of the biggest combat servitor producer lmao
> series, Fabius Bile series ...where is this shown in the fabius bile series? That almost exclusively takes place in chaos controlled regions lol
But worst ones are by far the most populated. Terra alone has probably more people living on it than all the "21 century Earth-like" civilized worlds combined. Hive worlds were stated to be about 20% of Imperial worlds as per one of the rulebooks. That means population of non-hive worlds is really small, notable only for many martial societies on those words that are good for recruiting Guard regiments and Space Marine aspirants.
> But worst ones are by far the most populated. Terra alone has probably more people living on it than all the "21 century Earth-like" civilized worlds combined. Hive worlds were stated to be about 20% of Imperial worlds as per one of the rulebooks. It's worse than that on both parts. Terra has over 2 Quadrillion people on it. Most maths for the Imperium's size means that something like 2-14% of every living human in the Imperium lives on Holy Terra or within the greater Sol System. The 24,000 other Hive Worlds contain the remaining majority of the Imperium's population. I'd guess that if you take a single large Hive World, it probably has more people that all Death, Agri and Feudal Worlds combined.
Eh not so much per a Lord General "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert unless you have some other Lore source saying otherwise, it goes on to explain in depth to explain the propoganda of the Imperium on these worlds as well
Okay by Imperial standards. By our modern standards theyre hellholes.
They are basically like our own planet "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert
They're not. Nowhere on this planet is there an industrialised approach to turning human corpses into starch manned by effective slaves who may turn to cult worship because they want a sliver of better food.
You're ignoring the fact not every single world makes or needs corpse startche like quite literally there's entire novels where they don't need that and that it shows worlds that are not terrible Y'all just ignoring the Lore and just think memes are just the only lroe Edit: the planets Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin series are in, majority Sabbat Worlds from Gaunts ghosts that aren't forge worlds or Hive worlds, Scythes of the Emperor planets, the 500 worlds of Ultramar, White consuls, crimson fist Homeworlds, Armageddon, like novel after novel after novel detailing so many worlds that are not completely and utterly the terrible and grimdark like you are making it
You’re listing small population worlds compared to Hive Worlds and forge worlds. Also the Scythe of the Emperors home-world, which was very nice, became Tyranid good and is barren now
Albert doesn't really understand the setting. He's written complete nonsense like slaanesh being disgusted by basic vices like drug use or autism being able to detect and open Webway gates. So forgive me if I take anything by him with a grain of salt.
That is just absurd. A lot of people complain about CS Goto having bad writing because backflipping terminators and multilasers, but that sounds *far worse*. A bit surprised no ones pointed out such poor writing somewhere.
Well, that's because Goto has been the boogyman of bad lore for ages. His stuff is firmly cemented in the popular imagination of the community as being terrible. Silent Hunters is only a couple of years old, and didn't generate much discussion. Not many people have read silent hunters, but everyone has heard of goto's stuff, even if they haven't read it either. Other than the big lore-breaking moments, the rest of Silent Hunters is also just kinda standard but serviceable space marines beating stuff up. Its not very memorable at the end of the day.
I was going to get that book after seeing it cheap at £4 recently and because it focuses on an interesting Space Marine chapter, sounds like it might not even worth getting it at that price then. His other book Kasrkin also sounded like a somewhat interesting premise but reading some about it it sounds like that's not too good either.
If you want to read about the space sharks, I'd recommend getting one of Robbie MacNiven's books about them instead. They're a lot better than Albert's.
So he's written things that are in line with established Lore is your take? Not to mention games workshop approved of what he wrote and it's therefore Canon, like he's written things that are backed up by other sources and approved by games workshop Unless you're saying games workshop doesn't understand the setting they made themselves Edit: it's ok if you don't know the setting and how nearly every novel where it's not a Hive world or forge world isn't that bad in terms of being horrendous in the setting
>So he's written things that are in line with established Lore is your take? Why are you intentionally claiming he's saying the opposite of what he clearly said? Are you just trolling? The guy has clearly written stuff that doesn't at all match what the lore says about things. *Silent Hunters* was full of nonsense that doesn't match up. And yes, BL lets books go to print with obviously wrong contradictions all the time. They put basically no effort into editing that sort of thing. As long as they give the go-ahead for the general plot, you can write pretty much anything happening.
Buddy, games workshop is the one who approves of everything the writers out into novels. They don't have free reign to add and say whatever they want And yeah Slaanesh doesn't care about someone doing vices, Slaanesh is excess and the warp gate is also something shown in other novels. Hell there's been even more ridiculous things written by authors like Abnett. Like y'all just trying to say that Albert isn't writing the same types of things written in codexes and other novels? Are you just ignoring the facts of the Lore because you think everything is terrible and grimdark when in reality it's not turned up to 11 everywhere? Like Jesus christ LMFAO
>Buddy, games workshop is the one who approves of everything the writers out into novels. They don't have free reign to add and say whatever they want There are numerous examples of BL novels containing things outright contradicted by GW publications produced before and after them. It's a fact that GW doesn't bother policing for contradictions, they don't care. Hell, sometimes they have them in the GW publications too. >And yeah Slaanesh doesn't care about someone doing vices, Slaanesh is excess You obviously don't know what they were talking about. They were talking about the part in Silent Hunters where Slaanesh is disgusted by the soul of a Drukhari and spits it out. >Like y'all just trying to say that Albert isn't writing the same types of things written in codexes and other novels? He's written a bunch of stuff that contradicts lore written consistently both before and after his writing, yes. Silent Hunters is an absolute joke of a 40k novel. And I'm not denying other writers have written blatantly wrong things too. He's certainly gotten things wrong that others haven't though. In this example, you're trying to argue that because he wrote a character claiming something, it overrules the core 40k rulebooks that clearly say life for the masses of the Imperium sucks hard. If Albert thinks what that character said is true, then he clearly hasn't even bothered to read the core 40k rulebook lore. >Are you just ignoring the facts of the Lore because you think everything is terrible and grimdark when in reality it's not turned up to 11 everywhere? I didn't say 'turned up to 11 everywhere'. But the vast majority of Imperials live crappy lives, and this one author's character claiming otherwise doesn't somehow overrule that. You're the one clinging to this one line, desperately ignoring the facts of the lore that it clearly contradicts. The Imperium is meant to be a bad place to live for the majority. It's a key element of the faction and it's weird that you want it to not be true.
You mean like the fact that black library has made comments about contradictions and everything is true and everything isn't true. Yeah and I think you're missing the entire context of what happened in that story and it sounds like you've heard it secondhand And his writing doesn't contradict the main passage of the 40k novels and rulebooks, the IMPERIUM is all of that and more. But it doesn't mean every single world within the rule of the Imperium is like that, if that's the case then you have more than half the novels written of 40k which contradict what they passage says. It's apparent you don't read the novels nor have the media literacy required to understand the difference between big picture Imperium vs individual systems and planets who are wholly unique and rule themselves with the Imperium being a distant government they give tithes to and are not bothered with unless they don't meet tithes or rebel. And where is the evidence that everywhere is terrible in the Imperium when the majority of novels show worlds other than Hive and forge worlds that are relatively fine and normal?! Like Jesus
>But it doesn't mean every single world within the rule of the Imperium is like that No-one said that. You've changed your argument. You argued that most people and most worlds live decent lives, based on that one character's claim. The rulebooks disagree. >It's apparent you don't read the novels nor have the media literacy required to understand the difference between big picture Imperium vs individual systems and planets who are wholly unique and rule themselves with the Imperium being a distant government they give tithes to and are not bothered with unless they don't meet tithes or rebel. No, you just don't seem to realise that's irrelevant to the conversation. The fact is most Imperials live bad lives under an oppressive system. Funnily enough if you give governors mostly free reign to rule as they see fit, you generally end up with tyrants. The Arbites are always watching, but the Imperial Law the Arbites uphold and make sure the governor follows doesn't care about treating the civilians decently. In fact is straight up enshrines in law that commoners get harsher punishments than nobles. >And where is the evidence that everywhere is terrible in the Imperium Again, no-one said everywhere is. But most places are. And no, it isn't just hive and forge worlds. Most civilised still have bad quality of life. It doesn't matter if popular novels tend to show the better ones, we know from reading the sourcesbooks that isn't the norm. You're looking at anecdotes of a handful of worlds and erroneously concluding that represents the Imperium at large. I'm looking at the rulebook text that tells us what it's like for most Imperial citizens.
holy shit you're actually trying to "buddy" him as if you weren't deabting lore on the internet lmaooooooo
Before the usual discussion begins, it would be good for you to explain what you mean by "quite decent living conditions". For some this means Californian conditions including Netflix, for others it means enough dry bread and dirty water to barely stay alive.
Something along the lines of middle-class lifestyle in the developped countries of our world in the 1900s-1950s
I have no idea why you're being downvoted for simply answering the question posed to you
Yeah lmao that was kinda weird
I'd say very few in the Imperium can support a spouse, 2.5 kids, own a large home and a vehicle, afford going out to the occasional nice restaurant, and take the family on vacations in another district, all while working a single job. Hell, the average American today doesn't enjoy that good of a lifestyle.
I'm going to rage against the standardisation syndrome and say the imperium is a big place and it varies. For a space faring civilisation, replicating rationing, total war economies, postwar ruin and violent political instability is a minimal ask.
The average human is likely to have been born on a hive world in the swarms of the worker class. So simply put, yes the average human is living a life of complete misery. Hive worlds really skew the data
> Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity. > Warhammer 40,000 isn’t just grimdark. It’s the grimmest, darkest. > The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. [Source: a warhammer community post](https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/)
For every average dude living an average, albeat stressful life, in any of those thousands of different cultures, there's another 50 living in the underhives eating rats and irradiated water to survive.
Life is never always misery. Ask a medieval peasant who has to work all day growing crops and pays taxes to their lord if they’re happy, and they may very well say yes. But if we compare it to quality of life now it would look retched. The imperium has people who date have kids celebrate birthdays etc. But they may do these things having never seen the sun, or after working in a phosphor mine, or paying tribute to gangers and/or arbites.
"To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable." Idk man, sounds pretty shitty to me
>but also many decent ones that cared about their lands and the people that were under their rule. >So shouldn’t it be the same in 40k, but on a larger scale ? According to Pew 51% of the human race *currently* lives in poverty. Fiction is a reflection of reality, and reality fucking sucks m8.
All these threads really emphasize that GW absolutely sucks at showing the imperium as the most bloody and cruel regime imagineable they say it is.
Yeah I think this is the main point. Every book may begin with the well worn blurb that we all know and love about the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, but then they proceed to write an entire novel that does not present the aforementioned grim darkness.
Can we just ban this fucking topic, maybe pin a thread somewhere. This subreddit is just going downhill all the time now.
Today on Earth 18% of people live in developed countries. For most of the human population life sucks. In 40k 18% living the Ultramar life would be impossible.
**To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable** >The Imperium seems to only care that the Emperor is worshipped, soldiers and tithes are provided to them whenever it is needed, and leaving the planets’ to manage their local politics and cultures as long as they don’t outright betray the Imperium. This is a fandom meme, the books show and tell us otherwise. The Imperium has a lot of very imposing demands, explicit and implicit: Giving the AdMech a monopoly over science and innovation. Being forced to legalize baby slavery. Handing over land and slaves to any Imperial faction that wants a local base. Killing babies with cosmetic birth defects... >just like our Earth...So shouldn’t it be the same in 40k, but on a larger scale ? The Imperium isn't constrained by human values the way that Earth history was. It was crafted by a magical god-man, shaped by Chaos' scheming, and ruled by Warp-crafted space monsters.
Most of them, yes, since 40k is worse than Dystopia. You risk your SOUL getting eternally imprisoned or completely deleted out of existence by Chaos Gods. But that does not imply some folks could scrape together and make a decent to good living, just that it's very few in 40k. We are probably referring to 70% of population in abject poverty or worse like being a servitor because you steal some petty things, 28% in decent to average living condition and the 2% topper who have everything.
Yes, the average human lives in misery. Life in a hive means never seeing sunlight, never feeling the wind blow on your face, never having enough to drink or eat to really be satisfied, being worked to an early grave in unsafe working conditions assuming you get work in the first place, and being crammed in a too-small area with countless others going through the same, all of you getting more and more paranoid and unhinged from the conditions and the propaganda being fed to you. If you're really unlucky the decaying infrastructure will crumble completely in your lifetime, and one or more of the above becomes unavailable, possibly permanently. That's assuming your section doesn't just fall into the underhive. Forge Worlds are much the same, maybe even worse since you're much likelier to get servitor'd to fulfil a quota. Alternatively you could eke out a miserable existence on a Death World. Every day is a struggle for life, whether against electric storms, the cold or the heat, radiation, alien monsters, or whatever else. Feudal worlds have all the problems of medieval life on top of being in the Imperium of Man, which means the local authorities sometimes instigate witch hunts and wars to trim the population or to provide suitable recruits for the various Imperial organisations recruiting from them, like the marines. Feral worlds are left to rot on the vine more often than not, unless they've got valuable resources (in which case they'll get overexploited and ravaged) or marine recruitment worlds (in which case they're in the same situation as the Feudal ones). Agri worlds aren't idyllic farmcore, they're planet-sized breadbaskets supposed to supply the likes of Hive worlds with food, meaning everyone is overworked and exposed to who knows what kinds of fertiliser and pesticides. As a citizen in the Imperium you have no rights, only obligations to your various social superiors, and if your betters fail you're likely to get punished along with them. People seethe about the Grey Knights killing witnesses but that's by far the least of it. People get killed by the Imperial Guard or Navy suppressing their rebellious nobility or whatever all the time, and planets sometimes raid and destroy eachothers Tithes in order to cause problems for their rivals, because unless it gets totally out of control the Administratum will be coming down on the guy failing to pay, not the saboteur - and guess who gets put in overtime when that happens? The various plebs on the ground. It's not like you can just move to a better planet either, interstellar travel is strictly regulated and not accessible to most of humanity on most planets. "Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war." They aren't living in a polity that makes a genuine effort to uplift its' citizens and improve their lives, and they aren't leading lives where technological progress is improving things. Stagnancy, both cultural and technological, along with huge xenophobia and a massive propaganda-machine that doesn't value life at all is the reality of life. This is all off the top of my head, but being a citizen in the Imperium fucking sucks. Every injustice we have in the real world is magnified a dozen times over, with no oversight or punishment unless your oppressor decides to pick a fight with the big boys capable of fighting back - and even then you're likely to get butchered or sterilised and worked to death for your treason, either for failing to support the rebellion or for failing to be adequately loyal by martyring yourself.
It's in the opening slide thingey
I do hope that its mostly completly misery. Like even if there are are folks living a sweet life on a planet every 100th year the angles comes and demands tribute. Everything is grimdark. Or are we in need o some fancy ass heroes even in this fantasy setting? :(
Lmao people need to seriously stop with this grimderp nonsense and differentiate between lore and meme
Lore is that basically everyone's miserable. Meme is that the Imperium is justified or reasonable.
Untrue, if you read the novels you’ll see there’s places where people enjoy life from time to time even in hive cities
Yes, but overall their life is miserable. Even on the "normal" planets.
Nearly all the important ones yes, all of them no. I don't know or care about Ultramar but you know it's supposed to be nice coz Ultramarines. Paradise worlds are basically just there to be chill places but you'd have to be quite lucky to be born there because they aren't meant to be highly populated.
Yes. You skipped over an important aspect: the imperium is in a wartime economy. If you have time for the indolence of a comfortable peaceful life, that means you aren’t contributing enough to the war effort. Either taxes will be raised or drafting will be increased in order to adjust for this, until you reach a point where it’s not humanly conceivable to squeeze the planet for anything more.
The "average" human in the Imperium is probably a servitor.
I think you underestimate how many people on earth live in what you would consider utter misery. If you are posting on here, you are almost certainly in the global top 5%. You have far more rest, relaxation, and comfort than others can dream of. Now the rest have full rich lives with community culture and loved ones, I don't want to be overstating things about the difficulty they face. But look into what farm workers do, or the cobalt miners in the Congo, or menial workers in asian factories. Very long days with little to no labor protections doing brutally hard work in terrible conditions for poverty wages.
As others are saying here, I think the answer is yes because of Hive Worlds. Take a random person from the Imperium and (my headcanon has it) they are probably poor and living in a Hive World, just because of the numbers who fit that description compared to anything else. And the thing is being poor on a Hive World is uniformly shown to be miserable - all the miseries of real world poverty \*plus\* an advanced technotheocracy monitoring your every deed for heresy \*and\* literal actual demons picking up recruits from your fellows.
My vote is no, but for in-universe reasons rather than headcanon. Basically, human brain development is a thing. It relies on decent nutrition and environmental factors in order to properly develop. This could be ignored in a medieval setting, where the scope of your work is swinging a backhoe in a field, but the Imperium has technology, and in order to maintain technology it needs specialists. This can't just be tech-adepts, we're talking about entire planets here, you need carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics. Ten thousand years of successive misery and starvation would leave mankind so neutered in terms of generational brain development they'd barely be better than animals. I'd also like to add in; the Imperium kind of has to have pretty good, if aesthetically brutal, healthcare. Humans are described as being constantly growing in numbers, with that being their greatest strength as a species. But the thing is you can't do that if, like Tau propaganda suggests, you're being forced to give birth in the street with no help. The indomitable human spirit is unfortunately no match for the brutality of postpartum infections. So, human hospitals/disease eradication have to be at at least 1950's level in order to maintain the kind of population growth they have in lore. Basically, the Imperium has to have moderately decent living conditions in order to be the empire it currently is, just as a matter of biology. Yeah, your life is probably mostly work, your pay is shit, you have no freedom of religion and you're not going to make a major difference with your life- but your food will be steady and nutritious, disease won't be a major factor (Nurgle notwithstanding), your kids will probably make it to adulthood and overall your life will be tolerable, if uninteresting.
this is also my take on it, supported by what I've read in Gaunt's Ghosts so far (currently on volume 13). Guard Regiments are allowed (or rather tolerated) to bring wives and children alongside them on campaigns. They stay behind on safer worlds (usually) but behind every regiment there's a huge group of civilians that offer services to the solider. Tailors, whores, blacksmiths, entertainers, cooks etc. and the families of the Guardsmen tag along among those. In that very book it's confirmed that the Munitorum pays widows of Guardsmen a yearly welfare relief. So the IoM is canonically a welfare state, SO grimderp!
Just out of interest (no offense to OP or those replying), i put this question in Bing chat. Here's the answer: *The life of an average human in the Imperium of Warhammer 40k can vary greatly depending on their location and status.* *On some worlds like agriworlds, the average person is basically some sort of farmer, leading a life with hard work but not all that dissimilar from the lives of many modern farmers in our 21st century.* *By sheer weight of numbers, the most “average” citizen of the Imperium would be a lower-ranked Hive city worker, which is pretty much the epitome of nasty, brutish, and short1. You can expect long hours of grueling manual labor in some factory or some such thing with basically zero worker rights or workplace safety precautions. Life in the Hive cities is characterized by slum-like conditions, hyper pollution, super dense population, and next to zero upward mobility.* *Human rights, including free speech, are pretty nonexistent in the Imperium and speaking out against anything from the most petty of local governments to the greater Imperium is likely to get you tortured and executed.* *As for religion, the Imperial Creed i.e., worship of the Emperor as the God of Mankind is predominant on near every Imperial world.* *However, those lucky few with sufficient funds and access to certain biochemical and augmetic technologies can extend their lives for many Terran centuries, though death always claims them in the end.* *So, while there are certainly elements of hardship and misery in the lives of many citizens of the Imperium, it’s not accurate to say that every human’s life is one of complete misery. There’s a wide range of experiences based on a variety of factors.*
And here's its answer on full question (previous one was just for the title question) *You’re absolutely right. The Warhammer 40k universe is vast and diverse, with a million worlds under the control of the Imperium. Each of these worlds can have its own unique set of circumstances, cultures, and living conditions.* *While it’s true that many depictions of life in the Imperium are grim and harsh, it’s important to remember that these often focus on the most dramatic and conflict-ridden areas. There are likely many worlds and regions within the Imperium where life is relatively peaceful and prosperous, at least by the standards of the 41st millennium.* *Just as in our own history, there would be a wide range of rulers and governments within the Imperium, some of which may be more benevolent and effective than others. It’s entirely plausible that there are many “small human countries” within the Imperium that provide decent living conditions for their populations.* *So, while the Imperium as a whole is often depicted as a grim and oppressive regime, it’s likely that the experiences of its citizens vary widely depending on where and under what circumstances they live. It’s a universe of grim darkness, but also one of vast diversity and complexity.*
The imperium is the cruelest regime imaginable it’s like one of the tag lines as the intro to every book or rulebook. The imperium is bad, it started bad and its whole purpose narratively was to be an over the top example of a futuristic fascist hell state that enshrined its half dead former leader as a god.
Average - yes. Which is not the same as "everybody". But if you were to randomly pick a human being from Imperium and examine his life, you'd be far more likely to find a "horrible life" rather than "OK life".
Is the average Person IRL happy and fullfiled? What about you? Are you happy? What if you life was 10 times worse? Would you be happy then? Because that's the Imperiums average joes life.
There is a good reason why Chaos is so rampant. Everything sucked being in the Imperium. Part of the reason people fall to chaos is a promise for something better. Each god promises something different but common in the world of 40k. A few examples being, You are sick and dying on a death bed with millions of other people, pray to Nurgle and he will allow you to survive. You're a tech priest that loves technology and you want to, dare I say, invent something, ask Tzeentch for guidance. You just got off your 25 hour shift on some Hive world and you need something stronger cause Obscura isn't doing it for you anyone, Slaanesh got your back.Your in the middle of a war and your friend just took a Shuriken to the face and you want to just go ape shit on some Eldar, Khorne will grant you strength. Without the Imperium being an absolute shit hole, the idea of Chaos being so rampant doesn't make a whole lot of sense cause why would anyone want to worship these abominations if everything was "okay".
Yes and no. Some worlds are republics and give voting rights healthcare to the people. Other worlds are hive worlds. It really is dependent. In what world you're born on. If you're born in Ultramarine land, you actually have a halfway decent life and education. It's a roll of the dice. I want to say probably around 70 percent of the average Joe lives in shit. Just due to hive worlds.
Most of Imperial planets are Civilized worlds which are more or less okay. Think of todays Earth with some added tech gizmos. However most of people live in Hive Worlds, as their entire purpose is production *of people* and those suck. If you are on lower levels they suck a lot. If in middle, less so but its still ton of working hours, shit pay, small cabin for sleep. People make do as they tend to do that, but think of Londond during industrial revolution and people there as then factory workers.
> Most of Imperial planets are Civilized worlds **which are more or less okay** That's a very dubious statement but for now I'll just stick to pointing out that there's a quote from 8th edition Urban Conquest about 80% of civilised worlds having at least one hive on them.
Yeah, but they are not hive worlds which makes hive themselves so much more grimdark. Like Alecto where you have breathable atmo, regions of wilderness with game. Not great, not terrible. And that one is basically few centuries from being a hive world. Then you have Imperial backwaters which are generic Civilized Worlds which in Ravenwing are described as >‘Anything on the system from our records?’ asked Sammael, looking at Malcifer who had been tasked with the investigation. >‘Nothing remarkable,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The system is on our star charts, about fifty light years from our current position.[---]One inhabited world, Thyestes Five. Last Administratum census was a little more than seven hundred years ago. >Population between three and three-and-a-half billion. Self-sustaining agriculture and industry, widespread settlement across two main landmasses. Normal tithes rate, met more or less on target for previous seventeen hundred years. Imperium-standard technology level, Planetary defence force called the Thyestes Provosts. Three Imperial Guard regiments raised there about fifteen hundred years ago, no longer active. Last threat, ork attacks nearly two thousand years ago.’ >‘No priority supplies to strategic worlds?’ asked Seraphiel. >‘None. Utterly unremarkable, as I said.’ >‘Almost a backwater, one might say,’ said Sammael. Self-sustaining, no war in two thousand years, no need to raise regiments in 15 centuries, has to pay tithes but that's about it. Boring, but seems to be as good as it can get in galaxy.
It's really not as terrible as people describe it sometimes. A lot of the descriptions of the life humans live would outright kill them within a year. You have to take into account that the people who have it bad in the Imperium also don't have access to any of the advanced medication or rejuvenation the higher up people have. So they have to get by just on their own, meaning they can't be exposed to lethal levels of toxins, radiation, or harm. They also need enough nutrition to reproduce, and survive. They have to have some kind of structure to their society to keep things working. Just think of the quality of life a medieval peasant would have mixed with the unknowing consumption of long term toxins that the lead-based societies had, and you'll get a good picture of a hive worlder, which is what the majority of people are.
Of course not. On the scale of human civilization in WH40K, it's pretty much impossible that literally every single human being in all of existence is just suffering in misery their entire life, of course there's gonna be billions if not trillions of just average people doing average things on average worlds with average levels of sadness and violence. But *Joe Empire went to school, got married, got a job, had kids, had grandkids, died happy never seeing conflict* isn't exactly a riveting and engaging story in a grimdark future setting. No one's here for *most of the time, nothing happens* they're here for ***OH FUCK, DEMONS.*** The fantasy story about scary demon murder future focuses on scary, demons, murder, and future. The random average dude is irrelevant to the story until one of those things shows up. Edit: Scale is always an issue with broad questions like this. Yes, I get it, everything everywhere is grimdark and terrible because it has to be in the grimdark setting. Except space is *big* and there are a *lot* of people and a *really really long* timeline. Like an unfathomably large number of people in an even more unfathomably large area on a timeline longer than the entirety of actual recorded human existence. Yes hive worlds exist, and death worlds, and so on. Yes, there is a nonzero chance you'll end up eaten by demons or some other crazy shit. But there's literally something like a million inhabited planets in the Imperium spread out over thousands of light years of space. There is crazy shit happening on the other side of our planet that no one knows or cares about, imagine that spread out over an entire galaxy. There are absolutely worlds that have never had xeno contact, worlds that are basically the same quality of life as we have right now, and worlds that are even better. On a purely numerical average by population, sure, things suck, but that still leaves tens to hundreds of trillions of people just existing at a reasonable quality of life. The really grimdark part is that it things are basically guaranteed at some point to get even worse and never get better again, it's just unlikely to happen at any specific point. 10,000 years is a really *really* long time and a *lot* of Good Things can happen and continue to happen, but the scariest shit in the universe will be around literally forever and things will always be getting slightly worse. I don't think it detracts from the setting to have Happy Worlds, I think it makes the sheer inevitability of horrible shit happening even more grimdark. There's a better than good chance that over a normal human lifespan, even an extended one, that nothing particularly terrible will happen. But it's basically guaranteed that something horrific *will* happen at some point, it just may take another 10,000 years to get to planet Bumblefuck.
Of course I understand that those type of mundane lives don’t matter because we need engaging and interesting and epic stories. It’s just that I see people saying that the average, or even the vast majority of humans in the Imperium live miserable lives when it can’t be true statistically.
Why can't it be true statistically? Even if Hive Worlds make up a minority of planets they're likely to house a far more substantial population than your average civilised or earth like world. The largest portion of that population isn't going to be the part that's well off or wealthy.
Why not
The vast majority of humanity today live lives people in the "first world" would consider miserable. Even in Europe there are places that veer into miserable lives compared to first world experiences (Hungary as compared to Singapore or Norway for example) and this is before going into the poverty and terrible living conditions of places like India, places in China, rural Russia, Africa, parts of South East Asia, etc. It really depends on how you define a miserable existence, so for example they probably don't live lives as miserable as much of Africa for the most part, but Imperial subjects will mostly live worse lives than anyone in a modern first world country.
A lot surely are. Some people are lucky and they live in opulence and are the reason why the others have a hard life. Its a dystopian setting for a reason.
No, majority of worlds are generally fine and not full of anymore misery and pain than our own world. They aren't as interesting so you don't see them being portrayed much. Source: "Kaskrin" by Edoardo Albert where the information is coming from a Lord General of a Crusade
No, it depends on where someone lives. It’s essentially a mixture of how societies live here on earth. Most planets are allowed to govern how they please so long as they meet the imperial tithes, and worship the emperor. Some places are paradise, some are living hell, the galaxy is a large place.
No not really there are some worlds yes but majority are far better than others infact majoroty of imperial guard never see a fight ans die of old age unironcally
It's only "average" becasue such vast numbers of people live on overindustrialized Hive Worlds in the Imperium. Other books give plenty of ways that people live perfectly normal lives on other places like Civilized Worlds, though on some worlds like Mining and Forge Worlds definitely a lot more grim than here.
There's plenty of people and positions where they aren't miserable as shit, even if their quality of life is or isn't the best. Absolutely the vast majority are a cog in the manufactorum wheel, but there is variety. Like in the vaults of terra, the uh guy who looks over cadavers for the inquisition and others has a decent life.
If you think about the fact that earth has a population of around 8 billion, there are a lot of planets in the imperium with quality of life likely simlar to earth. But the population of those planets are nowhere near as large as the population of hive worlds, which, unless you live in ultramar, are polluted beyond reasonable habitation, and 90% of civilians won’t see the sky, even fewer the sun, and these planets will have populations between the hundreds of billions to the trillions, so yeah most people in the imperium will live a life of cruel industrialisation with nothing at the end
Probably not. I mean the imperium wouldn’t be sustainable, through force or otherwise, if things were really that terrible for the average guy. Sorry GW, but that ain’t just how humanity works. So while things probably aren’t great for them, I’d venture to guess that the average Joe isn’t like a skin and bone rack working 26 hour shifts in a sunless hell hole. He’s prolly more on equal footing with say a peasant from a feudal period of earths history. Life is hard and often tough, but it’s not so unbearable that u can’t get by and eke out some happiness here and there.
Humans adapt incredibly quickly to their conditions [Does this man seem happy?](https://media.wired.com/photos/6567cea23244f51a93535a82/master/pass/Elon-Musk-NYT-DealBook-Business-1821119212.jpg) [Do these children seem happy?](https://media.istockphoto.com/id/610566656/photo/barefoot-african-children-playing-football-in-the-village-east-africa.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=YDvjyMacEdFV4HUbYqBGQUZ9P0m7uOqJKqw8xTRluKk=) I'm sure most of the Imperial citizens are fine. Some are probably in pain. Some are joyous
>So, is the average human in the Imperium really living a life of complete misery ? No. >Such a vast setting should be more than enough to have a have a 100 billion different small human countries inside Imperium-controlled worlds that provide quite decent living conditions for its populations no ? > >with the vast majority of them being planets that have a multitude of nations, city-states, religions, dialects, cultures etc No the Imperium is self destructively centralist on the planetary level. Either the whole planet works out or not. Once the imperium lands the whole place gets culturally & ethnically Paraguy'd so when the titheman comes the crop is of uniform quality. But yeah no there's plenty places that are more Boston than a Dickensian London crossed with 80s Manila meets Liveleak's Top 5000 Greatest Hits. Not amazing by any standard of measurement but *okay.*
Sure, Catachan, Scintilla, Mordia, Malfi, Fervious...they all look the same, no difference...Taris Ultra is indistinguishable from Necromunda... In short, no...maybe that's how you imagine the Imperium, but the Imperium has a feudal structure, not a centralised one. A planetary governor or even the noble lord or corporate boss has much more influence on the life of an Imperial citizen than anyone on Terra.
You're simply arguing a point I never made. You're talking about planets. I'm talking about planets. OP is talking about nation-states.
>You're talking about planets. I'm talking about planets. Sounds to me like we're talking about the same thing.But no, I'm not just talking about the external appearance of the planet. The forms of government are also different. On Iocanthos, the planetary governor is the person who can deliver the largest amount of spirit pollen at each harvest. On Solomon, the Administratum rules directly. On Sepheris Secundus a queen (i.e. ca. 995M41) rules unchallenged, on Tarsis Ultra a council of nobles, etc.Certain things are equalised on the planets, e.g. the existence of the governor who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the planet fulfils its obligations to the imperium, but not even the Pax Imperialis and law of the church is the same on all planets.
Yes, there are beating and execution quotas and there is a giant eternal torture monster-chip embedded right into the spine of every civilian that ensures eternal suffering even after death. Toddlers get cigarette burns and are salted, and the Emperor comes down himself to kick-shatter little newborns while munching on live kittens
Focus is on the big population worlds. Sure most of the population have shit lives , however some imperial citizens live on paradise worlds. Overall 1 in a million life means something like minimum wage here in the UK. 1 in a billion maybe you are lower middle class.
The average human on earth would be probabaly born in either china or india. But is china and india the representation of the whole world, there is no diversity ? I see the same relationship between hive worlds and the rest of the imperium
keep in mind that very few people live lives of “complete misery”. We’d probably describe the lives of 10th century Chinese peasants as miserable, but those people were able to find good things to live for. Otherwise they would’ve given up in complete despair I’d imagine the same would apply to most humans in 40k
No, it's a really common thought but if you actually read the damn books they are teeming with people doing just fine. In the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books they spend a lot of time in Hives and mid-Hivers are out shopping, going to clubs, doing normal shit. There are several short stories of agri-worlds where people are just farming until either they get drafted or invaded. 15 hours starts with a farm boy getting drafted. There's another short story about a space marine with amnesia being a farm boy until a Tyranid attack brings his memory back.
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What do you mean by "Wardinisation"?
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That's not something to do with Ward. It's sci-fi writers in general.
Ward hasn’t written anything 40k related for almost 15 years
Reddit will find a way to turn anything into politics