It’s got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles, and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten.Ī Space Marine Terminator (Blood Angels chapter). There’s no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes within Games Workshop always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving. To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic. Rick Priestley explained that this was to illustrate the Imperium's practice of erasing embarrassing or incriminating events and figures from Imperial records ( damnatio memoriae). Two of the original 20 Legions and their respective Primarchs are not named and are described as 'redacted' from the records of the Imperium. It also first described the Horus Heresy, the civil war of the 30th millennium in which nine of the Legions converted to the worship of the Chaos Gods and rebelled against the Emperor. It introduced the original 20 Space Marine Legions as well as their Primarchs.

The book Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned (Rick Priestley and Bryan Ansell, 1990) was the first book from Games Workshop to give a backstory for the Space Marines. Space Marines were first introduced in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (1987) by Rick Priestley, which was the first edition of the tabletop game. See also: List of Warhammer 40,000 novels

Dawn of war space marines