Now buckle up, because talking about Warhammer 40K’s Chaos factions means first explaining perhaps the most surprisingly complex, intellectually stimulating element of 40K lore there is, and we guarantee it will deepen your enjoyment of the game and its fiction, especially if you’re looking to collect a Chaos force.ĭon’t worry, we’re going to get around to the badass-looking metal lads with the horny helmets, but trust us, this is one area where you are going to be glad you did the background reading.

From this omnipresent, immaterial realm stems the most pernicious and nefarious enemy of the mortal races in 40k, the reason for the civil war that split the Imperium of man and the reason why its ‘immortal’ God-Emperor is now a wasted skeleton wired to a chair: the malign and ever-tenacious forces of Chaos. In the 40K universe, faster-than-light travel is achieved by forcibly tearing a hole in the fabric of ‘reality’, then flying your spaceship through it, into the Warp – a hostile, transdimensional nether-realm composed of the souls (or emotions, spirits, psychic echoes, whatever makes you least scared) of countless trillions of unsuspecting mortals across the universe. Its long, jet-black dyed hair is swept across one eye in an emo fringe, it wears hobnail boots and it keeps getting sent home from school for setting fire to the desks. Star Wars has hyperspace, Star Trek has its warp drive (or, in Discovery’s case, travel via the mushroom dimension), Battlestar Galactica has her headache-inducing jump drives, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, of course, trumped the lot with its infinite improbability drive. Every great science fiction universe has its own jargon-cloaked, fantastical method of bending physics’ laws to travel faster than light across the vastness of space. To create a guide to Warhammer 40k Chaos factions, we must start at the beginning, with the Warp.

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