Re: Would you watch of Ron Moore produced Warhammer 40K television ser
What's WARHAMMER? I see it advertaised at comic shops and magazines, but I have no clue what it's about!
It's a tabetop wargame, with a fairly detailed and rich backstory fleshed out in a rather large amount of literature.
The core conceit of of Warhammer is the Immaterium, most commonly known as the Warp. The Imaterium is a plot device that serves as both hyperspace and afterlife, providing FTL, psychic powers, and gods. It is where souls go when people die, it is the source of all psychic powers and magics, and it is a fairly useful shortcut if you can access it. It's also influenced by the thoughts and emotions of sentient beings, and this is bad. Unbridled base emotion can create what is known as Chaos, and from this spawn daemons and even gods, hungry for souls. As a result, FTL travel is quite dangerous, as are psychics. There is a non-zero chance your ship will be invaded by deamons any time you go on an interstellar trip, and a pretty good change that any psychic will eventually be possessed and go on a killing spree.
Many thousands of years ago, on Earth, a group of powerful Shamans noticed the effects that unbridled human emotion was having on the warp, and that their numbers were dwindling as the souls of their dead were being eaten rather than being reincarnated. To protect humanity, they sacrificed their lives and fused their souls together, being collectively reborn as an immortal superbeing powerful enough to oppose the forces of Chaos. For many thousands of years, he guided and protected humanity secretly, and mankind spread out amongst the start. It was a golden age of peace and prosperity. And it would have ended that way, if humanity was alone amongst the stars. Alas, it wasn't.
The Eldar, essentially space Elves, were generally bored and decadent. They had a huge civilization and nothing but free time on their hands. They were didn't care about humanity, having all of their energies directed inward towards self-pleasure, but that didn't matter much. Their extreme hedonism coalesced within the warp, eventually becoming a hermaphroditic god of pleasure. When this Chaos God was born, it's first cries ripped a hole in the Warp, allowing chaos to spill over into the physical universe, utterly destroying Eldar civilization, and it produces warp storms, lasting centuries, which rendered FTL travel and communication impossible across huge swaths of human space.
The spintered and fragmented humanity, lacking the infrastructure to maintain their utopian technology, degenerated, some worlds more than others. And the immortal being who had been guiding and protecting humanity in secret decided to take a more proactive role. His solution, create a huge army of genetically engineered cyborg Space Marines and unite humanity one world at a time once the warp storms cleared.
He would have succeeded, too, except for the fact that his most trusted Warmaster, Horus, was corrupted by Chaos. The Emperor could not bring himself to slay his favored child, and as a result was critically wounded. Before he was injured, he designed a giant psychic beacon that he to guide human ships through the Warp and ensure that human civilization never again falls so completely appart. His broken body was placed in a complex lifesupport system and connected to that device, as per his wishes.
Unfortunately, he is effectvly a vegetable, barely having enough strength to control the beacon, and totally unable to rule the empire that he created. Around him formed a powerful totalitarian theocracy that rules, supposedly in his stead according to his wishes, though they do not. While the Space Marines fight against Chaos and aliens alike, the Inquisition uses brutal tactics to sniff out the forces of chaos at home, but it is a losing battle. Science is a lost art, being replaced by a variety of mysticism that impedes human progress, and every day more and more psychics are born, every one of them a potential conduit through which daemons can ravage an entire world.
Add to this backdrop the standard Insectoid Hive Mind, Rigidly caste-based Space Communists, the aforementioned Space Elves - in both sanctimonious asshole and depraved sadist flavors, Undead Cyborgs who worship star-eating gods, and Sentient Humanoid Fungus Genetically Engineered to Love War, with latent psychic powers such that their mechanics can cobble together improbable and impossible machines that work, including vehicles that go faster because they're painted red.
