I know a little about Orks and their weird group psychic thing where painting their ships red to go fast really makes them faster, and their tech only works because they think it should. But then I guess Orks aren’t even in this game.
I get that it’s a violent, black-vs-grey universe. I think it’s the originator of the term grimdark? The emperor is some immortal Mr House asshole who’s worshipped as a god, which powers some of their tech and protects them from chaos via his psyker shit? And he’s kind of a fascist, but it’s that or bloody chaos?
Rogue traders seem like somewhere between a privateer and a baron, plundering tithes in their castle-ships and acting as an arm of the Imperium in backwater space?
There are more wizards than I expected. Not sure if these mechanicus dudes are pulling “Temples of Syrinx” thing, or they know how the tech works but not why so they worship it? Or if it’s actually machine spirits?
Anything super foundational that I’m missing?
You’ll see a lot of brutal shit like servitors (lobotomized humans turned into mechanical servants). The origin for that is that AI was once very much in use, but the computers rose up and threatened humanity’s survival, so they made it very illegal. They now use “AI”, or “Abominable Intelligence”: living humans who have been turned into computers.
Another thing that’s interesting is that humanity’s been in the dark ages for so long that nobody has any idea how their shit works anymore. So they have people, called “tech priests” who dedicate their lives to learning voodoo bullshit to keep the machines running. Essentially, they believe that the machines are imbued with souls and they have to perform certain rituals to keep the machine spirits happy. All the giant military hardware they have is thousands of years old because nobody has any fucking clue how to manufacture it anymore. Same thing for most of their computer systems.