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As the title states I was wondering what outside media do you use for inspiration for 40k? Is it video games? Is it comics? Is it books? Is it movies? Or shows? How about drawings?
My inspiration currently is
Mass effect 1&2
Star wars clone wars
Dead space
Gears of war
Random comic on heavy metal
4chan....../tg/ only

My inspiration mostly comes from books, movies, films and music.
I look towards sci-fi movies mostly, like the original Star Wars trilogy (the new ones are rather rubbish IMO), or The Day The Earth Stood Still (the b/w original again) and The Hell Raiser trilogy, although that is not strictly Sci-Fi. Even Predator and the Alien's series of films are worth a look.

As for books, I'm big into the Star Wars books (got em all on my kindle!), and the Weaveworld books by Clive Barker are good too.

Music takes a special place, because I always listen to it whilst P&M'ing, I take inspiration from it. What I listen to does very much depend on the Army I'm working on at that moment.

I figure 40k already has a very distinctive style, so for my armies I try to stay away from other established stuff. So I stick with history, lots of history. A lot of historical figures are just as ridiculous as the fictional characters out there. Some of the ones that have been inspirational for my army are Boudicca and Eugène Vidocq

Now, for individual models I'll definitely jump into other stuff, especially anime.

For my DH campaigns, I draw inspiration from all sorts of places, whether that's books, movies, games, pictures I see in sci-fi art collections or online, particularly well-done models or just random bits that come to me at the oddest times.

My current DH campaign, for example, has lead the team out into the Koronus Expanse, and is based around some of the themes of the Mass Effect series of games (at least in part) with a blend of some of the corporate (here-tek) entities from the F.E.A.R series... and their antics.

Cool I really like how some video games got cool maps and it would inspire terrain builders!

Well i have collected massive amounts of 40K artwork, so i generally look at those. If not i tend to watch lots of sci-fi anime/movies or play games like Halo: Reach or Dawn of War.

Considering 40k is already a pastiche of multiple sci-fi, fantasy, and literary tropes, this seems a little redundant! However, I have seen n awesome Jurassic Park-themed Catachan army, with dinosaurs for tanks and dinosaur rough riders.

D9, hellgate london and crusade era knights. That's all I can think of right now, but there's more.

I'm currently playing Brink and it pretty cool! I really like the architecture of the ark and container city. I wanna make a imperial slums and make everything graffitied up and run downed

I'm a big sci-fi & fantasy fan and love Doctor Who, Blakes 7, Star Wars, Lexx, Farscape, Star Trek, Xena, Buffy and many more. I also collect a few comics and role-playing games.

But when it comes to 40K I try to keep all of that other stuff separate. A couple of my old RPG names have crept into my 40K fluff, but generally I want to appreciate Warhammer 40,000 in it's own right.