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Hey

I really like some of the more tragic and horrific elements of the background like the Adeptus Mechanicus Tech Thralls being cyborgs and the fact that they retain their original consciousness and are prisoners in their reprogramed/over ridden bodies and their consciousness becomes imprisoned and stuck along for the ride until the body dies or whatever.

And other things like the way a lot of the Imperium's tech relies on living/organic parts.. weather it's brains in jars or servo skulls or people becoming servitors and slaved and spliced into Warhound Titans to act as their guns targeting systems.

I think the most tragic is still the Tech Thrall just because they're still aware and know exactly what's been done to them. That's so fethed up.

Give me some more examples of horrific going ons of the 40k universe

Are you talking about ongoing torment or just stuff that's grimdark in nature?

Torment - there's always Night Lords Chaos Marines skinning or quad-amputating their victims while keeping them alive during torture or just because of their nature. There's also Dark Eldar grafting captives to all sorts of other things while keeping them alive - like just the head of a captive to a Homunculus's rack. There are also all sorts of groups of folks that have been enslaved or imprisoned - sometimes including Imperium Astropathic choirs.

Plain grimdark (depending on your outlook) - there's sacrificing thousands of Psykers a day just to power the Beacon, etc.


Edit - More horrific examples:

Ships lost in the Warp with crew suffering posession, mutation, etc.

Even just Chaos prisoners that have tubes shoved down their throats, working on edifices.

Folks afflicted by Nurgle disease.

Genestealer implantation.

Indentured servants of the Imperium on mining worlds slowly dying of radiation poisoning.

What about simple indifference by the Imperium?

The scope of the sacrificing of thousands of Psykers that the black ships bring in daily sorta seems I dunno.. a little less, in that. it's something that we've read about but havent seen how it's done or haven't seen it illustrated or anything so it seems almost hearsay (I know it's not.) but due to the secrecy of the Inquisition and scale of it... idk it seems less of an impact

Maybe because our society puts a lot of value in the individual so much so that it's easy to self insert/ imagine what it would be like to be made into a Tech Thrall and carry on living through that horror Where as it's hard to imagine what being a part of a mass of thousands of Psykers cramped aboard a Black Ship on the way to your own holocaust would be like...

And what we're used to technology-wise and what the Imperium are used to like Servitors/ their tech relying on human parts/brains ..Skulls flying around and Dreadnaughts and stuff... to me that stuff seems horrific.

I play/paint Imperium so I don't know too much about the other xeno races.

Another example of the Imperium using living human beings as tech are the wombs on Krieg.

On a related note - I'd say good books with those elements:

Dark Eldar "Path of the..." books.

Word Bearers Omnibus (particularly Book / Part 1)

Night Lords Omnibus

Getting Nurgle's rot is almost as bad as being captured by Dark Eldar.

Always thought the story of the DE guy who turned a captive into a chair to be pretty horrific.
Or when lillieth quad amputated that Chaos Lord and then preched him atop of a tower in commorragh.
Or mandrakes.
In short anything DE.

Lets hope you are captured by the Iron Warriors and turned into a giant vat for growing new space marines......

Remember that time that techpriest encountered the necrons, and tore out all of his implants by himself, leaving him limbless, eyeless and covered in open wounds?

Or that Eldar premonition of what would happen if the C'tan were to regain power, with the Deceiver making people believe they were walking in a field full of flowers, but it was really broken glass?

3rd ed necrons were fething metal. Pun intended.

 welshhoppo wrote:
Lets hope you are captured by the Iron Warriors and turned into a giant vat for growing new space marines......

Well, that's not very nice!

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Or that Eldar premonition of what would happen if the C'tan were to regain power, with the Deceiver making people believe they were walking in a field full of flowers, but it was really broken glass?

That is rather incredible, I won't lie.

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
Lets hope you are captured by the Iron Warriors and turned into a giant vat for growing new space marines......

Well, that's not very nice!

That's only half of it. The new born marines were then wrapped in the fresh skin of people to keep them nice and snug.


The failures were left to roam skinless in the wastelands around the hive.

 DarkBlack wrote:
Getting Nurgle's rot is almost as bad as being captured by Dark Eldar.

Are you not grateful of papa Nurgle's gifts?

But be careful, although Nurgle graces us with his many gifts, if he catches you trespassing in his garden he will turn you into a screaming diseased tree. (That'll teach those pesky Eldar)

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Or that Eldar premonition of what would happen if the C'tan were to regain power, with the Deceiver making people believe they were walking in a field full of flowers, but it was really broken glass?

That is rather incredible, I won't lie.

Yeah, the necrons in 3rd ed were pretty scary.
There's another bit of lore, where they found a surviving kid on a ship that was raided by necrons. When they took him into protective custody, he mysteriously died with no visible signs of damage.
When they performed an autopsy on him, however, they found some of his organs were removed, with there being no signs of surgery.

The implication is that a wraith (back then they were true necron killing machines, not maintenance droids) phased into the poor guy, and removed his organs.
Pretty spooky.

They aren't that menacing nowadays, imo. They made them too much like humans, as if the game needed yet another counterpart to the IoM.
They can still do a lot of damage, but ultimately its no different from an assault by Imperial forces, just only at a slightly higher power level.

There is one bit though in the 5th book that retains a bit of the old feel - According to the fifth ed book Night Scythe and Doom Scythe engines make such a terrifying and unnerving sound, that human soldiers experience psychological trauma and even brain damage when exposed to it for enough time.
Its pretty minor, but its a bit of lore that I appreciate, and it has an element of the horror aspect of the necrons from 3rd ed.

About the flayed ones, in case someone brings them up - I think they were more disturbing in the 3rd ed book. In the current lore, they are just necrons infected by a virus / C'tan Curse that makes them to try to eat meat.
Before, they were necrons who remembered they were alive, and were driven insane by these memories, desperately trying to regain their organic forms by clothing themselves in the skins of the living. That is way more disturbing, and serves as a better explanation for their appearance than "we eat meat now"

Anything Mechanicus is pretty horrible. Skitarii have what are effectively personality override buttons, and can be remote controlled by techpriests while still conscious. The surgeries done on them are also a bit squicky, and apparently techpriests like to randomly dissect Skitarii.
And then there's the fact that Skitarii are used as living Matrix style batteries for Onager Dunecrawlers.
And the fact that electo-priests eyes melt as soon as they first use their powers.
Oh, and the fact that Thallax are actually people in advanced armor with their personality stripped away.
Enslavers are pretty terrible, turning psykers into living warp gates while they're conscious.

 Verviedi wrote:
Anything Mechanicus is pretty horrible. Skitarii have what are effectively personality override buttons, and can be remote controlled by techpriests while still conscious. The surgeries done on them are also a bit squicky, and apparently techpriests like to randomly dissect Skitarii.
And then there's the fact that Skitarii are used as living Matrix style batteries for Onager Dunecrawlers.
And the fact that electo-priests eyes melt as soon as they first use their powers.
Oh, and the fact that Thallax are actually people in advanced armor with their personality stripped away.
Enslavers are pretty terrible, turning psykers into living warp gates while they're conscious.

Do they still exist though? The enslaver plague wasn't mentioned, which was a pretty scary event.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:


They aren't that menacing nowadays, imo. They made them too much like humans, as if the game needed yet another counterpart to the IoM.

I was actually just saying that today when I posted my new Necron models. Necrons were so much better when they were alien, and we weren't inside their heads. Giving names and human aspects to Necrons ruined their fluff. That's what ruined the Predators in those crappy novels by the Perrys, and I'm worried is what is going to ruin the Space Sharks in that new novel from Black Library.

Why did the Space Sharks think "blow up the entire planet" considered a good idea to "cause a diversion"? I am not sure I want to know that answer. They're so much cooler as lunatic wild cards.

Orks enslave whole planets, the populace forced to work in horrid conditions in ork ramshackle manufactorums, or mining, or just being the ocasional bit of fun by being thrown into squigpits.
While not as horifying as some of the other stuff listed here, but it's still scary to think about. Being enslaved by orks because they got bored slaughtering helpless people. Read ork fluff to see where grots are in ork society, despite the obvious comedy it's a life of constant fear, and anything not ork that is enslaved are treated even worse...and grots will most likely gang up on the slaves to dish out cruel punishment, a way to cope with their own low station in ork society.
While not torture I often think it would be better to get slaughtered in a rebellious fight then to be slowly worked to the bone.

I have one word for you... "Daemonculaba"

I really like some of the more subtle creeping horror elements:

-Necrons introducing the Pariah gene into humanity, intentionally creating soulless humans
-DoW implied pretty heavily that Tau slowly sterilized + mind controlled the human populations they conquered and just let them die out
-The living Eldar twin is "encouraged" to be planted in a wraithknight if one of them dies; similarly, it's implied that they sacrifice a soul utterly to summon the Avatar of Khaine
-Sheer masses of Guard slaughtered after battles with chaos for fear of taint
-Trazyn the Infinite time-locking people for gallery displays

The Dark Heresy sourcebooks have some of the best stuff, IMHO. Disciples of the Dark Gods in particular has some good ones.

Two that stand out to me are:
The Amaranthine Syndicate- A seemingly normal group of traders, merchants, and smugglers who are actually secretly in the employ of the Slaugth, an alien race of maggot men who crave the brains of intelligent species and have advanced, disturbing technology. The Slaugth are presented in a very Lovecraftian way, but what's most disturbing to me is that their middle men are normal, unbrainwashed humans who got into some kind of trouble and turned to the Syndicate to bail them out, then realized they were in way over their heads when it was already too late. They do horrific things for their "Principals", basically preparing their fellow human beings as cows for the slaughter, out of simple greed, desperation, and fear. And the lower down workers in the Syndicate don't even know what they actually work for. To me, it's the idea of becoming caught up in something like this without even realizing it that makes the Syndicate so frightening.

The Murder Room- A demonic entity of Khorne that takes the form of a room entirely soaked in blood, instead of some demonic baddie. A person can open a door they've been in a hundred times and one day, for some completely unknowable reason, it leads them into The Murder Room. When the person comes out, they become a serial killer. The room seems to like to target nice, unassuming, family oriented folks.

 fallinq wrote:
The Dark Heresy sourcebooks have some of the best stuff, IMHO. Disciples of the Dark Gods in particular has some good ones.

Two that stand out to me are:
The Amaranthine Syndicate- A seemingly normal group of traders, merchants, and smugglers who are actually secretly in the employ of the Slaugth, an alien race of maggot men who crave the brains of intelligent species and have advanced, disturbing technology. The Slaugth are presented in a very Lovecraftian way, but what's most disturbing to me is that their middle men are normal, unbrainwashed humans who got into some kind of trouble and turned to the Syndicate to bail them out, then realized they were in way over their heads when it was already too late. They do horrific things for their "Principals", basically preparing their fellow human beings as cows for the slaughter, out of simple greed, desperation, and fear. And the lower down workers in the Syndicate don't even know what they actually work for. To me, it's the idea of becoming caught up in something like this without even realizing it that makes the Syndicate so frightening.

The Murder Room- A demonic entity of Khorne that takes the form of a room entirely soaked in blood, instead of some demonic baddie. A person can open a door they've been in a hundred times and one day, for some completely unknowable reason, it leads them into The Murder Room. When the person comes out, they become a serial killer. The room seems to like to target nice, unassuming, family oriented folks.

Oooh that's good. That's my sort of creepy.

If you ever have the time or resources have a read of two particular spells in the wulfen book - Pavane of Slannesh and Final Decomposition both have well written and grousome lore that makes my skin crawl

Having read the Ultramarines books, I definitely think the Daemonculabla (sp?), mentioned above as a way to make new Chaos marines strikes some of the worst boddy horror images I can think of.

Yeah, the demonculabla is pretty fethed up.
One of the more grostesque aspects of the lore.

In the new dark eldar time line there is a short piece called the dancing dead, a mad archon kidnaped an entire govenors house hold fitted them with life support and has them as celing decorations which can be lowered to give a refreshing aura of pain and misery as there half living and totaly aware of whats being done to them with no way of stopping it.

 Tactical_Spam wrote:
I have one word for you... "Daemonculaba"

Yeah, Honsou is one sick feth. Probably sicker than Fabius Bile. And that is saying a lot.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 Tactical_Spam wrote:
I have one word for you... "Daemonculaba"

Yeah, Honsou is one sick feth. Probably sicker than Fabius Bile. And that is saying a lot.

Didn't Fabius Bile make the thing? I didn't think Honsou made it... Wait... Fabius made Honsou and Honsou made the Daemonculaba?

Where do you begin.

There's many dark places in the fluff, alot belong to dark eldar ...

 Tactical_Spam wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 Tactical_Spam wrote:
I have one word for you... "Daemonculaba"

Yeah, Honsou is one sick feth. Probably sicker than Fabius Bile. And that is saying a lot.

Didn't Fabius Bile make the thing? I didn't think Honsou made it... Wait... Fabius made Honsou and Honsou made the Daemonculaba?

Iirc, Honsou asked Fabius Bile to make it.
So basically a sick feth asked another sick feth to make something fethed up.

The most horrific elements of the fluff are bad custom chapter.

Normally starts off like "I wanna make like a totally really unique chapter thats like 1/3 loyalist word bearer, 1/3 grey knights and 1/3 space wolf geneseed and is immune to psykers and uses solely grav and I'll be proxying everything as thunderwolves, does this sound okay dakka?"

And such fan-chapters cannot be stopped by the holy inquisition as they are legion