When I got my hands on Warhammer 40,000: Imperium Maledictum, Cubicle 7's roleplaying game of "grim and treacherous adventure in the 41st millennium", I only had one concern - the players in my regular RPG group knew basically nothing about the setting. How would they cope with being thrown in at the deep end of a setting with literally hundreds of books worth of lore? I shouldn't have worried - it turns out that playing an RPG is one of the best introductions to the Warhammer 40k universe there is.
There are a lot of challenges facing someone who wants to get into Warhammer 40k lore. You can get into most sci-fi settings by reading a few books, watching a few movies, or playing a few games. 40k isn't like that - it's a setting first and foremost, where the most digestible summary of the key things you need to know is the fluff section of the latest core rulebook. Starting with that is a lot like getting into Star Wars by reading the illustrated encyclopedia.
Attempting to understand the lore at all can be a bit of a misstep, because while there is a fake history in 40k - see our Horus Heresy reading order guide to get a sense for how convoluted that can be - the main thing that you need to understand is the vibes. 40k has always been driven by aesthetics, whether that's John Blanche's art, Alan Merrett's introductory text at the front of Rogue Trader, or Jez Goodwin's Space Marine models. And the best way to understand them is via immersion.
For a lot of us 40k regulars, that just means following the fandom for years and years (and years, and years…) But playing in a Warhammer 40k RPG offers much the same experience in a vastly condensed format.
Imperium Maledictum - in fact, most of the 40k RPGs - make the process of immersion less daunting in several ways. First, an RPG has a narrow scope. The 40k universe is all about mind-bending scale, whether that's distance, casualties, or supernatural power, but something so vast is also hard to relate to. But RPGs shrink everything down to a concrete set of circumstances, the players' immediate surroundings, which are easier to understand.
Concrete and comparatively small doesn't mean boring - often the complete opposite. The Warhammer 40k rulebook says the Imperium of Man has an insane bureaucracy. In my RPG, when the party wanted to retrieve a lost set of records, they had to trade with a tribe of feral archivists who lived in a vast subterranean hanger and survived on a diet of old vellum and man-eating bookworms.
Imperium Maledictum also has a perfect excuse for why players are ignorant of the wider galaxy - their characters are too. The player characters are all in the service of a mid-level potentate from one branch of the Imperium, who has whisked them away from a blinkered, narrowly defined life path. Each player only needs to understand their own character's background, and the culture shock between party members makes for great roleplaying, and that in turn deepens investment.
Zeke, an innocent member of the player party who was born on a pilgrim ship traveling between Shrine worlds, was tragically adorable as he attempted to understand all the different representations of the Emperor used throughout Imperial society. It was a great roleplaying prompt for the player, and in turn a fantastic way to explore the theology of the Imperium and Adeptus Mechanicus.
Then there are all of the wonderful secrets in 40k. Brain-melting Chaos powers or the nightmarish way that Genestealers reproduce might be written right there in the core 40k rulebook, but they're so much more interesting to uncover first hand. My own campaign began as a police procedural investigation, and ended with a confrontation against a Dark Mechanicum Heretek which left the players bewildered, yet keen to learn more.
So if you're a 40k loving GM whose players know nothing at all about the setting - or you're the newby player who's been invited to a mysterious sounding 40k RPG - have no fear. You don't need to know the 40k universe to enjoy the RPGs set there - in fact, an RPG is one of the best ways you could learn.
Whether you're a veteran of 40k, or RPGs, or both, or neither, you'll find a warm welcome in the Wargamer Discord community. And if you don't have a GM on hand to run a 40k RPG for you, there's always the CRPG Rogue Trader - see our review for more thoughts!