In the miniatures game Necromunda, the underclass at the bottom of the hive city live on a diet of mould, rats, and food made from the recycled dead. In the Eisenhorn novels, an Imperial Inquisitor, so scarred by torture he loses the ability to smile, makes compromise after compromise until he's indistinguishable from those he hunts. In the board game Space Hulk, doomed space marines are beamed onto derelict craft in oversized power armor and then hunted by aliens through corridors they can barely turn around in. Though frequently balanced by a tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd, the various adaptations of Warhammer 40,000 that followed delighted in its grimness. 'There is no time for Peace,' it declared.
The back cover blurb was no less pessimistic. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable.' It described humanity's future in bleak terms, summing up what it's like to be a citizen of the Imperium like this: 'To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. The first edition of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 in 1987 nailed the setting's tone right away.
