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50 free Warhammer 40k trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free Warhammer 40k trivia questions with answers. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, and apparently quite a lot of trivia. This Warhammer 40,000 quiz covers the whole hobby: Games Workshop's rise from a London games shop to the FTSE 100, Rick Priestley's Rogue Trader rulebook of 1987, the lore of the Emperor, the Horus Heresy and the Imperium's million worlds, the factions from Space Marines and Sisters of Battle to Orks, Aeldari, Tyranids, Necrons and the T'au, the Chaos Gods and their literary sources, Black Library's novels and the video games from Dawn of War to Space Marine 2. The easy questions ask what the tagline says and which faction fights for the Emperor. The hard ones want the year Games Workshop was founded, how many hearts a Space Marine has, which 1956 film inspired the daemons, who created the Chaos Gods and what the Land Raider is based on. Built for hobby-shop quiz nights and anyone whose pile of shame has its own postcode. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the game, its makers and its spin-offs, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01In what year was the first edition of Warhammer 40,000 published?
1987
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader appeared in 1987 as a role-play-flavoured skirmish game; the 'Rogue Trader' subtitle was dropped for the second edition in 1993.
Q 02Games Workshop, the maker of Warhammer 40,000, is headquartered in which English city?
Nottingham
Games Workshop has been based in Nottingham since 1997, when all UK operations moved to its Lenton headquarters, the site of the Warhammer World visitor centre.
Q 0340k was conceived as the sci-fi counterpart to which earlier Games Workshop game?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle
Warhammer Fantasy Battle, first published in 1983, was the company's flagship tabletop game; 40k transplanted its rules and its Chaos mythology into a far-future setting.
Q 04Which word for a subgenre of speculative fiction derives from the game's tagline?
Grimdark
Grimdark takes its name from the tagline 'In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war', and now labels bleak, violent fantasy such as Joe Abercrombie's novels.
Q 05Which Games Workshop division publishes the setting's novels?
Black Library
Black Library began in 1997 with the short-story magazine Inferno! and moved to full novels in 1999; it publishes the Horus Heresy series among hundreds of titles.
Q 06Games Workshop was founded in 1975 by Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson and whom?
John Peake
John Peake, a schoolfriend of Livingstone and Jackson, made the wooden backgammon and Go boards the firm started with; he left in 1976 as the partners shifted to distributing Dungeons & Dragons.
Q 07Games Workshop's newsletter Owl and Weasel was replaced in 1977 by which magazine?
White Dwarf
White Dwarf launched in June 1977, edited by Ian Livingstone, replacing the Owl and Weasel newsletter; it began as a general role-playing magazine before narrowing to Games Workshop's own games.
Q 08Games Workshop joined which stock index in December 2024?
The FTSE 100
Games Workshop entered the FTSE 100 in the December 2024 reshuffle, its market value having passed £4 billion on the strength of Warhammer sales and licensing.
Q 09Which figure-making company did Games Workshop help fund in 1978?
Citadel
Citadel Miniatures was set up in Newark-on-Trent in 1978 with Games Workshop money to cast metal figures; its miniatures soon became the company's core business.
Q 10Who designed the original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader?
Rick Priestley
Rick Priestley wrote Rogue Trader, the first 40k rulebook, during his years as Games Workshop's lead games designer; after leaving in 2010 he co-wrote Bolt Action for Warlord Games with Alessio Cavatore.
Q 11The game's creator cites Paradise Lost, 2000 AD and which horror writer among his major influences?
H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror lies behind the setting's daemons and eldritch gods; the Emperor himself owes something to Leto II, Frank Herbert's God Emperor.
Q 12Who first added the Chaos Gods to the Warhammer setting?
Bryan Ansell
Bryan Ansell introduced the Chaos Gods to Warhammer; the setting's lead designer later reworked them, feeling Ansell's version sat too close to Michael Moorcock's Lords of Chaos.
Q 13The idea of daemons as human nightmares given form came from which 1956 film?
Forbidden Planet
Q 21How many original Space Marine Legions were there, two of which are 'redacted' from Imperial records?
20
There were 20 Legions, one for each Primarch, but the records of the Second and Eleventh were expunged and their fates never explained in the lore.
Q 22How many Legions rebelled against the Emperor during the Horus Heresy?
Nine
Nine Legions sided with Horus, among them the World Eaters, Death Guard, Thousand Sons and Word Bearers; the early-31st-millennium civil war is the subject of the Horus Heresy novel series.
Q 23Which Primarch returned to lead the Imperium and launch the Indomitus Crusade?
Roboute Guilliman
Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines, was revived after ten thousand years in stasis and launched the Indomitus Crusade once the Great Rift tore the galaxy in half.
Forbidden Planet (1956) supplied the 'monsters from the id', creatures born from a mind's hidden fears, which became daemons as the nightmares of mortals given form.
Q 14The Imperium's ban on artificial intelligence was inspired by which novels?
Dune
As in Dune, it followed an ancient war against thinking machines.
Q 15Roughly how many worlds does the Imperium of Man comprise?
1 million
The Imperium spans roughly 1 million worlds scattered across the galaxy, ruled for over 10,000 years as an authoritarian techno-feudal theocracy in the Emperor's name.
Q 16What is the name of the psychic beacon generated by the Emperor's mind?
The Astronomican
The Astronomican is a psychic lighthouse projected from Terra, fuelled by thousands of sacrificed psykers, that Navigators steer by on interstellar voyages; the Emperor has been on life support for ten millennia.
Q 17What is the source of magic in the 40k universe?
The Warp
The Warp, also called the Immaterium, is the psychic dimension that powers sorcery and psykers alike; the Imperium rounds psykers up on the Black Ships.
Q 18What is the Space Marines' formal name?
Adeptus Astartes
Adeptus Astartes is the formal name of the Space Marines, the Emperor's genetically engineered warriors organised into Chapters of roughly a thousand; the Adeptus Custodes are his personal bodyguard.
Q 19How many hearts does a fully developed Space Marine have?
Two
A Space Marine has two hearts, the secondary heart implanted to back up the first, plus a third lung and an extra kidney among the nineteen implants of the process.
Q 20What is implanted in a recruit to turn them into a Space Marine?
Gene-seed
New gene-seed grows in Marines' own bodies and is harvested surgically for the next generation.
Q 24The Primaris Space Marines were introduced with which edition?
Eighth (2017)
Primaris Marines arrived with the Eighth (2017) edition's launch box, Dark Imperium; they stand taller than the older Firstborn Marines and wear Mark X armour.
Q 25The Space Marines' Land Raider tank is based on which real vehicles?
British Great War tanks
The Land Raider copies the British Great War tanks of 1916-18: a rhomboid hull with tracks running all the way round and weapons mounted in side sponsons.
Q 26What is entombed inside a Dreadnought walker?
A mortally wounded Marine
A mortally wounded Marine, too broken to fight on foot, is sealed inside a Dreadnought's sarcophagus for the rest of his life, making it a cyborg walker rather than a robot.
Q 27Terminator armour first appeared in 1989 in which spin-off board game?
Space Hulk
Space Hulk (1989) pits Terminator-armoured Marines against Genestealers in the cramped corridors of a derelict starship; the game was revived in 2009 and again in 2014.
Q 28Which Imperial Guard regiment is modelled on World War One trench warfare?
The Death Korps of Krieg
The Death Korps of Krieg wear gas masks and greatcoats, dig in with artillery and ride horses in the style of the Western Front, a deliberate First World War German look.
Q 29Which faction is often described as the female equivalent of Space Marines?
The Sisters of Battle
The Sisters of Battle, formally the Adepta Sororitas, are the all-female warriors of the Ecclesiarchy, armed much like Space Marines but fuelled by faith rather than genetic enhancement.
Q 30Orks were primarily inspired by what?
Football hooligans
Orks were modelled on football hooligans, loud Cockney-accented brawlers who fight purely for the fun of it; their largest invasions are called Waaagh!s after their battle cry.