Reply To: 40k 9th core book – how much lore/fluff?

[greyhunter88 1654xp 2]

The new rulebook does have a lot of lore, but it’s mostly very surface-level. Armies will get a few pages giving their most basic premise, and there’s some brief discussion about the Imperium and “the story thus far”.

The core rulebook will probably give someone unfamiliar to the setting a good primer, but it doesn’t really give you a ton to sink your teeth into. The Codices are even worse. The new books basically assume you know everything already, and are mostly rules. The new space marine units, for example, sometimes have only 2-3 lines discussing them at all.

I would honestly recommend the old Fantasy Flight Games RPG books, which you can grab digitally on DriveThruRPG. They’re chock-full of amazing lore, in most cases much better than what GW puts out.

For example, “First Founding” has a ton of amazing lore about Space Marines and the original legions.
The ‘Dark Heresy’ core rulebook has a ton of lore about the Imperium, the Inquisition, and the life of ‘day to day’ Imperials.
Things like ‘Creatures Anathema’ and ‘Mark of the Xenos’ have a ton of cool monsters and aliens.
‘Battlefleet Koronus’ gives you a ton of detail about imperial vessels, warp travel, etc.

The rules might not be as useful playing Wrath & Glory but the fluff in those books is still top-notch, and they have a sourcebook detailing almost anything you could want to know.