The Warp Gates
Approximately seventeen thousand years ago the galaxy of the Milky Way was visited by a race of alien star travellers.
An ancient space travelling race we now refer to as The Old Ones.
Their degree of scientific advancement caused some of the species they met to worship them as gods, while others reviled them as demons.
The technology of The Old Ones had already reached a level where they were able to create life, influence its evolution, and shape the planets and environments on which it could live.
During their time in the Milky Way, they conducted many scientific experiments on its planets, shaping their environments and seeding thousands of them with primitive life. These planets included both Earth and the Warhammer, although any knowledge and most of the evidence of their presence has long since been lost. Most of the civilised species which currently inhabit the Warhammer world are the legacy of these experiments.
The Old Ones travelled across the vast distances of space by means of interdimensional gateways, spanning the distances between the stars by navigating their great silver ships through a parallel dimension called Warpspace which simultaneously connects all points in the material universe.
So, one of their first tasks upon reaching any planet including Earth and Warhammer was to construct a pair of The Warp Gates, one over each pole of the planet, to allow them to come and go as they pleased.
There is no record of what these gates actually looked like, but more recent gates designed for a similar purpose suggest that they probably looked similar to the NASA design shown below.
However, Warpspace is not empty, even though it is sometimes referred to as The Void. It is filled with a form of energy which is wholly alien to anything in the material Universe, and is inhabited by entities that are equally alien.
The Old Ones had already discovered that ‘Warp Energy’ could be stimulated by the psychic emanations of a mortal mind, and that the warp entities that inhabited The Void were attracted to strong emotional signals and had a strange tendency to grow and shape themselves to try and reflect the emotions and thoughts of the mortals travelling in their ships as they passed through the void.
This natural property of ‘Warp Energy’ was both useful and dangerous. On the one hand The Old Ones found that by carefully channelling and stimulating ‘Warp Energy’ they could use it to create virtually anything they needed, and so ‘Warp Energy’ became the primary resource used to fuel most of their creationist experiments.
On the other hand, they also recognised that ‘Warp Energy’ was immensely dangerous if exposed to random uncontrolled emotional stimulation. Not only could it spontaneously manifest a completely unexpected and uncontrolled creature or object, but when used in the material universe it could create and shape anything into a physical representation of whatever a mortal mind could imagine. Therefore, it was perfectly possible for ‘Warp Energy’ to literally make your worst nightmares come true, not just your dreams.
If this was not dangerous enough, the Navigators and Astropaths employed by The Old Ones to guide their ships through Warpspace soon began to report that not only was it populated by primitive energy-based life forms that had tried to attack their ships. But that now they were detecting a new, more intelligent, and devious form of life in Warp.
This new Warp Entity was not just attracted to strong psychic emotions with the motive of attacking and consuming them as the more primitive warp creatures were, but also seemed grow and draw power from specific emotions such as fear, joy, love and hate. Not only that but these new lifeforms were intelligent enough not just to attack and destroy the source of their power, but seemed have developed strategies to try and stimulate an increase in the strength of their preferred emotion from the ships passing through their domain, and were growing bigger and more powerful as a result.
Therefore, as The Old Ones travelled through Warpspace in their great ships they were careful to protect themselves with powerful enchantments and psychic shields.
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