Chronologic

As per my last post regarding maps, I love me my timelines. A big part of why we play this game of futuristic toy soldiers is the fluff, and the fictitious future timeline of the 41st Millenium which comes from all sources, canon (official rulebooks, codices) and sometimes otherwise (Black Library) is part of the rich tapestry of 40K.



Of course, sometimes names, places, races, events, and even whole periods can get re-vised, re-written, re-retconned (Think minor things like the recent change in position of planets like Valhalla with each subsequent new edition, or the name-changing/misspelling of the planet Harakoni to Harkon, or major things like Leman Russ, Squats, Zoats, Starchild, etc). As always, the powers that be that are GW shareholders executive and/or design committee which commission this ever-mutating self-revising-with-each-edition-release beast of 40K fluff move in mysterious ways.

Still, there are plenty of fan-produced timelines (and starmaps) about on the web that attempt to restrain this changeling beast, and try to make sense of it all in an attempt to put things into perspective, here are a few:

http://www.joachim-adomeit.de/wh40k/spacemap/map.html

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Timeline

When Big Jim embarked on his little journey to create his fan-based Minidex (LINK HERE), I volunteered to create a little timeline featuring the running-subplot of the ‘Quest for the Artifacts’ that his Soul Reapers just happen to be undertaking. Here’s the result:

As you can see, with much love and respect to GW’s IP and trademarks, I cobbled together a map and adjacent timeline featuring places and events relevant to Soul Reaper history from clues left over by Big Jim’s blogs, and from information gleamed from the previous links. The result is something you would typically expect to see in it’s double-page spread glory in a typical 40K codex production, which was the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ I was going for here.

Of course, one must read this in conjunction with the Soul Reapers fluff, all available from the complete playtest Minidex here! So let Big Jim and I know what you think!

Note: All Illustration work depicted here is fan art which is completely unofficial and in no way endorsed by Games Workshop Ltd.