Warhammer 40k Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Warhammer 40k trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Warhammer 40,000's first edition needed which third person at the table?
A gamesmaster
A gamesmaster refereed the fight, because the 1987 rulebook was half role-playing game: forces were often rolled up on random tables, and it suited small skirmishes, not armies.
Q 02Games Workshop, the maker of Warhammer 40,000, is headquartered in which English city?
Nottingham
Nottingham is home because of a takeover in reverse: the firm began in London, but in the 1980s its Nottinghamshire miniatures arm took control and moved everything north, settling at Lenton in 1997.
Q 03Which Chaos God of Warhammer 40,000 is hailed with the cry 'Blood for the Blood God'?
Khorne
Khorne's followers finish the cry with 'Skulls for the Skull Throne!'; he despises sorcery, so his armies charge into close combat and field no psykers at all.
Q 04Which word for a subgenre of speculative fiction derives from Warhammer 40,000's tagline?
Grimdark
Grimdark squeezes the tagline 'In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war' into one word; first recorded in the 2000s, it now labels bleak fantasy by writers such as Joe Abercrombie.
Q 05Which Games Workshop division publishes the setting's novels?
Black Library
Black Library began in 1997 as a small team producing Inferno!, a magazine of short stories; its success led to novels two years later and a list that has since grown to hundreds of titles.
Q 06Games Workshop founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson created which hit gamebook series?
Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy began with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982 and sold millions; seven years earlier the pair, with John Peake, had started Games Workshop by making wooden game boards.
Q 07Games Workshop's newsletter Owl and Weasel was replaced in 1977 by which magazine?
White Dwarf
White Dwarf spent its first ten years covering other firms' games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest and Traveller, before turning in the late 1980s into a showcase for Games Workshop's own.
Q 08Games Workshop joined which stock index in December 2024?
The FTSE 100
The FTSE 100 admitted Games Workshop in its December 2024 review, lifting a maker of toy soldiers out of the FTSE 250 and into Britain's hundred biggest listed firms as retailers B&M and Frasers dropped out.
Q 09Which miniature-figure company did Games Workshop help set up to cast metal models?
Citadel
Citadel is the reason Warhammer exists: role-players bought one figure at a time, so its manager commissioned a battle game that needed whole armies of them.
Q 10Who wrote the original 1987 rulebook of Warhammer 40,000?
Rick Priestley
Rick Priestley has said he always meant the setting to be ironic, and that it amused him to see the brutal, self-deceiving Space Marines hailed as heroes.
Q 11Warhammer 40,000's creator names Tolkien, Robert Heinlein and which horror writer among his influences?
H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft's mark is on Chaos: artefacts that drive their owners mad and secret cults serving evil gods come straight from his brand of cosmic horror.
Q 12Who first added the Chaos Gods to the Warhammer setting?
Bryan Ansell
Bryan Ansell set out the Chaos Gods in a huge handwritten manuscript; the game's lead designer later reworked them, finding the original 'a little too close for comfort' to Michael Moorcock.
Q 13The Horus Heresy, the civil war that founds 40k's backstory, deliberately retells which epic poem?
Paradise Lost
Q 21Which Space Marine Legion was the first to turn to Chaos?
Word Bearers
The Word Bearers fell through piety: they worshipped the Emperor as a god, he publicly humiliated them for it, and they went looking for gods who would welcome worship, the first of nine Legions to turn.
Q 22Which Primarch returned to lead the Imperium and launch the Indomitus Crusade?
Roboute Guilliman
Roboute Guilliman lay in stasis for ten thousand years, frozen at the instant of death, until he was revived to lead the Indomitus Crusade and win back worlds cut off by the Great Rift.
Q 23The Primaris Space Marines debuted in which launch box of Warhammer 40,000's eighth edition?
Dark Imperium
Paradise Lost: the game's creator called the Heresy 'just a parody of the fall of Lucifer as described by Milton', with the Emperor's favoured son turning on him as Satan turns on God.
Q 14In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium's ban on artificial intelligence echoes which series of novels?
Dune
Dune's ban on 'thinking machines' became 40k's 'abominable intelligence', outlawed after the revolt of the Men of Iron; the game's creator also copied Herbert's invented chapter-opening quotations.
Q 15The Imperium of Man is proverbially an empire of how many worlds?
1 million
The '1 million worlds' is a saying, not a census: the Imperium's scribes have never fixed the true number, and its planets lie scattered so thinly that most of the galaxy between them is unexplored.
Q 16In Warhammer 40,000, what is the psychic beacon generated by the Emperor's mind called?
The Astronomican
The Astronomican is a lighthouse that Navigators steer by, and it is fuelled by people: thousands of psykers burn out their lives to keep it lit for the Emperor to direct.
Q 17What is the source of magic in the 40k universe?
The Warp
The Warp is a parallel realm of raw supernatural energy, and also humanity's fast road between the stars: ships travel faster than light by diving through the dimension where daemons hunt.
Q 18What is the Space Marines' formal name?
Adeptus Astartes
Adeptus Astartes Chapters number about a thousand warriors each: after the Horus Heresy the huge Legions were broken up so that no one man could command such a force again.
Q 19What is implanted in a recruit to turn them into a Space Marine?
Gene-seed
Gene-seed cannot be made in factories: it grows anew inside every Marine, in glands that are cut from the fallen so that the Chapter can raise its next generation.
Q 20How many original Space Marine Legions were there, two of which are 'redacted' from Imperial records?
20
20 Legions were raised, one for each Primarch, but every record of the Second and Eleventh was erased before the Heresy, and their brother Primarchs swore never to speak of them.
Dark Imperium introduced Marines who stand taller than the old 'Firstborn' and went on to replace them: by the tenth edition many Firstborn kits had been retired from sale.
Q 24The Space Marines' Land Raider tank is based on which real vehicles?
British Great War tanks
British Great War tanks gave the Land Raider its rhomboid hull and side-mounted guns, a shape devised for climbing over trenches: a turret on top would have made the real tanks too tall and unstable.
Q 25What 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 26Which 1989 board game sends Terminator-armoured Space Marines against Genestealers in cramped corridors?
Space Hulk
Space Hulk plays to the armour's strength: Terminator suits come into their own in spaces too tight for vehicles, and here slow, heavily armed Marines face faster enemies that can only claw.
Q 27Which Imperial Guard regiment is modelled on World War One trench warfare?
The Death Korps of Krieg
The Death Korps of Krieg fight in gas masks and greatcoats and treat death as atonement: their world once rebelled, and its own loyalists drowned it in atomic fire to win it back.
Q 28Which faction is often described as the female equivalent of Space Marines?
The Sisters of Battle
The Sisters of Battle exist through a loophole: after a tyrant's reign of blood the Church was forbidden to keep 'men under arms', so the army it kept is made up entirely of women.
Q 29Warhammer 40,000's Orks were modelled chiefly on which real-world troublemakers?
Football hooligans
Football hooligans gave the Orks their Cockney accents and their creed: where other races go to war for gain, Orks start fights simply because fighting is fun.
Q 30What makes ramshackle Ork technology actually work?
A psychic field the Orks generate
A psychic field the Orks generate collectively, their Waaagh! energy, makes their tech work as long as enough of them believe it will, which is why red vehicles really do go faster.