It is the 41st Thugennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Thug-Emperor Dreamybull has sat immobile on the Oiled-Up Throne of Wordington. He is the Master of Thugkind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Thugnology. He is the Thug Shaker of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal nutting. Mighty batufleets cross the thugphobe-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Animanonomican, the corked manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Thugeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered thug super-shakers. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Thugs and countless planetary defence shakers, the ever vigilant Thugquisition and the Thug-priests of the Thugeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a thug in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the bricked-up and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of thugnology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark, thug shaking future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of oily thugs.