The Emperor is starting to show up in some big ways
Was the Emperor's plan always to become a god? | Warhammer 40k Lore
The God-Emperor of Mankind is, as you might have guessed from the name, a pretty important guy in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. He's the closest thing the setting has to an actual protagonist, but he's in the unfortunate position of being a corpse chained to a powerful psychic throne. In recent years, the Emperor's precarious position has become an important point in the larger galaxy of 40K. Is it possible that he is up to something? He may be a dead body used to plug a hole in reality that would otherwise be full of demons, but according to some new books in the 40K canon, the Emperor has more presence and agency than we might have initially thought.
The Emperor is made up of tropes that Games Workshop generously borrowed from the early editions of Warhammer 40,000; he very clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Dune. Despite this, he is critical of every aspect of the Imperium of Man. He's the religious figurehead of the galaxy-spanning empire, and being an atheist is so illegal you'll be burned at the stake for it. Ten thousand years ago, the Emperor had a band of great sons called the Primarchs, and half of them rebelled in a giant civil war called the Horus Heresy. The Heresy was created by the Emperor's most terrible enemies: the Four Chaos Gods and their endless hordes of demons from the extra dimension known as the Warp.
In the final confrontation of the heresy, the emperor was almost killed. In a DIY improvisation for the ages, his sons dragged him onto the powerful psychic conduit known as the Golden Throne. Battery life is not great, but there is a solution – feed thousands of human souls every day to the big man in the chair.
