The Milky Way Galaxy in 30K/40K

[Deus_Ex_Machina]

It is said in the Rogue Trader book (1987) that only a tiny section of the Milky Way galaxy has been discovered and settled by mankind. Most of those worlds have even lost contact with Terra. And yet whenever I visit the setting of 30K/40K I feel it to be confined and restrictive almost but obviously not as bad as the Old World. This may be because most of the novels and publications deal with the same enemies of mankind. This even caused me to place my HH 2.0 campaign into the Andromeda galaxy where I felt there is more freedom, a blank slate if you will, to introduce new factions (e.g. Rust Bots and more to come) into the game without conflicting with the current lore. 

 

A recent read of the Rogue Trader book mentioned Rogue Traders leaving the Milky Way galaxy and never being heard from again. Is this a missed opportunity to come up with stories from visitors or returning Rogue Traders from other galaxies? A few months ago I bought the trilogy Forges of Mars (Graham McNeill; 2012-2014) and it turned out to be an adventure story of an Imperial fleet going onto a crusade into uncharted galactic territory. This was a breath of fresh air as the run-of-the mill 40K story boils down to a planetary invasion of Xenos XYZ and the Imperium has to deal with it in one way or another. 

 

Do you think it needs to be this way because Warhammer is a wargame and therefore needs to have lots of easily identified xenos as enemies in comparison to having more adventure stories in the spirit of Star Trek?

[phandaal]

Depends on the stories. Some are good at developing a sense of scale, others have their characters show up whenever and wherever they need them.  Sandy Mitchell, Dan Abnett, ADB, Peter Fehervari, Anthony Reynolds, Edoardo Albert, and plenty of other authors have done good work in showing the scale of the universe. Seems to work best when they drill down to a "small" portion of the galaxy and focus on that so you can see how big even a single solar system is.

 

I have used this number many times before here, but the Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars. Assuming the low end, and assuming the Imperium's million worlds are spread over a million solar systems, that means the Imperium in the 42nd millennium controls 0.001% of the Milky Way galaxy.

 

This is partly why I dislike it so much whenever the story makes claims about weapons or events that will wipe out the entire galaxy. Or when everything ties back to the Great Rift, etc. When the actual scale of the unimaginably vast Imperium is tiny in the grand scheme of the galaxy, powering that scale up to be 100,000 times larger than the entire Imperium makes it large enough to be absurd if you think too much.

 

As for why the scale of the galaxy seems way smaller sometimes, it is probably just like you say. The company needs to showcase the factions they sell, and they want people to place their battles into the context of whatever location they have, and they want people to use the characters they are selling. So you end up with all of the stories at least one aspect of that. You do not hear about the 10,000 year war going on between two undiscovered alien civilizations right around the corner from Terra, although with the actual scale of the galaxy that could definitely happen.

[MARK0SIAN]

As Phandaal say, I think Abnett in particular does a very good job of giving you an impression of the scale of the galaxy and the imperium, in particular his Ravenor/Eisenhorn series. They’re one of the few ones I’ve read where travelling between planets/systems genuinely takes months. 
 

The change of the setting from a sandbox to a storyline has definitely made the setting as a whole feel smaller for me. Having the great rift span the galaxy naturally means a lot of stuff happens with reference to it and if locations all over the galaxy are dealing with the same thing it’s naturally going to make it feel like the imperium is a more cohesive and centralised system than it actually is. 
 

I think you’ve essentially just got to ignore the main setting and make up what you want for wherever you are. The easy excuse for why there’s no imperial presence somewhere is that the imperium has only ever travelled where the light of the Astronomican can reach. There’s no reason there can’t be a planet or star system close to terra covered in a small but perpetual warp storm that has always made the astronomican invisible and therefore it’s devoid of human presence.