According to what I’ve read, the Dark King (the Emperor’s Chaos God form) sort of already exists even though it hasn’t been born yet, because of the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey nature of how the Warp works.
The Eldar god Cegorach is also kicking around somewhere.
I always have trouble telling Gork and Mork apart. I think Gork is cunningly brutal and Mork is brutally cunning. It might be the two of them are more powerful than the Chaos gods. The other Chaos gods expend their energy on attempting to control the material world while Gork and Mork might occasionally send their prophets a few messages but otherwise don’t feel the need to interfere. As such, when the Chaos gods occasionally attack Gork and Mork they just shrug it off as no big deal. One wonders what Gork and Mork have in store with all that potential energy they’re sitting on. No doubt it’ll be cunningly brutal or brutally cunning.
In early editions of the tabletop fantasy game, you could roll on a random table and have a Chaos Marine show up in the middle of a battle. Warhammer isn’t as fun, fanciful, and absurd as it was 30+ years ago. Which is a pity.
Never played, just a casual observer of the lore, but (the April Fool’s musical notwithstanding) they’ve definitely gone all-in on the grimdark at the expense of the Judge-Dreddian dark anti-Thatcherian satire of the early days. It’s definitely STILL satirical, just not in a ha-ha way.
The problem with their fiction is that goold old James Workshop is trying to have their cake and eat it to. On one had the grim dark, ridiculous setting is part of what made Warhammer so popular to begin with. But on the gripping hand, when it comes to marketing at least, they sure do their best to make the Space Marines, Sisters of Battle, and the Imperial Guard look heroic. If you’re a parent taking their snotling to the local game store your immediate impression of Space Marines aren’t going to include child solders who were brutalized, brainwashed, and surgically altered to become what they are today. You might hear about this Emperor of Man guy but you’re unlikely to learn he put to death the clergy of false Earth religions (spoiler alert: they’re all false according to the Emperor).
The Imperium is still a terrible place, but they’ve toned down some aspects of the setting over the years. I kind of dig their style too. They don’t usually make overt changes to the setting in terms of what is or isn’t canon, they just pretend like it never existed to begin with.
Which is ironic considering that the lore implies, without specifically saying it, that the Emperor was also Jesus Christ.
Literally son of god or just the person a story evolved around?
ETA: And, if son of god that implies another god. Indeed…he is then god. And that mean omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent.
The latter.
The latter, though in the in-universe hagiography he’s probably also the former.
IIRC, the Emperor was supposedly born around 8000 BC and has played a major role throughout human history and had many identities, including that of Jesus.