This is awesome.
It would be cool to see what books talk about each world when you click on them. Also to be able to search for books and see what worlds are talked about in them.
There are multiple legs to The Hobby (tm), the painting and modelling, the game, and the lore.
For me, painting is the fun bit. I find the game broken and totally driven by marketing. Horrible pay-to-win stuff.
Gaming you need people, you gotta get down a shop and say hi. I prefer independents, as they sell other games, but what's available depends on where you are. Even without shops, finding a group isn't that hard, there's an organised one in my very small town. Facebook etc. can help.
For painting, it's easy, just find models you like the look of, the official site can suggest paints, and have a crack. Your first ones won't be great, but it's the progress that's fun. There's an absurd amount of YouTube content. My crew like Cult of Paint.
Lore, I know least about, I find the books unreadable, but the Black Library is vast. The Horus Heresy is the canonical backbone.
A friend actually writes some short stuff on the fantasy side, do him a favour and grab a collection with Jake Ozga.
The Latin seems quite wrong... e.g. "segmentum pacificus" should actually be "segmentum pacificum" [1] to keep genders correct. Was it the same in the books (which I don't know)?
Which is to say, the original authors didn't care and were just writing latinesque gibberish that sounded cool.
One of the critically important things to remember about 40k lore is that the game was originally a joke. Their "real" game was Warhammer (the game to be later called "Warhammer Fantasy"). Originally it was just "Let's put space opera tropes onto a game board and have them fight D&D monsters". Then they shoe-horned the chaos stuff in, then had a (presumably drunken) exercise in lore writing where they "invented" "Grimdark" by essentially turning the Despair knob up to 11.
And then it turned out to be popular, and it was time to start trying to write real stories on top of the mess. And... people loved it. Including a lot of people for whom the comically ridiculous Grimdark stuff turned into a kind of authoritarian wish fulfillment, which wasn't great. But you have to remember it was all a joke to begin with.
For me, painting is the fun bit. I find the game broken and totally driven by marketing. Horrible pay-to-win stuff.
Gaming you need people, you gotta get down a shop and say hi. I prefer independents, as they sell other games, but what's available depends on where you are. Even without shops, finding a group isn't that hard, there's an organised one in my very small town. Facebook etc. can help.
For painting, it's easy, just find models you like the look of, the official site can suggest paints, and have a crack. Your first ones won't be great, but it's the progress that's fun. There's an absurd amount of YouTube content. My crew like Cult of Paint.
Lore, I know least about, I find the books unreadable, but the Black Library is vast. The Horus Heresy is the canonical backbone.
A friend actually writes some short stuff on the fantasy side, do him a favour and grab a collection with Jake Ozga.
Good luck.
[1] see Latin dictionary: https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-dictionary-fle... and https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-dictionary-fle...
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/High_Gothic
One of the critically important things to remember about 40k lore is that the game was originally a joke. Their "real" game was Warhammer (the game to be later called "Warhammer Fantasy"). Originally it was just "Let's put space opera tropes onto a game board and have them fight D&D monsters". Then they shoe-horned the chaos stuff in, then had a (presumably drunken) exercise in lore writing where they "invented" "Grimdark" by essentially turning the Despair knob up to 11.
And then it turned out to be popular, and it was time to start trying to write real stories on top of the mess. And... people loved it. Including a lot of people for whom the comically ridiculous Grimdark stuff turned into a kind of authoritarian wish fulfillment, which wasn't great. But you have to remember it was all a joke to begin with.