the only “Good Guy” in 40k
Sorry, that would be the Tyranids. They just want dinner and to have babies.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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The first few Horus Heresy novels are worth reading. At the very least the first one by Dan Abnett, IMO the best 40K author.
It’s not space marine related, but I highly recommend the Eisenhorn Omnibus!
Seconding everything here. Ravenor is good too, once you finish Eisenhorn
Definitely start with Space Wolf by William King. You can read that with zero warhammer knowledge and it’s a very good book.
For chaos The Ahriman omnibus follows Ahriman from thr thousand sons legion after the heresy and is a fun story. It's got lots of thousand sons warp fuckery and some great characters.
The night lords omnibus is one of the first 40k books I read going into 40k with not a whole lot of knowledge. It's still probably my favorite 40k book, the characters are written incredibly well, the dark moments of horrific comedy are there, it features some great fights.
Fabius bile omnibus follows fabius bile of the emperors children legion in what's essential a great mad scientist story. Once again great characters and a fun story definitely worth the read.
The lion son of the forest is a very new 40k that follows the lions return to the setting. From what I remember it doesn't require a whole lot of backstory to be neccesary, as it explains a lot along the way. It's very involved with some dark angels space marine characters so I could be a decent jumping off point of sorts.
40K lore is huge. The best advice that I can give you is to pick a faction you like the most and just start reading about their part of the setting first. It sounds like you're into Space Wolves, so I'd pick up Ragnar's novels and just keep going from there.
Eventually, the main themes of 40k's lore will start to come up repeatedly, and the wider universe will start to make sense through osmosis the more you read. I'd recommend avoiding wikis and youtube lore however, a lot of that stuff is poorly written and badly researched, and it's a lot more satisfying in my experience reading the books the wikis are based on.
I'd also recommend Eisenhorn as a great starting point. But Games Workshop also sells rule books called codexes which have tonnes of great up-to-date lore about each faction.
Night lords trilogy .
@cashews_best_nut
So other than the Horus Heresy books which kinda-sort-of build on each other, you really can start with any 40k book that doesn't have a "Number # of a series" on it. The intention with most is that "any book is someone's first book" so while you'll pick up more if you've read other books there's little "required" reading.
"A Thousand Sons" might be your best bet. Focus is on Magnus and his legion but Space Wolves are a big part as well. Only issue is that it is technically the 12th book in the Horus Heresy series, though I personally started with book 14 and didn't have too much issue.