Christmass holidays is a great time to paint your old miniatures or recently bought (or, better, presented). Here are some greatly painted armies for your inspiration!
The Webway, also known as the Labyrinthine Dimension, is an extra-dimensional space partitioned off from the Immaterium millions of Terran years ago by an extremely advanced xenos species known as the Old Ones. Today, it is utilised by the Eldar of the Craftworlds and their Dark Eldar counterparts for faster-than-light travel and as the home of the vast Dark City of Commorragh and the hidden Craftworld known as the Black Library. It has been described as an incredibly complex network of arteries and capillaries, a maze of glowing tunnels, and a mystic tapestry of hidden threads that spread across the veil between realspace and the Warp.
The Webway is an extra-dimensional construct that spans the dimensions of Creation, primarily defined by the fact that it sits between the material realm and the roiling tides of the Warp, an interstice comparable to the fabric of a veil cast over something foul. As with all of the Eldar's most prized artefacts, the webway was brought into being by psychic means.
The Necrons are still a shadowy presence rather than a full-fledged force in the galaxy of the present time. They strike out of nowhere without warning, wreak havoc and leave before any major reinforcements can arrive. The origins of these various attacks and their motives are unknown, though it is known that the current Necron forces in the galaxy are only soul harvesters, not the full-fledged fighting machines of the C'tan. They seem to attack from nowhere often simply appearing at nearly any location in the galaxy, no matter how well-defended. Once in the recent past they touched down on Mars, simply passing by the Imperial Navy fleets protecting the Sol System unnoticed, and ultimately casting doubt on the impregnable status of Terra itself. The Necrons reached the Red Planet's surface and explored its subterranean Noctis Labyrinthus, perhaps in search of one of their C'tan masters, believed to be the entity known in the legends of the Adeptus Mechanicus as the Dragon of Mars, before being destroyed by the agents of the Imperium. This incident, however, is a heavily guarded secret within the Imperium of Man, which greatly fears that the Necrons may awaken the C'tan known as the Void Dragon which inhabits a stasis tomb beneath the sands of Mars. At the same time, the Imperium has been unable to capture a Necron in an attempt to learn their secrets; entire Necron forces simply vanish into thin air using their phase technology -- and they always take their "dead" with them.
The Necron forces come from Tomb Worlds as yet uncharted by the Imperium. Their phase technology allows them to deploy anywhere in the galaxy, almost instantaneously through unknown means. In defeat, they "phase-out" and return to their associated tomb-world for repairs. Any Necrons that have fallen in battle can be repaired there and re-animated, so their losses thus far have been minimal. Should a Necron be totally annihilated in battle, then they are truly beyond phase-out or repair, but again, often so little survives that the scientists of living races often have nothing to study.
The Necrons may have infiltrated the Imperium to an extent. Their elite anti-psyker troops, the Pariahs, are an unholy cross of human mutant and Necron technology. It is believed by Mechanicus savants that the Necrons had the Pariah Gene engineered into what became the human gene pool over 65 million Terran years ago. This gene has since manifested itself in the agents of the Culexus Temple, the specialised anti-psyker assassins of the Officio Assassinorum. Recently, however, there has been a dramatic decerase in the use of Necron Pariahs in Necron armies, and the Ordo Xenos believes that these troops may not have proven as effective as Necron commanders had once hoped and are being phased out of the Necron dynasties' order of battle.
Of all the galaxy's great powers, only the Eldar see the Necrons for the threat they truly are to all of the other sentient species -- and even they cannot be sure how many Tomb Worlds slumber in the darkness. After the War in Heaven, the Eldar took up a silent watch for any sign of Necron reemergence, and set watch on worlds they suspected of nurturing hidden stasis tombs. Many such worlds were seeded with life and adopted as homes by Eldar outcasts and Exodites, whose descendants would maintain the vigil. Where this was not possible, suspected Tomb Worlds were marked on a great crystal map so that their locations would not be lost as the millennia passed. Yet, as the ages of the galaxy passed, the Eldar became distracted by their own plights and thus forgot the duty they had sworn to uphold for their lost patrons, the Old Ones. By the time of the Fall of the Eldar in the 30th Millennium -- the terrible birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh -- the slumbering Necrons had been all but forgotten. Only in the Black Library and amongst a few outspoken segments of Eldar society did the vigil continue.
For the Eldar, the Necrons are a nightmare come to life. The children of Isha hold soullessness to be the very worst of all fates, and the Necrons therefore provoke an abiding terror that the Eldar can never truly suppress. For the Seer Council of the Alaitoc Craftworld, however, a time of terrible vindication is at hand. The Eldar of Alaitoc remembered their ancient duty whilst their peers forgot. They recovered the fragments of the great map from one of the Crone Worlds of the Eye of Terror, spread their networks of Eldar outcasts and Exodites ever wider and waited for the ancient enemy to return. So it is that whilst most Craftworlds are re-honing half-remembered strategies from the War in Heaven, Alaitoc is reaching its hand, assailing the Necrons on their own territory, sabotaging their Tomb Worlds and bringing the fight to their legions of undying warriors whenever the opportunity presents itself.
The Immaterium (also referred to as the Empyrean, the Aether, the Sea of Souls, the Realm of Chaos, Warpspace or most commonly, the Warp) is an alternate dimension of purely psychic energy that echoes and underlies the familiar four dimensions of the material universe. It is the source of all psychic powers and known instances of so-called "sorcery" or "magic" as well as the home dimension of the Chaos Gods and their myriad daemonic servants. In fact, the terms "Chaos" and "the Warp" are often used interchangeably by those aware of their existence within the Imperium of Man. Superficially, the Immaterium is Mankind's solution to the problem of faster-than-light travel. This function as an FTL medium for interstellar travel is achieved because the Immaterium is a domain of pure psychic energy, with voidcraft navigating between its currents, as in an ocean.
The psychic energy that makes up the Immaterium is believed to be the direct result of the existence of sentience in the universe, in particular the intelligent species of the Milky Way Galaxy. Considered to be a dark reflection of the material universe, the Warp is an ocean of chaotic psychic energy, raw emotion given physical form. Stirred by strong emotion and action, the Immaterium is the true Realm of Chaos, home to the Dark Gods who comprise the Ruinous Powers and their legions of daemonic followers. The Immaterium is also rumoured by many cultures, human and xenos alike, to be the final resting place of the spirits of the dead, and therefore can be considered the "Underworld" of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Every Craftworld is built upon a skeleton of Wraithbone whose structure extends throughout the gigantic voidcraft. A similar skeletal core lies at the heart of most Eldar constructions and every one of their spacecraft. In function, this core is similar to the blood vessels and nervous system of a living creature, pumping life-giving energy around the body and also transmitting the psychic impulses that coordinate its many functions. Wraithbone is psycho-conductive, and the core of a Craftworld acts as a self-replenishing reservoir of psychic power. The invasive rib-like structures carry this energy throughout the entire length and breadth of the vessel. In a very real sense, the Craftworld is a living entity, powered by psychic energy and responding in an organic way to the stimuli of psychic forces. The power contained within it can be expended as light and heat, and most ship-board devices could not actually function without the wireless psychic power grid that runs throughout the substructure of the Craftworld. The Eldar refer to this grid as the Infinity Circuit, a metaphysical neural structure studded with the Spirit Stones of the Craftworld's dead, their gestalt psychic collective serving as the source of the great vessel's power--and its ghostly sentience.
And finally, some Imperial forces so that you won't be so afraid of xenos threat.
