Depends on the book, as there isn't a current year' in 40K, something they lampshade with references to nobody even knowing the exact year anymore due to warp fuckery, entire fleets having to resync after warp translation (potentially having lost or gained decades), and a whole group of the Inquisition trying to keep an eye on it. Generally the 'current time' is the 'Indomitus Era', which is the century or so following Guilliman's return, and the Dawn of Fire books cover the first decade or so of that.Sorry I have another random lore question.
How long has Roboute been back?
I'm going through the lore and some of the books and I'm having trouble keeping track of the timeline. How many years has it been since he came back to where the current year is? I've tried looking at the timeline, but I'm not as familiar with it. So I don't know exactly where to look.
It also doesn't help that in some stories it's like he just got back and in others it's like he has been back for years or even decades.
One of the reasons they don't give a precise date is that, while Primarchs, space marines, eldar, tech priests and wealthy imperial political figures might not care about fifty years, the fiction exists to support a wargame. Having all the baseline human and Tau special characters be not available outside of a comparatively tiny window of their active service is just less fun for miniature painters and players who largely put a greater time and financial investment in than lore fiends. Same goes for someone who has painted a Gaunts Ghosts army, only to find they are technically all long dead by the present time the fiction is focusing on :D
For all their attempt to novelise the Indomitus crusade (and I'm quite enjoying the second book, Gate of Bones), the 'present' is very much a themed setting rather than a precise timeline of events, Imperium Nihilus conveniently making a mockery of such a thing for writers and readers and players everywhere :D There's a rough plan in the Dawn of Fire maps of which order the crusade fleets left Terra in and which way they went, but I suspect that as the series heads into Imperium Nihilus, the initial plucky attempts of Roboute's freshly commissioned historians to categorise and record everything are going to meet stiff resistance.
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