The Imperium of Man

The Imperium of Man is a galaxy-spanning interstellar Terran empire, the ultimate authority for the majority of the human race in the Lactea Galaxy in the late 41st Millennium A.D. It is ruled by the living near-god who is known as the Emperor of Mankind. However, there are other humanoid species classified as Imperial citizens, and human sub-races.
It is the largest and most powerful political organisation in the galaxy, consisting of at least 1,000,000 human-settled worlds dispersed across the universe. Consequently, an Imperial planet might be separated from its closest neighbour by hundreds of light years. As a stellar empire, the size of the Imperium cannot be measured in terms of contiguous territory, but only in the number of planetary systems under its control. However, most subjects have little day-to-day contact with the government of the Imperium unless they serve in one of its Adepta or run afoul of its various protectors, such as the Inquisition or the Adeptus Arbites.
===History===
The Age of Strife was a 5,000-year-long period of anarchy, war, and destructive technological regression from the 25th to the 30th Millennia that brought Mankind to the brink of extinction -- and reversed the highly advanced scientific and technological discoveries made by the galaxy-spanning interstellar human civilisation of the Dark Age of Technology that had preceded it. The Age of Strife was caused by SOMETHING that ravaged large portions of the galaxy beginning in the 23rd or 25th Millennium, depending on the source, which were the "ripples" in realspace of the psychic gestation of the new Chaos God Slaanesh in the Immaterium. Slaanesh was forming within the Warp as a result of the growing hedonism and utter excess of the ancient Eldar empire in the millennia before its Fall. One result of the Warp Storms was the impossibility of faster-than-light travel or astro-telepathic interstellar communication through the ravaged currents of the Warp, which led to the subsequent isolation of human colony worlds and star systems separated by multi-light-year distances.
Human civilisation in the colonised portions of the galaxy fragmented, and where it survived, it took on wildly different forms. On Earth, the planetary economy collapsed with the loss of interstellar trade and communication with the rest of humanity even as the social order broke down. Wars, rebellion, and disease were rampant. Vast swathes of the advanced scientific and technical knowledge accumulated in the previous millennia was lost or forgotten, and a slow descent into pre-industrial barbarism seemed inevitable. Brutal warlords emerged, who carved out new kingdoms to serve as their fiefdoms. The emergence of these often brutal neo-feudal kingdoms, the new nation-states of the people later termed "techno-barbarians" by Imperial historians, imposed an uneasy peace on the Earth that was frequently interrupted by feudal conflicts. The human race seemed on the brink of extinction by the end of the 29th Millennium, when the man who would become known as the Emperor of Mankind once more inserted Himself into the affairs of humanity.
===The Adeptus Terra===
===Imperial Military Force===
===Imperial Faith===