The Madministratum

And now for something a bit more fun. Though, obviously, still macabre... In a supplement for the FFG Rogue Trader RPG, we get this interesting morsel of information: Though many of their charters allow activities that might be considered treasonous (such as dealing with xenos races), there are plenty of zealous Imperial agents who have attempted to hold them accountable nonetheless. One notable instance was when the Rogue Trader Vorix Malcord was arrested in Port Wander for treason, because his grandfather had traded shipments of corpse-starch with the Stryxis. Rogue Trader: Hostile Acquisitions , p. 8. That is all the information we are given about the matter, and it serves as just a brief, interesting bit of flavour text to illustrate some key themes of the supplement, namely the ways in which Rogue Traders may have to navigate local or wider Imperial policing and laws, and how they may come into conflict with actors with other interests and mindsets. Perhaps, in this instance, the...

It was proposed on r/40kLore over at Reddit that I be given the title ‘Corpsestarchman’, and some people suggested I might be a bit too obsessed by the topic. I could have decided to attempt to refute such allegations. Instead, I decided to embrace them, don my Corpsestarchman costume, and offer up an extremely obscure and tiny but tasty morsel of lore: what may be the first appearance of the concept of corpse-starch – though not yet using that name – in Warhammer.  Not in 40k though… but in Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WHFB)! I am confident this will be something most people have never read about before, or at least haven't made the same link. Now, as covered in a prior post, the first reference to the concept of corpse-starch (food made from reconstituted humans) in 40k - though not yet given the specific name - came in materials for the game Confrontation in October 1990: https://madministratum.blogspot.com/2025/05/corpse-starch-what-lore-actually-says.html This was a skirmish...

Following my two previous posts about corpse-starch (and Soylens Viridians and Slab), I wanted to make a post to contextualize the presence of corpse-starch in the setting in relation to the Imperium’s wider use of people as resources, both while alive and after death. I want to start with something from the classic intro text to the game, from 1st ed. Rogue Trader (as an aside, the intro text to 8th edition also included something very similar): He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh is eaten. Human blood and human flesh – the stuff of which the Imperium is made. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. Now, this was very likely meant metaphorically (though who can be truly sure, with the insanity of Rogue Trader?), to signify that the Imperium uncaringly uses its subjects as a resource, eating them up, takin...

In a previous very extensive post available here:  https://madministratum.blogspot.com/2025/05/corpse-starch-what-lore-actually-says.html) it was thoroughly shown that corpse-starch, explicitly made from people, is well established in the lore, and is used on multiple planets and at least to some extent by the Guard. In this post we will look at Slab and, especially important for this topic, Soylens Viridians. We will start with the latter. Soylens Viridians Soylens Viridians is often conflated with corpse-starch – for very understandable reasons. Indeed, this was the case on Lexicanum (which was fixed due to my original Reddit post) and the Fandom Wiki (which at the time of writing is still wrong), which were both poorly supported by sources on these topics (and in the case of Lex, it was spelled incorrectly as Soylent Viridian). Soylens Viridians is often also claimed in many fan discussions to actually not contain human corpses, or to be proof that the notion of corpse-starch is...

To kick off, here is a post I originally made over at r/40kLore on Reddit surveying a grimdark element of the lore which is endlessly debated online: corpse-starch. It's a very long post, so here’s a quick TL:DR of its sections: 1) Why a post on ‘corpse-starch’? 2) Lots of lore examples about corpse-starch. 3) Thoughts on the place of corpse-starch in the lore.Part 1: Why such a lengthy post about corpse-starch? The topic of course-starch arises constantly in fan discussions  and is often very divisive. In memelore, it’s place in 40k can be exaggerated, with it being presented as the standard food for the Imperium as a whole. By contrast, there are plenty of people who in pushing back against this memelore, or who just don’t like the concept, go too far and suggest that corpse-starch barely exists within the Imperium or 40k lore, say that it is only used rarely as a last resort back-up in emergencies, or make claims such as that it is just a nickname given to food that people don’t...