A Geek History of Time - Episode 383 - Tyranids vs Yuuzhan Vong part I

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

You know, the thing is, you have reached farther for less good. To be blunt, the money in tabletop games isn't great. We have to wind up with the Church of England because obvi, I'll start. I mean, you're here to be the expert, but in the pale... That one, oddly, doesn't make me angry. Because, you know, who's the boss? You know what? I'm going to keep my head down inoffensive as I can to everybody possible.

And that's it. You want to fight? I'm going to dry hump your leg until we're friends. Of course, reminded me of that one woman that I went on a single date with who said, you know, the downside about my job is that we don't show kids drowning anymore. It is a geek history of time. Where we connect in burglary to the real world, my name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California.

And just earlier today, my wife and I put up. a canopy, like a pavilion tent thing, over her car in our driveway because we are approaching the burning season here in Northern California when the sun hates us and wants all of us dead. And my car is small enough to fit in our carport. Neither of our cars are small enough to fit in our garage

because our house was built in 1951. And weren't cars like eight times the size they are now? You know, you'd think so. And yet, by modern standards, the garage in our house is, is ridiculously small. And so in any event, because her car would turn into a literal solar oven without any kind of shade over it, we finally bit the bullet and bought a huge. like 13 by 13 foot pavilion that we put up and then, you know, staked the feet down into the ground. And when she and I went out, we had a date night earlier this evening, and when we went out, the difference in her car's internal temperature when we headed out for the evening was remarkable. Just having that shade over the car.

It was a huge big deal. So, yeah, that was what I was up to earlier today. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I am a U.S. history teacher at the high school level, eventually. So up here in Northern California. And I had a student. I don't want to violate confidences, but also this is, the details of this are necessary to understand.

Okay. So a senior student Okay Allowed a colleague, another senior student, to, to plagiarize off of their paper. Okay, off of their work.

Okay. Yes. So, and there was paraphrasing plagiarism. Okay. Okay. So that's plagiarism, and that counts as plagiarism. Yes.

And so I dinged them. both for plagiarism. Now, the thing is, this student had plagiarized once prior. Oh, no. Okay. So this time, had they not plagiarized, they would have had a passing grade. It dropped them down to a failing grade. The student who they let plagiarize off of them also dropped down, but not to a failing grade because this is their first time plagiarizing. So you helped me, right. And your grade sank lower than mine did. So I still passed. you fail a class that you need for graduation. Okay.

So that's awful. Now, the school system is what it is, and as such, they immediately offered this student a chance at credit recovery, which is the way to still get a passing grade in the class that you just cheated your way into failing, thereby ultimately, what's the word I'm looking for, escaping the consequences of that choice. Right.

You chose dishonesty. Don't worry, kid, we've got this other thing for you. But the thing is, it was the credit recovery class. It turns off in the next four days. Okay. So in order to get through an entire semester's worth of credit recovery in four days, do you know what students need to do? Cheat.

So the consequence of cheating is we will help you avoid the consequence of cheating by giving you a thing that encourages you to cheat, thereby avoiding the consequence of cheating. So now you can cheat your way through the thing that gets you around the consequence of cheating. So. You know, I was all set to go through this episode without getting a beer. I can pause it. That's fine. like like i already i already like i already like i already like i already like i said we had a date night earlier i had two cocktails at dinner and i was thinking yeah you know i don't need but now wow that

i'm i'm i'm i'm so sorry that's such bullshit all of that everything wow okay there's not one part of that that's not awful yeah so I, that, that's, that's rough. Oh, and you feel free to ask me how much time they had in class to prepare this essay, which is essentially a one page five paragraph essay. I know better. At the senior level. Yeah, I know.

I know. See, if I ask that, it's not going to be just, just needing a beer. It's going to be a beer in a scream room. Yeah. Yeah. No, you, because you do the same thing. We've established. You do the same thing I do.

Mm-hmm. you say, we're going to be writing an essay. Here are the materials you're going to be working with. And here is step by step, how I want you to do this. Yes. And we're going to break it down.

And I'm going to walk you through the process and all you have to do is follow along and put in a modicum of effort. Yes. Yeah. No, I know. I know. And so, yeah, that would be screaming and throwing shit

would be, oh my god yeah I'm so sorry that's so that's awful yeah anyway what are you going to talk about well we're gonna lighten the mood by talking about

a an alien invasion from a species that instead of using hard tech uses living biological weapons and is in fact to an extent a living biological weapon.

And those of you who have listened to the podcast for a long time, or more than a couple of episodes, really, no, we'll immediately go, oh, Ed is talking about this. So this must be the Tyrannids from Warhammer 40,000. Oh, okay, yeah. Those of you who aren't 40K heads like me or haven't listened to the podcast for a while and our Star Wars people

might instead have gone in a different direction like I'm sure you did and you are thinking of who, sir? Of the children of Yun Yuzon, the chosen race? Yes. You John Vong. Yes. And so this is going to be episode,

I think at this point, it's four in my mashups nobody asked for I mean, mashups nobody thought about, you know, nerd fights. And this is going to be the tyrannids versus the Yu-Jean Vong. So this is going to be a multi-part thing because I could go on for easily an hour on the Eugon Vong. Well, yeah. So I'm going to start it by giving kind of the game history and if you will, the ecology of the

tyrannids. And then you can jump in and explain. you Jeanne Vaughn, which you are much, much more of an expert in than I am. I, um, when you say I can jump in, I'm just going to tell you, you might as well just pull my string and let it run because it will be voluminous. Okay. I'm good with that. So get all, I'm telling you this is going to be a multi-part episode, right?

Okay, got it. Understood. So if you want to go all the tyrannids all day first, that's fine. I promise you if you spend more than 10 minutes on them we're going to need to split this into two episodes because not to worry I am chatting motherfucking Kathy when it comes to the Yu-Jean Vong Oh yeah no I counted on this

I can break down their armor their coral skippers Their weapons they have several Although they're all based somewhat on the amphistaff There are at least three that are very I mean see here I go Oh yeah you're already getting going Never mind the secret weapons they have never mind Yeah we got to get into the embrace of pain.

We got to get into their use of implants. Never mind the six fucking gods that they have. And like the, the, when you pray to which God. And then there's the cast system. Ed, do all the tyrannid you want because

the next episode and a half or two are going to be. It's just going to be usually. All right. I'm here for it. I'm here for it. All right. So tyrannids,

hey? Tyrannids. And actually I'm going to start talking about Tyrannids, not by talking about Tyrannids. But by talking about... By talking about Alien and its sequels. Oh, okay. So what I want to ask you in regard to Alien,

because this gets to kind of the roots of the Tyrannids. Okay. First of all, have you seen... How many and which ones of the Alien franchise movies have you seen? I have seen... the first half hour of alien cubed and that's it wow really okay it's you know how i have these weird blind spots yeah this is one of them yeah okay so have you ever seen the chest burst or seen from the first alien outside of the context of the film well obviously i've seen uh space balls

okay good point you've so there you go okay it gets out starts singing michigan j4 Frog song. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I've seen Alien. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have seen the, the parody.

I'm not going to say loving parody, but the parody of the most iconic scene from that film, which all of all of the cast members knew something awful was going to happen. The director had not explained to them exactly what the effect was going to be. Oh, because this was a late 70s movie. Actors is in the late 70s movie. Abusing your actors for the right reaction. Yeah. So when the xenomorph actually, you know, bursts through John Hurst's abdomen and, you know, blood sprays everywhere and they all, you know, absolutely scream bloody murder. That's actually the actor screaming bloody murder because, holy shit, who the fuck would do that, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So, so xenomorph, the alien from aliens. right is a humanoid vaguely kind of insectoid like it looks like it has an exoskeleton yeah you put a pill bug on top of some sort of large need creature

with talons yeah that's the pill bug part I hadn't thought of but you're entirely right and it has blindingly fast reflexes a face full of teeth and a life cycle that intentionally evokes violent sexual assault

over the course of the franchise, it becomes canon that the gestating xenomorph, the implanted alien in its host, takes on genetic characteristics of its host. So a xenomorph from a human looks like the alien in aliens or aliens. In Alien 3, Alien cubed, I guess, on the prison planet, the very first thing that gets

implanted is a dog. And so there's a dog xenomorph. Okay. And, you know, so this is a theme within the franchise and, like, I mean, if we were just talking about alien,

we could get into the psychological implications of that and what that horror, you know, represents on a, on a, you know, Freudian kind of level. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's not, you know,

what I'm here to talk about. though, but that idea is something that carries forward into the tyranids. And so Alien came out in 1979. It was a huge hit. It brought Gothic horror into science fiction. Right. It used the same used future aesthetic out of Star Wars. Right.

Yeah. It had a very strongly feminist storyline in which Sigourney Weaver, Ellen Ripley, the exo. At the beginning of the movie, it looks like Tom Scarrot, the captain, is going to wind up being, you know, the protagonist. And Ripley is this tight ass by the book,

you know, just crawling up everybody's butt about you're not following the rules, you're not doing things the way you're supposed to do them. And it turns out, no, she was right. You fucking macho idiots. Like if you had followed protocol, if you had not done this,

stupid shit this thing would not have wound up on board the on board the ship like okay the fuck right yeah um the way i haven't written in my notes is everybody treats her like a shrill bitch for insisting on following the rules not only is she proven right but she's the only survivor except for the cat uh spoiler for a movie that's almost as old as i am um and and it still stands up as a genuinely scary fucking movie uh the practical effect it's the most famous famous which is the chest burster. They're top-notch. They still stand up.

Right. The cinematography is amazing. Like, if I could handle horror movies, it would be one of my favorites because, like, I can look at the technical aspects of it and go, this is an amazing film. But I'm a whim and I can't handle a horror movie. So I'm like, it's brilliant. I can't ever watch it again. Like, I'm done.

Yeah, yeah. Got what you could from it. And now you're done. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like I said, though, saying, all of that. The reason I'm saying that is not because I'm here to talk about alien,

but because it made this huge impact in the science fiction space. It introduced all of these kinds of ideas. It put H.R. Geiger kind of on a mainstream kind of

map because he was the art director and responsible for the design of the xenomorph creature. And so, a lot of horror science fiction if you look you know you can look at sci-fi before alien and sci-fi after alien and there's there's a lot more horror sci-fi stuff going on in in the very early 80s and into the 90s um and and its influence wound up extending onto game tables at least

that's my argument because i'm convinced that the designers of warhammer 40,000 saw alien and we're like we're going to have something like that in our in our warhammer 40,000. game because how could you not like that's just that's so cool yeah and and if I recall correctly they came out in what 81 82 uh 87 is when rogue trader was first printed really yeah so it's it's it's it's a ways down the road I thought like if we go all the way back to like our episode three I could have sworn it was like way early in the 80s I no 40k no no it's uh Warhammer fantasy is like 85, 84, 85. Warhammer 40,000 is 87.

Okay. So, Rogue Trader, 87. So in the original rule book, there is... So that would have been aliens one and two by that point then, right? Yeah, because Alien was 79, aliens was like 84? I'm going to have to look that up because I thought aliens, was 88

really they went almost 10 years yeah I remember there was oh it was 86 okay yeah okay yeah it was Michael Bean

post Terminator oh right okay yeah yeah all right and you know thinking about it it kind of makes sense then because what we see

in aliens is thematically like that's a bunch of imperial guard troops facing off against

you know the beginnings of a tyrannid infestation so yeah like we I can

I can point to where the idea is influenced the guys writing the game so but the tyrannies have been around since Rogue Trader

but they haven't always worked the same way so on page 200 in the Rogue Trader rule book it talks about the tyrannids.

And it describes basically one creature. And that one creature is a, you know, stands about chest high. It can be, if it stands up on a hind leg, it can come up to about human height. But most of the time, it runs on four limbs and has two limbs to fire a weapon. And it's kind of a, it's something between like, an insect and a centaur. Okay. And, you know, roughly mass-wise analogous to a little, slightly smaller than a human,

runs with blinding speed and carries a weapon that is itself a living organism. And now this is the place where Warhammer took the alien idea and ran with it. they describe how you know the weapon that's carried is a flesh borer and it is essentially and there's an article in in white dwarf where there's a short story attached to it

but essentially it is it is itself a living organism its ammunition is its own young that it then spits or vomits at violent speed with an incredibly powerful, you know,

set of sphincter muscles, essentially. Right. It vomits these independent beetles that fly at high speed, hit a target and burrow into its flesh. You said beetles. Yes. Oh, interesting. Okay.

And, you know, they, you know, can get through cracks in armor and, you know, gnaw their way inside a target in, you know, blinding speed and it's described as you know there's incredible body horror involved and they talk about you know that's the tyrannids and they and it mentions that you know they're a hive of mind organism and you know

there are rumors of other other life forms and everything else but basically a tyrannid in rogue traitor is this one creature and kind of put a pin in that description for a little bit because we're going to come back to that later.

Okay. In the same book, a few pages either before or after, I don't have the book in front of me, and I don't remember how they get introduced. But they also introduce the gene stealers. And they're a separate creature. And they're described as being six-limbed, usually standing on their hind legs so they have forearms to attack with. Okay. And they describe the genes dealers as being, you know, hyperfast, have kind of an armored carapace over their body. Okay. And they are able to implant an egg or kind of a virus into a human that if the human survives and,

goes home, that human then becomes over time a gene stealer, a special kind of gene stealer called a patriarch. Okay. And now they don't tie the two creatures together in Rogue Trader. Space Hulk comes out in 90, I want to say it was, and it was essentially stripped down 40K rules where one person is playing the or actually it's it's one or two people are playing space marines and the gene stealers are the enemy aboard a floating wreck in space and um the whole idea of the game is to gradually get through the wreck in mission after mission uh and and the

Gene Stealers, at least in early editions of the game, operated on kind of an if-then chain of decisions. Like, okay, so you're going to place them here. And they're going to, you know, if they see somebody, they're going to charge, if, you know, if under these circumstances, they're going to turn, they're going to run this way, whatever. And these are the ones that are throwing the Beatles at them.

No, these are gene stealers. Gene Steelers have massive, they have four arms. Okay. Two of those arms. Long tongue? No. Yes. Okay. So like a Gene Simmons, but a Gene Steeler. Yes.

Okay. Yes, very much. And so two of those arms are essentially three-digited, and all three digits are sheer-like massive claws. Oh, okay. And then they have two arms that are like human, like human arms only. They have a carapace, and the fingers are unnaturally long, and they end in claws, too. But the claws you really got to be worried about is the space marine player, the big ones on the other two limbs. Okay.

And so in Space Hulk, the game explains, gene stealers are actually the vanguard for the tyrannids. They are the reconnaissance and infiltration force. And so they are able to operate away from the hive mind independently. And then in White Dwarf, eventually, during the era of the second edition of the game, Dark Millennium, rules were introduced for, hey, you can have a gene stealer army.

Oh. And so a gene stealer army, large portions of a gene stealer army look like an Imperial Guard army. Okay. But you're also going to have, your HQ unit is going to be your grand patriarch.

This is the human who, a while back, got infected by a gene stealer. Okay. And they gain psychic powers. Eventually they can potentially connect to the Tyrannid hive mind. And they have children. And part of their psychic powers is an unconscious charisma.

And even though they are loathsome to look upon, especially later on in their unnaturally long lifespan, they are able to seduce members of their own species in order to be able to create a large number of progeny who all mature exceptionally rapidly. Gotcha. And so the first generation of those progeny are hybrids who mostly look human,

but they're going to have like one alien arm. They're going to have like a hidden, an arm that they can like tuck inside their clothes. Right. And then when they reproduce, you're going to have pure strain gene stealers. and the hybrids and the pure strains and their extended kith and kin eventually are going to be driven to overthrow the imperial government of whatever planet they are essentially in preparation for the hive mind to show up and eat everybody so they're the vanguard of a kith army yes so nice I see what you did there that's good so you could you can have a gene Steeler Army at the kind of kind of midpoint late in second edition.

And then finally toward the very end of second edition, Tyrannids as a whole species got an army. And now that first critter that was in the basic rulebook for Rogue Traitor, it got a specific name. It's not just a Tiraninanin anymore because there's lots of different kinds of tyrannids now. Okay. that is a termagant.

A termigant is a Like a termite with a monocle and a sash and like a top. Yeah, kind of, yeah, yeah. Yeah, term of God. Yes. And so termagants are those creatures, you know, six limbs, basically run on four, shoot with two. And then they have friends,

the companion species are hormagons. And hormagons have four legs that they run on and two gigantic Sith-like talons. So one is a shooty beast and one of them is a close combat beast. Okay. And they were distinguished in second edition of the game. They were distinguished as having a very high movement rate. Their attacks were not very high strength, but the claws were pretty effective against armor. and their shooting weapons were not very

not very long ranged but they had a lot of them and they shot a lot of ammo okay so like volley and charge essentially yeah but along with hormagants and termigants now they also introduced a whole bunch of other critters many of which were much bigger Tyrannid warriors

are essentially take a termigant or a hormigant or a hormagont like I just described. Make it three meters tall. Okay. Give it a harder, tougher carapace and then

give it better weapons. So like in one of its more human-like hands, it also warriors stand bipedally. So they're not running on four limbs. So they have forearms that they can use to kill you with. So they might carry a bigger, version of the death spitter. They might carry

a venom cannon which generates and fires gigantic big, you know, javelin-sized poisoned bolts. Okay. But it works on the same mechanism. The gun is a living organism that is

tied into the warrior's own circulatory system, you know, and it generates its ammunition organically, right? And then they would carry like a neural whip, which would just be a long, a long tendril of muscle and sinew with with, you know, a barb on the end of it. And they might carry a bone sword, which is literally what it says on the tent.

Yeah. And so warriors are bigger and tougher and scarier. And they have command ability over the smaller critters. the leader in second edition of a tyrannid invasion is a hive tyrant who is like a warrior only even bigger and has much more independence on the battlefield obviously because it's the one giving the orders essentially and then you also have a creature called a carnifat which is take a warrior double it in size only instead of just making it taller it's much bigger and heavier um it has four gigantic big sithing talons and it's able to vomit a a plasma blast

basically like a heavy weapon and you said that the the warriors themselves were three meters high yeah so carnifex is 20 feet high yeah Wow. Yeah. They're huge. Yeah. I might be over exaggerating the size of a carnifax, but they're big. Yeah.

They're big. Like probably double the mass, if not double the height. Yeah, double the mass for sure. And noticeably taller as well, but maybe not 20 feet high. They're not quite maxized, but they're huge. And so in second edition, this was what was introduced. And the whole idea was they show up on your planet. They are a hive mind.

And their whole motive is to devour everything on the planet. They are, they are eternally hungry. Okay. When, when orcs show up, orcs want to fight you. Orcs, orcs want to prove days to biggest and to baddest by beating you in a fight, right? Right. And, you know, with orcs, the more they fight. the bigger and tougher they get.

It's a thing. You know, the Eldar show up on your world and they want you gone because your world used to be part of their empire and you are messing up the landscaping with your primitive monkey wheeled vehicles. We need you, like, why can't you use gravacist? God damn it.

You know, we spent a generation of our time shaping this planet. And now you're ruining the aesthetic like fuck off and die literally please so that's the elder and you know chaos wants to just you know destroy the imperium and enslave everybody all of those are from a human standpoint bad right we don't we don't but there is something about the visceral horror of no no they're not here because they hate you they're not here because they're angry they're here because your food. You can't negotiate with

I'm going to eat you. Yeah. You can negotiate with I hate you. And it's like, okay, well, if I totally surrender, like, you can enslave me. You know, like, there are ways to, to negotiate with someone who hates you. And that's like the worst way to negotiate, but like there are ways, right? Yeah. But like if somebody's ideologically opposed to your existence, that is a lot harder to negotiate, but if somebody just sees you as nourishment, like, unless you pull a squirrel girl and be like, there's a whole plan of better nourishment over there. Yeah. They're going, they're going not stop until they eat you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's a real, um, a real visceral, uh, level, level of horror involved in, in, in what,

what the tyrannids represent. And then there's the, you know, kind of biological ick horror of, you know, when they attack you, they're literally either vomiting or shitting on you. Right. Like, there's so much, so much going on with, with, in terms of, in terms of the, the psychology involved in what they represent. Yeah. In addition to, we're going to eat you.

It's, uh, our weapons on. you are things that like are just biological functions of expulsion yeah yeah yeah and so i mean that was that was in second edition that was kind of the extent of it is like well the tyranids are here they want to eat everything and you know that's that's the story that's that's the narrative anytime you have a battle where anybody is facing the tyrannids that's what's going on and okay well and that kind of also means that the tyranids are not going to retreat are they uh no they are not And I'll kind of get into the tabletop mechanics of it here in a sec. Which I guess that kind of differs a bit from like normal predators.

Well, normal predators on Earth, a majority of them are solitary. They're not that pack oriented, if I recall. There are still some that are. Don't get me wrong. You know, lions and hyenas and wolves. Yeah. But by and large, everything else is kind of a solitary. Well, orcas.

Yeah, well, maybe it does split 50-50. I don't know. But either way, it is hard to, like a single predator, you can bop it on the nose and have it go, this isn't worth it. I'm going to go find something slower. But, like, if you got a whole swarm, like locusts, like, you can only burn them. Like, you can't really convince them that this, you hit a whole cloud of them with your hands and drive that cloud apart for a second,

they're just going to recombine and keep eating your crops. Yeah, and the locust's analogy is a lot closer to the way tyrannids are described in the lore than trying to equate them with a predator. Predators are essentially opportunistic. You know, they see... Hence they can be convinced to fuck off. Yeah, like, you know, sharks. if you bop one on the nose,

they're going to be like, oh, okay, fuck that, right? You know, a pack of wolves might present more of a problem because there's just kicked Tony, but seven of them. Sal is still behind them. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, if you become desperate enough against really just about any, any solitary predator, if you fight back and don't get killed in the process,

they're going to, they're going to be like, okay, this is not worth it. I didn't sign up for this. I'm looking for an animal that, you know, doesn't, doesn't fight. Like, I'm done. And so, you know, here, this is just, this isn't even predation. This is just a devouring swarm. There is life here.

We will consume it and move on. Right. And so in third edition, they actually started really analyzing like, okay, well, what does that look like and how does that work? And starting in third edition, the biosphere of the ecology of tyrannid creatures began to expand. And so on the tabletop, there are synapse creatures. And part of what I need to reiterate, because I don't think I made enough of a point about it earlier, is that the tyrannids are hive mind.

So they are they are all operating under one massive urge to to feed to find sustenance to, you know, stop resistance and and to devour. Okay. And so your hormagons, your termagants, your gargoyles, which are essentially termagants with with wings. you know, and a whole bunch of other creatures are driven by the hive mind. And so their behavior

still on the tabletop sort of follows an if then kind of a decision tree. If there is a synapse creature somewhere nearby, then the synapse creature has enough

of an individual ego. to be able to see the tactical situation and move things in ways that might not be entirely instinctive. Okay. But if you manage to isolate a tyranny unit by like, so, okay, there's a group of warriors, you know, out at, you know, 18 inches away from me. And in, you know, and out on the edge of their synapse range, they've got like a synapse range of like, you know, 12 inches or something. And so out on the edge of their synapse range is that. this one group of

termagants that's going to give me a very hard time next turn if I don't find a way to deal with them. Well, okay, I'm not actually going to use my shots to take them out. I'm going to use my shots to kill the three warriors. Because if I can kill all three of the warriors, those termagants have now become separated from the hive mind.

And their behavior, they're not going to shoot at me. They're going to, you know, if you know enough about the way Tyrannids work, you can, you know, go, all right, well, I need to separate them because they'll you know, fuck off. Right. And in some circumstances,

what it means is that that unit, you know, when it comes time for that player to do anything with them, that player goes, oh, crap, they're not in a range of a synapse unit, and they're too far away from an enemy unit to do anything. So they just go away. And you get victory points for dealing with them. You know, so you have synapsed creatures

to maintain control over all of the essentially mindless eaters that you've got on the table. Like annex radio offices. Kind of, yeah. And so they are this hive mind entity and you have creatures that like you have a hierarchy. You have the vast majority of them are basically mindless. They're operating on instinct and they are directed by the hive mind. And then you have warriors and other kind of that lower tier command creatures.

features and then above them you have hive tyrants and and other you know major controllers and so in third edition number one they they kind of kind of jiggered with and and and kind of sort of I'm looking for they codified much much more clearly how instinctive behavior was going to to work. Okay. Because it had kind of been a thematic thing in second edition, but it hadn't really had the same level of weight in game. And so in third edition, they said, no, this is a thing.

And this is how it's going to work. So you could kind of more effectively, if you had read the tyrannid rule book, you could be like, okay, I know what I've got to do to try to deal with this. And then at the same time as doing that, they just like, expanded the like I said the ecosystem of tyrannids dramatically

okay so when you say ecosystem yeah you mean like it is what you're the word actually means or is this a metaphoric I'm I'm using it largely metaphorically oh okay because it's it's the best

it's the closest term I can think of okay So you have gene stealers that have already talked about. Right. Hold on a sec here. I'm trying to find. So you got gene stealers. You got the tyrannids.

You got the carnivex. There are carna effect. Carnifax, yeah. Carnifx. You got those three so far up through third edition. And you have the Hort effects, too. Yeah. Yeah.

And I feel like I'm missing one. But. I have tyrant? yeah the hive tyrant okay so those those are what you've got so far yeah and so let's see um just to kind of give you an idea um oh so uh synaptic organisms uh so a a hive tyrant is a is a gigantic creature and there there were special rules in third edition um the way the way normally normally shooting worked in third edition was if you have an enemy unit in front of you, you can't shoot over that enemy unit at anybody behind them. And playing against tyrannids, this would this would be crippling because they have, they have a horde of little griblies in front of you.

And then they've got gigantic big griblies behind them. And you're, you know, there's the, you have no, if you can't choose what to shoot at, you have no meaningful choice. And so there was a rule introduced that said, shoot the big one. Okay. Literally the rule, which was when fighting against a tyrannid army,

if there is like a synapse creature in line of sight, you can target those over the heads of smaller creatures, basically. I'm kind of oversimplifying. But so, and then as a way to, you know, prevent that from being crippling for the tyrannid player, they introduced tyrant guard, which would be literally a bodyguard of warriors, you know,

to stay around the hive tyrant. And they had, in two of their hands, they would have actually a big bio shield that was like a big slab of carapace with muscle behind it that they would be able to move to, you know, try to protect themselves and the hive tyrant.

Lictors are, He's got to be like bodyguards for something. You know, you'd think that. Yeah. But they're not. Elichter is a stealthy burrow down into the ground and ambush, you know, enemy units kind of kind of figure on the battlefield. Within the lore, lictors are part of the earliest forces that arrive on a planet. and they burrow into the ground

and they release spores into the soil that eventually turn into structures that become part of what happens later in the invasion. And they are independent, they're not a synapse creature because they can't command other units, but they are independent of the hive mind. Like they're connected to it,

but again, like warriors, they have their own kind of understanding of their own existence. They have self-awareness. And so they operate independently, and they will, you know, hunt down units and cause damage and cause trouble behind the lines before a campaign begins. Basically is the story there. Yeah. I already mentioned gargoyles who are essentially gaunt with wings.

Let's see. Oh, Rippers. Rippers are swarm-based. bases. So in the game, that means they have multiple wounds each, and it's basically just a gigantic base full of tiny little models. Okay. And so when you're shooting at them, you're trying, instead of just trying to pick one off, you're trying to, you know, essentially you're smashing a bunch of bugs. And they are capable of, they do swarm attacks really well. And they march across the table. not especially fast, but they're cheap.

There are lots of points-wise when you're putting army together. They're cheap. And you can create basically a wall of them to run in front of your other stuff and, you know, force your opponent to use heavy weapons to kill these things that are, you know, they're potentially a threat, but they're mostly a threat in combination with whatever's behind them. Okay. Yeah.

And in the lore, they are. kind of end stage organisms in the invasion when resistance has been subjugated rippers swarm out over the surface

and just eat everything creatures, plants, anything, just biomass, any and all of it, they just devour it.

And then they crawl into a nutrient pool where they get digested along with all the biomass that they ingested. Okay.

They're like aggressive mini stomachs. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Basically. And again, all of their ecology is based on massive rapid consumption of what's in front of them. So hard to negotiate with that. Yeah. So when the tyrannids invade, there are essentially three phases of an invasion.

The first invasion is reconna. or the first phase is reconnaissance. Okay. So gene stealers, if a gene stealer cult gets established on a planet, um, the human population winds up getting infiltrated and eventually out reproduced by the gene stealers. Okay. And eventually the gene stealers become powerful enough to take control of the planet.

And they then, send a psychic signal out into the world, out into the galaxy. And they usually believe that they are, that they are summoning some kind of benevolent God. Okay. What they are actually doing is they're sending a psychic signal out to a hive fleet. And the planet becomes a psychic beacon, and the hive fleet goes, ah, that planet's ready.

Right. And then, you know, the hive fleet then, sends forces. Now the other way that a planet can get discovered is Hive fleets send out

essentially scout ships living scout ships in all directions. Dron, I'm trying to what's the term for him? Vanguard drone ships get sent out

and these are very small in terms of like picking them up on sensors they're very, very quiet and they're very fast. And they show up in a system and they, you know, send lictor organisms and gene stealers, potentially gene stealers down onto a planet to start the reconnaissance process. Is this a place that is going to be worth anything, you know? And worth anything is, can we eat a lot of it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not treasure. It's not strategic. It's not geopolitical. It's no. It's, it's.

Does this planet harbor enough life for it to be worth us showing up and eating it? Right. Are there enough calories here? Yeah. Yeah. So once that determination gets made, once it's like, oh, yeah, no, this pings the life signs meter. You know, a beacon gets sent back to the hive fleet. And usually the hive fleet is centered around one or more immense.

again, living ships called a hive ship. Mm-hmm. And they enter the system and they enter orbit over a planet and they immediately bombard the planet with, with spore bombs, which prepare the ground. They spread spores for, for, again, structures that are going to show up later in the devouring process. And coincidentally, they're also essentially, you know, poison bombs. that, you know, gas, large portions of the, of the planet's population. But doesn't render them inedible? No, does not render them inedible to the tyranids.

And so the first sign for many planets that they're, you know, if they get taken by surprise, the first sign they have that the tyrannids are coming is every psychic on the planet immediately starts, well, gradually over a rapid period of time. First they start having immense, terrible nightmares. And then their every waking moment is overshadowed by the presence of a massive, massive

presence in the warp. A just deathly, literally it is referred to. It's where I get the phrase, shadow in the warp that gets cast over the psychic veil of the planet and it is the hive mind

and so this cuts the planet off from astopathic communication with the rest of the Imperium and remember that's the way in this setting that's that's the main way that planets maintain faster than light mostly communication with the rest of the Imperium is psychics, astropaths

sending psychic messages to each other and so this cuts the planet off, which is also part of the why, part of the reason it's called a shadow in the warp is to the rest of the galaxy, this whole region of space is now going dark. Okay. Now, is that

the only reason a place will go dark or are there other reasons as well? There are like an individual planet losing contact could be for a number of reasons. Okay. A subsector going dark rapidly over a very short period of time is a pretty clear

indication that one of the likely options is a hive fleet has arrived. Gotcha. Okay. So during the infestation phase, microbial life gets launched at the planet in order to outcompete whatever's already there to kind of bioform the planet. So they're basically sending rabbits and camels to Australia. Yeah.

Yeah. actually that's not a bad to get into a commonwealth analogy yes camels famously can eat about 90% of the flora found in the Australian desert most creatures in the Australian desert can eat maybe 10 to 15% of it so when they brought camels they became such an invasive species like it it got bad and And yeah. And same thing with the rabbits thing like that in New Zealand especially. But yeah. So the, the assault phase begins when Gaunt's gargoyles, more jeans stealers throughout the whole process, more gene stealers because they're so useful for so many things.

And then Warrior, this is when you see Warriors start showing up. and Carnifexes and even because, of course, if the Imperium has Titans, right? We talked about Titans in an earlier episode. Right. The Imperium has Titans. And because the Imperium has Titans, Eldar have to have Titans and orcs have to have something like a Titan.

And so, so do the Tyrannids. They have biotitans. And the model for a biotitan is one of the most I mean I find it hard to find the general adjective

to use because it is hideous it is this it's like something out of my nightmares it's it's a foot tall on a tabletop where most miniatures

are 28 millimeters right it's it's huge it's this big thing and it it looks like a daddy long legs with claws that went to a metal concert

it's got spines and spikes all over its body it carries under its body in two of its arms it carries a gigantic pair depending on how you want to arm it it's got multiple big ugly Titan scale tyrannid weapons I mean it's it's hideous but from the standpoint of I'm a modeler and I'm looking at this as a model,

it's an amazing technical feat. So anyway, they have Titans as well, just like everybody else in this universe. And so this is when all of the big heavy shock troop kind of critters show up. And they proceed to you know, just inexorably throw wave after wave after wave

of beasts against whoever is there on the planet whether it's space marines whether it's Imperial Guard, whether it's orcs, whoever it is, whoever's on the planet it is an inexorable

assault and it sounds like it's just also just unrelenting, unyielding and does not care who it's going after. Like there's no there's no extra verve on the attacks or reluctance on the attacks.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Or a force of nature. They are, they are a force of nature. And in order to stop a tyrannid invasion, you need to destroy whatever the command creatures are on the ground. So you're going to be going to have to, you're going to have to kill the hive tyrant leading a given, basically, whatever hive tyrants are on are on the planet you got to kill them there are um creatures

that are also synapsed creatures but are specifically zoanthropes they're called that are basically giant floating psychic brains with with uh vestigial bug-like bodies attached to them uh you need to kill them you need to kill all the warriors that you can basically anything that is a synapse creature you need to kill and then you need to mop up all of the other critters. While you're doing that up in orbit, you need to be able to take out the hive ship because the hive ship is birthing more creatures to throw down onto the planet constantly. Okay. And so just like everything else in Warhammer 40,000, there are fleets.

You can build a tyrannid fleet in Battlefleet, Gothic. which is the space battle game for Warhammer. And in that game, Tyrannid fleets actually just, except for a couple of ships, most of their escorts just follow and if then decision tree. Which is entertaining to watch

because if somebody knows what they're doing, they can essentially out, out, I don't want to say, Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, I know where you're going to go. If I do this thing, I can bait you to go this way.

Right. You know. And so anyway, you need to take out the hive ships. And if you manage to stop the invasion, the tyrantids are going to leave spores and, you know, eggs and other stuff behind. so you're going to have to be hypervigilant for another two or three generations because you don't know how many of your people may have gotten infected

by gene stealers. You don't know how many lictors they left behind that are just going to dig down into the dirt and go dormant and stay there for however long. Like, you know, so there is kind of no win. Like lore-wise, there's kind of no winning.

And in the novels in the universe, what has wound up happening in a lot of cases is, okay, look, we're getting all of the people off of the planet, because manpower is our most important resource in the Imperium. We're getting all the people off of the planet, and we are going to virus bomb the whole thing. We're just, we're nuke the whole site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Right.

You know, and burn it to a cinder, you know, give the tyrannids nothing. and then we're going to go to the next two systems from here, like in every direction. We're going to go to the next two systems in every direction, and we're going to do the same thing there. This is a wound on the Imperium, and we're going to cauterize it. Right, right.

And, you know, you have rare examples, like the Blood Angel Space Marine chapter, their planet, BAL, is a rare example because it's the blood angels, and, you know, they have. have to be better than everybody else. Their planet is a rare example of one where, like, no, an invasion was actually fought off. And, you know, it was already an irradiated wasteland.

So they, you know, didn't have to do much there. But, you know. So anyway, it's in universe, in the lore, there's no winning. Like on the tabletop, in a game, at a tournament, whatever, there are obviously ways to win. but like lore-wise, if the tyrantons show up, you're boned. Right. As an individual. It's if, you know, if a tornado shows up, your town is going to be destroyed.

Yeah. Like, the only difference is you can rebuild after the town's been destroyed. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. This is much more of if there's like a three-mile island or Chernobyl. Yeah.

You don't get to rebuild there. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So once, if the tyranids succeed and they manage to overthrow, you know, any defenders, then they begin building capillary towers, which are essentially think biological beanstalks. Okay.

And when I say beanstalk here, I'm talking about the science fiction theory of the idea of a space elevator, beanstalk to a space station. Oh, okay. So they build these gigantic towers, which are surrounded by nutrient pools. And as rippers go out into the countryside across the planet, they bring themselves back to these pools. And then the nutrients from these pools get pumped up into orbit to feed the ships.

And then eventually the ships, you know, suck all the, out of the capillary towers and leave them behind as husks. And eventually the planet is just left as a lifeless rock covered with essentially the think of, you know, when a shell is left behind when a mollusk dies. Right. Those kinds of structures are left all over the planet after the tyrantids move on. And everything living is gone.

Yeah, because these again are like locusts. They're not, they're not setting up some sort of. new eco balance with the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that is, that is the kind of, that is the summary of what the tyrannids are, what they represent in the game and how they are treated in the lore. They are a they can be if played by a moderately skillful opponent that it can be a moderately skillful opponent that it can be a nightmare to try to deal with because they are very, very good at giving you multiple bad choices to make every turn.

Right. Okay, I have a wall of rippers in front of me. am I going to spend my time shooting the Rippers because like if I don't they're going to get into if I don't kill them off somehow they're going to get into close combat with me in like a turn right and then I'm not going to be able to shoot at anybody and behind them or you know a a whole wall another wall of hormagons and when they get into close combat they can cut through my armor like butter so like okay so am I going to shoot at the Rippers?

Am I going to shoot at the Hormagons? Or, like, am I going to try to shift and try to shoot at the big guy, the warriors over here? You know, there's just, there's no, there's no good decision. Every decision is going to suck somehow. And they are a wave after wave after wave. Like, if you're playing a Tyrannid, most of the time, there are a few exceptions. But when you play a Tyrannid army, you are playing a horde army. I would say, depending on the addition of the game,

I would say even more so than an orc player. And like Tyrannids versus Imperial Guard, because Imperial Guard has a very large model count as well. These wind up being very long time-consuming games because you've got to move so many models around and you've got to roll so many dice for everything. Sure. But they represent, like you said,

they are themselves a force of nature. They are inexorable. They are uncaring. Although sometimes in the lore we see that like the the, the, the, the intelligences aboard the hive ships, which are referred to as the Norn queens, which are the ultimate kind of individualized intelligences within the hive mind. They can apparently kind of hold a grudge. Okay. But, but, you know, on the ground against the mass of this wave of chitinous death coming at you, they are uncaring, they are unfeeling, they are unbothered, and you can kill thousands of them. And it will make no difference.

And how many are like in a given battle, how many are fielded? You said that they're like pumping out generations above. but so lore on the table top I know I know that on a table top you would be limited to like maybe 25 per side kind of thing or there'd be rules governing yeah how many points you could put on the table

yeah a brood of hormagons has up to 20 yeah but lore wise what are we talking lore wise tens of thousands okay tens of that like hormagons hormagons armagons termagants legions of them tens of thousands of them

which I know, speaking to you, you're like, well, you know, technically a Legion is only, yeah, I understand.

But I mean, the Rowlandic sense what a Legion was too. Yeah. Yeah. So. I'm not the pedantic one when it comes to military stuff.

Yeah, okay, fair. True. That is. But so tens of thousands. So we're not talking 10,000. We're talking like 70,000.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I can't think of a single thing surviving. this assault. I cannot.

And I've got tons of research on the Ejean Vong. I'll share with you in the next episode. But you're not going to win. Neither will battle mex. Neither will. Like, there's, I don't, I can't think

of a single thing that'll win. So in, if you can like just napalm. So in universe, yeah. The way, in kind of on the tabletop, the way, the way you wind up dealing with this is you use large, blasty, area effect weapons,

you have your own massive volleys of fire. Right. You know, as a space marine player, the joke is, well, you know, one good thing about phasing tyrannids is you're not going to miss. Yeah. You know. And if you're far enough back, you could have lunch while you do it. But, yeah.

Again, they're really fast. Yeah. So. And again, the, you said that the ships above are just pumping out generation after generation. Yeah. So you're going to run out of ammo. Like, yeah, I, again, because they won't get scared and leave.

They'll just keep pumping out multiple generations until they get to eat what they wanted to eat. Yes. So, yeah, I, yeah, I think you found the everything killer. I can't think of a single universe in which they would be defeated. They could be survived. Yeah. You would be fighting a rearguard action to get off planet. Yeah.

And reestablish, but that's about it. Yeah. Yeah, and their name is the great, their epithet is the great devourer. Yeah. And so, yeah, they are, they're, they're terrifying. That's, that's their, their whole reason. And so, I mean, that's, that's pretty much the background for it. So what, what do you, what do you, aside from what you just said, is there anything else you've got as a, as a kind of a takeaway or anything from that?

Um, it's always interesting to me in war gaming and lore gaming, uh, when, okay, I go back to the X-wing tabletop game, right? Okay. The game is called X-Wing. That should be able to take on any ship. And you might need to do some special tactics or whatnot, but you should be able to take on any ship. Okay.

And one of the things that, uh, somebody's in mind and I like to do was to figure out like figure out the X-wing breaker and then what would it take to break that squad and then what would it take to break that squad and on and on and on. Right. To the point where the X-Wings became fairly irrelevant after a few releases,

you know, because there were so many, there were B-wings and oh my God, they had auto-canons. And so now the things that were the X-wing killers are getting just destroyed by the B-wings, well, nothing could beat the B-wings and then you found, you know, and on and on. And at some point, and again, you got the point equalization thing, right?

But at some point, you get to a point where the thing that the game is named after is irrelevant to the iteration of the game because people have to keep coming up with the newer, better, stronger, tougher, good luck beating this thing, kind of stuff. And tier did sound like the ultimate expression of that.

They were for a while. And of course, the other thing that happens is you have power creep. On the tabletop, you have power creep. And which is essentially kind of what you described already. But in 40K, the power creep wound up being that in fourth edition, Tyrannids got their rulebook for fourth edition relatively early. And for a while, everybody at tournaments was like, I don't know how to deal with this.

You can do these bioform modifications on your individual critters and like, oh, my God, how are we supposed to deal with this? Well, then, you know, the next codex that came out, they were like, okay, everybody's complaining. We got to figure out a way to deal with the tyrannids now. And so other armies got special tactics or weapons that it was like, oh, well, this is a hive tyrant killer. Right. I wonder what it does.

You know, and yeah. Well, I didn't mean it was named that. But it was like you looked at the profile of the weapon and you were like, oh, well, yes, this is really great for, you know, anti-armor, but it's also going to be a hive tyrant killer, you know. you know, and it's like, you know, in the lore, it's described as being, you know, this anti-tank weapon, but you're like, yeah, no, that's not anti, that's designed to kill lifetime. Right, right. I don't see what you're doing. You know, and, and so, you know, that, that happens over time. And then, and this is now, we have now heard about the release of 11th edition, Warhammer 40,000 is coming up either the end of this year or early. next. And so they've been around for eight editions.

And they have kind of, there's been a sign wave. Like there have been some editions where it's like, oh, God, tyrannids are like, I don't know how to deal with them. They're unstoppable because, you know, the rules favor close combat in this edition and what the hell. And then the next edition is like, oh, well, all right, tyrannids and orcs are both now boned, you know, long live the Eldar and whoever else, you know. And there's this kind of this sign.

wind wave. And so on the table, they're not as, as, oh, my God, what the hell am I going to do consistently as they are in the lore? You know, everybody in the lore in Warhammer 40,000, depending on who's writing and who the, who the, who the protagonist is and who the antagonist is, different factions are to different degrees, the unstoppable doom of the galaxy. Right. Sometimes it's, the tyranids are just going to devour everything and why are we even fighting? And sometimes it's, no, the necrons have arisen from their tombs after sleeping for, you know, 10 million years. And, you know, woe betide the younger races, you know. Right.

Because otherwise, again, power creep in the lore. Because why bring them up if somebody can easily beat them? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, but in, but in. in the lore, again, it is, it is pretty significantly, you know, kind of the theme is when they show up, you just need to get off planet as fast as you can. Right.

So. Yeah. Well, cool. So yeah. Yeah, I definitely, it's going to be the next episode where I get into the Eurjon Vuong. Okay. I'll tell you right now, they're not going to win against the Tirenets. They've just not.

They, yeah. We'll get into why that is, but essentially, like I said, Tyrnids are a force of nature. They're, they are lore-wise at least. I can't speak to the TTRP, but, like, I mean, those games are built on finding a balance so that random number generators and tactics matter as much as everything else. So, yeah. Cool.

All right. Well, what would you like to recommend to people? In keeping with the theme of kind of both of our factions that we're talking about in this series, I'm going to recommend the War Against the Cotaur, or it might be Chator by David Gerald. It's a science fiction novel that essentially kind of describes a Tyrannid invasion in that for reasons nobody really understands suddenly massive plagues. multiple plagues over the course of several years cause, you know, millions of deaths. And, you know, medical science is mystified by these diseases. And then it becomes clear that some alien intelligence has seeded our planet with their own bioforms in order to invade the planet in or in order to, to ecoform our planet to be more like their own bioforms.

to be more like their planet in preparation for their invasion. And it is a, it is a relatively hard science fiction series. And it is, it is not for the faint of heart. There is, there is a lot of, a lot of squick to deal with.

There's, there's some serious gore. And there are also some very, very traumatic circumstances described over the course of the series. but it's a really well-written book, and Gerald really clearly did a lot of thinking through the process of what would it look like if our planet was being terraformed by an alien species. So it's a very good read.

I highly recommend it War Against the Chitorra by David Gerald. How about you? I'm actually not going to recommend any, books on the Ejean Vong just yet because there's 19 of them. You have plenty to choose from. Yeah. But I am going to

recommend that you watch Chronicles of Riddick so that you can see that just because some characters look badass or some races look badass doesn't mean there are any worth anything. The necromongers

are just disappointing. They have an incredible look to them. I don't particularly enjoy the aesthetic of that whole thing, but they have this incredible look. They come in, they look all intimidating and shit, and then they just lose to a guy with a knife. So, like, you know, just to keep in mind that looks amazing doesn't necessarily mean much beyond that.

All right, fair, important. Yeah. Where can they find us? So we collectively can be found on our website at wauba, wauba, wauva.gikhistorytime.com. Our archive, which continues to expand, is on YouTube under a geek history of time. And our podcast, of course, can be found on the Apple podcast app, on the Amazon podcast app, and on Spotify. Wherever it is that you have found us, please take a moment to subscribe and give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. and I remain, as ever, a shadow in the warp, although I mean a different sense. Yeah, well, I mean that in a difference.

I'm going to have to find a different way to describe that now, but where can you be found, sir? Let's see. You can find me and the Capital Punishment Crew on the first Friday of every month at 9 p.m. at the Sacramento Comedy Spot. You really should come back out. It's probably you've got time to get to the August 7th show. There's also the September 4th show and the October 2nd show. That one will be bilingual as far as I recall.

Yeah, it'll be kind of fun. But you really should come back out. If you haven't been in a while, damn the torpedoes, get yourself some tickets. Go to satcomitistop.com. And grab your tickets in advance so that you get good seats. But you owe it to yourself to come back out. So that's where I would recommend. And like you said, we have a YouTube channel, geek history time.

Play that in the background. Subscribe to it and just play it in the background. It's over 122 episodes have been uploaded now. So we are ahead of the encroaching shadow of the warp that's occurring on all of the podcast apps because we have over 370 episodes. So, you know, they can't just indulge us and keep all 370 on there. Yeah. So go check out the YouTube.

There's all kinds of really good stuff. Nice. Yeah. So, sat comedy spot 9 p.m. First ride of every month. So, well, sir, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, remember, the Emperor protects.