The 40k Lorecast - Bonus episode- A great discussion with John & Brad with Tom from Robots Radio.

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Surprise! Today we have an extra episode available for all of you. This is not a podcast on Warhammer lore, but rather an episode to announce us joining an amazing group of Lore podcasts called Robots Radio. Is a collection of podcasts devoted to the lore of the gaming and nerd culture. In preparation we jumped on with Tom the head of the network as well as the host of the Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and Lord of the Rings Lorecast. We discuss a range of topics, from our casts, his casts, and just gaming and nerd culture in general. It is a fun lighthearted dip that we hope you all enjoy.https://www.robotsradio.net/PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. I don't know that there's an easy way to start this. So I think we'll just, maybe this is me starting it right here. But hey, welcome to the podcast, everybody. You're probably, if you're listening to the 40K lorecast, you're probably wondering who's this voice. I haven't heard them in before. And if you're listening to one of my shows, you're probably like, wait a minute, what's going on? We've got this.

You probably read the title. So spoilers, I guess, not important here. But anyway, we are welcoming on to the network, the Robots Radio Podcast Network, the 40K lorecast with John and Brad, thank you so much for, first of all, for reaching out. And secondly, you and I, all of us have had some conversations

over the last few weeks about setting this up and how this feels like it just makes a lot of sense. And so for people who don't know, I do the Fallout lorecast, I do the Elder Scrolls lorecast, to do the Lord of the Rings lorecast. We have a bunch of other lorecasts on the network. That is the bread and butter of what we do.

in any show that's not a lorecast is probably talking about some sort of video game or nerd culture or sci-fi or fantasy thing or something like that. So we are ecstatic to have you joining us and being on board here. So everybody knows, I'm Tom or Robots. I go by both. In fact, sometimes I say it so quickly, Tom or Robots, people think that's just one title.

I call you Robert to your face as a result of that. Yeah, I like to meet somebody that immediately very strong, say their name completely wrong. It's probably the Voltax. Like, oh. Yeah, so welcome to Jack and Benny, joining the network. So, yeah, tell us, tell my audience, this is, just so everybody knows, this episode is going to go up across all of our different shows. So everyone's going to get a chance to meet everybody.

And we are eventually, by the end of this episode, going to be talking about things like, well, how do Fallout and 40K or elder scrolls? What are they have in common? How are they different? Why do we like all of these things at the same time? and that kind of stuff. But before we get there, why don't you introduce yourself to my audience

and let them know what you guys do? Go for it, Brad. I was about to say, I was going to let you say it first, and then I was going to one-up anything you said. That's why I'm going to go first. We both play 40K. Can you tell if these guys are strategy gamers?

They're strategy gaming right here. We're 100% strategy. I'm choosing to go second. Go ahead, this is bullshit. However, I am Brad from the 40K lore cast. I've known for a lot of people from playing.

40K, which I've been doing since the end of the beginning of time. There's a reason why I'm known as old man Brad. We won't give that email out again, by the way, because that's dead. I set it on fire. Your email, your 40K almost actually predates high speed internet. Yeah. That was true. Wow.

Yeah. I also have an email with my name and I have a one on the end of it and a two on the end of it, but I also think that I might have the original. I'm just that old that I accidentally created it and locked myself out. That's how old I am for stuff. Okay. So if you're looking for an old man show, they should definitely tune into this show, right? We spend a bunch of time also discussing how to open a PDF.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the best thing is, is during the 40K lore cast, I don't think we've ever had an episode where we didn't talk about different games from Fallout to Mass Effect to whatever. Yeah. Because we've both been wild avid gamers since forever. You know, I'm playing Dragon Age 4 on Nintendo.

I was doing just the tech. versions of dungeon crawls back on the Commodore 64. A little too old for everybody? I'm just saying, that was the thing. Yeah. It hurts. Yeah. It hurts.

It hurts. It hurts, but it's true. I was in a thing. So obviously, I'm also, I'm John Barsadi. I'm the other host of the 40K lore cast. Like Brad, we can play in the game. I mean, I started playing the game in the early 90s and then hard quit it for almost 20.

Read the lore at a good time because there's some rules that were not my favorite. And then they changed the rules. And I came back to the game. It was wonderful. when I came back to it. That is true. Yeah. I mean, I came back to shield drones,

and that was an improvement. So for those of you who know 40K, think about like, like, because second edition or shield drones, which one do you want to play against? I went to. All of my listeners are like,

okay. Yeah. This is basically what happened. The difference in the games is so, let's talk about the ways. So 40K lore cast, Brad and I made together as a way to kind of celebrate something that we've been experiencing a lot.

One common thing about Warhammer 40,000 is that, opposed to a video game, it's played live. And you play with, you know, you could be anywhere from in person. 20 people to hundreds of people in a room. And the games are about three hours long with breaks in between. And during those breaks, everyone tends to sit around, eat, sometimes drink, do kind of whatever. Sometimes? Yeah.

Sometimes it gets a little bit rough. But what I'm getting is that where we made the podcast out of was in those times and we're all sitting around, a really common piece. I kept with conversations really about like, lore and pieces of the game, not the competitive element, but just the stories behind the game that are fun.

Sometimes as that's just complaining about, hey, the lore says it does this, but why on Earth is it doing that? The tabletop is significantly different. But the IP of 40K is gigantic. It's just, there's so many factions. There's so many stories. And this all goes back into the early 90s till today.

This is an ever-changing story, adapting storyline that's continuing. on. There's just we, we're, as long as people will listen to us, we've still got material for forever. Yeah. And that's something, real quick, that's, that's something that's very similar with my show. So, for example, both Fallout and Elder Scrolls go back to the 90s. And the series have had multiple entries since then. And there's debate about the, you know, certain things that seem canon or don't, depending on, you know, which game in the series or who is controlling the series at the time in the case of Fallout. And there's all of that stuff. And then there's,

There's the, well, this happened in the game, but is that canon because that's a gameplay thing? You know, there's all, it's a lot of the similar kinds of conversations that we're having over in my stuff. So I totally go. I bought Fallout one on disc. I believe it was a CD. Should have been during the year. Yeah. It was CD-ROM.

It was CEDYROM. It was a chain of stores that exists. I would go a mall. Right. Yeah. Like the Babbage's. Yeah. Did you have Babbage?

Yeah. I never buying it. The cover looked cool. The cover looked cool and I fall out. This was the most amazing thing I'd ever played in my life. Until Fallout 2, unpopular opinion, my favorite fallout. That's actually pretty strong in the community. Yeah, of the people who played the first two, almost everybody I've talked to personally, has said,

Fallin 1 was great, but Fallout 2 was they perfected it. Yeah, I think Fallout Brotherhood of Steel or Fallout Tactics is ready to get some bushback. Absolutely. Yeah, those are very different. Why would you say that to me? I'm having a good time talking to Tom. I actually, all right. Why are you going to ruin things?

I'll just make us not get listeners from Tom Station. I actually enjoy fallout tactics. Is it as good as other fallouts? No, but it was... He's going to double this up with his Terminator 3 is the best Terminator also. No, I said it's better than Terminator 2, number one. But number two, it's the same way, but Fallout Tactics me of XCOM. It's not a hot tank.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a lukewarm take that's sitting out. getting rotten. The first one is good. Terminator 1 is the best. I just think Terminator 2 is not as good as Terminator 3. And I've been,

and our Discord has explained to me that I'm wrong. And I'm just not, and I'm just hanging out in this hill dying. Well, this is why this stuff is fun. It's all subjective. These are all opinions, right? Everybody's experience is different. And that's something that I regularly have to, like,

especially people who comment on YouTube. It's like, hey, man, subjective experience, maybe relax a little bit and just enjoy, you know? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's also, I mean, that's the whole point of gaming, though, is that we game, in my opinion, we game is almost an escape from reality. I don't mean in a bad way. I mean, in a good way, like, hey, because it lets me kind of live,

for one thing, there's right and wrong, there's yeses and no, life is all gray area. Video games give you a bit more of the black and white. It's nice. It's a nice escape. And whatever speaks to you speaks to you, there's so many games out there that I've never played, or I played for five minutes and gave up on, that people love the end of this earth. And that's how it's supposed to work. And that's all it, is what you do is you finally, with stuff in common you celebrate with. I'm like, hey, you love this too? Awesome.

I've met so many people from all over the world because I've traveled for, I was on the America's team for 40K. And so I've been to the world championships, which is 36 to 40 some countries all come together. It used to just be the European team championships, but America didn't realize we weren't part of Europe, so we kept showing up.

We actually want to not be at one point. Yeah. But I met people from my people from, all over the world. And you get into that great talk about games and lore and everything else. And there's so many common games that people play. You get the fallouts, the Elder Scrolls, the mass effects, the old, what was it, the gold boxes for the D&D games. Literally right there on my desktop. It's right. Right. I'm just, you can go into people. You don't even have the common language. You're pulling it together, but like you have those shared

experiences and you can become instant friends with someone. You love this? I love this. We have something that we can talk about. And there's no, my favorite conversations are the, hey, we're sitting around eating and drinking and we were talking about fallout. We were talking about whatever for the last three hours. You're like, did you do anything else? I'm like, not really. We just kind of hung out and talk to gaming and lore and whatever else. Yeah. I mean, that's, that is the spirit of the entire network. That is when I started the network. That is when I started the network. network. That was the thing that I wanted to do. And it grew out of, first I launched the Fallout Lorcast. This is like six years, six plus years ago now. And it took off pretty quickly. It actually

did pretty well for itself, pretty fast. And then I launched the Elder Scrolls Lorcast because I was like, well, if I can talk about Fall, I can talk about Elder Scrolls. And I was still working a full-time job at the time, doing all of this stuff in my extra time. And within a few months, I had made a lot of contacts with other Fallout creators. And I found out, hey, guess what? These people are really cool and they were a lot of these newer creators would do projects doing some really cool stuff and within like four or five months I was like you know we should probably get together and maybe you know if we help each other out build kind of a network or something maybe that'll work out better for all of us and sure enough it's grown to this thing where it's like all these different games and all these different people and they all just like coming together and talking about stuff being able to get made fun of constantly which is what I do I'm ready for it I listen to you from a very long time from your beginning, we first met, and I was like, he sounds very familiar. And finally, I look it up and I'm like, oh, yeah, I've heard him so many times.

And John goes, well done, detective. You couldn't figure out the guy that you've listened to four hours was right in front of you. I'm like, sometimes I have a hard time. It's not just that also you couldn't figure out the guy you're talking to who we'd mentioned to you what his podcast was. You and I had looked at his podcast together live on the TVB, on the TV together. And you went, oh, I've heard you before. Context, to context is everything, right?

Tens of operas. It just is like, what, is this how you bet Springsteen too? We're like, oh, I've got a really good singing voice. You've ever thought about performing? You should probably, you should make a band. Yeah, it happens. But here, let's, I want to know a little bit. I gave a little bit of my background starting,

starting the fall out orchestra and that kind of thing. But I want to know, like, coming to your show, show. You guys have been doing this for a while as well. I'm sure you've covered a lot. I mean, how many episodes are you in now? I think we just recorded 85 the other day. We're not even at two years yet. Yeah, but that's not shabby. Most podcasts, and this is one of those things that I do because I run a network and I used to work in marketing all that kind of thing. Most podcasts don't last more than 10 episodes. Like, like bare. The funny thing is, is we got popular just randomly. And then we got a huge boost.

Space Marine 2, the video game can now. And we just hit the Willy Walk elevator shooting us out the top of the building. It was fantastic. A lot of, like so many new people came in. And these were a lot of people that actually didn't have a background in the actual tabletop game. They only knew it through the video games. And then they found us in the lore cast. So we have a lot of people getting together from,

that chose wildly different ways to get there what their backgrounds and stuff were. And I love that. So first of all, I love that your movie reference was from the 70s. Also, we've already established you're the old man. Also, so I'm curious because that was a video game. In fact, my experience with Warhammer is mostly video games because I've never played the tabletop stuff.

Yeah, the Dawn of War series, Dark Tide is pretty awesome. Space Marine 2 is on my list of things. It's been on sale lately and I'm like, do I pull the trigger yet? Do I have time to use? These are so good, dude. It's worth it even just for that. It's got a very good story, actually. What's the part about that?

I would say is good. It's a short, the doubt, I will knock it with one piece. It's a short game. Yeah, I've heard. It's a multiplayer game. It's meant you can see, it's a multiplayer game that's, that, you know, has a storyline, but it's a very good storyline.

So, especially on sale. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've, I've read reviews. I've watched some videos on it. I'm like, okay, this is, I'm totally going to enjoy this one.

I play it. Do I have time yet to vote to this? But my question is something very similar happens to my shows, for example, when the Fallout TV show came out, boom, the number spiked. When the Rings of Power came out, the Lord of the Rings Lord. That's spiked, right? And the best marketing for our shows is

the main line like doing something. Company who's running the thing, doing something. But I'm curious because people coming from the video game they don't know a whole lot about the deeper lore stuff. Because I mean, as you mentioned before, 40 is a very old series at this point

with lots of war. I mean, there's lots of different types of space birds and there's lots of different aliens and things like that. And if they've played Space Marine too, then they know like this one type of space marine. They know the very tip of the ice brain. You got like, okay, bug monsters. So did you notice that people, like, were you doing certain topics

at the time that people like looked up? Did they go to those topics? Were they just like down for whatever? Did you notice anything like that? I'm going to give John props on this because he keeps us on packed. We had a story arc we want to start with because the game is based in what's called the Horace Heresy. It's the big civil war.

They split all the good guys became, you know, nine legions here, nine legions here, and they split all of their assets, basically in the galaxy from man and went at it. And that's the basis of the game. So we kind of started from there and went, hey, we're going to do offshoots, but we're going to keep it in the timeline.

and we keep going back so people can enter if you don't have a lot of knowledge of 40K we wanted to make it so it wasn't so daunting because that's one of the things as somebody that frequents a lot of Lurcasts that going into any other 40 not just I pat myself in the back but I can't reach because my arm's too short

but a lot of people had just this huge library of great material but it was really hard to follow to get that when am I getting in the pool I want to see. I think one key difference, Tom, some of the shows is that so with, well, I'll use other things you cover,

Fallout's the one I know the best because one of the most invested in. Sure. You've got maybe seven games, eight games now, ever. The main light ones, the main line ones, there's one and two, one, two, three, New Vegas, four. And then 76 is canon, tactics is canon,

according to the most recent announcements for them. So that's seven canon games and four main lines. with New Vegas, which might as well be a canon, like mainly. Exactly. So that's what I'm saying. And so whereas in 40K, we get our information from two sources. One, we have novels of which there are 400. And then you have codexes of which there's probably three or 400 again of those.

Well, it's so. The difference is that whereas like, like, you're so much information. So a lot of people are coming to us because if you're, I mean, names in 40, if you're super into Death Guard, you've read ever. You've read every book on death card. You know every, you owned every death guard code. You've consumed death card all the way through. You know it through and through.

But that's one of, I think, 30 factions right now. I have to check that. It's 28 right now if you don't count the small. You then play against. And there's some offshoot that are, yeah. Count the small is like 70. I know, people agent's army for that. There's also inside those 28 factions,

there's a bunch of drop downs for a bunch of different. Yeah. So what happens is, so for example, you as that death guard, it's what I think a lot of our listeners are, you as our death guard player who knows death guard better than anyone. It's an extreme example. You're that level. You play against a friend of yours who's got an Imperial Guard army.

You're tacitly aware of it. You don't really maybe have the time or energy to go read the 40 or plus Imperial Guard books, that's where I think a lot of our stuff is. And again, I could be wrong on this. Maybe I've got listeners saying that you guys do a terrible job of this. but the goal we have, and I've asked, is to give enough of a high-level overview of each group and each piece so that when you're going back to the origin of our cast,

sitting around with people having a conversation, you're like, oh, I do know about that. Oh, I heard this thing. Or even more so, if you're sitting there saying, hey, there's 400 books where I start. Yeah. Well, I heard John and Brad talking about this story. It sounded awesome.

I'm going to go pick up Gaunt's ghosts. I'm going to go pick up. We get asked that a lot, too. That's one of the biggest things of where should I start? Where should I? What are the best things to read? Just where should I enter the lore? Yeah.

And the thing about it is I'm super excited about the Lord. Johnson said, but I'm overly excited. He's in charge of basically putting the baby carrier on me so I don't just run around yelling at everything that's shiny. But I think we carry that over into the cast because you have to be passionate about whatever you're doing in a lore cast, whether it's, you know, you know, whatever type of game, whatever you're trying to go through, I'm generally excited and or mad if people that listen to ours, they can get me started by Lords of Terra.

But I'm kind of mad just thinking about that, by the way. Bor. Erebus, yeah. God. But you're right, though. You have to be passionate about it. It has to be something that you are willing to devote your time and experience into. So what I find interesting about this is that each of the series that we talk about has kind of

this different, the lore is laid out in different ways. So for you, it's like across all these novels and these codexes and then also in the games and that kind of thing. But for Fallout, it's like, okay, these are the games. This is where most of the lore is. Now there's a TV show. Which helps. And which helps.

But the games themselves are these huge, like, open world games with all of these characters and all of these different little bits and details and things like that. And then you go to something like Elder Scrolls. And similar in that the majority of the lore is the mainline games, but it started long and, like, in Fallout, the lore from Fallout 1 still feels like it tracks with the other lore later for the most part. There will be people who argue that once Bethesda took over. It wasn't as good and all of that.

Of course, people have those kinds of opinions. But in Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls Arena was basically like, well, how do we make a game in the early 90s? Talk about those gold box D&D games that's pulling from games like that. And we just kind of do our own spin. on D&D. And I have some, the more I've studied the way that that storyline plays out and Lotus, my co-host and I will talk about this pretty regularly. I have this, this theory that the lore that came from the very first game is actually them retelling a tabletop playing of D&D.

Yeah. And the main characters were their playable characters. And I think that might be what happened. I will get yelled at for this, but I just think everything's rooted in D&D. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I play D&D in 80s. And I really, I really. I'm talking D&D1 and I call it D&D one. And then, I mean, I still have. Yeah. Before advanced D&D was a thing. You were playing.

Because A&D is actually all I have here. So if I walk out of this room, I'm in over to a closet, I've got 20 maybe books of AD and D. I also have 40 books of Rifts. That's actually the other one I played, which no one liked. Everyone loved Rifts and then went to play it. And they're like this.

It's so involved, dude. Oh, your character creation is like three and a half hours. Yeah. Palladium made some mistakes. But anyway, it's a side note. But what I'm with you on that Tom dead on is, like, yeah, like, it was because D&D just seemed to me get lucky. They wrote a game in the 80s that was in some ways perfect. Yeah.

Like it needed improvement, but the concept was perfect. Right. Right. And it goes all the way back to the 70s. In fact, so you and I are similar ages. And I didn't get a chance to play D&D, just like I didn't get a chance to play Warhammer because I didn't have any friends playing it. Right. But my dad handed me down his D&D manuals. from when he would play with his friends in college.

And I would pour over those books. I couldn't play them. They're well written. But I was just like, oh, what are these monsters? And what? Okay, you roll down. I'm trying to figure out how do you even play this? Because then have anyone tell me how to play it?

Yeah. And I found that so enchanting to just pull that stuff out of there. And then there's another, like we can draw a direct line, all of this stuff, all the way back to J.R. Tolkien, who inspired guys like Guy Gax with D&D and that kind of thing. So doing the Lord of the Rings lore cast, I talk about a lot of this stuff, and sometimes that stuff comes up. So you can draw a direct line from J.R. Tolkien to D&D, and then that branches off to, you know, Warhammer and to Elder Scrolls, and then eventually to fallout, and then all of that stuff over time. And to go back to my original point, the Fallout series is set up mostly games, yours are set up mostly novels and those kinds of things. Elder Scrolls is interesting because it's different because we haven't had a mainline game in 14 years.

years. But Elder Scrolls Online... I didn't realize that. It's been forever. Skyrim. Yeah, Skyrim was like, what was that, 2011? Yeah. But after Skyrim came out, Elder Scrolls Online came out. And every year that they've been out, they've released a new zone with new lore and new stories and those kinds of things. And so Lotus and I joke about this all the time, but there's more lore from Elder Scrolls online than there is from all the other games added up at this point. And so we get the same kind of thing because people will be like, well, I never really got into it because it was an

MMO and it's absolutely a game you could play by yourself. And a lot of people like misunderstand that. Like most of the time I just do stuff solo. I just want to get through the stories and, you know, build my character and do fun things like that. I'm not so into the group content as much. But like, if you miss that, you're missing where they've taken lore all the way from the first game, the second game, the spinoff games. And they've gone deeper into it because they were like, oh, there's the mention of this city in arena and in arena it was just like this procedural generated

every city looked basically the same and here all of a sudden we get to see it in Elder Scrolls online and it's stylized and there's like a real place you can go with interesting characters and it fits the race that lives there really well and there's some really cool side stories about why the buildings look the way they do and all of this kind of stuff

so it reminds me of like the show The Mandalorian John is it Farvrau the director one of the main things that he did when he was making it was, as he's been going through it, has been saying, I want everyone to go back and go to every, like, basically any ever mention of Star Wars. Let's start trying, basically, let's try to take this, like, fractured things is all over the place and bring it back in. And I'm going to go, a very strange reference, but there was a robot chicken. So robot chicken

Star Wars, the third one, one of the people kept saying wizard. I'm bringing it back. And the only reason I laugh is it in Spader. Mandalorian C.O.3 or something. He ends up playing and goes, that was wizard. And my wife had to listen to me laugh for two straight minutes and paused the show because he made a robot

chicken reference in a Disney show. And I was just so overjoyed by it. But it is. It's that piece. Because when you do that to someone who knows the lore, that puzzle goes together and like our in our heart and we just couldn't be happier. Yeah. It's one of those things. A lot of, like so

jumping to Tolkien stuff. The Rings of Power has had kind of a mixed reception. Some people really like it. Some people have some problems with it. All of that. And I will agree that there are things they could have done better. But while watching season two and seeing these battles that occur in the Silmarillion, they're not in the Lord of the Rings, they're not in the Hobbit.

They're in the hardest to read book that Tolkien ever put together. And his son had to actually put it together and edited it. And there are these epic battles. And the big conflict at the end of the second season, And I never expected I would ever see that on a screen. Even after getting Lord of the Rings and how good Lord of the Rings was, I was like, they're never going to cover stuff that was in the Silmarillion. That's ridiculous.

And all of a sudden they did. And I'm like, that's amazing. Like there's a scene where Sauron hoists up. Oh, his name fell on my head, the Smith guy. It's going to come to me as soon as we're done talking about this. And in the book, it is graphic. Sauron takes a banner, stabs him through the chest and hoists them up and uses him as his flag, as his battle flag.

And they had an homage to that in the show where he's like torturing him and he's up on the top of this pole up against the wall. And like that kind of stuff. I'm just like, that's never going to happen. And all of a sudden it does. So yeah. There's something about that.

It just brings you together. And this is again, because what happens is it's a cool scene out of the way. So someone who's never seen it or read that book watches that scene and goes, oh, that's cool. And it's great that you do that. And then at the same time of someone who's read it, like do you?

It's so much more. though, like your experience is mom. So, you know, I want to ask on this, where do you rank those? Fallout versus, I mean, the Lord of the Rings, where are your adaptations? Like, where's your ranking? Like, my personal rank for what I like,

what series I like best or my, which type of ranking do you want? Right. Did you offer a line to say Lord of the Rings is the best adaptation ever? Because if he doesn't say that, I think he might lose listeners. Like, what's about, are we going like? I want to go, I want to go games. How about that? Okay. So are we going like, what is my favorite?

game or are we going like what is the best adaptation of this lore in a thing? Additation for you that's came out out of games right now. Out of games like games to something. Games in general. Yeah, not him to mean. The fallout TV show hit it really, really hard. Like I love. That's what

was in my mind because you were saying Easter eggs and stuff because I played through all the Fallout games so many different times they did a lot of homages and Easter eggs in all of the Fallout of the series shows. And I thought what both you were saying,

I felt like I got so much more from that series because I was like, oh, I got so excited every time that something was in the background. They were using this. Yeah, they printed. What's it called when you use a thing to print physical? 3D print. They 3D printed using the actual geometry from the games

for like the guns and like some of the other little items and things. And so that's why in the show, when somebody's holding up certain types of pistols or whatever, they look like they're from the game because they're actually from the game and they were just 3D printed into reality. I really enjoyed that one. I was just wondering where your thoughts are like so.

Because a lot of times they miss. And the thing is is whether or not something I think hits it out of the park, I do like to support because I want more of them to be made. Right. I would rather have them swing and miss and then go, okay, well, that didn't work. So let's try again.

100%. I mean, how many times we've got a fantastic four movie about to come out this summer, right? There are, this is what the fourth or fifth one that we've had? 11? Yeah. Like, they've done it so many times and yet they keep trying. And I'm fine with that because maybe this one will be the one that we're all like,

oh, that one's really good, you know, like. No, I'm with you. And it's funny because as soon as Brad said that and asked me the question, I went to my browser and started Googling, like, let's see what their options are. I mean, I will say I'd have to go last of us. But man, there's some misses hanging. out of here. Oh, yeah.

Like the Warcraft movie was, eh. Oh, it's funny. The TV shows are better than the movies we have Prince of Persia. Yeah, I never saw that one, yeah. It was, you did yourself a fan. There were different team raters. I think, I think the Ender's game might be the biggest disappointment of the old.

Don't get me started. Right. Because it is my, it's my favorite book, period. Ender's game is my favorite book out of a billion books that I've read. I watched that movie and I'm like, I'm in a fight. somebody above it. When the Street Fighter movie was bad, oh my God.

Street Fighter 2, we're okay with it. Whatever. But you know, when Ender's game was bad? Did you guys watch the original Mortal Kombat in the theater? Me too. Yeah, yeah. That was as a teenager when that came out, I was like,

okay, I think a part of it was just the soundtrack. Soundtrack was, yeah. Yeah. I was like, okay, this is ridiculous, but. But at the time, I was like, yeah, it felt like a good popcorn movie. It was like, okay, it was a bunch of ridiculousness on the screen. I'm cool with it. That's not thing.

It's fine, but I just buy more laugh. It's not great. That was entirely me setting up Brad to make him sad. I'm just at some point. I'm just going to be so bad at this game and watch his face just sink a little bit. I'm still angry right now. It's, I have that. Ender's game is in my house on every single level of my house.

There's a copy somewhere everywhere. Because I've also read it so many times. but I used to travel, well, I still travel, but I used to travel a lot, lot. And certain things would I'd want to grab when I'm out. I'm like, I'm going to read this again, you know, just because it gives me that whole remembrance of the first times that I read it.

And a lot of games are like that too. I go back, hell, I've played Mass Effect through, I can't even tell you how many times I've played it through. Because it gives me that whole, I love this setting, and it puts me back into the, when I first started playing. Right.

I was discovering things. I get that again when I get a replay. If I wait a little bit, you know, you still remember what's going to happen. But I love that, that the replay value of games. Yeah, you mentioned, you mentioned Mass Effect. I used to do the Mass Effect lorecast. In fact, I'm on it for the majority that I just, I just handed it off to another co-host back in December.

And they're still going with it. It's still on the network. So if you like Mass Effect, go check it out. You'll hear me through like the first 200-something episodes or however many it was. So, yeah, absolutely on the same, on the same, like, in the same place as you with those types of games and series. So here's something I'm curious about. 40K hasn't really had a adaptation yet for like movies and TV shows.

There's the rumor that we have Henry Cavill working on something for Amazon. What will make that absolutely work for you? Like in your mind, when you picture going and seeing this, what are the key components for it to actually... John and I are arguing instantaneously on it. I'm giving it mind, screw it. I want one of two things. I want it to be relatable. the world is so big

and the main space marines that are like huge, the epic fighting force I feel is too large for like a TV show. There's people that are just regular humans called road traders that kind of go everywhere in the galaxy. They get a

hall pass where they can go anywhere they want. There's millions of worlds in just the Imperium of man, humans. And then there's, the others are inquisitors who are from the dark age and they're looking for heresy. And you can do that also and both of them would work really, really well.

I just want something that connects with as many people as humanly possible. And I don't know if just like the big Marines, which are the poster children for the game. Right. Marines are. It's kind of like in Fallout, you have different characters. And yes, power armor shows up. The Brotherhood of Steel shows up. But that's like even the character who's the brother.

of steel person is just new. He's not one of the traditionally experienced ones. You're coming at it from this perspective of somebody who's new, who's kind of learning the ropes while the audience does as well. And I agree with you. I think that that's going to Tolkien. That's the reason why you start in the Shire is because that feels like a familiar world, even though they're hobbits, it feels the closest to our world.

And then you get deeper and deeper into the fantasy and, you know, all the other deeper stuff. So, yeah. Really, John, no short joke for that one? No, it was going to be. I'm like waiting, just waiting. No, it's like, you identify with the Shire because you're one of the people. Because you're a dwarf. That is true.

You're with the book. The difference is the Shire, like, the Shire's outside, like growing things, doing all that stuff. You take an axe and pick out of a wall to get the shiny jets. I know you well enough. Like, it's also wrong. But mining's probably bad for the migraines. The sunlight's bad for the migraines. So pick one, you know.

Yeah, just to sit in the dark if you'll be fine. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, my thing. is like, so the only, like, again, lifelong fallout play, the only complaint I actually have in the shift over from Sierra to be the Bethesda, that's correct, right? It was interplay, but

it may have been published by Sierra. There was, I know there's a Sierra Games logo when I turned on. I remember that one. Were they that black aisle first time? It used to be the show was really heavy into the dark humor. Or sorry, the game. And Fallout 4 and 3,4

have it. Vegas actually gets, it was good in Vegas, it moves around a little bit. Because some of the original creators worked on Vegas. Yeah, that would make sense. That's kind of where like one of my, so my actual most open complaint about 40K is if you read it a certain way, it's incredibly depressing. Oh yeah.

Incredibly depressing. No, it's a dark fascist future where everybody's constantly murdering each other. And it's a same thing, you know, going into Fallout, I think, in that regard to is you could write that game to be just true post-apocalyptic nightmare zone. But it's nice when they go, yeah, look, it's a post-apocalyptic, nightmare zone. Don't get me wrong. But you'll random to go to this place and there'll be a ghoul who's actually funny and is turning into a tree.

And it's great. And I want that's my thing of of Warhammer as I'd like to see a bit more like comedic relief brought into it. Kind of like what you saw with The Witcher actually in some regards. That's where like I'd like to see more of a shift into it. And so from the Henry Cavill

series, they're going to do something. It'll be epic. I'll watch it no matter what. But I would like, I would personally like to see it be less absolute grim dark, set in a grim dark and area. But let's enjoy ourselves a little bit. Because to me, lifelong RPG player, those are the best games are the ones that are set.

You know, the world is ending, blah, blah, blah, or the world has ended. But it's not just, you know, people stabbing each other over a piece of meat. It actually is. Yeah, you have to do life. Give me some bits. Give me some like, oh, actually.

And then this bit's a little bit humorous here. Right. I mean, if you want to go what I want for 40K, I want Firefly in the 40K universe. Oh, wow, that's a fun idea. Would you have like a core team of people who are like rogue traders or something? You could do that with the road trader or you could do it with the Inquisitor. That's why I was,

we have separate. You could just take the original Firefly series. Don't even change a script very much. Change up your uniforms. If you don't add in the Zenos. That just works, though. It really does work. But it also makes it more impactful if somebody like anything that's crazy powerful or crazy

humongous or because if you keep the scale on the scale of human beings, then anytime you get some dude who's like 12 feet tall in power armor or you get some gigantic bug or anything like that, all of a sudden you go from like, hey, this episode's us doing normal things and we land on a planet and all of a sudden, oh crap, there's a battle coming out and some crazy gigantic thing happens. and that sounds amazing rather than everything's amazing all the time. Well, nothing's amazing. That's my problem with the Marine thing on that is I was worried

because that's what they had talked about doing with 40K is doing something with the Marines and the Horace Heresy. But the problem is that those guys are so much bigger, better, faster, stronger, everything than everybody else. It's the difference between... It's the difference real quick.

It's the difference between, like, I don't know, you guys watch the Daredevil Born Again series, Okay, so my son is 14, so he's old enough to be watching these things and understands like the artistic intent of a lot of it. We have these really good conversations about it. But one of the things that really clicked for him was when it's Thor and the Hulk punching each other, it doesn't, you don't feel the pain. They're freaking a Hulk and a God. And a God. But when it's a dude, punch in another dude and one of them gets a knife in the shoulder, you're like, oh, oh, oh.

It's somebody you can relate with. Absolutely. Yeah. And every little bit of damage, every little bit of pain adds up because everybody knows what it's like to be injured and to know how hard it is. Even just getting a poke in the arm, heck, you fall down to skin your knee. You don't want to bend your knee. You know, like it doesn't take that much for us to feel like pain. My favorite shows the movies is still the amount of people that just shake off the gut shot.

Right. Yeah. You just shot in the stomach. You're like, you're not running around. They always just to go, it's just a flesh wound. here. Like, no, it's a, you're going to die, man. And I'm not going anywhere. Right. I love, like, my friend of mine was the stunt coordinator for one of the John Wick movies. Yeah. Like, I love him, but I've also like, dude, you and you know, you can't just pull up your suit jacket when someone shoots you and stop a bullet.

Right. Right. It's a Kevlar. Super cool. I watch it and I loved it. Right. But, because like, I, that's one thing that I love is when you watch a movie. Like, it's, so one of my rules in things, in all things, sci-fi, fantasy, whatever it is, never explain. it to me because the second you add the world of physics, I now can criticize you and rip you apart. Right, you're looking for every little hole. Yeah, because it's easy to do. I'm watching John Wick, I'm walking out like, wait a minute, I can't move my arm that. How is he stopping a bullet

by moving his, like, is he fastened the speed of sound? Right. People just shaking up. Man, that changed it in the movie. You're like, hey man, you just got a knife buried into your leg and you're like, that was like 10 minutes ago. Don't walk it off. Fine, that'll be fun. Yeah, we any of us go get surgery and it

makes us weeks. Weeks. I was just going to say, keep in the leg. You know what it feels like? Watch Ricky Bobby. Watch how to dig a night. Accurate representation

and getting stabbed in the leg. Right. Right. It's just, they just shake things off. You're like, hey, man. The gun wound is my favorite, though. You're always like,

I got shot in the stomach. That's no big deal. You're like, that is such a big deal. Yeah, I think. But to be, to bring it back, though, the video games, that kind of stuff, that's always the challenge,

though, with a lot of the video game world, because he's always supposed to be superheroes and Superman and all that stuff. And 40K has a little bit of a luxury in that there's been a lot of genetic engineering. So it's set in the year of now 41,000. So, you know, we've had some advances. Sure. And that just time.

So you know, you know what does Space Marines well is the YouTube series? So I forget the name. Staris. And then that same guy went on to do the short that was part of the other video game stuff from Amazon. I forget what that series. was called. Both of those. Man, Brad, you did

you had a cast on it. The hammer and boltie guy? No, no, no. The show. The Starty's guy. The creepy Pac-Man thing. The really good. Secret level.

Secret level. Yeah. So I've watched both of those. And maybe it's because they're shorter little snippets. It's not a full-time show. So you can go, okay, these are badass dudes. And this is how badass they are.

Watch them kick everybody's butts. But look, they're not impervious, because now they're up against this thing. and now it's a real challenge. And that's cool because you can just put it. It's like reading a comic book and then putting the one issue of a comic book down and then instead of picking up a novel. Yeah.

Secret level might have been the thing that hit it out of the park for the feel of what 40K is. Yeah. That whole feel was so like the grim, dark. I mean, in 40K, it's kind of everything sucks. Everybody's at war. Everybody's life kind of blows. Just deal with it. But like these guys are so much better.

And we have a hard time on the tabletop because it's going to be a balanced game. But in the lore, you send that group of Marines in and they're fighting against all those commando type troops and they're basically a biker gang. And they just decimate them. Right. Right. It's like dropping a nuke. You might as well just drop a nuke on the bike game.

They had no chance against those guys. But that's an interesting thing we talk about lore though. And this scenario I do think is fascinating me because what we're doing from a lore standpoint is a bit more divergent. and I think a lot of other stuff out there because Warhammer 40K is a tabletop game that you don't even have to know the lore to plug. You have no lore knowledge whatsoever. Honestly, it's a math game.

And it's core. D&D is the same way. You don't necessarily need to know, okay, this is the land of Féeroon, and you're in the city of Neverwinter, and they have a history that you don't need to know all of it. But what I think is, is that when we talk about lore cast, and we talk about the people listening to us,

it's the different group. It's the people who actually do find, and I always go, I don't like using the word escape, because it sounds like we're trying to, get away from me. But it is for me, there's a mental benefit to me in gaming. I can feel it and I experience it. Like when I'm, when I'm too busy to play any video games during like for like a week or two weeks, I am testier. Even though I'm doing other things, I'm doing my jiu-jitsu, I'm doing, I'm working out doing these things. It's not the same. If I can find an hour,

or two hours to sit down and play a video game, I find I'm in a much better mental space than I am normally. And that's why I use the word escape, but I don't, I don't mean it as a negative. I mean it's almost like a recharging. It's like a yeah. I mean, there's a word that it comes. It doesn't mean relax. It doesn't mean recess. There's a word that basically means

to enjoy doing something and it actually recharges and refills you. Yeah. And that's where like, I think somebody's yelling at their speakers right now. Yeah. Well, it's fine. And I think that's all this stuff where we're interacting with and talking about. That's where it really is. That piece of, hey, what I

this. I'm not saying I should do it 20 hours a day because don't. Yeah. No, my God. I would never years ago. Years ago, I was like back when Twitch was new, I was working full-time before I did podcast. I was working full-time job. And I committed to streaming after work in the evenings for four or five hours. This is a reasoning the game experience though. Right. And eventually I gave up on it because I actually ended in my company went through a merger. everybody on my side got got I had to go find a new job basically but after six months of that I was building a community it was going well but now looking at streamers and especially the big ones I mean yeah they're making a ton of money but they have to be there eight 10 hours 12 hours a day every day they're

chained to their seat like the it's not getting the joy from the game that's right right and you and I can't play for the story right you don't see a lot of people especially streaming Some do. But a lot of times, man, you just want that feel. I play a lot of RPG stuff. So, like, I really, really enjoy that one-on-one feeling of discovery and moving through the story. Amazing. Yeah.

Yep. So let's talk about the ways that you engage with these things. One of the ways that I love to engage is not min-maxing on purpose. Is instead to come up with a character, an idea of who my character is, and why they make their decisions and then make my decisions regardless as if it messes something up or not, and then I just have to live with the choices. So, for example, recently I do streaming, but only every so often because it's fun and I like to chat with the community.

And it's a good time. It's not because I have to do it for a living. It's really, like, it's job adjacent because I do this full time, but it doesn't, it's really just for me to have fun. But in the Elder Scrolls Lorcast, we had a competition for people to give us game challenge ideas. And the one that won was that I had to play Skyrim as a, basically a

grumpy drunk monk. So I had no weapons, no armor. I had to only use my punches to fight things, which was hard to begin with. But then any time I came across a drink, I had to drink it. So I wasn't against stealing it from people.

So I was constantly drunk. My stamina was always low. And on top of it, I was also always grumpy. And so I was homeless. So the way I played it was I spawned into the world I went to the closest town so it was like Riverwood I got a quest when did the quest Came back turned in the money turned in the quest

They gave me 50 gold and I was like well that's not enough gold So I guess I have to beat them up So then I started a fight got kicked out of town and I had to run away Before the guards got found me had to find another town to go to because I couldn't go back there And it continued and it was a permadeth until I died and had I been playing on my own I wouldn't have done a permade because it was just fun for the stream But I would have seen like okay can I actually continue you playing this character with this mentality

and actually further through the quest and yeah, it's going to mess stuff up, but maybe it's going to be crazy. I don't know. But that's the joy of it because we can't. I mean, this is like, candidly, life is full of consequences. You have to, you know, and we all make choices, all these things happen, et cetera.

But your games aren't. They don't have a reset button. Right. It's awesome. It's funny. I can't play evil. It's so crazy in games. Most people can't.

Like 70% of people who are pulled can not do an evil play through. I've tried too. Like I'm going to do the evil run of this. And then I get in and I'm like, I don't like this at all. I just started restarted. I restarted by BG3 multiple types now. If a role in honor motor road goes bad or recently one of the Teethlings died. And I was like, no.

No. I'm completely, I'll just redo the game. I like this. I don't like what bad things happen. I'm like, life is hard. I want my video game to be all. the good things happening. Yeah, and sometimes I do that too. So, like, it depends on, like, I'll have

a different goal. Am I doing this because I want everything to work out? So I get to see all the story and all that stuff. Or am I doing this because, screw it, let's just see what happens. Oh, God, that just happened. I guess I'm just going to deal with that. You know, and so it changes I will say, I mean, part of it also comes down to the video game

itself, because one of the series I always love was Fable. Yeah, one. was great. Really great games. And to Brad's point, you can play those games evil, but you don't like feel because some of them's you play evil and you feel bad about it. Right. Those ones you didn't. It was silly.

Fable was very silly. Yeah, that's why it was still. Even Cotor in the evil because you were evil, but there were constantly punishments for it. So it was kind of like it was almost like it was a nice own moral story. But some games you're like, I'm evil like, cool, you're a warlord now. Like, oh. Yeah. Like, so I just

get child soldiers and murder them all. Yeah. With their looky best friend. Yeah, I don't love doing this. Can I I think I'm just going to be set now. It was a good, it was a good twist, though. It was. But I like the games like that that are more kind of bit goofier. Even like Fallout.

Like you could have fun and Fallout 2. Oh, yeah. Oh, you could do some bad, bad things. One of the best things you can do in Fallout is get really good at sneaking and then just put grenades in people's pockets and then walk away. Like, walk like, who's like, oops. There you go. I don't think I've ever played Fallout 2 and not murdered every single mob family.

in New Reno. Think about that you know one of the things I really like it, well, you know all of these because you've done

Fallout out lore for a long time. I love the fact that bad stuff will happen after you do something good and then you'll go back and you'll find out

something completely terrible happen because of your good act. Right. That's what I mean. I love a good game at the end where they give you hey, here's a recap of all you.

I love that. Everything you ever did and here's what it did for them. And it's just like, Oh, yeah, right, right. Well, I had good intentions. I love when you also get the thing that you forgot, you know what I mean.

You get the screen of, you know, as they're going through this and this and this. And then you go, oh, yeah, I did not fix this. Son of a bitch. Whoops a daisy. Sorry, guys. Life's not great for you right now. Yeah. So one of the things that a lot of people in the Bethesda community, people who like fall out and Elder Scrolls debate, is the, as the game,

games have moved, as Bethesda has had control of Fallout, and they've always had control of Elder Scrolls, but as the games have become more modernized, they've become more streamlined, and some of that's good, and some of the, not as good, depends on who you ask. But one of the things that changed is that in the older games, and games like Morowind, for example,

you could kill essential NPCs, accidentally even, and it would give you a notification that said, like, you know, the fates have been severed, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. So you knew if you continued playing on that maybe those quests would never be able to be finished, but you can't do that in Skyrim.

And with... Oh, and whole God. Well, the oblivion remake... You hear a lot of F-round and find out moments. Really? Like, oh, yeah. That's... I'm out of huge portions of the game. Right. So I'm curious, because the oblivion remake is...

Rumor, like, there's a big trailer that's dropping tomorrow as we record this. So everyone knows. We recorded this weeks ahead of time, so we don't know yet. But it might shadow drop tomorrow. I don't know if they're going to change any of that for oblivion, but they're working on Earthroll 6. I forgot about that. And one of the things that we're really hoping for Elder, at least Lotus and I in some of our community, is that they allow you to make those kinds of decisions.

And I think it would be really cool to even just have a toggle in the settings. It'd be like, can you kill essential NPCs and ruin your quests? Yes or no. And if you choose yes, you just got to deal with it. You just like, sometimes you just do something. And then, yeah, at the end of the game, you go, well, maybe I can't even finish the game. But if you do, you go, well, there's the whole side of things over there that I can never do because that person's dead. It also makes it easier when you're like, I just, oh, I've got all these open, active quests.

What if I just tell the guy I gave it to me? Right. I mean, it's completed. Weirdly enough, I don't know why maybe think of that with stuff you're talking about, you know, getting a tag. I miss the old, the super old school games when guards were just like the worst thing that could ever happen to you is you angered the guards. Like the ultimate games, I'm really going back on this. Yeah, we're going 80s, 90s now. Yeah.

But like, if that used to be when you did something wrong in town, the guards, by the way, the guards should definitely be the main characters. They were more powerful than anyone. But the guards would just beat the crap out of you. I mean, yeah, it's just, but it is true. I mean, it's just different eras and different styles, obviously. I mean, I, like to go back, like, I still to this day, I built a couple years ago, I rebuilt my computer.

I put in a G-Force 3070 in there. I put, I got like, I think Intel 12 or whatever it is, the newest Intel. I did all this stuff. I built a thing up. I turn it on. It's beautiful. I load DOSBox. And I start playing gateway to the Savage Frontier.

Because while building it, something, some memory triggered in the back of my brain of, oh, yeah. I started thinking about a Vorpal sword. It was something silly like that. Then you go, yep, let me go play this instead. I'm like, yeah, I could have been playing, you know, cyberpunk. But no, I'm going to go. I'm going to open up. DOS box and see what DOS box looks on this computer.

Oh, it runs smoothly, it turns out. Right. Right. Yeah, we all do it. You know, like I go back to the... You can't help it. But it is because there's an homage to some of those older ones. And I think the best games are the ones that keep some of that there.

You know, Warhammer as a tabletop game, our rules have changed a lot, a lot, a lot over the years. But the core, well, second edition, core, all is still there. First edition, Warhammer 40K was like loopy. Like, we, there actually was more like D&D. You had a 20-sided. die and eight-sided die. Redsaddy was... D-12, the D-8, D-4, D-6.

I don't know it was it was a D-20. He had a D-12. It was D-12. Yeah, all this stuff. They mentioned they were like, hey, that's a bit much. They paired it down. But the rules at their core, if you play the game in like 1991, and you were to pick the game up now are not that different.

And that's because they realize, you know, what you do is you build on the bits that work and the bits that don't. Mass Effect. I always joke about Mass Effect. Mass Effect, the whole series is incredible. But the very first game, I had to land on a planet that stupid truck and drive that stupid truck around drove

everyone in six. No one appreciated that. When that went away in Mass Effect 2, I think that was one of the I couldn't have cared less with other improvements. That one improvement. I'm like, this is a much better game. Thank you for doing that. I wish they had more, they did a decent job in some of the new games, but like

a lot of the games nowadays don't have as much just hidden just text. There's so many like small text and stuff. If you're going through a Marrow when if you're going through the old Balder's skin, like BG2 and stuff, but like BG3 is amazing game. But like a lot of the games, there's so much text and books and reading and stuff that

you can get into as deep as you want in the games. Fallout, man, I'm still going to follow it too. Fallout 2 just had so many little random things that you could read about. You could get so in depth into what was actually happening in other places. I love getting in a wild whirlwind of the world. nonsense where you're like, oh yeah, I haven't even thought about doing the main quest because I've been trying to find out everything that's happening with this particular section or what happened in the robot.

I can't remember the company. So is the view plays it third person? Is that what fallout too is? It's isometric third person. Yeah. So the example is so for Warhammer, we had Rogue Trader come out. Yeah, that's another one on my list of like, I keep seeing it on sale. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm going to play that.

Don't play mass don't pay space brain too. Play rogue trader. Especially for what you like. It's the astronomically better. And it's made by Alcat. Those are the guys that made the Pathfinder games, Pathfinder Kingmaker and Pathfinder, Wrath of the Righteous.

And they have, for anything they do bad, they make up for it with a huge amount of storytelling and a lot of lore in everything. You can get as much as you want. What I would say about that, them, Mass Effect has us as well. Fallout has it. If you just take your character and you put them somewhere, you could watch the text around you occur. And it's something amazing about that because they were funny.

Same with me to make a bit of a weirder reference, all of the Blizzard games where you'd click on the character. You kept clicking on them. They would say different things. Zook, Zook. Leave me alone. Please stop touching me. Eventually, it was always funny.

I love that. So that's one thing. I will tell you that's in Rogue Trader. Rugger has that. Like there's a bunch of just conversations happening. All over the place. Yep. Yeah.

My routine every day is I'm a morning person. I get up around 5 o'clock in the morning. It's where I am. I can't do that either. Yeah. I've been doing this since like 2001. So just the way I am as a person. And what I do is I have some coffee and I'll usually just play video games as I wake up

and drink coffee. But that's why I love games like that because I can just walk during my coffee. I'll just sit there. Actually, my work computer is off the side of my real computer. So maybe I was look at some work emails and I'll just watch the text scroll. And you just get me a little laugh. So like, oh, and it makes me smile because there's an engineer who's probably listening to our cast.

Yeah. Put time into that. Right, right. So what you're describing is using the game to take your mind and put you in a situation you'd rather be in than the current situation you're in, right? Like, oh, I have to go to work, but it could be over here. But I think that's also one of the reasons why a lot of people listen to our shows is because while they're driving in a car, while they're at work, while they're working out,

whatever, they'd rather be mentally in a different space, a place that they love, even if it's terrible terrible future, it's somewhere that is more interesting in a place that they'd rather be thinking of. Also, you mentioned all like the terminals and all the, you know, all the other extra stuff in the

Fallout games. And the reason why your audience goes to use, because they haven't read the 400 novels. The reason why the fallout audience comes to me is because so many people will just skip reading the terminals. They'll just, they just much good stuff.

Yeah, most of the people who play these games, at least on their first play-through, will just mainline the games and they don't read all the extra stuff. And then they'll go, oh, yeah, there was that quest where that crazy thing happened. And I didn't read all the details. I wonder what the actual story was about that. And then they go listen to my show and they're like, oh, okay, I get it. I think you want to, you've had me even play different play-thrus. I said, I've listened for a while now, to your follow podcast.

And I'd go back and be like, wait a minute. I don't remember that the way you're telling saying it. I'm going to go back there and do another play through specifically because of this. Yeah. And that's what, and that's, again, I think where a lot of the lore cast come into place because, you know, for whatever reason, we did consume it all. And I'm happy to tell it to you. And I make you have to go back and read a 500-page novel, like for the,

for the Warhammer fans listening to this. I'm like, man, those, that invasion of soul books, the very end, the Siege of Terror books in Warhammer are, I mean, they mimic, Tolkien look like freaking, I don't know, like, I got a, the comic book, like the amount of words in those, I think the audio book for one of them was like 16 hours. Yeah, yeah. You're just like, oh, right. Okay, they get rough. And so that's what this is. It's like, hey, I can tell you some of the stuff in there.

Because some of it's, because the one's action scene too. Someone's like, hey, I'm just going to skip the whole like, there's 30 pages here of action scene, which I can sum up with Team A, beat up team. Right, right. Yeah, this is what they did. You are rolling the dice pretty hard. The 40 key universe, the blue, it's called the Black Library, their selection of

books are really good. What the shit that I just listened to? Really good. You get some in there where you're like, I mean, I've fallen asleep to a few books over the years reading them, but they've got other ones where it's like, yes, I'm not sleeping the night. You know, and that's, I mean,

that same thing to be with gaming. I mean, there's times where, you know, I did go to work tired because I hit a piece of mass effect fallout Skyrim. It's like, nah. Just one more quest. Just one more quest. I just got to, okay, now I just finished that. I got to take this back to this person. Okay, might as well, I got in a big fight. Okay, well, I mean, I got to beat them up.

Yep. So I got to keep going to do this. Because, I mean, I think like you, I don't play games online. It's part of it's just, I think it's just an age thing. I just never. Maybe. Maybe. I do sometimes, in the case of Elder Scrolls online, it's more of the, like, getting together with a regular group to do the trials every week.

and like that kind of thing, as opposed to just like, hey, let's go run around and do some stuff while we hang out. You know, like, that's a lot easier to manage. Like, we're like, in Noom. And this is, but also that's one of the joys of having, like being in this community. For example, I played Magic the Gathering when it came out in, I want to go at 95. It was the mid-90s, yeah. Or yeah, somewhere in that one played it. Put it down.

And then years later, you know, I'm meeting people, like, you got to play magic again. I'm like, oh, okay, let's go, let's see what it is. And I watch it happen. Like, I have no idea what you guys are doing. I recognize those cards, but I have no idea what's happening here. Why are you not tapping your mana? Like what's happening? Yeah.

Yeah, but totally different. I also just don't do it when I talk to them. Well, tell me more about it. I love hearing about it. Right. I love it. There's so many. I haven't played D&D.

I haven't played any of the additions of D&D since Wizards of the Coast Baltimore. Not out of some weird protest. Wow. I just haven't had time. Yeah. You know, to do it. Yeah.

But still read the books. So talk to my friends who play. Still learn as much as I can about it. not even in an effort to go play purely in a like hey man this stuff's cool and I'm passionate tell me about tell me about it yeah it's just fun well that's a that's a really cool place to kind of wrap this up as we're getting kind of at the end of the show I just thought it would be fun to have just like one more question we've already we talked about 40k being like a tv series or a movie and they have lots of cool games that are out there is there a game type or subject that they

haven't done that you're like oh this would be really cool see we've got first person right you've got adventure you get to be space marines you get to be tactical you know

over the top I want to be I want to play as elves yeah I was about to say I know what Brad's gonna go with this thing 100% yeah they

crazy space magic anything from a different kind of perspective because there was is it fire warriors that the tal game brother that came out

fire warriors the taugame but they've never done anything with Eldar which is space elves yeah and so that would be

that one is probably there. What style game? Would it be a tactical game? Would it be like combat game? RPG. It's just an RPG. But you are in their world from their...

As one of them. I'd like to play... We've got very little... In the 40K, we see a lot of the Xenos races that aren't human-centric, and we've got... We don't have a ton of books and lore from their perspective.

It's always the... They're the enemy. Yeah, you look at it from what they do, and you don't get a ton of why they're doing it. You get some from their codexes, because you get a rule book for each faction. So if you get the Elf rule book, they'll have stories about them,

but we don't get as much in games or books, like the novels and stuff, are usually written from someone else's perspective, even when they're dealing with that race. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. I would, I mean, the one for me, honestly, I want to see them unravel some stuff.

One of the challenges in the 40K universe is they start a lot of storylines that they don't finish. There's so many cliffhangers out there. And I would like to see something. Like, to me, like, there's nothing better than when someone finally kind of explains something. We've actually had some of this in 40K recently, where they've actually, like, some of the new novels

have filled in like 30-year-old gaps in the Lord. Yeah. And it's like, oh, yeah. You know, it's kind of a cool way to see it. And that's something that I'd like to see more of. Like I will say, for example, the Fallout TV show focusing on that final bit of, hey, how did we actually get here? I also watch the show Silo on Amazon. That same thing of like, I like this.

You don't have to unravel all the mysteries of the universe, but after 40 years of writing universe mysteries, it's okay if we close a couple loops here. Sure. Right. It would be the game. To me, it would be actually like the rogue trader game, but actually be the best way to do it. That style of that, they said the third person,

whatever that's the three RPG, like a great RPG, the RPG third person outside where it is someone, and as part of the core of the game, they're actually closing some loops that I've had bouncing around in my brain. Because what in my mind what I think they were doing with 40K was they were trying to set up what we call narrative.

So what you can do in Warhammer, I say, which are the term, the proper term is, but we have our figurines. I like figurines. It's more fun. I just call them dolls. It's fancy. Fine. I think my miniatures. And we can play what's called a narrative game where I'm saying, oh, this is, I'm going

to do the invasion of such and such, blah, blah, right. And they write them, but the problem is these storylines never close. And so, like, we get constant stuff in our Discord, which, you know, I love our Discord. Right. Like, hey, can you tell a story about these guys? And in my head, I'm like, hey, man. I realize that those guys are like 11 paragraphs. Right.

No, I get the same thing. People are like, hey, it would be really cool if you do, I'm from this state. Could you tell, do a episode about what happened in Fallout in this, in the state of Minnesota or something like that? And I'm like, it was cold. Nothing. Maybe there's a sentence somewhere that admits that Minnesota existed maybe. But like all the time, people are like, oh, they're hungry for stuff. But if there's just nothing there, I can't do an episode.

episode about it other than just like, oh, there was this one line of conversation in this one game and that was it. Actually, let me ask you, I don't know. Do we know what happened to the NCR? Well, so according to the TV show, the TV show is canon. Before the TV show. Before the TV show. Did you know what happened in the SIR? There is no. So the NCR shows up in New Vegas, right? New Vegas was written by some of the same people from Fall in 1 to 2. Yeah. And New Vegas has no official canon ending. In fact, Todd Howard has said that they're doing the best they can with the TV show to allow that to still be ambiguous. Cool. So we don't know.

So even in season two, they're going back to Vegas, to New Vegas. But from what we've seen at the end of season one, yeah, the end of season one, and then some of the, like, the screens, the pictures that are coming out from the filming, it looks like New Vegas is like not doing so well, but we've seen NCR soldiers. We've seen Legion. We've seen like a number of these different factions,

some different people from other vaults. Like, we've seen a variety of different stuff. But I'm pretty sure the thing that they're actually going to show us will be able to be rationalized as, well, did these people win this? Or did these people win this? We don't really know. They're all still there. Right.

So, like, regardless of the ending, if everyone's still there, then maybe it rules out one or two endings. But it doesn't necessarily definitively say that. But that's the other thing is that, like, you could say, well, oh, the Legion wiped the NCR off the map in Nevada. right or Nevada everyone gets on me it's Nevada I was I was to correct you I used to live in California and I'd go out to Nevada a lot and it's it's not it's not Nevada it's Nevada

is I thought no somebody correct me as maybe I'm just confused Nevada Nevada Nevada I don't actually I'm not waiting on the yeah anyway anyway but like just like with season one they were like oh the city their capital got blown up but that doesn't mean that the faction's gone

like if somebody all of a sudden nuked DC, would we all just not be here as Americans still? Brad seen redone in the theater. In the theater, the original, thank you very much. Wolverines! So that's my

perspective of all that stuff. But there you go, yeah, this will be fun. We'll have to get together again sometime in the future. And kind of... This is right. Yeah, maybe especially once we get like a season two of fallout or like the 40K show comes out and we kind of talk about it. Maybe you guys can fill in some

details on stuff because I've walked lore videos. I've listened to some of your episodes, but I definitely don't know enough to be like, okay, this is everything that's happening once I see the show. So, I mean, we are, I mean, just, just, we're at episode 85, well, 85 hasn't released yet. Sorry, we've recorded 85. I mean, I lose track of what's out because I just, I, we record them, I edit them, I load them, and then they just sit and there's Tom knows, it sits in the queue and it goes, oh, that one's live, okay. Yeah. But what happens is, I mean, I remember when I first started doing, I'm probably same to them to you, right, first started doing the cast. My wife says, well, you know, how long are you

do this for. What do you mean? She goes, like, not in a bad way. She just meant like, well, how many episodes can you really do? I'm like, oh, it'll outlive both Brad and I. Right. And we can go on forever. I will die before we run out of ideas.

And that would be if they stop producing content for the game right now. Right. Yeah. Right now. I would have to teach, my son's not even six. I'd have to teach him how to how to podcast. Just hand it on. I keep this thing going through that much content.

So, yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, for you, even with like the limited number of games, you're still so much stuff. I can tell a story about every single quest line and every single game and still have other stuff. What are your top two? What are your top two? Games. Games.

Like, what do you go back? And not just like, you know, the actual thing. What do you're like, go back? What are your top two? I go back to you? It depends. It depends on when you ask me this question. Like right now, I've been, I've gone back to Skyrim.

I've been doing these challenge playthroughs. I've been modding the heck out of it. I go over 500 mods. And I've been trying out all of these different, like, I've increased the grass. graphics to the point where it feels like a modern game again, but then it also adds other stuff in. And some of it is actually really good content from other creators. So Skyrim is an easy to go back to game because the loop is so satisfying.

You go somewhere, you meet somebody, you go on a quest, you go in a dungeon, you beat up the things in the dungeon, you get some cool stuff, you continue on somewhere else, something happens along the way. You know, all of that works out really well. I find that easier to go back to than something like Fallout 4 because Fallout 4 is stories is from a specific. protagonist rather than from an unspoken hero. And I love the game, but I find it a little bit more like I get railroaded back into the story of me playing with character rather than being who I want to be. So, but yeah, all of all of the elders, like the more recent Elder Scrolls and the fallout, I jump back into the Fallout games.

Outside of that, I go back to things like, like the binding of Isaac. I don't know if you've ever played the binding of Isaac. it's like you're a creepy baby and you shoot your tears at things and it's like it's a rogue like you should look at it up it's I don't know 12 years old at this point but it's one of those games that's a rogue like

so every time you play it it's different but you can also unlock different powers and everything you know you were talking about sometimes you want to go play a game not because it's hard but because it's just familiar and comfortable well that game can be really hard but if you get the right powers and everything kind of doubles up all of a sudden you're just obliterating everything on the screen every time you move in a new screen

so that's my like I'm just chilling out, listening to probably a podcast about some lore about something while doing, playing that on the screen because I don't have to pay as much attention as if I'm in an RPG. The one, I'll ask you another different one to it. I always like, what's the funniest game you've ever played? Funniest guy?

That's a tricky question. We're all old enough to play back when they really made games funny. Yeah, like, what was the pirate game with Guy. Guy, Guy, I was immediately going to. Those games were super funny. The Monkey Island. Monkey Island. Escape from Monkey Island.

Space Quest. I remember playing Space Quest. Oh, Space Quest was amazing. The Space Quest games. But yeah, you're right. Fable. Fable was super weird and funny and fun ways. And funny is tricky to do sometimes for games. It's something that I think we've lost a lot recently. That's actually why I think about it. It's hard. Yeah, like the Monkey Island games, there's a whole series of those. Like, Leisure Suit, Larry was stupid.

But like there's a whole. It's the same company, too. I know it was the same company. I really graphics. but like you'd had like there was an era of gaming that was this like real goofy style. Oh, it's like, come on, bring it back. Those things. And maybe we'll have listeners will make comments to us about like, oh, you should check out such and such. It's like that because I miss it.

They're more likely to be indie games. So there are some like, I can't remember the names, but there are some indie games that I've played just picked up on like game pass. And I'm like, oh, that's really funny. And then you play it for five hours. You've done. Outer worlds. There you go. Outer World.

I never finished Outer Worlds. That's what I did. And even the expansion was going. Outer World. There we go. I got it. There was tragic. Yeah, but funny.

Yeah. Yeah, something, I think it was like everything felt too closed in. When you're in a zone, you knew you were in that zone. Yeah, that was the, that part felt like. I'm not going to. I'm thinking about old games against, though. Because it, like, my favorite, my favorite story game was Plainscape Torment. My brother played that old.

My little brother got into that when we were in high school. And I would ask him, like, how's the game? And he was like, it's super weird. He wouldn't tell me much about it. But he was like, it's kind of cool. He kept going back to it because he really liked it, I guess. It just had so much in-depth story, but it also could change quite a bit. Because the game centered on you, period.

It doesn't matter whether you were good, evil, neutral, whatever. Like, you lived so many lives and you're finding them out. You're discovering your past selves and everything else. And it's just, I really enjoyed. I like the longer games, the where they have the tons of lore. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I'll have to think about the whole, like, what else is funny out there? Because it's been a while. That's a good one. That's a tough. It's something that I think, I isn't in the market for it.

And again, this is also a challenge more to listeners. They're like, hey, guys, if you've got stuff, I mean, obviously Tom has a Discord. We have a Discord. come in there, tell us.

There's nothing. I would take more joy in than that. Yeah, so to wrap this up, how can people check out your stuff? How can they get involved? Yeah, we are obviously, we're the 40K Lourcast, we're a podcast, so you can find us on any podcasting platform, Spotify and iTunes, Xbox, apparently. I learned that one about episode 30. You can actually listen to us on Xbox and got a lot of comments. You had no idea, too.

That was so hilarious. But additionally, we also have a website, the 40KLorcast.com. You can just go there and there's links out to it. We have a Discord. It's easier to find our Discord via show notes or the website because it's Discord. I think GG at 40K. I'll tell you right now. Actually, I should have checked this at the end.

Yeah. Just look for the link. It is Discord. It's Discord GG 40KLC or go to our website and click in. Just click. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then Tom, for our listeners, how do they find you?

Yeah. So all of the shows on the network at RobotsRadio. dot net. So by the time they're hearing this, you guys will be on there as well. You'll also be on our Discord and there's, of course, links. You can even just search Robots Radio Discord and you'll find it. And then my shows, the ones that I'm currently hosting, are the Fallout lorecast, the Elder Scrolls lorecast and the Lord of the Rings lore cast. And the Lord of the Rings lore cast is a lot of fun because the whole premise from it from the beginning was like, people bounce off of the Silmarillion. They'll watch the movies or they'll read the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, and then

they'll try to read the Silmarillion. And they'll be like, this is like the Old Testament. I can't do this. And so that's where the premise for the show start came out. I can explain this to people. I can help them understand and get through this book. And I've had a lot of people say, oh, my God, this is so good. Thank you so much for that. So if you're into any of that stuff, go check that stuff out. But RobotsRadio.comnet is the main place to go or the Discord. And you guys are going to have a channel on our Discord as well. So if you are somebody who wants to connect and chat in that channel, but also see what all the other shows are. And there's all sorts. I mean, If you, chances are, if you can think of a popular game series, we probably have a show for it.

And maybe a lore cast, but maybe a different kind of show. So lots of good stuff. And I hope everybody takes a chance. We're super excited about this. I think it's just, it's a nice home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I'm so glad you guys are here. Obviously, we agree about a lot of things and, you know, resonate on all of these different topics. And it's fun to have other shows on the network who understand the, like, the behind the scenes. what it's like to run one of these shows and have these communities and all the, all the good things that come from that. And so it is nice to have you guys on board. So thank you so much for reaching out and welcome aboard. Yeah. Thanks. So thanks. I mean, so thanks to be part of it. So yeah. And there you go. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. If you have any other questions, then look in the descriptions of either episode

that you're listening to this and you'll find links for everything. So there you go. All right. Thanks a lot. We'll see you next time. Take care, Tom.