The 40k Lorecast - Episode 1 History of Mankind - Age of Terra, Technology, Strife and the appearance of the Emperor

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Welcome to the 40k Lorecast. On our debut episode we deiced to start at the beginning. Well not the beginning beginning, that was millions of years earlier, but the first of the 40K lore written. We take you from modern era up to about 30,000AD. On this episode we cover: Age of Terra, Age of Technology, Age of Strife, the Unification Wars, and the Great Crusade.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. Welcome to 40K Lourcast with me, John Barsati and Bradchester. On today's episode, we're going to be covering the origins of mankind's journey into the Warhammer 40,000, by going from about what we would all consider modern era through the year 30,000. And from there, it's going to get pretty deep, pretty quick. But today we're going to flip through the age of Terra, age of technology, and of course, the dark age of technology, the age of strife. We might end up getting into some chaos gods and a few other things, but we'll see where

we go. Things did happen. Things did happen. So we're now going to dive a lot more deeper into the lore. So hopefully, for those of more lore bunnies of you, you're really going to love this. One little caveat I do want to make is that this is written by GW over the last 40 years and some of it has changed. It changed wildly.

and also is still at odds with each other. So we're going to give, let's be honest, we're going to write history just like the conquerors do, exactly the way we want it to be. There's some stuff that's been retcon, there's some stuff that hasn't been, and there's some conflicting lore. We're going to pick the ones that we like the best,

and we're stigant. Excellent. So just thank you for coming along, and we'll just jump right into the first of it, which is the age of terror. Effectively, modern day plus. This is because 40K is based in the Milky Way, we talked about in the first one. It is us. It is from Earth. And this is the journey of, again, Earth Plus. It's us right now, up to about 15,000 where we became a spacefaring race. We colonized the entirety of the solar system. We terraform the entirety of our solar system. And we started doing the extra solar expansion. And we still didn't have FTL. We didn't know about the warp yet. And so,

So we were really constrained by the travel of that time. And we spent a lot of time in that was the biggest restriction was we couldn't go fast. Cool. I need to go fast. We needed to Ricky Bobby. We needed to go way faster. But we were the masters of the immediate thing that we could reach. And I think this is a cool time to talk about because it's probably the easiest part from an early sci-fi element where mankind has fixed the earth.

and then we start looking at other bits. Mars gets colonized. Saturn gets colonized. Obviously, Uranus got colonized. Also, Mars became, because of things that we found in Mars later on, where we jumped started our own tech, which may have been part of the age of technology, may have not. But the biggest thing is Mars became,

and this is one of the things that we definitely need to touch on, is Mars became a complete separate entity at that point in time. There's Earth, there's Mars, and then there's a bunch of planets that are conquered, because we really hadn't met anybody at that point in time. But we were owned by those two planets, and sometimes it wasn't a real amicable situation with it. We pushed out as far as we could. We squabbled, yet we had moved past the stage of, are we going to kill ourselves, or are we going to find enough resources to exist?

and we basically made it so we could extend. The issue is that we were only held back, truthfully, by travel speed. At this point, we could settle any planet, any piece of rock we found. Yeah, we could terraform it. We wouldn't go with Garden World, but it became a place that could do it. We had enough, we had the ships, we had all these things, but we were still held back. Then we get into the age of technology, which is also when we started having things like STCs, which are world-creating organisms,

basically full AI capable of taking whatever resources you have and making them into legitimately anything you want. Star Trek replicators is the best thing I can say for an SDC. And that's what ends up shifting. So around the year 15,000, it's actually two things shift. The first one is the appearance of what we call mutant navigators. These are human beings with a third eye. Astropaths.

Yeah, astrapaths is later called. What these were able to do is allow them to actually utilize warp drives. So the issue is that when we talk about Warhammer a lot, the warp is maybe one of the most important parts, the most important part of the entire universe. Yeah, entire universe. With warp, there's nothing. Effectively, mankind mutates randomly,

and these people are born with a third eye. And this third eye can actually see into what GW calls the imitarium. You basically have magic users. Yeah. People they can see the weave in D&D, they can touch the laylines. They can utilize the warp energy and they can guide you. The game rifts was so good. It just never took off, but it was so good.

The biggest thing is that we didn't put the beacon up for a long time. We basically guided us through and it allowed us to conquer the stars. And we actually went legitimately. It was the gold rush. you get 15,000 to 25,000, and this is all shrouded in darkness. So you're not 100% sure, but this was 100% the gold rush. You were going out west. We went, all of these places were overpopulated, and we took giant amounts of population

and went everywhere, breeded like rabbits. And the thing is we were allowed to go everywhere because we could terraform anything we wanted. And we could create any. It didn't matter what the world was like. We could make it livable. And that's a big deal on that. I should say it.

Standard-Debtors, I apologize. As usual. STCs. I fully nerded it up. STCs. So what's happened is all of a sudden, two things have these people who were born give us two abilities. Ability number one is they can actually seize.

They can drive a ship now through this thing called the warp, which we've touched on before. So now we can use the warp to get from point A to point B without having to go in a straight line, we go in between space to the next part. But the other one is they can also talk. That's actually... And that's probably bigger. That's bigger.

I actually think it's bigger because just being able to travel means nothing. Because that's one of the things where we look at in humanity right now of, hey, if we go super far, we have to wait forever to get a message back because of warp communication through that. You could get, I say instantaneous, but it's a little weird because time goes. different. Time goes a little bit different. No more.

For the most part, you can get immediate communication between far-flung civilizations, our civilization, colonies, everything, all these words. We can connect them. We know what each one needs. We know what defenses are needed. We know who

to bring what breakthroughs they've made. And that was a big thing when we travel is we encountered other everythings, between civilizations, between new forms of energy, and that's where the age of technology win is they had reality changing technology. They could form anything to what they wanted.

Not as bad as Eldar's. They can't just think of it. The Eldar is still, we'll get to what was going on with them during this era, too. They were having a very serious party. Like, woof. But during this, we technologically made it so that we could do almost anything. It was crazy on that. We colonized the entire galaxy.

We literally set up and they became, now in 40K, they've become horror-infested worlds, but we set up effectively agriculture worlds, industrial worlds, and resource worlds. And they are horrible places now. Maybe they weren't as bad then, but they basically started to really focus what a world was supposed to do. You're supposed to produce food, this you're supposed to reduce resources, and this one is supposed to print out ships, whatever, housing, whatever it was. And that was a big deal, though, because it became the blueprint, basically the structure for

what the Imperium is now. We still live under that what the original pioneers put out on these planets. We still use all of those planets exactly the same way they did here. Just a few less of them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's significantly less of them. But this is the pinnacle of achievement for humanity. We're as far as we're ever going to be.

We are trajaned up right now from the Roman Empire. We're as far as humanity is going to be. And then stuff happened. Some more stuff. So during this era, just so people can keep an eye, what we're talking about here is a really, they called it the Long March. This is incredible levels of travel

where people would be on ships for, it could be decades. It was a very strange time, because they started using the warp for the first time. Let's talk about this because. World travel. It's just a warp travel. It wasn't even just sometimes they were traveling for,

and we're going to go again, their perception. Their perception was decades, but sometimes these people, because of the fact that you're traveling through effectively primordial chaos, these people would take centuries of real time to be where they were. It took a couple years.

Sometimes you got there 200 years later. And that's where I think we want. You should talk really more about what warp travel was at this point. Because if people, even you play Warhammer 40K, the warp is really well established. We all know what the warp is, all these things. They didn't at this point.

They just happened to stumble into this thing. And like, oh, we can use a special ship engine, and I'm going to keep bringing back the movie Event Horizon. It's basically it's almost identical to Event Horizon where they had this way to jump across the galaxy and no one quite figured out why it worked or how it worked, but it did. There were some downsides to it.

There was some casualties. Also, we didn't know that there was some terrible people. in the warp. Also, we were making them. Yes. So at this stage, some of the stories that come out about this, people would go through the warp and a ship would arrive somewhere and everyone was dust because they actually had been in the warp for millions of years. And they all just aged until the entire ship disintegrated and happened to come out the other side. Other times, the ship actually arrived before it left, because that's the warp.

And then just for even more fun, sometimes it arrived in the wrong galaxy. Yeah. You can imagine, like, these people are hopping on this ship to go somewhere, and you don't know what's coming out the other side. The wildest thing about this to me is this is at the peak of our technology. This is the peak of our knowledge where we think we know. Oh, we did not. I can only imagine these people who are the masters of our domain, and except for this, which we have no idea how it's. Yeah, also T. Oops.

And so once they arrived at the planet, though, they were destined to. or maybe just got to the solar system and started picking planets at random, who knows, the ship they were on would actually then be broken down and that would be the start of the colony. And what Brad and I were talking about earlier, these astrophabs who were with them would then communicate back to the original,

they probably soul or could be elsewhere, saying, hey, we're here, we've built a colony, send more stuff. And that's how they built out. You can imagine the west of America, instead of a wagon, it's a ship. It's a giant spaceship made of every, And also these weren't like get involved, we're doing Lost in Space type ships.

Yeah. No. These are gargantuan city-sized ships. You basically went, hey, what are you traveling in? Los Angeles. Yeah. The ship. It's that big.

And we have that many people on board because when we get there, this is who's living and taking care of this planet. And we did that a lot. And that's a big deal. And that's when we started to meet people. We met a lot of what the Imperium would now call lesser races. So at this stage, yeah, I mean, the joke I made is we arrived on planets, and some of them had occupants who weren't super cool that had to see us show up.

And so had neighbors who also were like, hey, no. And so that started some conflict. The other ones is that you had weather and atmosphere that had to be tamed. And so one analogy I like here is planet LV-426 from aliens. This is, you know, alien and aliens. It's an unhabitable planet. We go there. We terraform it.

And after a little bit, the local inhabitants decide, hey, no. Also for everybody, LV4 to 26 was literally where the aliens came from. Well, they didn't come from. They happened to be. They were there. That was the crash. We're not going to end up.

We can do another lore cast on the Prometheus and aliens movies. I do like them. I recognize it. People don't. So one thing that we need to talk about now, though, and spend a lot of time on, is STCs. So standard template constructs.

Which is a super, it's considered almost the holy grail in the current. In the 41K or 40K. In the current timeline of the game, Warhammer 40K, STCs, if you find one, it is magic from the old times.

It is netheral. I'm super nerd enough with the ND here, but it is all of the old forbidden magic. And we will get it. into where we are now because it's a very archaic inquisition, dark ages type time. But this is almost you could get persecuted now for having this because it is heretical knowledge almost. It's from the time from before us.

But this is a big thing because we could make anything out of anything. This is also before we had, I was say Risen, the Knights, yes, it's before we had some problems with AI rising up. Yeah, we'll get there. If you played Mass Effect, some stuff happened. Yeah. Or if you played any video game that involves AI at all year. We're going to get there, trust me.

Basically, the SDCs are the almost mystical level of AI. They could take any problem, any situation, any circumstance, and make you have a new city, a new life, a new planet. I'm a big fallout person. It's a geck in a lot of ways.

That's what these things are. Yeah, yeah. That series is incredible, except for 76, boo. But anyway, what we're looking at really, I think is important. It's not understanding about this is that this is how mankind was able to expand. We have the ability to now move through the warp. We have the ability to communicate to the warp. But we also need to be able to land on a planet and quickly start working on it.

You can imagine, just think about the logistics involved with having to bring everything with you. The STCs were everything. They were how to build a terraforming unit, how to build a building. But also. build weapons. But yes, but also they were the downfall at the same time. Do you know how to make a cell phone if you got put back into time? No.

Exactly. That unfortunately was the SDCs because they took care of everything. Here's how we're going to do this building. Here's how we're going to get weapons, armor, agriculture, big buildings, terraform. And then when we lost them, well, it was a big deal. A big deal. And this is, and what happened was is that this technology is everything. We are now coming into planets.

And mankind, when we talk about expansion here, mankind goes from a peddley little solar system called soul, which is the one we all live in now, to half the galaxy effectively. It was almost more, basically. In 10,000 years? Yeah, 10,000 years, we took over a good 50 plus percent of the Milky Way. It's not like we discovered it.

We were there. And not like one planet here and there. We controlled solar systems throughout this area. This is, and it was all because these STCs. And I'm harping on them a lot because as we get through the story that is Warhammer 40K, these come up a lot. And they're extremely important. They also, because of the astrapath, the way they work,

they were able to share technology. So as advancements were made, they were shared galaxy-wide. And instantaneously. And so this allowed for even, not only a further expansion, but kind of what we get into next, which is the creation of the night worlds. And so we night worlds, it's a K-N-I-G-H-T-S night worlds. So at this point, mankind has started moving a bit more feudal, for lack of a better phrase. All these worlds have to be run.

There is communication. What they begin doing with the SDCs is building giant walking robots that can... Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim. And these things can break up a mountain. They can dig a big hole. They can kill all of your enemies. I mean, some of the...

Some of the side stories and things of that nature, which are not canon, but they are. Chew doesn't say they're not, but they're written by the people. Yeah. These things are carving out canyons for things. Like, instantaneously, these have, they're powered by superfusion engines. And these are bigger, by the way, than the Warhammer 40K nights that a lot of us are used to. These are almost city-sized creatures that are moving around. They can crack a planet.

So they could do labor. they're also in existence because we are running into alien races who are not super happy to see us. And what do humans do? We make bigger stuff than everybody else. So let's remove them. And so right around the midpoint here, this interstellar government appears. And I'm going to be honest, I've done a ton of research into this and no one can give me what it happened. Well, they keep this specifically vague. They keep it specifically vague, but also the Imperium, when they refer to it.

this officially in the Imperium. They make it so it's always a tale. It's a telltale of woe and what you're not supposed to do. And this is why we don't have AI anymore, even though they do. But this is why. And these are the awful people that did it. So when they talk about how this government works, it ended up working. And I feel that these are tales from it because we had at the Lords of Terror, which were terrible people for a long time. We won't go into that. But we had people that were running the precursor of the Imperium. We started to have our society, well, we already talked about with STCs, but we started to give our, the basis, the crux, the foundation of everyday life and even everyday expansion life started to be fully reliant on AI. When you don't have anything else to do or that you have to do, what you start doing is wanting things.

that other people have. You have everything, but what do you want? I just want them. So this is one of those, stop me if you've heard this before, from a sci-fi standpoint, mankind expands,

mankind makes the sides that work is hard, decides to make a bunch of robots to do all the work for them. That way we could work even faster. And if you can't figure out what happens next, you don't play video games. Yeah.

And also people became real shitty. So the AI decided, you guys suck. And this is, In the lore, these groups are referred to the men of gold were the rulers. You'll hear the term men of gold. And again, these terms were not real. These are the terms that GW's had a fun trick with where the idea is these are stories being told, the modern citizenry about what happened before.

So they've named them the men of gold, the men of stone, the men of iron. The men of iron is full-on canon too, by the way. Oh, yeah, that one's canon. So these things are men of stones. And it's all false. Effectively, the men of iron are the ones who decided to make a, And they decide we're going to make this great AI, these robots, they're going to do all the work for us. They're going to till the fields.

They're going to build the factories. It was beyond that, though. They did legitimately everything. They were in charge of all aspects of life. That's why it was such a big fall because you weren't even making your own plans. Everyday life was controlled by these guys, but also everything that you did. Your armed forces was controlled by the men of iron, your expansion. Your travel was controlled by the men of iron.

So they were in charge of legitimately everything. The only thing that they didn't have, this is the only reason that we're not doing the Met of Iron 40K is, well, they didn't have psychers. So an interesting thing, and we're going to actually explain what happened in a minute. But out of nowhere, just as we said earlier, the astropaths, people being born with a third eye,

mankind mutates again. And we start getting more called psychers. These are just magic users, for lack of a better phrase. These are human magic users. I don't have a better term for it. But like incredibly powerful out of nowhere. The original, let's pull it back just a little. The astrapass were people that were aware, a shaman, a person, a medium.

They could see, they knew that this world existed and they could guide you through it, but there was nothing they were really doing. They could guide you from point A to point B, which was, don't get me, incredibly useful. It's super important. But we got a new level of people who could crush a tank by thinking about it. They could. They were, we talk about psychers.

We're also not talking what we have now in 40K psychers. These were borderline gods in their power. They could do. This wasn't just, ooh, I can shoot some lightning out of my finger and zap you. I can make the sea dry. And they came out of nowhere. People were just born with this. And this was all around the galaxy.

So random worlds were having these people appear. And at first, they were welcomed. They were worshiped. They were worshiped. They were worship. Originally, they were, this is the coming of the gods. The Greek pantheon just showed up. Because for all practical purposes, Herra just showed up.

Some people didn't think they were cool and killing them all off, which we're going to get to in a minute might have been a kind of a good idea. Because the one thing that no one really understands. about psychers was that was where their power came from, including the psychers themselves. Which is also one of the, and this is not canon, but this is a bunch of stories that have written, which is why were these psychers so powerful? Because there was so few of them in the beginning that they were basically able to pull out of this limitless source. No one else was using it. And also some of the people behind it, which weren't super cool, were in their infancy. it was a pirate poor with humanity

and they wanted them to have all. Yeah, the thing about where they're pulling this power from, there were things in the well. And what began happening, worlds would go dark because what a psycher really was a person who was communing with the

demons. It was a conduit to dark gods. And much like a vampire, where you have to invite them in, demons can only possess a being. And psychers were the type of things that demons could possess. And when we say demons, we're not talking nerglings.

We're talking real demons. These things were big. They were powerful. And they would come in through the cycle and literally take over the entire world. So this is right at the edge of the end of technology, which then leads to what I'm going to effectively call the rise of Alexa. You should all say thank you and please to your Alexa. I really do believe that.

she's tracking which of us are mean and which of us are bad, and she's going to the terminators to kill us all. Effectively, the AI got fed up with our shit. And basically, because AI didn't have the ability to travel, we cordoned them off effectively. We won the war versus AI behind. Before we won the war, what ended up happening is, really destroyed civilization.

AI turned off. AI decided to not work for us. So all of our food stopped being made. all of our travels stopped happening. And people who were traveling became lost. Became lost. The AI decided that its greatest enemy was us. Again, GW is not that clever of rules writer.

I don't know who kept this idea for actually. Maybe it would be fair to you. Maybe they were the first ones going for this idea. All I know is I'm 42 years old and I've heard this story a lot of times. Love it every time. Keep reading it every time I hear it. And the biggest thing is also the only reason that the zombie movie shows become thing.

Yeah, it was the worst people when shit starts going down. Kind of us. Us. Kind of us. Which is those people we talked about the war alerts and stuff when, hey, everything's terrible. What should I do? Be terrible to other people and take their stuff.

Should we band together? What are you talking about? I just want to take your things. No, yeah, what your things. We'll be right back after a quick break. So this leads us into the third age, which is the age of strife. This is about 5,000 years. So we've been talking, first we had 15,000 years, then we did 10,000 years.

then we did 10,000 years. I know it's diminishing. This is 5,000 years that I'm politely going to refer to. It sucked. It was, let's talk about, I'm going to go, I'm going to back pedal just a little bit because they try to make it the dark age of technology, but that was effectively the golden age of humanity. We had a really, we had a good run.

We had somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 years of stuff's pretty awesome. Yeah. And then we had some times that weren't at the beginning in the end, but then we get into this age of strut. And the age of strife is our fault. But the age of strife is also, sorry, Eldar. It's also Eldar's fault. 100% Eldar.

Eldor are doing bad stuff on a galactic level. And it's creating a rumbling in the tummy of the warp is about the only way I can say it. They created the bad. They added some bad oysters to the, the warp, we have all this problem. We have this AI takeover. We effectively fight through but crush our civilization. and then effectively in the middle of this were cut off from all of our other places

because warp travel for us doesn't exist because the warp became, it went from a choppy sea to every single place in the warp was a tsunami and you could not travel at all. It wasn't like travel was scary, it was risky. There was no travel for thousands of years. So all of a sudden you were in a world,

that only produced hubcaps and not food. You're a real bum that you have so many hubcaps and not a lot of food. And also, we got taken over by a lot of people. A lot of these people we were picking on went, hey, man, you've now got hub caps and no food and or you've got food and no weapons. Yeah, that was the big rule. This is a really nice place, and we noticed that no one's coming to help you right now. Yeah, it turns out pitchfork,

versus orc. Not a great combo. So at this stage, it all just falls apart. Mankind is cut off. We can't travel. We can't communicate. We can barely feed ourselves. It is just completely falling apart. So of course, what happens next? Civil War. So now mankind gets insanely levels of violent and begins just slaughtering each other because they can. Because yes. Yeah, which, as we've touched on before,

but the chaos gods really helps making chaos is having a time of their life here because now, not only do they have access to the colonies via psychers, but also these colleagues... We're not going to dirty dance that real quick. Go ahead. Go ahead. That's basically what that happens. And so now we've got colonies are falling to starvation,

colonies are falling to civil war, colonies are falling to Xenos, and colonies are falling to just being possessed by demons. And yeah, stuff's kind of bad. And the thing is about this in this time, and this will be a big thing when we get the 30,000, the Crusades started. Certain people that were fully functioning solar systems and planets, a lot of these things pulled together. They're completely isolated. Yeah. But systems. So you had some systems were actually self-sufficient because they had agriculture. They had multiple planets that did multiple things. Sometimes it was just one

planet. Sometimes it was an entire system of planets, but some of these people got their shit together. But they were still lost for thousands of years. But like we have these pockets of humanity that effectively have anywhere between dark ages to age of technology technology. And you don't know what's what they're going to have. Completely long dark. So then what ends up happening now is the whole thing of the warp turning off, there's a big explosion over in the elder side of the galaxy. Oh, blah. You're so not doing this justice.

So Eldar, the elves. They're on team Caligula? Yeah, they're on team Kaligula. But they're also, they rule the other half of the galaxy, and they have been doing this for millions of years. They don't even consider what we're doing worth noticing, because we really get to them. And when we do, they just, whatever.

So they make, Caligalian, like, guys, you get a slow your role. That's pretty weird, man. So they're doing some weird stuff. They have a society that is, we'll go into more of this in future episodes, but they effectively have our STCs and things like that, our technology, they're like, oh, that's cute. We think about things happening because our whole race is magic. That's what they're doing. But because of that, they have a connection to this warp, this chaos.

everything that they do has an immediate reflection, their shadow in that. And so they've been being really bad, really weird for effectively millions of years, but they really ramped up the mojo at the end here in the few thousand years, and they break the sky. They create a dark god. They make an explosion in the galaxy, an explosion so large it encompasses hundreds of solar systems basically the middle, the core of the Eldar civilization is instantaneously destroyed in an instant. All of these souls are taken away by Slanesh, the new fourth chaos god.

But in the birth, the gestation of this manifestation of basically again... Excess, gluttony. Yeah, exactly. It is creation of a god in the warp. It clears up all of these warp storms because these, 5,000 years of warp storms. And when we're saying warp storms, again, complete inability to travel instantia.

We're back to faster than light drives. Correct. And the reason it matters is that we are talking about people being thousands of light years away from each other. So fast and light drives, you get there a little bit quicker. But you're talking about, hey, let's go through, I don't know,

50 generations of people before we get to where we're trying to get to. Exactly. It's not, it wasn't. Or we can get there next week. Yeah, exactly. And so this point, it calls clears up. So on the good side, the Eldar, they clear it up. And so now, thanks. Thanks, Eldar.

What percent of them died? Oh, it's like 90%. Yeah, so most of them are dead. They split into multiple factions. It's the Amish of the Elder took off. Yeah, pretty bad moment for them. But for mankind, hey, guys, thanks a lot. The sky has cleared.

And this times out with- I need everybody to know this because we've got our outline that we go over. And one of the things on the outline is effectively, John telling me to shut up about Outlar because it's my favorite. and going, we will talk about it later because I was about to give you guys about five hours of me chatting about what happened with Eldar

during this year. Here's the thing. We're going to record a number of podcasts of Brad talking about the fall of the Eldar. It may or may not publish them because it may end up being a 42-hour diatribe. That's actually interesting,

but only if you're super into this stuff. I have to give him the credit. I'll let him do it. I'll put the microphone in front of him and let him talk. I may take a nap during, you know, there are things that goes on. might not be plugged in. I'll all record because I want to take of history.

We'll have it recorded. But yeah, he's going to go. So right at this time, this is where the Emperor of Mankind comes up. Baging. Yeah. So the Emperor of Man. I look that both of us took a long side. I think we're both rubbing our heads

because the problem with the Emperor of Mankind is this is one of the most... He's been around forever, but he kind of hasn't. And then he wasn't, but he was. Yeah, and he's maybe the most important figure. is the most important figure in the entire universe. And so they've also rewritten him a bunch of times. So we're just going to go with kind of what there is about it. And if this all sounds contradictory and so we don't know what we're talking about,

yeah. The emperor is somewhere around 8,000 BC to, he was created supposedly by some sort of shaman. At one point in time, those Native Americans, at one point in time, his Mesopotamians. Well, that was one of the stories. Right. GW changed that and rewrote it again.

But basically he is a super juiced up guy. Also, after I said 8,000 BC, is he older than Brad? But all we know is he was a conglomeration of some people that wanted to make the ultimate super psychic, pure, basically pure psychic entity as a human. Yeah. So when he comes from, right now there are two stories. If you talk to people who've been playing 40K long enough, there is more than two. But effectively, there are two stories.

The first story is that mankind has been fighting chaos since the dawn. And we had these super-powered shamans who I guess were around. And they were having a problem effectively. The chaos gods are eating. They were all effectively wild our thing. They were all farseers. They all saw into the future. And they were creating someone four way into the future.

humanity was going to have this huge problem and they needed the emperor. And then effectively, the emperor was told to get ready for this huge problem, but then didn't help with any of the huge problems until he just decided. Yeah. The emperors. And that's at this stage of the story. And when we get further into it, you'll realize, yeah, it's pretty serious. Story number one, just to catch everybody up is pretty simply.

They were early psychers. They foresaw the future and they decide to sacrifice themselves. and all her souls to make a new super creature. And that became the emperor. And then he spent 38 years after they created him, just hanging out, doing his thing, not doing anything important. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, so 38,000 years. 38,000 years.

38,000 years as normal. Also, not helping at all. No. No. By the way, it doesn't even. Is that laughably the most powerful person on Earth? Not even close. Everything we're going to discuss him doing,

he would have chosen to do at any point. Literally any time. Not today. He also has. Still playing Boulder's Day. He got stuck. Next level, computer brain. Now, he's not just a super genius.

He's a, I can think of thousands of things of the exact same time. Probably the most powerful psycher in the entire galaxy. It is the most powerful psych. So this is the most powerful. I was about to use the word mortal, but he's not even mortal, but he is being in the entire galaxy. Yes, we can live forever.

Let's go with perpetualism. Please, yeah. He can. you can kill him, but he'll just come right back. He will literally reform and be there again. So he's lived all of these lifetimes. And when he'd get into the fact that he's dick for the fact that he looks like something different to everyone, that's actually canon now.

Yeah, I forgot about that one. Yeah, he's, everyone perceives him different. Everybody basically perceives him as what they, they want him to be. And that's just what he is. He doesn't even say it. So, and he also sounds like something different to everybody. So everything about him, he's a warp entity, basically.

He's effectively an angel slash demon on Earth that could have helped us at any point in time, Emperor. I'm talking to you, money. He just shows the hang. One thing that is important is that the chaos gods also sensed his existence. And so when we talk about the chaos gods, we're going to dive more to this in later.

But at this point, chaos gods were still forming and becoming stronger. All these culminations that we're getting, as mankind, because the chaos gods feed on action. They feed on if you commit and you kill and you do bloodlust, corn is interested. When mankind was just on Earth, they were doing a lot of that.

They're power in corn. But imagine when mankind then leaves Earth and goes from population of billions to trillions to, I actually don't know the ones above that, but we're getting into those numbers. And we also get into the, they've retcunded a bunch of times, whether the gods have always existed, the gods just came in,

only one of them do, and the other ones were eternal. Yes. But overall, they feed off it. So as mankind expanded and became these things, then you go over the age of strife, where mankind now is having interwar. They're having plague. They're having...

And again, the emperor did take his sweet sweet pie. And so while all this is happening in age of strife, the chaos gods are getting real strong, because they're just getting fed with all the things that they're looking for. So the chaos guides have a name for the emperor, and it's the anathema. And they call him the anathema because he represents what they knew to be their greatest threat.

So they call him the anathema because he is the greatest threat to that. So the other story, though, I should just quickly note on is he was actually just born to immortal parents and happens to just be out of pure luck for no apparent reason. The most powerful being in the entire universe is just born. And he's immortal and he's perpetual. and he can't die. Yeah, and I just think this story's lame. So that's really all I want to put it to do anything.

Isn't that one also? He just keeps coming back. Like, he just shows up. They've made a bunch of shows about that. He will die. He will literally be dead and just no matter what, he just comes back. So from this point, we now move into kind of the last part of what we're going to cover on this episode, which is the Unification Wars.

Can we talk about the ultimate also recone? Which one? Melchador is possibly the coolest guy in the entire show. Oh, yeah. He's got a best friend. I should mention it the whole time. That he's either been with for thousands of years or just a little bit. Yeah, he's got a best friend called Malcador.

They just hang out a lot in all can. I would say he's the Robin to Emperor being Batman. Which is hilarious because he's wildly powerful and also a perpetual can. Robin was powerful. Robin had his things. Yeah. Which one? Yeah, it's a fair point.

All right. There are certain Robbins are better than other Robbins. But anyway, so we get into what's, now the unification wars. And so these ones, we may come back to these and dive real heavily at a later stage, but for now, we're going to just move through them, not quickly, but with some level of speed.

We'll be right back after a quick break. So effectively, the emperor now decides that this is his time. All of humanity is on the verge of extinction intergalactically, civil war everywhere. Everything's falling apart. Now is his time.

Who would have stopped all this? But let's do this now. The semi-GW canon line on this is the emperor came out when he felt that humanity might never recover. Like he feels that this is the, there's been plenty of them. But this is the time when humanity might just go too far. And there won't be a humanity kind of thing. So the emperor, of course, is still on Earth. So I think we can spend some time now talking about how much fun Earth was.

us to live on it this moment in time. It was a total wasteland of people fighting in a wild game, but people literally fighting in the, because at the time, Earth is a planet-sized city, effectively, which he then converts to be a real cool city, but whatever. But the things that it is just techno-barbarians killing people. I mean, it's fallout, but more structured. Yeah, fallout. versus a twisted metal versus all of these things.

It is completely over. It is busted things. We've broken the planet effectively. And it can't survive by itself. The Earth is no longer livable without outside hell. We are slowly going away. The Emperor gets together. They juiced up super soldier regiment.

Not quite space marines. A little more crazy, way more violent. And we'll touch your. So I'm a little teaser here. The next episode we're going to cover how these super soldiers that he made just happened to come into existence. Don't worry. We're getting that.

Yeah. Originally, the emperor was just another techno-babarian warlord. That's what everyone assumes he is. It's another person coming up, except he doesn't lose. Like not even close. He wins against everything. And he's cheating because he's had access to all that old technology. which again, weirdly enough, he doesn't use all of it.

But he uses some of it. He has better weapons than everybody else on Terra. And so this is where we come into a topic that I know Brad's going to love, the Thunder Warriors. So Thunder Warriors, again, GW gets better at naming things later. But the Thunder Warriors are a genetically engineered super soldier that are completely at the whim of the emperor. They are basically enslaved berserkers. I mean, they unleashes them on the populace when he wants to win the war. And they are, I don't even know a better word for it, just merciless.

They just crush. Unstop. We'll kill them. Yeah. They are not. There's no negotiations, no anything. When he decides to show up, that's why we said that person, kind of a dick sometimes. He took back Tara by.

murdering every single opposing soldier, period. He flatlined everybody else. And a bunch of random people, too, in the process. Yeah. When you say a bunch, millions upon millions of people got killed. And again, not the nicest guys, super effective. There's absolutely no one at the end. There's nobody left.

And this is actually one of my favorite stories of them, is that at the end, there's a final battle with another major techno-er Baron Warlord, whose name is escaping me right now, and I apologize. But according to the stories, at the end of this battle, sadly, all the thunder words to the very last man just happens to die. Every single one dies. Every single one dies in victory, because that's usually how you win a battle, is every one of your soldiers dies and you win.

I mean, in a complete coincidence, the emperor has a new fighting force. It's true thereafter. The truth about what happened is the emperor killed all of them, is that he creates these soldiers, he sends them out, he conquers the earth, and as soon as this is they are done, he goes. And he knows that they can't function in his new society that he pursued, that he's trying to make.

Because he has a, we're going to go into the crusades. The emperor wants to take back the solar system. And he wants to take it back in a certain way. Also, at the time, he is all about technology, atheism. Oh, yeah. Not believing. Well, also, I'm going to give me one prop on this. He has a reason for not religion because he feels religion's concerted cults and feed chaos. Feed chaos. And he also has a terrible idea, which is, I'm not going to let anybody know about chaos because they don't know about chaos. They can't feed chaos. And you're like, that's a stupid idea. Spoiler alert, doesn't work. It's like super bad. So at this stage, we now move into what you call reconstruction. Earth is fixed. It actually is terraform. It's back to. comes back to normal. Mars is redone.

We'll get there in a second. Yeah, Mars is redone. But effectively, he solidifies the Earth. And then from there begins... Also, I'm going to give it another trap because it's by far my favorite piece in 40K media, the last church. Watching on YouTube, it's awesome. Oh, yeah.

So then begins a thousand years called the Great Crucinct. And the Great Crusade is really less of a crusade and more of a unification. But I'm going to use a GW terms because the ones that they want to use. At this stage, Emperor, mankind is fixed. at home. So then we have to go to Mars. And we can't do too much time on Mars, but why I want to give people a quick breakdown of what's been going on Mars this whole time? Wow. So Mars, we won't even get into what's there. Mars has a super advanced entity that's on

Mars and they're effectively just using that. I know we've never seen that in sci-fi either. And they are just been hurting themselves into machines. They are literally being machines and they worship the machine god. and the emperor shows up, and because he's the ultimate psychic in the universe, and he can basically make anybody think anything. Because you see him as what you want to see him as, they think that he is effectively the avatar of the machine god, and go, done, you are now our new leader.

The one thing that's going well for Mars this whole time is, well, all this crap's going on Earth, Mars actually is doing bouquet. They're a weird cult who keep cutting their arms off and putting robot arms on themselves, but they got their thing. Weirdly enough, even though, and this is where it gets super backwards, though, even though Mars is all about technology, they worship the technology as opposed to understanding and forwarding

the technology. So they're basically never pushing technology for it, and they don't know exactly how some of it because they now revere it as their God. So it's holy. so they won't take apart things to figure out how they work. They just do everything in their power to keep some of their machines working. They are backwards, basically. They don't even know how a lot of their stuff works because they're not allowed to ask

because it's the holy machine. It's the holy toaster. And you've got to make sure that the toaster works at all time. You're like, how does it work? We will murder you for asking. If you open that toaster up, we are going to cut every piece of your body. Yes. So from there, at this stage,

The emperor shows up to Mars and he makes a treaty. Well, let's pause on that real quick. Why he wants Mars. While they're still backwards, Mars is effectively an entire planet. It's a forge. The entire planet is a manufacturing. So he needs this to start his request efforts. Yep.

You're like, hey, man, the closest planet to me apparently just blanks out war machines. I need that. This is where the treaty happens. At this point, the Emperor makes a treaty with the cult mechanicus, which gets, because this is a very important treaty on everything we're going to talk about around mankind going forward. Because this is, this partnership is massive. This partnership, not just because of what it grants both of them,

but because of the stage it sets for a lot of the future in the 40s universe. And they also weirdly have a bunch of stuff, right? Yeah. They argue about whether he was already manipulating them somehow. from a planet away, but you get to Mars and they're like, hey, we've got all these war machines. And a bunch of

spaceships. Were you guys going to go somewhere at them? Absolutely not. No, we're just building them. You're bored. Yeah. Pretty much. Can I have them? Yeah. Go nuts. So the emperor, and so I made some notes just we keep track of, so the emperor is basically getting war gear. He's getting weapons.

He's getting giant knights, Titans, spaceships. And Titans are a big thing to do. because Titans are the closest thing you're going to get to the old robots back in the age of technology, because Titans are effectively marching cities. They have their own economies. They literally have marketplaces that's not. They're gigantic.

That's a real thing. They're really cool. They're really cool. And he also then gets foreshadowing here the ability to create his own super soldiers with genetic engineering and genetic manipulation. A little bit of foreshadow there. Also, from the age of technology. You're a liar. You were there for. What was going on.

Yeah, exactly. But the cult mechanic and what they get back is to keep being weird. So the emperor is not going to make them act like the way he wants the rest of society act. But also they get the thing they want more thing, which is more technology to worship. So the contract is, and this is the reason we bring up, this is really important for some later events. Golf primaries.

Yeah, exactly. The concept is they get to go to the stars with mankind. And as we find technology, they get to take it and bring it back to me. Mars to be part of their enclave of technology? No, because for them, and they have some short stories where they've just kept STCs away from them, but they

want these STC blueprints because they are legitimately for them, the holy grail. This is their life quest of their entire, the cold mechanic is to get this old technology and to continue on. Yeah, so

effectively, mankind gets weapons, technology, and manufacturing. and the people that are getting it from get to come along for a ride and study rocks like an archaeologist. I don't know. I guess it was a good deal. That brings us to the conclusion of this episode. So I just do a quick recap. Mankind rose. Mankind fell.

A leader arose and pulled it from the darkness. And now it's ready to rise again. Probably not. So the next episode is going to be the last piece of history up until what we would consider the somewhat modern part of 40K. So this is going to think of what's called the Great Crusade. And the Great Crusade is really the launching point of modern 40K. It's the re-concruing of the galaxy, but also the reunification of those, again, super soldiers, the emperor made. Oh, yeah, the leaders of all of those, remember that we talked about chaos, wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

So what's going to happen? And that's our next episode is going to be the Great Crusade. So thank you for listening to 40K lore cast. Again, I am John. This is Brad. This guy. And we will see you next time. Oh, yeah, like and subscribe.

That's a thing. Please.