The 40k Lorecast - Episode 102 - The Pariah Nexus pt 1

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

On today's cast we begin our coverage of the Pariah Nexus. We open up with the setting of the story around the psychic awakening and how it had affected the entire galaxy. From there we move into the imperium entering the Nephilim Sector and the experiences of the imperial forces there. We then dive into why the effects of a pariah or the pylons are so detrimental on humans and other warp touched beings. We then jump into the history of the Ad-mech and the Necrons, namely the ad-mech keeping that a secret. We then close on the arrival of Guilliman to this conflict.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 with me, John Barsati and Bradchester. This is round two that hopefully during this round, my child will not again take out the power plug that goes to the router. And we don't lose it 20 minutes in. What? Today's cast, we're doing a dive into the events of the Nephilim War, which later became known as the Pariah Crusade, aka the start of 9th edition.

I know where I wanted to start talking about things almost immediately after the Horacee. And I got putting time out. Brad's pitch was, we finished the Horace heresy. So the oldest, well, not the oldest, but some of the oldest parts of the Lord said, can we do the new stuff now? Like, well, it involves entirety of characters who no one's ever heard of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they'll figure it out. Can we do the new stuff now?

I don't understand what's happening here. Yeah, I'm not following all your complaints. So that's what today's going to be. The 40K lore cast is a weekly show in the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern. for if you like the cast please follow and comment on it it really helps push our algorithm out which is really grown our listener base we're actually a lot larger than i ever imagined in a million years we would be at from a listener base and that's because the spotify and iTunes etc

algorithms like us a lot because of how much you all like it listen and comment so thank you for doing that and if you can keep doing it it's awesome i do read them all even the people who copy and paste the word wah 99 times into all of our casts, which I respect going with the same joke. 99 Wog balloons.

Yep. What? Brett had two choices on the song had the word 99 in it. And you went with Luft balloons, which I think was the right call. 80s for the win. Additionally, if you like the cast,

you want to hear more of us. There's a link on the notes to our YouTube page, the 40K lore cast. There you'll find old versions of the show that have been converted over with imagery and more importantly, subtitles so you can know what we were talking about along with our life. Yeah, believe it, there's been a few times. Those subtitles are not easy to make. Like, what was Brad saying?

I think I got it. Or in the case of me, I think I was saying, who knows? But anyway, you also have links to our live Q&A sessions. And now our other two shows, the history of 40K, which is a show also available on Spotify, iTunes, etc., focusing on the history of the tabletop of Warhammer going through the additions, the rules, et cetera, and Brad's upcoming show. You think we got stuff wrong in lore, wait until we start mixing rules together from 25 years ago? Yeah, if you guys want to have a fun one, the one that came out, I think last week, time of recording, Brad and Sniggs halfway through realized they were talking about the wrong edition. I had to edit it out. You guys won't hear it, but it was about a 10 minute that just had to

get cut out of the entire cast because they had the wrong edition. That was close. With Sniggs, it goes, hold on. We're off by a decade. And we back and edited it. Totally close. It was fun. Also, Brad's new show coming out, two old men and their handler, where it'll actually

more of a competitive 40K focus with still quite a bit of lore to it. That's coming out in, you know, sometime in the future. Yep. We also have a link to our Patreon in there. Massive thank you to everyone who's contributed already. The Patreon is how we are. are growing out and expanding further. You guys have helped us out.

We've been able to buy new microphones, new headsets. It's why we're able to do YouTube, better editors, all this stuff. That is a massive piece of the Patreon. So thank you. If you join our Patreon, you get this show, along with a history of 40K, completely ad-free. It's only $4.99. Hold on, everybody. What conversion are you going to give us this week, my friend?

This week, it's going to be 17,927. point three zero Mongolian turgaks for all of our listeners in Ulaan Batar, which, by the way, we do have listeners in Ulan Batar or people with VPNs. It's one of the two, but I can't see that. And I learned for this cast that Ulan Bataar is the coldest capital city in the globe with an average January temperature of negative 22 Fahrenheit or negative 30 Celsius for the rest of the world who aren't American. I'm throwing this out there because John has given me shit multiple times about

my nonsensical random facts that I know. And now he keeps hitting me with these. Yeah, because I watched Where in the World is Carmen San Diego as a kid or Santiago. Is this San Diego or San Diego? It's probably Santiago now that I say that. But anyway, Where in the World is Carmen Santiago? And it was a good show. And now it's going to be stuck in my head forever.

Lastly, as always, we have a link to our Discord. Our Discord is now, oh, it is big. I think we're over 9,500 pushing. 9,565. Yeah, pushing towards 10,000. There's a ton of activity in there, lots of channels. It really is made for people who love 40K in mind. The goal here is not to have it be like a chat forum where you come in there and ask a question.

Everyone yells at you. Instead, it's an really incredible uplifting community covering everything from the actual game, the tabletop, literature recommendations, even people who are you able to game with in Space Marine 2 online. Great spot. massive thank you to all our moderators who have really made it what it is, not just in moderating, but more importantly, they're the ones who designed it. They're the ones who added all the channels, made it so great to navigate through. So huge thank you to them. But with that, let's jump in. So psychic awakening. This is an era of 40K known as Psychoak Awakening. These were

Codex supplements, which a lot of us have some strong opinions on a couple of them, launched between October 2019. We're going to do more and more on this, because Because I think you, mostly too, really agree that some of the best lore has been written in the Gathering Storm and Psychic Awakening supplements and the continued supplements that are coming out for the game. I think that the writers have done a great job of this. So I think it's important to cover. Yeah, absolutely fantastic job. Just the rule writers with some of those books. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Back, pump the brakes, big dog. We're not going to talk about the rules during these. Well, I try to think, was it, I don't know, although the Harlequin one was a white dwarf, where your Harlequin troop master just became the greatest melee fighter in the galaxy. Let me just talk about re-rollable two upsets. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. With a sword, it was like, oh, what battle round is it?

Yeah, I've got 14 attacks now, whatever. It was horrible number. It was. I knew it gained, I think, did it gain a strength and attack for each battle around? Yeah, it was nice. Anyway, yeah, he stayed in the transport till turn three. and then decided to just yolo everybody. But anyway, the psychic awakening was a backdrop of the Great Rift

split in the galaxy. And it was really well written because it was, to Brad's point, it was talking about how each faction of the game stepped up to take it, either to take advantage of it or to try and stop the Rift expanding. The Rift would be when Abidon broke through Kadia and the Eye of Terror expanded. and it effectively cut off the galaxy for the most part. Exactly. And the last book that came out in the series was the Necron book,

which is our main focus here. And it focused on the Nephilim subsector and its role in the Indominus Crusade. Now, to Brad's point, what we're discussing here is when the rift happens, Acadia falls, the eye of terror explodes, this giant. You can see just look up map, look up 40K map, and you'll see it. It's effectively cutting, not necessarily in half, I would say, the upper third of the galaxy, it rips straight across that. As it went through, it created effectively a mini dark age of technology for a lot of the

worlds, because worlds were totally cut off from them. Except, unlike during the Dark Age of Technology, where it was like, we can't really communicate and there's Raiders, this Dark Age of Technology included giving demons free reign into the material. You also still have Drew Carrey. We're just like, well, this is fun. It's not a great moment. Hikari were not on the side of, let's try to stop anything.

They were just on the, let's take advantage of things. The reason it's called psychic awakening, though, is that with the Rift coming into the galaxy, it quadrupled quintupled, it massively increased the overall psychic powers of people within the galaxy. So everyone, even people who were not force sensitive became force sensitive, and those who were forced sensitive became astronomically more. It was an explosion. of power that ripped through the galaxy. Yeah, so, for example, the Eldar.

The Eldar found themselves more power than ever before, and this is the backdrop for Ynid being born. I would argue probably Yenid doesn't get born without this occurring. And because of this power, though, aside from Yenid, just regular Kraft World Eldar were much more powerful than before. So they were able to actually fight back. A lot of the craft worlds start doing pretty well during this era because they're overpowered by the cycle forces.

stands the fact that demons and chaos started showing up everywhere because chaos was used to have to kind of peek out or be summoned or have great things happen. The Rift gave them such a huge staging point of wherever the hell they wanted now. Yeah, exactly. The best example of it is ball, where the Tyrinids were about to consume ball as the tyrantids were closing under the last pieces of the Blood Angels defending ball. That's when the Rift ripped through. Cabanda and all of the blood letters came lying out of it. Yeah, Cabanda did not. He was not being subtle with this maneuver, came in and ruined a hive fleet.

And there was no summoning ritual. He was just able to do it because the Rift happened to pass nearby. At the same time, I would argue that this is the reason why we see so many of the demon primarks now. As we've talked before, it used to be when Angron would die. He would disappear for a tant. thousand years. Now he's gone for like eight hours, sometimes even less. If you roll the three sixes, give me a few seconds. And he pops back off. But it's because this rift has messed with the blend of reality and irreality. The issue, though, is it also is affecting the orcs

who have become extra ornery. Riled up, irritated? Yeah, riled up. Poked with a stick. Yeah. And even the Tao got a psychic awakening book. It was also them and Gene Stirl called, and they got Shadow Sun back. And the fifth sphere of expansion. I've read the book, obviously. But we're going to probably cover a lot of the psychic awakening in the future. I just want to do a little bit of a backdrop here. The most important part of the psychic awakening, though, is the resurrection of Gilliman.

If we're talking the narrative of 40K, that's the biggest one. And Gilliman, at the stage we're here, he's now gotten back to Tara. he's met with the emperor. He's declared himself the Lord Commander of the Imperium. He's got a special item that he is because he is definitely lacing up his boots and mighty ass kicking. Well, not only he lays up, he also held up the ad meck and held him to make a bunch more

because one pair is not going to be enough. We need this to be standard issue gear. Yeah, exactly. Get out there. He also organizes, I would argue that he organizes the biggest crusade since the original, original crusade, the Indominus crusade might be larger. If you're just talking total numbers, I would say, I think it's larger.

It's less space marines, obviously, but overall forces, it's larger. Because he took the entirety of the Imperium and went, I'm giving everybody a purpose because, well, we're getting invaded from, well, east, west, south, north, and everything else. And also up and down. That's the thing, too. Yeah, I will say he does have, if you guys listen to the sisters cast, the luxury of having the sisters who seem to outnumber the. the space marines about like 30 to 1 anyway and can also wear power armor and shoot bolters.

So these were options. But yeah, to Brad's point, the Indominus crusade launches itself out of segmentum solar. And the idea was to first halt the advance of all the enemies of mankind and then start reclaiming the worlds that were kind of in systems that were lost, mostly just the ineffectiveness and follies the Lords of Terra, who are once again not important because Gilliman is here. It's a good. Gilliman's here. And so the Lords of Terror have now moved back to being more what they were when the emperor was around.

Yeah, you're there, but Gilliman will come back and slap you with a power fist, which means you will actually cease to exist. Yeah. Yeah, it's like one of those weapons in the game quake. The person just explodes. And you're gone. Yeah. So the first thing Gilliman does is he divides his fleet into three things.

Primus, Secondus, and Tertius. And he sends them all out, each to perform. like a host of tasks. They all had a list of things they were going to do. But it's not long before they find themselves getting reassigned by Gilliman to new things that he discovers. And we're going to talk about one of those. Write me out. Right. Yeah. Nephilim sector. So the Nephilim sector is out in the bottom right part of the galaxy. As the galaxy is burning, and I do mean burning, there are calls coming in from everywhere.

The Astropath Choir on Soul was becoming overall on. the request for aid. And actually astrapas themselves were dying out. They were actually killing astrapass because they were getting so much connection. Yeah. Or receiving. Because there's always stories of an astropass dying,

trying to send a message because they have to get through the warp. It's so hard to do. These ones had so much overload. It was like a computer that overheated. But it was noted at some point, actually fairly quickly that there was one sector that wasn't crying out at all. But more importantly, it wasn't even communicating.

It's the Nethul and stuff. Which is a big deal because it is home to a lot of giant hive worlds. Yeah. This is kind of like if you played Mass Effect 3 with Sanctuary, where you just, it was just too quiet, something's off. Yeah. So all around the Nephilim sector, though, the systems are burning, like the rest of the galaxy. If these worlds had fallen to chaos, to orcs, or the like, even tyrannids,

there would have been a distress call coming out. Nothing came out of those. There have been multiple distress calls. And we got nothing. Yeah. No matter what, there would still would have been automated distress calls, the initial when they make contact distress calls, other worlds coming out, but they got nothing. So the Imperium sends a battle group to go handle the situation because they knew this is off,

but they also knew that whatever's there is probably not a good fit. So they said a full battle group out there. All around the Nephilim sector, though, and this is important, the worlds were burning with the rest of the galaxy, maybe actually a little bit more than they should. Because for an area that's not in direct touch of the rift, it was almost too hot to be a hot zone because it sits a little bit below into the right of the main part of the rift.

But upon arriving in the system, as they found the imperial worlds were either in full revolt or under full assault from Zenos, but not named Zenos. When I say Zenos, I don't mean or Orcs or Yucari, the great numerous extrasenos in the galaxy. And it's because these revolts, these invasions were much more akin

to the attacks of the Crohn's at Ardumanta that we covered at the start of the War of the Beast because the Zenos that were attacking the Nephilim sector were just trying to get through and out the other side. They're fleeing something behind them. There's something at the rear window that was scarier than going through Imperium defenses. Yeah, and it was the same with the Imperial Rebellions.

The Imperial Rebellions were not some ambitious planetary governor or general trying to seize control of a planet. It wasn't chaos cultists or genius or patriarchs trying to seize the planet. It was people rebelling to try and seize the ships to get off planet. And we'll do more on this widespread rebellion a little bit later in the heresy. But this had drawn the attention of the sisters of battle. Which is somebody that you don't want to get the attention of when you're in rebellion.

Yeah. And so the order, our martyred lady order showed up and we'll get more to them in a minute. But for now, I'm going to focus just on a battle group and they're experiencing. So upon arriving in the sector, this battle group, which is called Calades, found something kind of awful. Upon arrival, they found it easy to get there. Never a good sign. Because with the opening of the Great Rift, this is also called, by the way, the circadix maledictum, the warp is a nightmare throughout the galaxy. Warp travels insanely turbulent. It's like flying a plane over thunderstorm. And entire sectors were cut off. This is almost right before the birth of Slemesh, when you

head just crazy roiling in the war. Yep. And the stories are coming out of this is that when a fleet would try and translate out of the warp back into reality, upwards of 10% just wouldn't make it out the other side. And they were doing short jumps. However, this battle group, when they get to the edge of the Nephilim sector, they found the calmest warp basically in human history, but actually recorded human history because there might have been some nicer bits earlier.

It was a flat ocean, but there's a catch. and the catch is while the warp is calm, it's because it was no longer there. Well, you know, the astrophath and the psychers were not super excited to be cut off from the warp. Yeah, they were literally screaming and some of them dying, not because they were being attacked by the warp, but because they couldn't see it or communicate in it.

There are stories of psychers falling to the ground and choking to death as if they were drowning. And they literally died, not like, you know, This isn't even just a thing for the psychers, though, because they couldn't translate in. Warp engines would just fail and just not be able to go or interact with the warp at all. Yeah, you would actually try to translate into the warp and just every would fire up and it wouldn't work. One of my favorite stories was one of them actually did do that.

They were able to translate to the warp. And as they went into the warp, their Gellerfield overloaded. And they just looked at it and they started looking around waiting for the demons to come murder them all. And they just traveled through the warp with no problems and then came out the other side. And yeah, that must have been a fun moment. So the group master of the fleet Kaladis was this old rugged veteran named Marin. And he just looks around, sees all of this and goes, yeah, this is not natural. I'm going to go find the disturbance and I'm going to destroy it.

I was just saying in pure imperium form, what's causing this? Let's not try to figure out what's making the warp calm. it's not natural, let's blow it up for sure. That is 100% prime imperium there. But what gets crazy about this story, this is a really well-written books, guys, this is fun. As they get further in, they discover endless abandoned planets.

But when I say abandoned, I mean, we're talking more like day the Earth stood still. Like, you know, not that one. Yeah, it was just, there's... No, because that one, people were still around. There's just, there's nobody there. LV428. Got a mass effect again. Yeah. When the collectors pick everybody up,

their structures were still there. They're just nothing. Everybody's gone. Everything's fine. So as the battle group arrives in the system, but it's saying, that wasn't true that they didn't find anything. They found a wall that blocked them off from even seeing anything. Exactly. And so once they made it to the first space stations, they found them abandoned,

Not a single human there. There were servitors, but they were just standing around in a permanent rest mode. There was food on the tables. Obviously, I was rotting away at this time, but there's no signs of a struggle, no signs of a fight. But they did notice all the spacecraft were missing. So the conclusion was everyone just left. So then, of course, they go planet side. And when you get planet side, a lot of the same stuff.

These are hive worlds, maybe not necrumunda hive world, but these are still. still hive worlds and there's no one there. And some of the stories I love is like the machinery, because the machine spirits are still going, is still functioning. There are airplanes that are flying around in the sky, still just flying around forever. Because again, we don't use fuel guys. These are endless fuel cells. The creepier ones was they would find on the ground crashed vehicles, as if the pilot just stopped carrying and just drove into a wall because they all turned off. Right after this, though, doesn't take long. They noticed that the people who are, who've gone down to the planet, they don't feel right.

I mean, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't feel right. These guys were just losing their mind with an overwhelming sense of just something's on me, anxiety, paranoia. I can't stop moving. I can't rest. I can't sleep. I can't do anything. They wouldn't eat. They wouldn't do anything.

But they also weren't accomplishing anything either. So they were just spazzing out, is the medical term. Yeah. And so this is called the stilling. And it started as an overwhelming sense of anxiety and paranoia. The soldiers, they just couldn't settle down. They couldn't just get rest. They couldn't sleep.

It just something was wrong. And then, but over time it gets worse. So a lot of them just started wandering off. Just not so much like a zombie wandering, but just like, hey, I don't like being here. I'm leaving. Abandoning posts, doing whatever they can. Others would just sit down and say, I'm not getting up. I'm not doing anything.

Leave me alone. And the longer they were on the planet, the worse it got. This became a huge issue because commissars are a thing. And commissars don't ask you to do stuff twice. So the compasses... I mean, the second time they ask is followed by a bolt pistol in the back of your head. I don't think they're second time. I think there are commissars who were present here who had carn-level kill counts on Imperial soldiers.

This is insane. But even the commissars began struggling as they began committing suicide because they find a weakness in themselves. So the Imperium starts losing a battle to occupy an empty world that has no enemy combatants. Not great. Now, luckily, any good battle group has an inquisitor. And they had a woman named Draxas. This is awesome, by the way. Yeah.

She's a one. She's a playable model, by the way. She's the one with a weird dragon on her arms. He's really good, too. You find her in Custodes armies all the time. Her rules are meh. But I can see how it would be helpful in Custodes, though. I was like...

Four up devs versus infantry. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's helpful. That's all I'm saying. 18-inch loan out. Yeah. Interesting, unlike her rules, she's an incredibly powerful cycle.

She's not in the data. I'm not in the data. I'm not. So what she was able to sense was that the world had been severed from the warp. And it wasn't that the warp was, a calm ocean here, but rather the warp was being trapped behind a wall and couldn't get to the planet. What Drax has found was even more concerning was that she couldn't find any reason why.

Because as we said earlier, there's no signs of struggle, there's no battle. But even more whack is, hey, let's go look at the security cameras and all of them were corrupted with no information. Yeah. There's no data. Nothing anywhere. can't find anything. And this couldn't happen by accident. Luckily, Draxas is part of Ordo Xenos, so she knew there was something alien going on here. And she didn't really know how the Necrons were doing it, but she was pretty sure it was the Necrons. And yeah, so we'll go ahead and jump at the beginning. It's obviously the Necrons guys. I'm not writing you a novel.

It's, we all know this is about it. This is also a titled Necron episode. So as the battle group presses forward to the sector to find the cause, this disturbance gets worse and worse and worse. The point where space marines started struggling against this. The spaceships themselves, it was permeating even into them. So soon the number of sanctioned psychers, astrapas, and navigators began to deplete because they started just dying and killing themselves, so much so that the commander, Maron had to assign bodyguards to each and every psycher in the fleet to stop them from killing

themselves. But they eventually enter a system called Zidos. And in Zenos, they get its really strange readout from one of the planets called Mesmach. And this battle group has a vanguarded of ultramarines. They deploy down into the planet to survey the situation. And I'm going to be honest. This is what it says in the book, guys. It says they deployed down to the planet to survey the situation. Which, no, you know what? I took offense to this. Because Zedos, They're surveying the situation. There's a giant pylon bigger than the Pentagon. Yeah, that's my point.

They say they surveyed it and they found it. They found something that was two miles or so wide, so three and a half kilometers and 10 miles high, so 16 kilometers up. And they had to land on the planet. Don't look for it. Yes. Instead of just going, it's right there. Also made entirely out of it.

of Blackstone. Which also gives bananas energy off of anything. You're just like, yeah, we found it. By what? Looking down, you didn't need a survey party to go down. It's right there. I can see it. I can see it from orbit.

Yeah. Needless to say, the Imperium was like, that's probably the issue. And so Commander Maron orders the attack. So he decides we're going to destroy the pylon and we're going to hunt down every other pylon destroy them. So he puts the call in all this, to have, all the ships on the fleet arrive, and they would then destroy the pylon. However, Illuminator Cizarus had a different opinion of what they should be doing here.

If someone in Discord could give me the Jordan meme with Zaris, and I took offense to that. Yes. So let's talk more about what this pylon network is. So the pylon that Maron found was one of hundreds, maybe thousands in the system. It's a project by the Silent King and Illuminator. I'm going to go with Cesaros. It is not hard. It is not easy to pronounce necrone stuff, guys. I apologize. It's a lot of silent letters.

I'm rocking with Zaris. Too loud letters. Zaris. So the goal of the Silent King and Eliminator Cesaras is to shut down the warp in the region. And this is because the Silent King had a problem. Actually, he had a lot of problems. But one was bigger than the rest. The tyranids were upon the galaxy.

and there are more on their way. The necrons are not awakening as planned. Yes, many tomb worlds were lost to planetary destruction. Others were lost to other necrons. His fighting is a big deal, as we said in the last cast. Yeah. Yeah. The necrans have no stance right now in the current amount of necrons versus the current

amount of tyrantids in the galaxy. Necrons lose this automatically. And the Silent King needed the species of the galaxy to fight the tyrantids while he musters his forces from their deep slumber. But every time that they fight the tyranids, the tyranids win, it then feeds the tyranids because each world is full of biomass. So he needs to figure out a way to kind of bolster his forces.

Look, good news for him. Around this time, Gilemon also realizes the tyrantid thing. It starts exterminatising worlds to starve the tyrannists. He starts doing a lot of worlds. Yeah, but that's a very recent thing. The tyrants have been doing quite well up into this point. point. The biggest problem, though, for the silent king is just how active the warp is in the galaxy. This is causing even greater strife. So it makes it so the human worlds are easier for the

tyrannies to conquer. If an imperial world was just fighting the tyranids, they could probably hold out or at least leave more of a pyric victory where they could just destroy the planet on the way out. But the problem is that tyrants are hitting worlds where strife and challenges had already appeared. So the chaos has already gotten in there. And a lot of times these imperial world are fighting multi-front wars against chaos and tyrannins, Ternids, orgs, people, anybody, Dark Elder's been raiding you. There's so many other things going on here.

The Silent King needed to do something to stop the warp. And good news, he has a very long hatred for the warp and the technology to do something about it. We'll be right back after a quick break. He grabs Cizzerus and it's an emotionless plan. Quick note on Cizzerus, because he's one of my favorite necrone characters. He's a cryptech within the necrons.

And the cryptics are scientists, for lack of a better phrase. They're responsible for all the technologies, all the advances, as well as for seeing the future. But also, they're repair. They also do on-site repairs and stuff like that. I forgot about that. Yeah, they're cryptex. I don't love them in the new necrons, but in eighth edition cryptex were fun to have in your army. He's also a badass.

He's a giant walker. Yeah, Cizirass is super cool because Cizoraz is also the person who oversaw the creation of the necrodermis that became the necrons. The biotransference obviously was a Cetan thing, but Cizirass was also part of that. He's the most powerful cryptic in all of the necrons. And so the silent king grabbing him probably helped. Yeah. Get the guy that's in charge of every advancement that they had at the time. Yeah.

And they've ever had. So the pylon network within the Nephilim sector is both vast and complicated, and this is created by Cesar Us and the Silent King. Because pylons don't work by just placing one somewhere and then another one equidistant, like cell phone towers do where they can bounce signal. This is more complicated because you're actually trying to, the way I look at it is like the warp is more like it's an amorphous blob. So just putting up a wall around it, they'll still find a way through. So you have to kind of shape it and control. I like this quite a bit because of the fact that while the necrons don't access the warp, they know and understand the warp by mathematics, and they're going to shut it down by tech.

I love this part about everything that they're doing and they're talking about. They're predicting the expansion and decline of the warp by using their own technology. I think that's wild. Because they learned it during the war in heaven. Yeah. And so each world throughout their network could have one or many pylons. Some of them are massive, miles high. Again, 1.6 is your conversion for kilometers, guys.

Because America's cool. We're going to do 1.6. Yeah, yeah. But in other places, they'd have a cluster of smaller pylons, a range in a certain pattern. But the overall effect is the same. It's a Faraday cage for the warp and built throughout a system. And then the larger the network is, the more the control.

What it does in the positive is it severs the connection from the immaterial to the material. So this is just a void for all things warp-sensitive in the area, as well as making the area completely inaccessible to the warp. If the necgrads weren't such terrible people, this is actually a really good idea, even for the empirium. Oh, this has potential. And we're going to get into that more later with Call when we talk.

It'll be more than the next episode where Call discovers this network and goes, but can I have it. Right, exactly. It's like, I know we're fighting against this guys, but like, he's not wrong. This is, yeah, like, I just, can I just keep some of it? Not all of it, but just, I'm keeping a piece. Yeah, the Silent King's plan is first to control a sector this way, and they begin to spread it across the galaxy. Because he was not just severing the warp he was trying to do. He was trying to use these sectors of no warp to also muster his own forces. Right. That's what I'm saying. They're still trying to conquer the galaxy. But the Necrons, and they talk about this a lot, in the actual supplement books,

where the necrons are fully confident that they're just going to shut the rift off. They're not going to... It's not like we're limiting the rift. They were going to close it, period. And they were really confident. There's been a few of other people in the Second Awakening's who had a similar plan.

The necrons is only one that was actually working. The rest of them were like, we'll do all these rituals and stuff. And they're just going to put a cage around it and then shove it into a corner and not caring. You guys are dancing around with sticks and chicken blood, and we're going to actually put some tech up here. Yeah, oh, look, no warp. The reason this was happening in the Nephilim sector

is this was actually an area that had a lot of non-awakened tomb worlds. So what the Silent King was doing was he was building this up so that he could awaken tomb worlds in this section, unmolested by chaos and other forces. Because what he didn't want to have happened was have as the necrons come up, fight the tyrannids, defeat the tyrannids, but then be too weak to conquer the romew the galaxy, like what happened with the C-Tan.

When they did defeat the C-Tan, but the Eldar and C-Torke were just too powerful, and they had to go hide. So this time, his plan was, I'm making sure I've got all my forces and probably going to go a little bit slower. We're going to start in this section, and we're going to expand out and begin conquering. There was a flaw in his plan, though. And the flaw in his plan is simply the necrons are not warp-sensitive, so they don't understand what cutting things that are warp-sensitive off from the warp.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Joe. Let's talk about what's been the Thorne and the Silent King's side the entire time, which is he doesn't get the Imperium. Like all of his tech and everything else, he figures out all of the other races, and then the Imperium keeps doing, you guys are doing well in spite of yourselves. I don't understand it.

What he really couldn't foresee was the amount of aggression, the Imperium would show towards what he was doing. Because my assumption is from the Sunken's perspective, hey, I'm shutting the warp off, so no more demons. Everyone's cool with that, right? And unfortunately, the side effect was pretty significant. As I say to Brad, with a pile of medication behind him. What do you think of side effects, Brad?

They are real and not great. Yeah. So as the reports start coming back to the Imperium about the Nephilim sector, it's immediate interest to the admec, who, and we're going to do a deep dive later in the cast into some of the stuff with the ad mech and the necrans. It is quite funny. But the Calades Battlefleet, as always,

is traveling with a full complement of admec. And they were there to harness what was left of the technology as well as to aid in the divination of whatever was going on in an area that involved technology and send all their reports back to Mars. That's the key part right there. The Mechanicum had been studied, being Blackstone pylons around the galaxy forever.

They never could fully understand that technology because it was both too advanced as well as too alien for them, but also it was too old. All of the pylons the Admec had found were built 60-something million years ago. They knew what Blackstone was, which the Imperium, by the way, calls Noctolith, noctolith, whatever.

It's a big deal. They don't understand it at all, though, because they're using it as a nullifier, or at least the necrons in this thing, but it's also a wild synergistic amplifier of the warp also. Yeah, the only thing they did know is that extended exposure to Blackstone has bad effects on organic life. Bad?

The thing was, but let's get into this. What everyone they'd encountered had been around for 60 million years. This is, they were, it was kind of low energy stuff. So they were aware that it would slowly, and in effect, lobotomize beings that were around it because you would eat your soul. But it was slow for people like, Onkadia, which obviously had these, their lifespans was shorter than the time it would take to lobotomize them. But when the admec get to natholin, these things are happening in hours, weeks at most.

It is fast. And it's because the difference is that have a 65 or 60 million-year-old pylon that's on low energy output. This one's at full power. With new batteries. Yeah. And they are just watching this thing happen. And the ad meck are mildly interested. to say the least in this.

However, the stilling also has a big problem on how the materium actually functions and interacts with the imaterium. And I'm about to cover some stuff, guys, that was in the silent king novel. I'm not going to spoil the whole novel for you, but some of the stuff is in that. These are massive reveals. Deal with it. GW in those books admits that all humans, all beings have a soul. The soul that you have sits effectively in the immaterial and is an energy output of what you do in the material.

And this is how the warp gets affected by actions in the mortal realm. This explains why beings like humanity and being the Eldar are able to affect the warp so much more with their actions than like the Necron tier did back when they were growing around. The more it disturbs it, the more it goes there. But it also works the opposite direction. So if a soul is inclined, the warp, it can affect it back through. Like we've discussed before, when Corne has a champion, he will provide blessings. And that's how he can reach through the warp into the material and make someone better. Zinche probably did the same thing, where it would give some knowledge or some insight into someone that it wanted to affect.

If the mortal vessel then becomes so inclined. It's also the more that you interact with the warp, the more that the warp interacts with you. and the strengthening of that bond, though. So you change things in reality and you mirror in the mirror world, which would be the Imitarium, you affect it in there, but you strengthen that connection

through just your actions. And if you sever that connection, you are a husk of yourself. You're a soulless husk because you've lost your connection to yourself. Yeah. In the case of like psychers, this connection is obviously a lot stronger, but it affects everybody.

And where this matters is with the pylons, in place and the network active, the mortal being no longer has connection to its own soul. And this is why these people were just freaking out so much. You've now taken away emotion, both good and bad. And I think it's a really good explanation of what it's like being around a blank. Because we've heard for decades now about in GW lore. If you're around a blank, you're just uncomfortable, you don't feel well. This explains it.

because you're being severed from your actual soul and your feeling. So joy, fear, sorrow, ecstasy, they're all fleeting. You get them for a moment, but those motions sit more in your soul, which is in the imitarian. So you never get to really feel a fullness of life. Let's go on the next. Which is why you'd hunt them down his heritage. Well, let's go on the next one, man. Do the necrowns never have souls then, even when they're a neckgrounds tear? That's what you're really complicated. They allude to that, though. Yeah. But then what are the C-Tan eat. That's the problem. It is because, but the C-Tan

had no access to the warp either. So maybe the Necronter had a different version. And it would make sense because there's other species in the galaxy. The tau are not force sensitive. So maybe there's some energy level or just different beings or different things. Who knows? But that's how it's written.

So what happens for humanity, Eldar, by the way, also get exposed to this, which they are not huge fans of. But as a being, you don't know what's wrong with you. You just know something's wrong and you don't like it. Effectively, one of two things happens. You either freak out and try to leave or you just give up on life. The ones you try to freak out and leave, that's great. But a lot of others, this is what's happening with a commissars having to

kill everybody. People just sit down and they wouldn't eat, they wouldn't drink, they wouldn't move. They just died right then and there. This, by the way, total surprise of the Necrons had no idea this is going to happen. Yep. This falls into the category. of oopsie. Well, remember, they also think that they are going to get the Imperium before they start attacking them on their side by doing it. Yeah, this is awesome, guys. I mean, that's why I love it.

It is, this is that thing of a dog or cat bringing you a dead bird. They're so proud of themselves. Check out this thing I did. We should eat this dead bird together because we're best friends. And the Imperium just went very quickly, bad dog and got a rolled up newspaper. I will say the Imperium may want to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper. The Mechanicum were behind the person hanging with a rolled-up newspaper saying, I'd like to eat some of that bird.

Also, where did you get that bird from? Yeah. Are there more birds over there? So I want to spend some time now on ADMEC and the Necrons. And again, this is really more fresh out of the latest books, but I went back and checked the old codexes after learning this, and it does hold up. Necrons just showed up.

That's the crazy part, even though they've been in the game forever, in the actual lore of when they showed up, it's like yesterday. Yeah, I mean, it's the Necron's first contact with mankind was 897 of M41. We're at 999 right now, maybe a little bit past. We're less than, we're like, what, 103, 110 years of Necrons being around. However, their first interaction dates back at least 10,000 years. crusades. Yeah, and this is because the Mechanicum had discovered them and kept it a secret. They had discovered these tomb worlds to most as to a casual observer, the thing about a tomb world

is that when the Necrons would teleport down below surface, it wasn't everything. It was just all the bits that mattered. But there were like old, mostly pyramids that were 60 million years old that did have some leftover tech. They looked to the casual observer like a mountain or a giant landmass. But the AdMAC exploratory fleets were finding them. And thanks to excavation, chats with the Eldar, maybe even some random interactions with awakened necrons, cough, cough, what's sitting on Mars, the Void Dragon on Mars, cough, cough, possibly the entire origin of the machine spirit, cough, cough.

Anyway, the Mechanicum are highly interested in this race. They are motivated on this. Yes, yeah. So for the last 10,000 years or so, the Mechanicum had been plundering Necron tomb worlds for all sorts of technology. And they started off plundering all the stuff above ground, but over time discovered that there were actually stuff below ground. And this changed a lot of their stuff because, much like Trays in the Infinite, if they could

open these tomb worlds and loot the sleeping catacombs, they could get everything there. But what the Mechanicum were doing is they were then bringing in Meltow. bombs afterwards to blow up all the evidence. So that way, the Imperium couldn't find out what they've been up to. Well, this, my favorite. This did come back to bite them several times, though, because as they're stealing things, the actual two more defenses would start activating. Yeah.

The initial, and the early bits, this weren't bad. It was wraiths, scarabs, and spiders. So the first few ad meck got their butts kicked pretty bad by those things, but then later they're like, oh, yeah, hey, bring guns. Yeah. It's also important. Bring the pickax, but also bring guns. But at some point during M41, the worlds start becoming an issue. Because up until like 700 of M41, the reawakening process hadn't been triggered in mass. Now all of a sudden, it's going. So stop me if you've seen the sci-fi film before where the tomb awakens and comes fully online before you finish your plundering. This might come up. So all of a sudden, power supply. phasing technology, weaponry, and more. These are now accessible because the tomb worlds powering online, but so are the defenders.

So the ad mech have to start looting these worlds faster and faster and faster. And what happens is kind of funny. The ad mec realized effectively like the timer, any good heist movie, right? I was going to say, but I love it because of the fact that they go, they always react this amount, this time, they do this, and they get wildly overconfident. Because they just start sending people out to get this. They go, all you have to do is wait 10 seconds. The camera moves here, you duck under here and you do this.

Yeah. There's a scene in the Silent King, where they talk about this, where a bunch of Necron warriors are behind an impenetrable force field. And so they know if they hit the force field a certain way, they become a threat, and the warriors will march out. They just slaughter the warriors. This is how they've been doing stuff. And this was great. Any of us who played video games in the 90s is how you beat every boss, you go back, you go forward, you hit them once, you go back, you go to the right, you go forward, you hit them once. It would just in repeat and you would win every single time, unless the Lord awakened.

And this became the bigger problem for the Admec, because for a while in the early stages, they were able to just kind of wreck the tomb worlds. And before, by the time the Lord had awakened, all the forces were destroyed, the that could loot the place and blow it up. But communication happens. Other tomb worlds are awakening that they're not aware of. And suddenly in the middle of the awakening process, the tomb world makes an adjustment and turns the lord online or worse yet the overlord online. Now all those useless thralls have a genius at the helm. I love everything about the fact that they originally classified the necrons as a low-tier zeno species that wasn't a big deal.

Because the necrons were, and this was also a mistake ad-McMade, as the necrons were discovered, it's a great point Brad's making. The necrons were classified as a tier three zeno, which means local threat, nothing beyond that. So effectively, don't go to an active necrone world, and you're fine. And they did this because the Mechanicum didn't want the acquisition or the Lords of Terra to launch an attack on the necrons because they didn't they needed to pillage more technology. But enough tomb worlds came online and the days of looting the catacombs became kind of the inverted.

It became the days of the admec getting their butts kicked by the necrons. Pretty badly by the way. Oh, absolutely wrecked. Admec exploratory fleets just kept pushing their luck on these tomb worlds, taking too long to break into vaults or spending too much time. looting and the alarm had been raised, and they would have total losses, no way of escaping. Because when the necrons show up, by the way, they don't show up slowly. The better part was, is the admec started to show up, and there would be fully operational Death Stars in orbit, out in systems, ready to go. And you're like, hey, we're going to sneak in

and take all this stuff. And they're like, yeah, we're going to destroy your entire fleet right now. Yeah. And so this starts really with the. Silent King coming back in 744, but it's more when he ascends the control of the necrons, that's in 900 of M41. That's in the full Necron awakening really takes off because now it starts happening quickly. Now Tomb Worlds are turning on in what used to be, I don't know, let's say it was 10 hours before. Now it's 10 minutes.

They've just come online, but more importantly, other necrons are showing up. And again, this is in some of the novels where the ad mechrex or on the planet, engaging, working through it, and all of a sudden, all the alarms go off on the ship because there's an entire Necron fleet in orbit. Because remember, the Necrons have phase shifting technology. So they can appear in mass. You're having a grand old time shooting mindless, you're fighting mindless warriors easily. And all of a sudden, an overlord in a catacone command barge comes down with a bunch of not mindless ones, right? It's still mindless, but under his control.

So they start, go from doing Laura Croft Tomb Raidering and stealing stuff. So they're starting off with stealing. And then they're waging a war in secret, of course, because they still want to steal all this stuff. And then they graduate to holy God getting wrecked by the Necron. Because Necron entire dynasties are showing up overhead going, yeah, quit stealing our shit to having to,

never before seen tail between your legs having to tell Gilliman about what they've been doing because it's a real big problem because the Necrons took huge offense to what they were doing and were following them back to wreck other Imperium worlds. And it's a really cool scene in the book, by the way, guys, where Gilman literally makes the head of the Admec apologize to the Imperium, in effect, and tell them all the truth. the way, did not know he was going to make her do that. It was a good scene. But on that note, let's get to Gilliman because he's the last thing we need to cover before we jump into the Pariah

Crusade. At this stage in imperial history, there had been conflicts with the necrons, but they'd been scattered. In addition, most of the conflicts with the necrons were against individual tomb worlds that were nowhere near full strength. Well, let's caveat that a little bit. All of the recorded interactions with the necrons were with non-fully awakened tomb worlds, even the battles they lost. The fully awakened tomb world is kind of like hitting the Eldar during the fall. The fall. The Dark Age of Technology. Yeah. Or actually, yeah, the fall where they would just get near and the Eldar would go, yeah, just delete all of that from orbit. I don't care about it. So we don't know how many times necrons wiped out an exploratory fleet, but it's more than zero.

Now, the only group that has deep knowledge of the Necrons is the Admec. And for the last 20 to 50 years, the Admec had had to come to terms of the fact they were losing a war against the necrons. And the bigger problem that the ad mech had to go to Gilman with is not the, hey, we picked a fight and we can't win. Can you help us out? Which is how it started. It's actually, we picked a fight with what might be the great. foe in the entire galaxy. And we don't just need your help

pulling our asses out of this fire, but if we don't do something about them, they're going to kill everything in the entire galaxy. Yeah. So all of a sudden, this necron conflict goes from a small little area to a full-blown

galactic war. And it's because the admec pop up the map to Gelleman and just because Gellman says, well, where are these necrons because I've heard of them. I've read all the data on them. How bad can it be? Yeah. It's pretty bad. The answer was check off. Oh, yeah. A bunch of those two worlds were heavily populated imperial worlds. Yeah, because the thing was that ad mech had looted these worlds of technology

10,000, you know, 5,000 years ago. And the Imperium sent settlers there and built stuff on there. This is all LV428, basically. It's a, they discover the entire galaxy. is LV428. So this is kind of a nightmare because the Necron forces are now spinning up, much like what we saw in War of the Beast,

where these small orc conflicts went from, hey, there's a lot of orcs here to, hey, there's a lot of orcs here to, oh my God, there's way too many orcs here. Someone do something about this. So the Mechanicum go to Gillum and say, please help.

Luckily, they had call. and call is the progenitor. You really blow this over, though. G-man was banana pants angry about this. He was, but the good news for them is that they had call do it, and call is the reason G-man's alive. True. So there's a little bit of this there.

But the bigger piece, though, is actually G-man trusts Call, and he knows call will tell him the truth. So call comes in with the full truth about how massive this is, how many Necron tomb worlds are literally on key imperial worlds, and that this conflict of the Necron's is completely unavoidable, and the conflict will be on scale or on par with what he's currently doing against the Tyrians. Because remember the whole thing of the Adominus Crusade, one of the main pieces of it was the Tyranns.

Gilman got back to Terra, looked up and discovered there was a high fleet, belining towards Terra itself. So the first thing he was doing with the Primus, Secondus, and terminus fleets were to control some of chaos of it, but a lot of it was to push the tyrantids back. And now he's just told, oh, yeah, the tyrants are actually number two. These guys are number one threat.

So Gilliman looks at all, because he is the greatest military mind of this era. Just, I'm not wrong, because the lion's not awake yet, and I don't think Gilliman's better. Pers, I think Gilliman's better. That's for a debate for a different day. Gilliman calls fleet primers, seconda, and Tertius to join him in an all-out assault in the Nephilim sector because he realizes the amount

of effort the neck going to the nepholum sector means this sector is important to the necrons. So if he can get there and demolish it, he can at least backfoot them for a little bit and then move his forces elsewhere. The goal for Gilman really at this point is whack-a-mole galaxy. He needs to get everything in the entire galaxy a bit more stable so he can start picking some fights and taking some key players out. Unfortunately for Gilliman, he has no idea of the size and scope of what's about to come into play in the Pariah Crusade.

So with that, we'll break because next week, we're going to kind of just do a linear run through the Pariah Crusade, which when the Imperium breaks into the system, takes some pretty serious losses, discover that the Sisters of Battle are pretty, pretty badass at this thing. Spoiler alert, the Faraday cages don't affect your faith in the God Emperor. That comes from somewhere else. So once again, this is a battle. Best Fighting Force the entire Imperial Galaxy. I say that as someone who doesn't play sisters. But anyway, they're awesome. You're a video game, by the way. Oh, it's exceptional. So this is a Necron forest that's never been recorded before. A lot of just, just a little side note for everybody.

the Necron Codexes started in third edition. Fourth edition? Third edition? Fourth edition. Yeah, third edition. And they added a few models here and there until we got to about eighth edition in which they, I would assume they had less than 25 data sheets in eighth edition. The start of ninth edition, which was the launch of this crusade, they got quite a lot new stuff.

And it was timed up very well from a plot standpoint that, oh, yeah, this stuff had always been there, but those tomb worlds hadn't fully awakened yet. But now the Imperium is hitting a Necron forest that literally has stuff. Even the admec didn't know that they have. Faults and things of that nature coming out. Because it's all the things that they have the shards contained in. So they have their most powerful stuff. Wasn't going to be just wandering out. Yeah. Destroyers, the hex mark destroyers come into this. The weird tall thing with the long legs in the eye, whatever that's called. I like necrons. The War of the Worlds. There you go. I just, I like necrons, but I actually like the older necrons. I like gray-tied.

Nacrons. What if I run 80 warriors at you? Well, I'll shoot them. They come back to life. Sometimes. This has been John Barsati and Bradchester.

See you all next week.