The 40k Lorecast - Episode 130 - The Minotaurs? NOPE suprise its the Lords of Terra!!!!

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

On today’s cast I tricked Brad into talking about the Lords of Terra by telling him we were going to talk about the Minotaurs. We start with their origins as the magisters temporal, and how that set up some of the “challenges” the imperium would have with them for the next 10,000+ years. Then we move onto the Council of Terra, which also kind of sucked, but was at least functional. Unfortunately we then get to the grand council of reconstruction which was the last time it functioned in a way that benefited the imperium at large, cause that is when the Imperial Senate was created. From there we just dive into the nightmare of bad choices that happened. Until at the end we set up the perceived need by the lords of terra for the Minotaurs.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 lorecast with me, John Barsati and Bradchester. This sad guy. Today we'll be starting our coverage of the great bronze Marines, the Minotars, with a focus on their history, the mysteries around them, along with a dive into how they function and their lore. For those don't know, 40K lore, the weekly show and the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern.

Like and subscribe. It's been great. You all have been doing it. Our algorithm is rocking and rolling. So appreciate it. But if you haven't done it, do it some more. Great. Link on the show notes to our YouTube channel for our bi-monthly Q&As. We just did one recently. Our other show, The History of 40K.

And if you want to support us, we have a link to our merchandise. And of course, our Patreon. Our Patreon helps us out a lot with this show. The Patreon helps us get audio equipment, helps us expand more into YouTube, despite us constantly failing with those expansions. But one of them is going to work, God damn it. Massive thank you to everyone who has contributed to our Patreon.

You guys have really aided us incredibly in this. For those who haven't, if you want to, you get this show and the history of 40K completely ad-free, and it's only $4.99 a month. Or still, $4.99 a month, but it's warmer. I realize Brad constantly references it, so we might as well give Guam a glow-up. Yes. Guam is lovely. and if you're going to build a naval base in the middle of Pacific Ocean,

might as well build it in paradise. It's located just west of the international date line, for those who don't know. And it's been a military outpost for the U.S. since 1898, when the U.S. won it from the Spanish in a Spanish-American war, except for that little three-year period where the Japanese had it and were total dicks during that period of time. They were, holy God. But it is also a paradise.

The average temperature is 85 degrees Fahrenheit, for those of us use a real temperature, or 29.5C for all your weirdos. And interestingly, it has the tallest mountain on earth technically because Guam is on the Mariana Island chain. So Mount Lamlam is measured from the seafloor, which is kind of cheating because it's on the Mariana trench. So it's 1,300 foot elevation, but it's technically 38,000 feet high, so 11,500 meters, which

is a little bit BS. Yeah. But fun note. I'm going to start measuring my height. while standing on things. Yeah, exactly. Bread's on the chair. Therefore, it's the chair counts.

Yep. But for those, we do have listeners in Guam, because we have mostly, I know you're probably military, but for those who are there, Guam is also a major MMA spot in the Pacific. And if anyone's looking to train there, go to Steel Athletics. It's over in Tamuining. If you're there, go find JJ. He's the owner there.

And tell him, you know me because, or you listen to my podcast, you'll blow his mind. JJ and I trained Jiu-Jitsu together. Yeah. Well, he owns the spot. Jay J-Jy did Jiu-Jitsu there for 10 years. He's a good buddy. He moved out to Guam to open the gym out there, and he's a great guy.

I think he's a Ranger reservist now, too, but great guy. If you're on Guam, go check out Steel Athletics. All right. Lastly, our Discord. It's also in the show notes. You should also join our Discord.

Lots of people are there. Great spot for the, do you want to ask us questions, tell me all the stuff I got wrong. I took a lot of heat for that Blackbeard comment, and I'm going to stand by it. Just come with it. I like dying on stupid hills.

But more importantly, it's a great place to interact. It's really been improving a lot recently. We're getting a lot of people coming in there. We're having another painting competition coming up soon. But we have a lot of stuff for great literature advice, just great camaraderie. People just trying to hang out, learn more about the lore, and just meet other people. Get in there, join. It's completely free like every Discord should be.

No one should charge for Discord. It's free. I'm just going to state it over and over again. I hate when people charge for discords. You haven't said that in a while, too. I know. I got yelled at in a while. I'm going to bring it back.

Don't charge for Discord. Don't charge for things that no one charges you for. That's a dick move. Anyway. All right. Speaking of dick moves, surprise. We're not talking about the Minotars today. Brad is super upset about this.

We're actually covering the Lords of Terra because in order to cover the Minotars, we have to cover the Lords of Terra. And I started writing it and decided, suck it, Brad. We're doing the Lords of Terra. And the next episode will do the Minotars. Hooray. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is actually a surprise episode of the Lords of Terra. Yeah. What's really great is getting ready for a cast and then we do a different cast. Yeah. Grab your nitroglycerin tablet because it's party time, Brad. It literally has them. None of you can see this from a camera.

Brad actually just pulled out nitroglycerine. All right. Let's see what we can do at a Brad's heart rate. So I actually... Let's talk about why we have to talk about the Minutars first. Yeah. Or sorry, talk about the Lord's of Terror to talk about the Minutars because the Minutars wanted... Sorry, the Lords of Terra, which we will now dump into...

Yep. Wanted a patsy Marine to go do Marine things or do Lords of Terra things with Marines. and now we're going to talk about how much they suck. They've always sucked, and they always will suck till the end of time. I mean, yeah. This is the longest set of show notes we've had in four to five months. Yeah, because the Lord of Terra are fascinating. They're fascinatingly awful.

All right, so the Lords of Terra actually do... I like this history because it's kind of fun to go into, mostly because it's just circular of terrible ideas, becoming more terrible ideas, becoming, yeah, predictably failures. Well, let's talk about how they started. Because first off, Emperor takes, this is Reclamation War over Terra, takes everything. He never does anything to the nobility.

And a lot of this nobility class were just, hey, you get to stay nobility if you join as part of my side. With the emperor, GW writing is very, very Britain-based. Yeah, of course. It's what they know. It's what they know better. It's meant to resemble 19th century Britain massively. So the emperor and Malcador, they start consolidating power as they're moving through,

but they realized they couldn't destroy the nobility class. They could clip the wings a little bit. But if they destroyed them, it actually would cause a bigger problem. So as they accumulated lands, they gave them new titles, new tasks. So they could still feel important, but never give them any real purpose or meaning, which is smart. But they also had kind of a lot of resources. So they still, because they kept giving them land effectively, you know, it would be land back in the day. But they still had a ton of resources because they did want them to do stuff.

They needed them to. I mean, the truth is, the emperor in Malcador, they couldn't, and we're talking about it's more later. They couldn't just control the populace. They still had to have people in charge. And it's easier to take the people who were already in charge and let them still be in charge and just have them not stab you in the back. And so that's, they also needed their kids to make the custodes. That's also a thing, too, did help. Well, also, that means someone was Valador's dad.

Yes. But they also, they had. I bet you Valador killed him. I bet you, Valdoor killed his dad by. No idea, but 100%. It doesn't even matter. In my lore, he did, for sure. Yeah, 100.

But you got to figure that also they pulled some of the early Marines from these places, too. You know what I mean? Of course. From different places of Terra. But the things they needed people to take care of the populace can take care of resources that they're going to need when they start pushing out into the Great Crusade, this is what they start with. Yeah. So let's go with the very first inception of it, which is called the senatorial.

Parham Imperialis. This is the governing body made up of chosen nobles across Terra. This is before the Great Crusade. This is during the... Why can't I think of the name? The Reclamation Wars? Yeah. It's during the Reclamation Wars. So this idea was actually pretty genius, when it comes to adding nobles to the fault. Because one problem that they were always going to have was the nobility that they just conquered were thirsting for power. The whole history of Terra with the techno-barbarians and everything was everyone. was trying to get as much power as they could get. You call this genius, but like,

this is genius. I sure, if your genius idea is to grab the backstabiest of backstabbers and put them all together so they can't backstabers. Exactly. He killed the backstabious ones, but what he did was the emperor created, you know, he basically put himself in Malcador all the way at the top. But then he created almost like a middle, class, for lack of a better phrase, of power underneath him and said, you guys can all be here.

And some of you can be upper middle class and some of you are lower middle class of power. And then you can all just stab the crap out of each other in here as long as you leave me alone. He basically made trickle-down economics that doesn't, by the way, which by the way, doesn't work. But side note for a different cast, I'll go on. I'm going to go with my ultra- rare reference. He did a Chinese downhill. There are no rules. And yes, that is from Hot Dog the movie.

Go look at it. It is from Hot Dog to the movie, which I've sadly seen. Yes. But he just tells them, hey, what are the rules? There are none. Don't mess with my stuff and stab each other galore. How do you go up in the rankings? Do stuff that I don't want to hear about.

Also, make it so you don't interrupt what I'm doing. He doesn't even care. There's a free-for-all going with it. this. Yeah. Well, and we know, he gave them all a very, very basic. Here are four of you get to be in charge. Well, actually, not four of you. He, better, but he said, there are four jobs someone can have. That's what he said. Here's four jobs. I don't care who gets them, but they're going to be done. Or if it's the same guy when I come back. Yeah, but they're all going to get achieved. And this sets the stage by way for the entirety of the Imperium. There's a job that has to get done. The job

I'd better get done. I don't give two Fs who does it. I don't think that the emperor even called these guys, but they're actual names. I think he just chose, you know, Ted, Billy,

Jimmy, and Don, and those were the names that he gave to them. They're like, that's a different guy. Don't care. Is everything still on time? Good to hear.

You could be standing on that guy's dead body right now. As long as I'm getting my troops and my supplies, I do not give a shit. And so let's talk about the first four Lords of Terra, which is called the Magisters Temporal, where the master of the administratum, the grand provosty marshal, the Arbites,

the chancellor of the state's imperium, money guy, and the Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial armies. Duh. So let's talk about them because it's kind of fun. So the first, the first Lords of Tara, these people were meant to handle

the day-to-day of the Imperium, just super basic. money, administration, keep the order, make the military work. But from day one, there is drama. And I love this because, by the way, if you want to know more about this. No shit, there's drama, John. You have, again, a bunch of guys that are getting their job by any ruthless means possible. Is there going to be some issues?

Probably. Yeah, this is awesome. All right, but you do want to call out. We get a lot of comments about, like, where do you get the stuff from? Valdor has a book. Go read it. It came out in 2020. A lot of this comes out of the Valdor book. It's actually one of the cooler books if you want to learn about this era.

So we have these four ones. The first one we'll talk about is the very first master of the administratum, who sets up the administratum to be what it is today. His name is Noam Ratravia, and he came from a very powerful noble family in the Americas, who smartly joined the emperor like on day one. Day one, yes. And we're like, yep. Like we're, we're, we're, we are investing on the ground floor here.

This is, these guys are buying Bitcoin in 2002. Like, that's how they saw this one. He got his two, he got his whole cards and went, I'm all in. Oh, my God. This guy is one of my favorite and least favorite because he's actually very intelligent. This guy has a plan. He rocks out. He's your favorite, but he's also the worst because he's what sets up.

All of the bad things. Yeah. Everything. Yes. This guy is, hey, is this going to make things slightly better for me and worse for every single person in existence? Yes. I'm going to do that.

And he does. Yeah. And he immediately does. Yeah. No one was quite an intelligent talent. But at the breath of way, light your selfish. So he looks around and basically looks at all the potential jobs and realizes that this imperium is going to get big.

And a big thing. is going to have bureaucracy. So I'm going to put myself in charge of the bureaucracy because that'll make me the most powerful person in this thing outside of the emperor. And I'm going to make sure that everything goes through the bureaucracy. Yes, it had the things. He set it up so that you could effectively skim money off everything.

Everything could be slow. He made it inefficient purposely to steal easy. he this guy sucks so much oh it's like it's amazing and we're back to him in a second because while you had him on the other side you had this guy pelops dravagnor who was the head of the estates imperium who was massively over his head pelops his job was to find all the money to fund all the crap the emperor want to do which is a lot because remember like the emperor still needed money like it's one thing to remember is that you know the emperor the imperium is not slaves like we There is imperial currency.

People get paid for their work. There's a lot of debate over the value of it, and there were a lot of Bolshevik-style revolts over the last entirety of the period, but there is a currency. And Pellops, though, his job was have the money to do all the weird things the emperor and Malkador want to do,

like build a hidden fortress under the Himalayas. Right? His Dr. Evil plans. Yes. Over and over and over. and over again. Yeah. So he has,

that's Pellops' job is I have to build a layer in a volcano. That's going to be incredibly expensive. He's doing all the Peter Griffin stuff too, just constantly having it. I need a helicopter with my face on it. But this guy is so dumb. Yeah. One, he's watching the guy that works with him,

obviously steal money, can't figure it out. He doesn't really know how to do his job, one. Yeah. How this guy got. But this is, but that's what's great. But he got it probably because no,

him helped him. So Noam, the guy we just spoke about, of course, comes in, hey, buddy, I got an idea for you. I can use my bureaucracy to get all the money you need, just so don't worry about it. I got you. You just sit there and tell me where it goes. And Noam effectively just makes Pellops his puppet and goes, cool. I think puppets around the world are mad that you compare them. In one move, know him now controls half the government. On the other side, though, which by the way, by the way, this is how the Lords of Terror will function forever. A couple main people will in, will Jimenez to rule over a bunch of the other Lords of Terror who are too weak to really exert themselves in any way, shape, or form. I just assume that literally Pellips had a hat that

just said chief awesome dude in charge of awesome stuff and they just high fived in. I view Pelops the way I view most of the people in idiocacy. Yes, 100%. It's what plants crave. Brando has electrolytes. This is like the beginning. By the way, this novel is one of the reasons. There's many reasons I hate the Lord's Adara.

But this really kicked it off when you're like, hey, day zero, the guy in charge of the money was given a PlayStation 5 and told him to go sit in the corner and that he was the best. And you're like, what else do I do? Now, that's it, man. You're awesome. You're so awesome. You don't even need to do anything. The one I found funnier, though, is this one's tougher to pronounce Kli San Waya. Ooh.

So we're with Kleason. Kli san. was the first Lord Commander Militant, the head of the Imperial Army, which sounds super powerful and super cool until you remember, Malkador existed. Well, back it up, and Malkador was pretty hands-on about things. When Malkur wants to be hands-on, he's not just hands-on. Remember we said, like, you're a puppet? Think of this one more as the literal sense of Malkur's hand is actually up and inside you.

Like, Malcador basically was like, yeah, Cleeson was a figurehead at best. Nothing Cleeson did happen without Malcador telling, I don't know if it's a he or she. So I'm going to go, without telling her exactly what to do. Like, it's so funny because Malcador being the scammiest of scamy dudes of all time knows that Noam is doing all kinds of sketchy stuff. So he just says her, show up every time and just go, I vote whatever you don't. Yeah. Klessan's job was to say no.

Every time Noam said yes. Didn't matter. Didn't matter. Her entire job was to cause problems. But my favorite one of all of them, because it's a really cool story, is a Woma Canaware. She held the title of Grand Provost Marshall. She was the head of what later became the Arbites. She's a really cool story in this novel.

Actually, probably the best story in this novel, if I'm being honest. And she was in charge of upholding the law of the Imperium, which you're going to discover in a second really sucks because of who's in charge of the Imperium. Like, really sucks. So, Owoma is a super cool character. She came from a region. It's supposed to be in Africa, but it's really the Balkans because it's costly being conquered by different techno-barbarians, like over and over and over again.

and all she's learning is like, oh, people in charge suck. But weirdly enough, mommy, as a wild sense of morality and everything that wants to do. But she learns it. Yeah, that's what she learns. She learns that this power corrupts. And so the emperor sees her and goes, perfect. I'm going to put this person in charge of keeping justice and order in my kingdom or my imperial, whatever you want to call it.

And this is one of the few people I can do who will not actually corrupt. But the problem with the emperor, though, is he doesn't actually think this one through because she's going to dole out justice fairly. So let's fast forward now a decade or so before the onset of the Great Crusade. Remember when that Thunder Warriors all tragically died to a man fighting the last battle of Terra? Yeah, it's a hundred of that bullshit. No, everyone knows that he went, hey, what are we going to do?

Weirdly enough, Valdoin some custodes were also there. and they decided that they wanted to see who could kill the most Thunder Warriors. Yeah, the real thing was Valdor and like seven Custodes called a meeting with the Thunder Warriors and got very stabby in that meeting. But a few of them got away, including the Primark of the Thunder Warriors, which don't get excited that Primark just meant general. I just want to say he's got a Primal. What is it?

Primark, that meant general. But he's named Ushhton, and he was the head of the Thunder Warriors. Ushdan and a chunk of Thunder Warriors escape Valdor's slaughter and they hide out, but they send word back to the High Lords of Terror, what had happened. Uwma, along with the head of the biotech division, whose name is Amar Astarte. I refuse to say that out loud. I just get it. Get it?

Decided to do something about it. Now, this is a little bit complicated, and we're going to cover this story more and some later bits, but Amara Astarte helped create the Thunder Warriors and the custodes, but her greatest legacy was the space marines. But when the primarks got warped away, she wanted to kill all the space marines because she was like, look, without the primarks,

this project is doomed. They are going to destroy the Imperium. Cough, cough, she was right. But, Ouma gathers this, like, imperial police force and starts heading towards the imperial palace because it was new there. Also, she did this very good timing. The emperor and Malkador were off worlds with the potential.

I'm going to say. Yeah. We're not marching on the palace of them. She was going there to arrest Valdor because she did not blame the emperor or Malkador, despite it obviously being their call. But she was going to arrest Valdor and try him. You can't blame either one of them because she wanted to actually arrest. And she knew if she was going to arrest the emperor Malkador,

they were going to get killed instantaneously. Well, I over read into this. I think this was her kind of, she wanted to test the emperor. She was going to arrest Valdor. and basically hold him on trial in front of the emperor and Malcador of like, hey, this guy just murdered a bunch of people for no reason. What do you want to do about it? Which the emperor would have been like, yeah, he's fine, shut up.

But that's a side note for a different day. What I love about this, though, is that as she's going towards the imperial palace, she gets joined by the Thunder Warriors, their primark, but also these like pseudo-thunder warriors, pseudo-space marines called Castellan exemplars, which were the special, like, side project on the Mara started. So let's tell what actually is going on here. She might have got Valdar to talk. He's not much of a yapper, by the way.

Not a lot of conversations coming on him. But if she wouldn't have got joined by all these guys, I think that everything wouldn't have happened as bad as it did. But effectively what happened is you showed up with all of this force and Valdar went, oh, I didn't know this was Boots of Mighty Ass kicking time until you showed up with this many guys. I love this because, I mean, they show up with

this great plan. We're going to march in there. We're going to grab Valdoor. He's going to surrender. We're going to hold him a trial. And Mike Tyson has a great line about this. Everyone's got a good plan that they get punched in the face. And Constantine Valdoor had that punch in his pocket.

So they basically, they approached it with all of them. This is probably thousand of them or 2,000 of them come walking up. Valdoar walks out solo and looks at them and just says, look, so you guys, you guys are just surrender now. And they're looking at him like, what are you? Darth Mall style. All solo.

Yeah. Seriously, you guys are going to surrender now. This is stupid. No. And they're like, no, we're not. He goes, you are going to surrender now. Trust me. And they're going to, no, we're not.

And then 10,000 first Legion of Star is come pouring out of the complex. because they were ready. Yeah, this is full-blown, you know, Death Star episode six. Like, they are fully operational and just wreck everybody. I mean, kill everything. Quickness. Although Valdoer does battle the primark of the Thunder Warriors, they have a nice little chat during it,

and he does put the Primark of Thunder Wars out of his misery. But not a conversation. He just talks shit to him. The other weird part of this, though, is that, Amar Astardi sneaks off during this and gets down to the lab where they're building the space marines and she has a bomb with her, gets confronted by a custod, and then suicide bombs the lab to take it out. But this made no sense because this is the year 30,000. Right now is 2026 and I have a full cloud backup of my computer.

So yeah, so she blew it up and the emperor was like, yeah, it's in the cloud. I don't know. You blew up all my days that still stored. like neat. Still have the project. Although then it gets lost later, I don't know. Because then like when Ravengard want to get a copy of it, it's like, oh, you have to go over there.

It's hidden. Like you couldn't just go to Microsoft and like, all right, pull it up. There's no Google drive you're going to pull that from. I do love the fact that Veldor gives her clemency. He does. Yeah. Well, but I like this fact because effectively what he says is,

you're just too good to be part of the Lord of Timmoncy. This part is great because at the end of it, everyone's dead except for Woma. She survives, basically. Well, a lot of them survive. Veldor stabs all of them. But Woma, yeah. It's not like one of them's like, oh, imagine she's the only survivor. She's the only one of the story, by the way.

Valdor does start to talk while he's finishing people off. Yes. Like, just like, hey, you know, you're kind of a good person. Stab. And maybe this isn't the right job for you. Stab. But he does tell her, like, look, I'm not going to kill you. I'm not even going to punish you.

The only thing, but you don't get to be a Lord of Terror anymore. But I'm going to ask you just to leave, basically, the Imperial Complex. And he settles her outside of that and gives her a very good life. She lives out the rest of her days in peace. He sets the stage, though, it just kind of tells her you aren't morally sucking. You cannot be you. Yeah, exactly. What I like about is that he doesn't hold her at fault at all.

He recognizes everything she did was correct. But also for the job that you're in, you can't be. Yeah. She's like, it gives the agent speech with serenity where you're like, I can't live in this world. Yeah, no. I'm a monster. Yeah. This is what he's just like, yeah, man, if you're going to be in this job, you have to be terrible.

Yeah. And so there goes the first and only good Lord of Terra. So let's move on. And then we have 12,000 years of sun. So now it's going to evolve. We'll be right back. after a quick break. So Tara is conquered.

The emperor sets a site in the galaxy, but now there's going to be a lot more moving parts. And so to achieve this, we're going to, we have to expand out from the Magistrate's temporal. So that gets dissolved. And we get two things. We get the Council of Tara and the War Council.

The War Council is the Emperor, Malcador, and Valdoar. That's a fun council. And then they add Calbor Hall, and then they keep adding primarks as they get going. You may say as they get discovered. Yeah, but we're not talking about that because that would give Bradjoy. We're going to talk about the other side, which is all Lords of Tara.

So at this stage, they're called the Council of Terra because that was about their level of power. They were a council who would be told to shut the F up whenever the emperor got upset. Let us set the stage a little bit because we haven't talked about it in a hot minute. One of the big things about it is at this time, the emperor and Melcador are wildly. They have their talons and everything. They keep everything very, very close to the vest, which obviously becomes terrible once both of them are gone. But at the time, there's a lot of things that they're doing that make it so they don't care that this is effectively a puppet council. They don't give a shit because everything they care about is they have their hands in and they're personally doing it.

Both of these guys are Wiley Coyote super genius. they can manage so many things at the same time, and they are. Well, and the problem is they basically, the purpose of this Council of Terra, the whole reason they exist is to do the stuff that the Emperor and Macador aren't dealing with at that moment of time. Everything they do at some point the Emperor and Malaccar

deal with, and they kind of set on a path and go, okay, I've started it, just finish this, and then they leave. That's the idea. And they kind of sit up there. But as we'll get to later, this is this will burn them. Yeah, it burns them.

Also, one, because the people that they put in charge are terrible. Two, they also go, hey, you follow what I was doing. And yeah, cool, man. You're a generational genius. I can't do what you were doing. Even if I didn't suck. I still couldn't do what you were doing. But let's talk about the actual structure.

because I do like want to talk with the very first council of terror I do find funny because the very first thing that they do is the head of it. The first lord of the council is of course, Malcador. Now, and then Malcador goes, all right, and below him, he puts Valdo as the captain general of the custodian guard. And the reason he does this is a not unsubtle hint. Reminder that there's a bunch of custodes on Tara. And if you idiots try even one stupid thing while we're off world, These golden bananas are going to come in here and make sure you understand. We may be on the other side of the galaxy, but they're not. So they don't have any actual role besides just threatening at this point.

Oh, yeah. Exactly. There's no purpose to them in there other than to kill the Lords of Terra if they do something stupid. Right. They have no, they have no purpose on this council. Valdoors with the emperor. He can't even vote. He's usually not even around.

And he's like, yeah, but if you guys do anything, all of my guys come in here and like pull you in from limb. Yeah. So we're clear. Yes, so we're clear. Awesome. But then we get into the actual beat. So obviously we still have the Adeptus Administratum. We still have the Estates Imperium, the Lord Commander Militant, and the Lord of the Arbites.

Those are all there. But we've added a bunch more. The first one is, well, the Astronomicon's there now. So that's important. So they had, so we can't travel. So now we have the head of the Astronomicon. Because if that thing doesn't work, no one goes anywhere. This person become Corhan Herusula is the first master.

Yeah, of it. So separate from them, but also equally important, is the Navist nobilite, which is the Navigator houses. I think it's probably more powerful than that because the Navigator houses become dynasties and super powerful in it. Well, it's hard because I don't think you get one without the other. It's true. It's just as far as people that can wield stuff, though, the houses become super powerful, even though they're not on the council, I'm saying. So the differences I would say is where I'm agreeing with you is where is the head of the Astronomicon, it's just the head of the Astronomicon. That's a dude who's in charge of that.

The Navigator houses are the mafia because they just sit there and they're like, yeah, if you guys want to ever do anything, you need us. You can't do any of this without us. You know, whatever we say goes. So much money and power. It's crazy. And they are nothing. And they're still incredibly powerful right now. And they're also super messed up.

You also, you breed psychers for a long time. Yeah. They're not great. You also have the astrophatic choirs and sanctioned psychers, just basic general psycher presences in general. So to this end, Nemo Zing Meng becomes the first master of the adeptist telepathica. We'll cover him actually

probably later this year when we talk about the siege of terror. He has a pretty big role in that. It's a huge role. It's pretty cool. Especially he's in the new books. Yeah. At the same time, the Imperium is growing. So now we need supplies. So the merchant fleet, which we've covered before, comes into

existence. And so given the size and scope, the head of the merchant fleet gets a seat in the council. The one I found interesting, though, is so does what's called the Order Hospitalliere, which is also randomly, I think that's French, but it's not important. This is the group that oversees all the doctors, nurses, et cetera, and the Imperium.

And given the Imperium is on a war footing then, still is, it makes sense. But I was actually surprised it wasn't part of the ministratum. Yeah, which they didn't get folded in, but they eventually get folded into the Sisters of Battle, which I thought was really weird. It's not their Sisters of Battle. Remember, the Sisters of Battle are part of the Adeptis. Sorry, they're part of the Sororitas. Yeah. So that's why the Adeptus Sororitas, they're part of this.

later. It's a weird, they move around a little bit. Because there's so many layers. When I think of sisters, I think of the things that are all part of them, but actually a sisters of the force. Yeah. Yeah. Is surrounded by six or seven other layers of But my favorite one of all

this is the Adeptus Mechanicus. The story of the Admec joining this is actually great. So the ad mech are currently not well liked in the Imperium, and that stretches back to the first time they were met. say, yeah, you're not really changing anything, man. You're like, hey, man, no one really likes them right now.

Yeah? And that's how it's been forever. Forever, everyone has viewed them as weird and untrustworthy. And spoiler alert, everyone's been right the whole time. 100%. Yeah. Every time, they're always doing something shady. But the thing about the ad mech is they make big shit the Imperium needs and they know it.

And they don't really like being told what to do by some like weak, all-fleshy, like squishy things. So one of my favorite stories comes to this era. So the admec joined the Lords of Terra during the Horace heresy. They couldn't get in before that because they'd just been stalling tactics. And so when they went to join the council of Terra, the idea was to show the loyalists on Mars that should they side with the emperor that he would respect him and treat them as an equal. So they give them a seat of power. But the other people was said seat of power. But the other people with said seat of power didn't want to give them one because, you know, it's more power to give up. And even the other members of the Loyalist Mechanicum didn't want to see.

Don't want to be part of it. Yeah. Because they knew that if they joined the Council of Terror, they would then be part of the Imperium, which they didn't really want to be either because they thought the Imperium was all weird too. They just wanted to play with the weird stuff they had on Mars. Also, it's the middle of the heresy. Things aren't exactly going swimmingly for the Imperium.

So all of this comes down to a, they actually try to assassinate the head of the Mechanicum who's trying to negotiate with the council in order to join it. So anyway, this all ends in this really hilarious scene, which is the Council of Terra call a session to debate the addition of Mars to the Council of Terror. And they get there and the majority of the council say no. But they go beyond saying no. start saying, well, since Mars has fallen to civil war and there'd been an attempt on the life of the ambassador, the treaty that the emperor had signed with Mars is null and void. And it's pretty

obvious that the people of Mars can't really govern themselves. So therefore, the only thing to do would be for Terra to govern Mars. And they begin debating with each other and yelling at each other which of them should be in charge. In charge of Mars. Yeah. And while they're doing this, the building starts to shake pretty violently, by the way. I love this in the fact that somehow they infiltrated a Titan. How bad are your scouts? No one noticed because the Mechanicum kind of saw this one coming. And they brought with them the Imperator-class Titan magnificent incendious, who is 55 meters, so 166 feet,

Hall. So walking city, which walked up to the building they were all in, leaned down, at which point the ambassador from Mars went, so are we getting in or not? And yeah, they still have that seat to this day. Yeah. That was an excellent negotiating tactic. Yeah. Oopsies, but then we'll move from then to the post-seizure of terror. So the Council of Terra mostly actually survive a siege of A couple of the military guys died. But everyone else actually survived. Real quick on setting this up, though. Everything is in disarray because we no longer have the emperor and Malkador are both gone.

It is a wild free-for-all. The only person holding anything together with anything is Bobby G. right now. Yeah, this is a little bit of this because the custodes bailed. They went, all right, we're going into the palace. We're going to secure the emperor. And we're not even popping our heads out for a while. The prime marks. Remember how I said?

The emperor in Malador held things close to the vest. Well, their vests are now gone. Yeah, one doesn't even exist anymore. Yeah, exactly. It's disintegrated. And the other one is currently a flesh puppet on the throat going, oh, I'm supposed to fight a lot of battles. Great.

But he's no longer, there's so many things that, again, they were in charge of that they were personally doing all the time. You have a huge vacuum of power. Bobby G. is taking care of day-to-day trying to fix the impact. It's even harder than that because the problem is you have all the prime arcs are back, and they're split on what to do. And by split, not much. Gileman is like, hey, let's fix crap.

Dorn and Vulcan are on time. Fine, we'll fix crap, but I got stuff to do. Corex actually had already left. Corax actually bailed immediately. The lion and Lehman were on their way out the door. But at the same time, the issue is the entirety of the Imperium is looking at the space marines with the hey assholes by eye, because the Imperial citizens had just looked around.

It wasn't Imperial citizens that had just stormed the castle. It was Astardis. Like, demon estardis, but still, that's splitting it. It's still Astardis. A lot of look very astardae-esque. Yeah, looked an awful lot.

Like you guys were just fighting us, you know, the Emperor's children just did to the gap. You know, like this is... One of my favorites still. Yeah, we have some opinions about you all, right? So the council is shifting a little bit And then looking at the space marines going, hey, these guys aren't necessarily the angels of the emperor. They're kind of the bringers of doom.

And their desire is also, one thing to keep in mind is this whole desire to go run out and chase down the traitors and go kill them meant that they were going to grab a bunch of resources to go do that. Resources that they could have been used to rebuild terror. Like when Lehman and them left, they took a bunch of important crowds. with them. Yeah. Like food. Well, it becomes even worse because the Council of Terra becomes the Grand Council of Reconstruction. This is literally, this is when Palpatine becomes the upper just for a while, guys.

The Grand Council of Reconstruction gets a ton of new powers and ability to get stuff. And they're like, this is just until we reconstruct. and it should only take somewhere between one and 40,000 years. Yeah, more importantly, this also is when they create the senatorium imperialis, which becomes the Lords of, that's what the Lord's Terror run. So Gilliman runs the Grand Council of Reconstruction, and he's able to do this despite the misgivings of the senatorum, because he had a hidden ally, the Assassin's Guild.

The Imperium uses such crazy. Look, guys, I know that you're probably incompetent and corrupt. but these guys over here will stab you in the face. It is amazing, though, when you look at the history of the Imperium, that the Assassins Guild are actually one of the better groups. They're like the good guys, actually. Yeah, over and over again, by the way. He's sketching his dudes in the galaxy are like,

look, man, I know you guys kill people for a living, but you're still better than these guys. The council was actually against Gileman, and then one of the guys, and we'll cover him later, got himself a seat on the council, by telling the head of the abidistratum, well, everyone around you is an assassin right now, so I'm getting in, right?

And then he got in. And then he told the rest of the council, we're going to do what Gilliman said, or we're going to get a new counsel. So those are your two choices. Yeah. And as always, I've said before,

Gilliman did everything correct. He, but he does. He does make, well, the problem is, sorry, he did things too correct for a while

because everybody that's on this new, I'm just going to call them Lord's a Terror because that's just what they end up being. Everybody that's involved in this makes a wild amount of money and power. Like the next 100 to 200 years

are just these guys not even knowing what did their Scrooge McDuck jumping into their piles of money. They have so much which also means they become less and less effective though because nothing but

prosperity has ever been in front of them, eventually becomes the War of the Beast, which we're talking about in a second. And so what happens is Gilliman, though, sets it up well. They re-grab Luna, they reclaim Mars, shipping lanes, all that stuff. Stuff is rocking and

rolling. And Gilliman also does another genius thing, because Gilliman is a, he is perfect, just deal with it. But he also understands diplomacy really well. And what he does is he made sure that as he was rebuilding the imperial, him up. He made sure all the members of the senatorum were getting wealth and glory during this era.

Each of them were successful. Each of them were having their own little glow up. So all of them didn't want to backstab Gilliman because things were going well. And so this was going well. It's growing. But then Gilliman gets stabbed by Fulgram and it all goes to shit. Let's fast forward a little bit. Gilliman dies in, well, dies. Gilliman gets stabbed in 121 of M31. Within a millennia, the senatorum has been transformed into the nightmare that is the Lords of Terra. The 12 posts of, quote, great importance to the Imperium, nine of which, by the way, will always be present. The administratum, the Inquisition, the Minotaurum, Mechanicus, Arbites, Navigators, Astronomicon, Assassins,

because you can't get rid of them, and Telepathica. They all kind of hold. And then these three others will kind of ebb and flow. Military leaders, states, imperium, merchant fleet will move around. Because they get absorbed a little bit. A lot of times one of the other nine are in charge of that. Because certain families become super, super powerful, to be fair. You say that there's nine all the time, but sometimes those nine are not nine.

They're like, oh, it actually does go down. But there's always supposedly 12 Lords of Terror. Now, it gets a little bit goofy. because then you actually look at them. And then at this point, there were six. Yeah, I know. I don't write this stuff. I'm just,

I'm repeating what's written. So the War of the Beast we covered, but in effect, we get to the War of the Beast, and yeah, all these guys suck, like, royally suck. Like,

these are Nepo babies running their dad's companies in the ground. So Colin Farrell in horrible bosses is basically Warren Buffett compared to these clowns. Like, it is, it's that bad.

I was about to say that Colin Farrell would be, such a step up from the Lords of Taran at the time. They make absolutely no decisions other than letting the Imperial Fists deal with it, which causes all but one fist to die. The Imperial Fists become singular as a result of their decisions. And then the orcs arrive on Terra. They all freak out and do nothing about it.

In fact, the only time they get their stuff together is when the Imperial Fists do a coup to tie. They don't get their stuff together. The Fists kill everyone. No, they didn't kill everyone. No, they just, he just makes himself Lord Commander. They didn't kill everybody. He just threatened to kill everybody unless the Corland became Lord Commander. That's what happened.

And the War of the Beast concludes, and the Imperial Fists decide that they're not going to rule the Imperium as a space marine. That's one thing. The Space Marines, by the way, have never been the Lords of Terror, except for the very short periods of time. This is because the Space Marines are not meant to be. They are meant to be out fighting. they are not meant to be back on terror ruling. So here's what you have to do. Your imperial fists,

you're going to leave. And you need to leave someone to restore terror. You need someone to do it the right way, leaving someone who's pure of heart with a strong moral compass, able to discern proper course of action no matter the difficulty, someone who would value diplomacy and respect the values put forth by the emperor. You know, the head of the assassins? Exactly. That's exactly who you put in charge. Who already murdered people on the council? Yeah. So 546 of M32, Dragon Vengorvich takes control of the Imperial Senate.

And I love this part of Imperial history because it actually is funny. He looks around at all the Lords of Terror post-war the Beast. And as a head of assassins, he had an intricate file in all of them and just goes, reviews everyone's strengths, everyone weaknesses, and realizes the best thing for the Imperium. to kill every last one of them. And he also does it. The end of Godfather's style, he kills them all at the same time and replaces a bunch of them with Caledus assassins.

That's my favorite part. Some of them he puts in new people, but he has that moment like, oh, I can't replace all 12. So his Calatus assassins take the spot of them. So it looks like, oh, no, Ted's still alive. I don't know what he's talking about? Look, he's right there.

This is magical. And for a hundred years, Van Gogorich rules the imperial. until the Imperial Fists swing back around. I love everything about this because the Imperial Fists come in and go, oh, come on, man. And then they have to, but then the Imperial Fists do it again. They land, fight, kill Van Gorge, and leave, and they just leave.

Just leave. They don't do anything. They just kill off Van Gorsh and all of the other, all the current heads of Lords of Terra and leave. But Ultramarines exist. So a decade goes by, and the Ultramarine's chaptermaster. Things are bad, by the way. Along with 50 other chapter masters show up on Terra because this power vacuum turned

Terra into like post-Shikai China. If you don't know what that is, look it up. It's like the 1915 China. It sucked. But the Imperium's about to collapse. All right. The chapter master is just, they'll descend on Tara. And they do this great thing.

They basically go to Tara and say, all right, everyone who wants to be a Lord of Terra raise their hand. And they all do. And they cool, meet us here. And everyone goes into this big meeting room. And a day or so later, there are 12 Lords of Terra and everyone agrees. By the way, those are the Lords of Terror. Everyone leaves and goes, yeah, those are the 12 people.

We're okay with this. And the 50 chapter masters, remember, 50 chapter masters leave and go, so we're good. I always thought that guy was right for that position. Yeah. Thanks guys. So did everyone else. Yeah, we're all perfectly aligned on this situation.

All right. So now we have another 4,000 years of the Imperium growing and festering and stagnating. But, you know, we talk about this. Technology stagnated, the ability to live in the Imperium stagnated horribly. Yeah. But the Imperium is growing, crowsyting. crazily still, even though we're losing everything. Also, during this 4,000 years, this is when it really sucks to be part of the

Imperium, because imperial life starts to blow. Yeah. Which is part of what makes this actually able to happen, which is Goge Van der. Yeah, so the Imperial Creed starts to grow at a fevered pinch during this time. All during this time, the Astardace become more and more detached for the Imperium. And the custodes are hunkered down. keeping the emperor safe. So the only people watching over the Imperium is the Imperium itself, which just opens the door for a colossal failure. Some point during the 36 millennia,

because GW is not very clever in their writing, they decide that the Ecclesiarchy would have levied their own tax the population. And I can go into the pros and cons of Lutherism and redistributive tax system. It's mostly pros. You know, civil education based on leitzing ordinance blah, blah, blah, basic framework. It is a basic framework of how most countries functioned today. One of John's degrees might be in this deal with it. But the Ecclesiarchy in the 36th millennia went hardcore 15th-century Catholic Church because the GW writers are all Episcopalians.

Between the last thousand years before this, though, the ecclesiarchy becomes wildly the most powerful thing. Yeah, but what is it? They do. But what I'm getting as GW basically was copying? what the Catholic Church was doing in the 14th of the 15th century. In the Catholic Church. Yeah, where we're doing, what do they call?

Basically, you're paying to go to heaven, et cetera. This type of stuff comes into play. But the Ecclesarchy starts dropping their own tithe on everybody. And what this does is it's putting effect of double tithe on planets. And a lot of planets can't afford this. However, at the same time, the Ecclesiarchy had built up their own military. Big one. And so anyone who fails to pay the tide, the ecclesiarchy would declare them heretics

and invade and just take it. Were you actually talking about indulgences, I'm assuming? Yeah, his indulgences. Okay, go ahead. You lost me for just a second. I thought you were saying something else, but it's an indulgence. I can remember. I couldn't remember indulgence.

Yeah. No, you're good. I thought you were trying to see something else. But go ahead. So during this time, around this era, the 361st master of the ministratum was elected. This is Goge Van der. Goge. Yeah, Goge sees the power within the ecclesiarchy, but he sees untapped potential.

The ecclesiarchy had been using the power for influence and monetary gain, but he realized, no, there's way more here. So he went for it. He uses the administratum to prove air quotes there, guys. By the way, so many air quotes were both of the years. Well, I'll be honest. So he's going to prove that the head of the ecclesiarchy was a traitor to the imperial. but he kind of was. So, whatever.

All of those guys were at the time, if you want to go full on. That's what I was going to say. Like, me, yeah, six one and a half dozen the other. But he then sees this guy, Paulus III, calls him a traitor and executes him. He then shows the entire populace that the rot from Paulus wasn't just him. It spread all the way through the ecclesiarchy. Only a noble entity such as the great administratum could purge it of the corrupt. So he declares himself the head of the administratum and the ecclesiarchy in order to purge the ecclesiarchy from the corruption.

And he begins a rather public campaign, by the way, of executing cardinals. And what I like about this, though, is that he's about to seize for himself a massive amount of power. And he has, but he had to disguise it a little bit because he had to keep himself safe from the other, lords. So Goge does this really clever maneuver where what he does at first is he basically plays up I'm taking it to the ecclesiarchy because don't forget, all the other senatorums hated the ecclesiarchy because they had been gaining a ton of power and they've been flaunting it. So he's coming in the saying at the time like this though, because the church becomes such a powerful entity and it's the church versus the state at the point in time, which you have these noble families

which are basically at odds with the power of the church. Yeah, and so he just, it looks like outwardly at first, he just slapping the church down. And so all the other people are, like, cool, so the church is basically going to lose their seat. Who cares? Awesome. And he starts almost redistributing some of their wealth, because he doesn't care about the money.

He's got the administrative, he's good, to the other Lords of Terra. But the real thing he's doing, though, is he's taking control of what actually matters, which is the power. of the Ecclesiarchy, which is two things. Their spy network and the populace. So one by one, he starts taking control of the other Lords of Terror, because he got

this incredible spy network to know all about them, but he's got the people, too. So he can busy go to any Lord of Terror and say, you're going to bend to my will, or I'm going to declare you a heretic and you're dead. You have, you cannot stop me at this point. Turns out, though, he's nuts. Like, I mean, real nuts, too. Super nuts. Like, maybe chaos corrupted level of nuts, if we're being honest.

He also probably holds the most power that any non-marine has ever held in the empire. Oh, yeah. And over this time, he begins a campaign of slaughter throughout the galaxy. He does discover the planet of San Lior, which is Valkyrie. Just deal with it. We wait into this when we cover the sister to the battle, who, in the end, meet the emperor. and they're super unhappy after they meet the emperor with Goge and make that very clear to Goge.

But before any of that happens, the space Marines have to invade Terra again because in order to kind of pull Goge out of it. And I bring that up because it's kind of the last bit I want to talk about here because it gets us set up for what we were supposed to talk about today. We're going to talk about next week, which is the Minotars. The Lords of Terra have an issue. And the issue that they have is military power.

So the Lords of Terra wield incredible power within the Imperium, incredible power with almost no checks on it. They have really two checks on their power. One is the internal one, which they'll hate each other. So, you know, there's that. But the second one is the one that's come back to haunt them time and time again, which is the Astartis. Every time they get a little too big for their britches,

the Astardis show up and go, yeah, we're real tired of you guys doing the nonsense you're doing. Rat, tat, tat on you, mother. If you think about the history of terror, siege of Terra, the Stardis, were the Beast, you know, the siege, Astardis. They put an assassin in charge.

That was Astardis. Who killed the assassin they put in charge, the Astardis. Who killed Goge, the Astardes. Also, the Inquisition and the Ecclesiarchy are Lords of Terra. They have some issues with the Astardis over and over. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so the problem the Lords of Terror start running into is what can they actually do about the Astardes?

Because sending the Imperial military after them isn't actually that easy because A, the Astardis are much better fighters. So your casualty ratio is not ideal. You go 1.2 because a lot of these guys are loyal to the Astardis. So you can't exactly grab them and go, yeah, man, I've been fighting with this guy my entire life. not turning on him. No. Like, yeah,

guys, I need you to go fight the space wolves. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Like, why? No. He saved, they saved my life.

Yeah. No. Like, I've been with this guy for the last 30 years, which is all of my life. That's an angel of the emperor. No.

And so the issue they have is every now and then they can prove, oh, these guys, these are corrupt. They can do it, but that's hard. They do have the assassins who can kill in Astaris, but assassins fight solo. And okay, you send a couple of assassins out.

They'll pick off a few Astardis, but they will die for it. And they also are outnumbered by Astardis. And then the custodes, don't even ask. Don't ask. Don't ask. And the sisters get a little bit tricky because of the fact that the sisters want to know what the holy reason. Oh, exactly. Yeah.

If the Astardis in question are corrupted, so the Astral Clause, yes, the sisters would have happily killed. off the Astro Clause. No problem. But that whole thing we did with the space wolves, yeah, that wouldn't have gone well. That wouldn't have gone well at all. Yeah. So that's the issue. So they needed. And I'll do a little replay on that. Also, when you make the sisters go fight somebody that they don't think they should have been fighting, the sisters will come back to have a talking to you about why you sent them. And that talking is going to involve Melta. Yeah. And maybe one of their many weird-ass paint engines that you don't want to be in.

So with the Lords of Terra needed, or effectively was their own space marine chapter, but a better one. And we're going to get into this a lot next week. So they decided to build their own, one that will do their own bidding, one that they could arm with extra technology and do up. wild technology that nobody else was getting is they were using a bunch of stuff that had the big no buttons on them. Yep. When you make the rules, there are no rules that's kind of half the fun. And so next week, that's what we're going to get into. Now that Brad has a chance to collect himself, I'm talking about the Lords of Terror for an hour.

God, I hate the Lords of Terror so much. Next week, we're going to get into the Minotars. And we're going to, or maybe I'm going to surprise Brad, and we're going to talk about just poisoning space marines for an hour. Why would you do that, Tim? I'm bored. I had a bad appointment today. Stop hurting me, John. It's fine.

If the doctors can do it, I can do it. But yeah. But next week, we're going to talk about, actually going to talk about the militaries. The mysterious origins, some of their appearances in the lore, which actually are disjointed. They've got a very odd history.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And, oh, God, I miss the Imperial Armor Books because some of their lore is really cool. That's amazing. Imperial Amber Books had great lore. Yeah. The War of Badab,

which I'm doing at Adepticon, which will be about when this episode's coming out, is because of Imperial Armor. That's where you get Carcaryodons from. So anyway. So yes. All right. With that, John Barcotti, Bradchester.

This guy. See you guys next week.