The 40k Lorecast - Episode 15 - The Scouring.... well really just the start of the Imperium going to hell in a handbasket trying to kill everyone and everything associated with Chaos

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

On this episode we cover some of the post heresy actions of the imperium. Trillions are dead, Terra is a trash heap, and the galaxy is burning, so what do you do? simple... revenge!!!! Did Guilliman have a great plan to restore the imperium? yes he did, did anyone listen.. not really. Do the Lords of Terra step up to help save humanity or just help themselves? The Lion and Leman go on a "punch traitors in face" quest. and more.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 the 40K lore cast with me, John Barcotti and Brad Chester. This guy. All right. 13 episodes in, Brad, and now we're moving into what we call the free-form version of us, where we're going to be bouncing around a little bit. Are we now going to do 13th Crusades for the next 25 years? Please, no.

Oh, God, no. What, it worked for Avedon. It did work for Avedon. Actually, no, it didn't. It hasn't succeeded at one of them. He's just... He did. Now he has?

Kind of. of? He blew up Cadia. Again. I mean, yeah. It's Cadia getting blown up. That's definitely one of the crutches of GW. But on today's episode, we're going to kind of start setting up some future stuff. We just don't want to have to do a bunch of spoiler episodes.

So today is going to be post-horis heresy, the scouring, what it's known as. I like to call it revenge. I mean, a bunch of stuff that we're not allowed to say on this, because it's hate effing. Yeah. Oh, this got ugly. So for those of you who don't understand what we're talking about, Horace, after he dies, the forces of chaos, the traitor legions, that they break up immediately.

Well, they were, let's set back. Let's rewind this. Because what happened is Horace was already having trouble, keeping chaos together, weirdly enough, keeping chaos together. It was hard. So wrangling cats didn't seem to be the best thing. But he was doing it by the power personality. He was the most.

powerful besides the emperor personality, maybe besides the emperor, to be honest with you, because that was his jam, is just Horace was a good talker. Yeah, to be honest, I think people liked Horace more than they liked the emperor. It's just the emperor, like, which is more powerful. Well, yeah, when you were in the emperor's presence, you felt fealty to him, whereas Horace kind of you wanted. He tricked you into that because the emperor is a cheater. So, but the thing is, is that Horace was already having issues because the more that they fell into chaos and were powered by Cass. Obviously, the more influenced chaos has. And if you're looking to get a nice regimented, structured thing going on, powering it through chaos is not the best way. So it was already

fracturing. And so when you take away the figurehead, which is literally how all chaos since then and forever is led by powerful personalities. When you took away that power of personality, something that was already hanging by strings, it didn't just fractured. It exploded. I mean, we already covered in the, during the Horace heresy that the Emperor's Children had already run off to just go do Empress Children stuff. Iron Warrior is bailed. Angron, yeah.

I mean, all these guys, even, even the Death Card, they were all already fallen apart. Horace goes and they all fall apart. The problem for chaos, this one, is the other side was very singular in purpose. They were not. They were also not done. Yeah. Chaos said, hey, guys, I'm pretty tired now. I'm about to go home. And they were like, we're not done at all. We're not done up. I didn't hear no bell. Well, and more importantly, ultramarines just showed up at the end of the party and went, well. And did you also have, which we will get into our next episode, you have an angry lion with dudes that are already mad and he's been setting shit on fire.

If you met chaos in passing on the expressway, the lines like, we should probably burn that down. We've got the situation of, you're right, the white scars, the Ravengersal hadn't recovered, Blay Angels have lost their prime arc. They're all struggling, but you just got full force, ultramarines, full force dark angels. And actually, full force, quote, yeah. And a good chunk of what's left of that space wolves all just showed up and they missed to the party and decided. And, well, to make their own. And to be honest, I don't know who's more angry about it, Lehman Ross or the lion.

Yeah. Like both of those guys are bet. And they also kind of got tricked by Horace, which is making them even more. Even more bad. Oh, we got duped. And I'm on the other side of the galaxy. I'm going to ruin this guy. Also, he's dead.

Can we revive him so I could kill him again? Okay, I'll just murder everyone he knows. Yeah. And an important piece here is that the last thing the emperor said before being entombed was, you have to destroy chaos. Well, let's talk about that. Sort of. But I'm saying what he wanted is a free empire. Again, the emperor, while being a terrible English dad, has a vision of no chaos taint,

a free world that is not infringed by chaos. and that's what he's going to. And his sons went, oh, so we should go on a genocidal lunatic rampage? To be perfectly fair here, his words were, he said, hey, we should remove the taint of chaos.

I don't want chaos around. Let's get rid of them. But he said it to warriors who were going to take that one way and one way only of, oh, go kill all the guys who were on chaos. On my way, Dad. And they took that literally. Yeah.

and just went, oh, so we should kill who? All of the chaos. Yes. Like, and what is chaos? What is chaos? This is also the beginning of the Imperium turning to shit to be perfectly loud. Yeah. We're going to do an entire episode in the not too distant future on the Inquisition and its origins.

So, but like, they had a very broad definition of who is chaos. I would even say they didn't know who was chaos. I would say it wasn't even broad definition. I would argue they didn't. know who was chaos. They were kind of like thinking witch trows. Hey, if you sink, you're innocent, if you float, you're... We're going for, yeah. Anyone who doesn't make

eye contact, we're shooting. And if I don't like their eye contact, I'm also shooting them. Yeah, we're like, I don't really like, I'm not cool with those color of eyes either. So it was a big deal. And they effectively all meet. They meet a Tara. They do the Thundercats go,

put the hands in. And they go buck wild. And they have a, they have new Great Crusade energy. Yeah. So I think what we should discuss is the situation that they've come in. So again, the emperor is talking about, and this is really, this is important foreshadowing

for what ends up happening to the Imperium. Terra just got bombed to oblivion. We are... It wasn't just terrible. You've got to figure that the Imperium is shredded. You don't really know who's cast and who's not. And also,

it's a galaxy literally at war. And that's not even That's not even talking about outside. At war, not like at war, like we've declared war and you want me to come get you. It's on fire and burning. The numbers that I was able to find were over $3 trillion or dead, at least probably more than that. And I only think it's, I think they listed at $3 trillion because I don't think GW knew the number

above that. Well, there's also $3 trillion, but that's the, they're talking about the fighting forces. Yeah. And then the civilians are off. There's no number. Yeah. Yeah. They're going.

The issue that the survivors have is, well, what is to, you know, But we're discussing what is chaos? I mean, obviously we know the traitor legions. What do we do about Mars? Which is effectively 50-50 right now. Yeah. We've got an imperial navy that every single element that exists within the, within the Imperium is X percent is chaos and we don't know which ones.

You have a world that went dark. Did that world go dark because it turned to chaos? Did that world go dark because chaos attacked it? Did that world go dark because chaos attacked it? that world go dark because all their astropaths got shot? We don't know. Well, one of the biggest things on that is you do have to ask yourself, I think that they almost gave Mars a half pass.

Yeah. Because of the fact that they went, well, we think that some of you guys might be chaos. And a lot of you guys did some sketchy things. But also kind of, hey, we're at the end of World War II. You guys are bad guys, but also I'd like you to run half of our stuff. Let's just be honest. how do you tell the difference between Mechanicum and Dark Mechanicum?

Because the guy just tells you he's not. That's it. By actions, it's like, hey, this guy just cut a guy's arms off and put robotic arms on him. Oh, he's totally Dark Mechanicum. No, he's actually regular ad-Mack. That's just, that's Ted. That's, yeah, Ted's, Ted loves him. He's got an emperor tattoo.

Yeah. And the biggest thing is, like I said, that they literally treated like World War II scientists. You're like, well, you're on the wrong side, but now you're on the good side. And also, we really need you guys to make stuff so that we can go get the bad guys quotation marks. Cowber Hall is dead. That guy's, that guy's gone. Yeah. Somebody has to be made an example of. Someone's, someone's getting involved. I'm sure there's some other bad guys. And I know that you guys are all good guys now. And they're like, oh, yeah, please just leave us alone. We're definitely

good guys. Another problem you have is chaos is now everywhere. We went from in seven, eight, In seven years, we went from, there was no chaos, or there was chaos, but no one really knew about chaos. It was so, it's popping all over. Well, it's also, there's cults. And the thing is, is that all there is just, remember, the horse did a great job of propaganda misinformation. This is all the Imperium's fault. So you have these cults that took place because, guys, your terrible suffering is for sure the Imperium's fault. Yep.

and your life sucks, and we'll get into this because it got suckier. Oh, yeah. But that's all you know. So, like, well, now you, you didn't mean to, but you just joined a cultist squad, you know. And now that, and we covered this on the Eldar episode about, you know, the birth of Slynesh. Once chaos gods are getting a taste of the depravity that the Eldar put forth, they got empowered. Well, as we just said here, at least three trillion, no, way more than that. are dead. And they didn't die of old age. They died in ways that feed Nurgle, feed Zinsch,

feed Slenesh, and feed corn. So all those gods are more powerful. They've now also been breaching the materium from the immaterial in there, and taking over the traitor legions. So chaos is also just popping up everywhere. So it's not, the, the imperialian doesn't know this. The problem is, as they're going to go out and wage their crusade back, they have no idea. A world they'll pass over that's totally cool in two years might be pure chaos. Well, they also kind of, and it depends on the Legion, and it also depends on what lower you look into. Some of the Legions still kind of thought the chaos was just something that their fallen brothers found and utilized. Yeah.

And that was it. They didn't realize that this thing is insidious tendrils everywhere now. You open the Pandora's box and you're not getting it back in. It's just everywhere. Well, and that's why I like this idea of a world that you look at today. It's like, oh, they're good. They're totally fine. And so you move on.

Because remember, we still have to move linearly. These guys have to need to come out of the galaxy and start moving in a straight-ish path away. As you go, you're going to check on a world. And the world's totally cool. And you're going to move forward. It's going to fall to chaos. You don't realize it's falling to chaos. I have to double back and do all this stuff.

So what they're about to step into really does set the stage for, the Inquisition, sisters, all this stuff that are coming down. Because you kept getting bit, you literally bit in the ass because of a world would fall to chaos when you're 10 systems away and that was the logistics. Yeah, it was shipping you all your food. Actually, it was the hub for all your food. Now is Nergel, which means. And then you have to go back and that's happened multiple times now.

And now you don't even have that. Not only did you not, you were you not even able to recapture it. now you eliminated that and now you don't you need another one so now it kept going well if we would have done this right the first time and you would have just accepted acceptable losses of everyone so this is i want to cover this way because one thing i didn't like when i kind of do some research into the scouring as we call this is we refer to scouring as a period of time the scouring has never ended in my as far as i'm concerned the scouring began when horace died and we are in the 41st millennia now,

and it's still going on. This is the scouring to me is just... They made it more of a secret, though, because they still pretend that chaos, people don't know about chaos. The average imperial citizen still does not know that it exists. What I'm talking about is that when you look at it from an imperial history standpoint,

they refer to it at this period of the scouring in my... Oh, no, this is forever. You're 100% correct. This is just what we do now. We just renamed it a few different times. So the reason I bring that up is that what we're going to cover today, is kind of the earlier part of the scouring. This doesn't end.

The plan was to wipe out chaos. If you played the game, you're aware that they didn't. One of my favorite parts of this is Bobby G. comes up with amazing plans. And nobody pays attention to them. They all agree. Everybody high-fize Bobby G. It says, you're right.

This is a great plan. And then they go, Yolo swag. Yeah, I'm not doing. They go, hey, I'm going to make a bunch of toys. in charge. Let's do this. So let's go into kind of that exact piece. They all get to Tara. As he said, they have their discussion and everyone

agrees, well, the emperor said wipe out chaos. Let's go wipe out chaos. Bobby G. offers up a plan. Well, it's not like he gives a plan. He has a manifesto PowerPoint. He was writing the whole. Oh, yeah, this is good job. He's got everything. This is how it's going to go. This is

the perfect way. This is how we stamp out chaos. And everyone goes, we 100% agree and then they leave and he goes but that wasn't part of the plan they goes no one's following this plan yeah because they all were especially the lion and leaman yeah very strong opinions of what they were going to do next and bobby jes presentation five stars good job 100% totally it also should do that would have made a wildly better imperium yeah because his was a conquer rebuild refocus basically re-educate the populace and move on and

Lehman and the Lion basically went, I'm down for vengeance. Yeah, I need to go hit somebody now. Well, what happens when you've done hitting them? I'm going to find someone else to hit. Well, what happens then? See part one. They're like, what about that rebuilding effort?

I don't, I forgot about that. Someone will do that. Yeah. You're like, I'm pretty sure it's just going to make more chaos happen. You're like, nah, it'll probably work itself out. I'll punch that chaos. But by the way, foreshadowing, did not. Did not.

Weirdly enough, if you beat the crap out of somebody and you leave, they're not super cool with that. The other problem, though, with this is chaos, and we're going to get to how fast they did this, did have a place to flee that made this whole process effectively impossible, which was the eye of terror exists. Yeah, but they all took... So you could just go into the eye of terror.

They took the most odd roots, though. Oh, they did, but what I'm getting at is that this whole plan of, like, I'm going to go hunt them down and kill them all. It's like, well, then you're going to have to go into the place. There's an infinite number of them. It's not really going to work. And also, the laws of physics don't actually. Yeah, exactly.

Like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, you're not orcs. You can't make this happen. And some of them... The orcs could have wiped out chaos. I will say that. And I'm saying that as an orc player and that I know I'm right.

The orcs could have through power of belief. Just made it happen. They could have just said, I'm going to kill corn. And then corn would appear in front of war boss. The war boss would kill corn and corn would stop to exist because that's just how the orcs function.

They have no idea why. Yeah, no one understood how it would happen. But if you have grots... Let's talk about some of the things that happened. Because a couple of the legions, one, Emper's children have been read kind of about 22 times from what they did. After they went to the, after they went to Gap and rounded up the employees and took them to the eye of tear. But they kind of just went to different places and did raids, dark elder style almost,

and just kind of made their way and didn't get into a ton of scrimmages. Their legions fairly intact comparatively. What I think that, but that's also because of their Slanesh. Slanesh is not really Slanesh is not, and I'm going to get Shifting Demon players here, but Sleeneh is not a combat god. Slanesh

really seems to only love overwhelming Oz in her favor. It's success. It's all success. So it's not this, you know, it's the opposite of a corn or an orc, you know, where they actually are trying to really take on the biggest best.

Yeah, I'm going to show you. Biggest and the baddest. Yeah, they're more than happy to raid the planet of all farmers and just take the farmers back to Tortureville and have fun in Tortureville. And so they get back to the Itaer semi-quickly. I mean, when we say semi-quickly, the Ayrr is, again, far away. Again, it's a galaxy. It was in the dead center of the Eldar galaxy. Right.

In the Elder Empire was so far away from humanity that they didn't think that humanity, even though they were taking literally millions of planets, was worth bothering with because it was far away. Exactly. That's how far they were away. So they go away. The Iron Warriors make a bunch of weird stands for kind of no reason. Yeah, they just, well, it seemed like they just wanted to build forts,

which we've already established they're not as good at as other. Yeah, but none of their stands make any sense. I'm sorry, but like most of the reason they took me to stand is because someone wanted to write a story about another chapter. I'm sorry, but guys, that's just, that is like, sorry Iron Warriors, but they literally just use them as the foil. to tell a story about how cool X chapter was in winning a story, a battle against Iron Warriors,

who were just stopping at random places. They're like, hey, we got to stop here. Why? Because we got to lose later to so-and-so chapter. Why? It says here in the script. I'm just following the script. What's the script?

It's not important. Yeah. You're like, we're basically WWD wrestlers. I don't know this. What legion, sorry, which chaos? God or Iron Warriors attached? They're not. They're undivided.

They are kind of, yes, they're indivated. Okay, that's what I thought. Because they never, he finally, he wasn't even a demon prince for like a forever.

Yeah. He's just, they, because again, he just was full of furious anger to go screw you robel door. Yeah. I mean, so you've got that.

You've got the, um, the night Lawrence who were pointless in this entire thing in the first place, by the way. Sorry, Conrad Cruz, by the way,

read his. Conrad Cruz is incredibly important in the whole horror heresy and even into the scouring. Yeah, well, he literally breaks the triumvirate of the sanguinus, Bobby Gia, and the lion. He's fantastic. His Legion is useless.

Yeah, he's... He's... Nothing. He's a genius slash idiot. He just comes up with... Because he's crazy. He sees the future, but he's also insane. So he does all this crazy shit, but his Legion just, while they also led

several people on a wild goose chase for a while, including the Dark Angel's, but like he literally just ran around and harassed people. And they went, you know, we were doing this before. Let's just do it again. So they take the most leisurely way back to the eye of terror and just make life miserable for billions, maybe trillions of people where they just decide. It's actually funny because they. they turned into the Droucarry,

just like the Emperor's children turn. I mean, a lot of them just become the Drucari. Well, they become the fallen, the fallen, well, we're not falling in darkies, but the fallen as in the fallen elder. They went in falling to chaos. They followed the same script that the Eldar did. They just did it way faster,

because humans don't live as long. We need to speed this shit up. Let's just skip to the back, you know? Like, skip, let's just turn to the, the back of the book and just see what the last come pages are. That's pretty much what humanity did with the fall of chaos. Like, let's just move, speed this up. Let's just go to the last chapter.

We got this. Alpha Legion 2. We don't really discuss too much. Because they're just, they're so. Well, oh my God, you can't. And that's a lot. That's actually probably more recond even than night. You mean the first primark found, but actually the last primark acknowledged. It's like which, which one, which brother is actually the one that died,

which is the one. And people are going to yell at me because this has been kind of already put out now as fully canon, but whatever. Yeah, but for people who are newer to the game, yeah, after then, that there are some of these stories they held. Alpha Legion has been all over the map. It's, you don't know. And one of the biggest things is, did they fall to chaos?

Did they not fall to chaos? At least the brothers. Yeah. The Alpha Legion, oh, sorry, but for people, Alpha Legion is a dual primark. It is a twin, identical twin brother. That no one knows. That's the whole thing. The only the emperor, I think, is aware that there are two of them.

Even the other primarks. And they would keep literally taking each other's place. Even the other primarks didn't realize there were two of them. Well, they would take turns. Yeah. Like, yeah, just should have taken turns. And if, Brett and I've discussed it in the back in the past, it is humorous. These are seven foot tall, 450 pound monstrosities where he's are hiding behind a curtain.

Who is also true? No. Alphari. was apparently on terror for a long time, like pretending that he was one of one of the other guys. And you're like, hey, man, one of these dudes is like two feet taller than everybody else. For the record, if you've watched the Princess Bride and seen Andre the Giant, he's bigger than regular people than Andre the Giant was to everyone in that movie.

Nothing to see here, guys. Just in line with everybody else. Like, no one, no one noticed that guy? He's blending in perfectly. Remarkably handsome, too. Yeah. It's not even, those guys are all otherworldly handsome. Like, when you look at a promont, you're like, whoa, what's going on?

Because I made the comment on Andre the Giant, he doesn't look like onto the giant. This is seven foot tall Chris Hemsworth. And they're actually slightly tall. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, seven and a half foot tall Chris Hemsworth. Just got to walk him. I'm thinking of the, what's the, what's the meme? Hello, other kids with the skateboard.

Yeah. Steve Weschemy. Steve Weschemy. Like, hey, other earthlings. Yeah, which is pretty much what they're doing. We'll be right back after a quick break. Alpha Legion does also run back to the eye of Terra. Mortarian gets there fairly quickly, it looks like.

Well, Mauritarian, never, he got trashed at Terra. So he got reborn into the Terra. And this has been retcon multiple times, too. They used to have it D&D style, where if you got killed, you had to spend X amount of years before you could come back. but then that got Redcon and then now in current lore, Angron can insta comeback if you have enough fighting going on, which I actually like because it's if the power of corn is,

you know, if you have enough, he'll just keep bringing back. Yeah, he'll just keep coming back. But otherwise, you know, if the fighting's less, he can't come back. Yeah. So, but like we went back and forth about this. At the time,

Mortarian couldn't come back into the real world for X amount. of time. He was in timeout. That's fine. Yeah. He was in timeout. So that's why they went back. Same with it. Dan Grown. And the loyalists just go buckwild. Yeah. Now that being said, we actually should caveat that. Mortarian has died. Mortarian has been sent

back into the I of Terry. He's been reborn there. There still were a bunch of death guard though spread both on the planet throughout the systems who did not teleport with him back to the life. To be fair, to be Let's talk about the fact that he kind of just had the death guard that came with him over there

because the death guard that tried to flee Terra didn't do great. They didn't get very far. No, they got, they're in a lot of stories. You know what the stories are? They're not death guard stories. They are Space Wolf, Dark Angels, Ultra-Reed stories. About the Trader Legions during. this kind of early part of the scouring.

All the stories are, and this is the cool story about character A, obliterating deathguard or somebody else. One guy, though, who did flee pretty quickly back to the eye of terror is a badden. Oh, he took his ball and went home. But also, he did go buck wild because he grabbed Horace's body, took his talon, and just went, I'm out. I'm out. And the vengeful spirit, it just went.

Later, guys. Yeah, full speed that way. Yeah, he was, I do love, if you don't like Avedon, I'm sorry. And we'll continue to say, which is the better pronunciation, but I've heard it both ways in audiobooks. It's hard. It is spelled Avedon. It's just easier to say about it.

It's still my favorite is the fact that his name is Abadon, the destroyer, and his name translates into the destroyer. So he is the destroyer. or the destroyer. Well, anytime it comes to the pronunciation, because we're in America, I'm going to,

this fun one, pronounce K-A-N-S-A-S-S. No, no. It's Kansas. Pronounce A-R. K-A-N-S-A-S-S. It should be Arkansas, but we pronounce it

Arkansas. I can't fix this thing, deal with it. But that's where we are. Also, we have a war against you, screw you, England. Yes. So one of the big things here is,

well, let's just go back to what we're saying. The Imperial, We rally. I say we, I guess, the Imperial, humanity.

Well, I think we both like this as we couldn't be Eldar orcs would like to be on the team Imperium. Yeah, I mean,

nothing good happens to team chaos in the end. Like, well, weird that when you subscribe to chaos, in the end, you also get tricked

by chaos and something bad happens to you every time. Weird. Yeah. You scroll back to the end of the book

again, and it's always bad. But the thing is, is that this doesn't happen. This wasn't a two day. This isn't a weekend. This isn't a long weekend. What, years and years? I think it was decades

before they got the Iron Warriors all the way. Oh, they were chasing all these people and you've got psychos like Conrad Cruz, which were just, he thought it was funny so he was road running this. He also got caught twice. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's so. Look at the escaping. Right.

So like, it's just, this is going on and to be fair, again, things are getting shittier because, well, remember a shitty time in human history, real human history, called the Inquisition. When we used the fear of the populace to give some people power to do some, wow, bad shit. Well, sometimes you can get a Vipis to do that and then ramp it up for 10,000 years. That's a really good segue to something I wouldn't talk about. So we discussed earlier, Gilliman sits there and says,

says, hey, guys, I got a plan. And everyone says, hey, it's a great plan. And then they don't listen to a word. But he bail. Yeah, but no, that's a big deal because of the fact that Bobby G. And by the way, he's alive for a long time after this. Yeah. He doesn't get jacked for a while.

Yeah. And he. Well, yeah. But he doesn't get jacked for a while. And he comes up with legitimately Bobby G. is the most boring and the most awesome prime act out there. Yeah. He's got a lot of plot armor.

But he comes up with a literal, this is how we achieve the goal of our father, an enlighten empire. This is how we take back. This is how we rebuild from the, we're at our lowest point. Let's bring us back. And we do none of that. And eventually he gets hurt and put in stasis. Well, I want to tell you why we didn't do none of that. And this is just my theory.

But my theory reading the lore is he has this great plan. And Lehman, the lion, I mean, everyone agrees with it. Those are your two big ones. At this, my power standpoint, you know, obviously sanguineus isn't around anymore. Talk about it. Which is who used to be the voice of reason. Exactly. So Bobby J would give you.

Well, think about what used to happen is Bobby G would give his plan. It would always be a great plan because he's Bobby G. Everyone else would tell him to go pound sand. Sanguinness would tell them we should at least do most of his plan. and everybody else would go, all right. Yeah, we like you. We'll listen. Yeah.

But the problem he has right now is that Lehman is having none of it. And he's already gone. He basically, he's lost his shit. Bobby finishes a speech and Lehman goes, great idea. And this went about as well as when he put out the Codex of Stardis. Yeah.

And when we're going to break all your legions apart. And he basically sent a picture of his junk. Yeah. And was like, I'm not doing it. So is this a no, guys? But then the lion's the same boat, though. The lion's equally just gone off planet.

So the problem, Bobby G has... The lion goes full vein. We're going to talk about this the next episode. But the lion goes to the basis of what it is to be a dark angel, which is vengeance. It is hell. Pure kill. But what I was getting at is that the problem for Gellman is that he's got this great plan, but all the people he needs to line up and support it, they're not just not supporting it.

They're just gone. Well, they're also kind of doing the opposite. Because you remember his plan is to take, rebuild, re-educate, move on. And his brothers went, cool. Remember that whole take thing? They didn't even do the take thing. They just burn it down. You're like, I can't take it anymore.

Why? It's not there. It doesn't exist anymore. That's what you wanted. That's a huge deal with this is he's trying to do this. and to be to be perfectly honest about it, he does pretty well with what he does. His plan works in his tiny little bubble

what the ultramarines can do because the ultramarines are currently wildly the biggest legion. It's not even good. It's close. There's the ultramarines and then you jump off a cliff and then the numbers. And what I'm talking about is the assets, the number of Marines,

the number of Imperial Guard, the number of ships, the number of worlds. The world's ologyns. Everything. Problem that he has, though, right now, and we're going to dive in this in a minute, but understand that Bobby G. has put together a pretty intricate plan about

here's how we're going to expand out, basically almost redoing the Great Crusade in a lot of ways. We're going to, we're going to take, because this work, we're going to effectively do it again with some important caveats. We'll get you in a minute. Well, to be honest, some of it's trash. Sorry, Bobbiji.

But, like, his, overall plan is actually just better than the original crusade. It is. The problem he has, because it's informed. He's trying to, is that he's, as he expands out and gets there, the dark angels and the space wolves got there first and just lit the planet or the system on fire and are gone. So he's coming in and people are looking around going like, hey, what the hell just came through here?

He's like, sorry about that. By the way, you're still part of the Imperium. Can you go back to making hubcaps? You should probably trust me. They're like a guy just murdered everyone I knew. The guy who looked an awful lot like you and your Legion just killed everyone here. Yeah. Everyone I've ever met except for that guy is dead.

So, um, yeah, man. It also makes it really hard for any of you who work in any sort of job that requires logistics is imagine if half the ships you're relying on for legislation just got blown up in a day. Well, you don't imagine you're, right, you're at Ford and you're like, hey, we got to make X amount of cars. This dude says we have to have. to complete this many cars. Yeah, man, three quarters of the workforce got killed yesterday. Yeah, cool. They said they still need that many cars. You're like, yeah, man, like, we can't do

that. I'm not saying that they're late. I'm saying everyone died. We don't have an option be here. So the whole, this is to say, come the next thing we're going to step into here. This is the Bobby G. tried to fix this. I really do believe he did. He tried to fix this. And he might have, but he, But everyone saw blood. And so the issue you have is, and them all seeing blood, led to a very natural next step, which is the Inquisition.

And we're going to do a whole episode of these guys. And the Inquisition was awful. But, and sorry, Malcador, you did a bunch of cool stuff. He originally, it was supposed to be,

it was never supposed to be good, be honest with you, because he kind of created the KGB originally. Yeah. Like, he effectively created thought police because he was trying to root out, chaos, wherever it is.

But it became a widespread, eventually galaxy spread movement and gigantic arm of the Imperium, its own arm. It was no longer the secret police. It was the, wow, this is a gargantuan branch

of we smell corruption everywhere. And then you got people that we won't, we'll get into this. Yeah, we're going to do episode on the end. But so everyone kind of can follow along what's going on is we've got a problem of that no one really knows who the bad guys are. As Brad has said, and I've said numerous times, the regular member of the Imperium doesn't know that chaos exists.

What they kind of understand has happened is there's been a bunch of pretty large-scale revolutions happening all over the place. We have to do something about it. Behind the scenes, the people in charge are very well aware of what's really going on, which is. an infection, but then they have to get soldiers. So this is a conversation with a secret. The Inquisition is formed by Malkador to hunt out chaos, which no one can know exists. But in order to hunt out chaos, they have to get citizenry to go and hunt out chaos, but they can't tell them that chaos exists.

So that, like, level of disconnect basically translates to, hey, person X, you are in charge of hunting down problematic civilians. What's a problematic civilian look like? Whatever I tell you to do. Yeah, figure that out and good luck. And also, you can edit this out later, but the Lords of Terra since the beginning have been a tornado of Dix. Oh, no, the Lords of Terra are probably one of the biggest problems we're going to do here,

because they are just... They use it to basically go, hey, you don't agree with me? You're probably chaos. Let's just send some guys to kill everybody that supports you. And that's exactly what happens with the whole scouring. The scouring period should have been fairly short. It should have been, they go out, the worlds that had aligned with Horace were eliminated. The worlds that weren't with Horace were reinforced.

That's how it should have gone. But instead, it became really the revenge, is a better way of looking at it. And people were just looking to not only get back, in the case of like the space wolves and the dark angels, they were trying to what to go kill off everyone who caused them any problems. But behind the scenes, you also have people who use this period for self-advance. It's 100%. They just give it. They consolidated their own power.

And anyone that went against them, they went, well, that obviously is a heretic. And they would just have all, they didn't just have them killed. They just had all of the, they're, I mean, it's way worse than that. Because they would go, hey, this system supports you. This system's obviously. obviously heretical. And then you would have inquisitorial forces show up. And when I say inquisitorial forces show up, it's not like three dudes with their comrades. No, they took an Imperial Navy fleet with them and blew the planet up. And all of a sudden, you don't have any

supporters. And you're like, I'm probably going to win the election. I thought I was going to win by, I was going to lose by four billion votes. But I just blew those up. Yeah. I blew up six billion votes. Yeah. So, so now it looks like the polls have me winning. So. The one good thing that, in my opinion, and Space Wolf players will disagree with me on this one that comes out of the... I doesn't read so much right now. Yes, is... Because I can read the screen. Yeah, Brad can see the notes before we're talking about this.

Gilman does, at this point, though, pull off the second founding of the space. Boom. All right. I actually like this. And the reason I like this is when you look at the problem that happened with the Horace heresy, the biggest issue where the legions were too big and they could be, they were too easily corrupted. So what Gilliman decides is the best way to do. this is we're going to split these legions down to smaller fighting forces and you'll still be

under the great uh i get it but he makes it so it's g man made a bunch of great decisions he had a great plan this part of the plan i'm sorry i think it sucks because he became and he's always become always been not become the king of bureaucracy oh he added so much bureaucracy he added layer upon literally you can't get things done in the Imperium because it is, there's worlds that have been just destroyed accidentally because of the fact that a form said went the wrong place. And they said that they might be chaos.

You're like, wasn't this file, this form filed? It looks like 8,000 years ago. Yeah, they might still be there. Just blow it up. Blow up anyway. Yeah. So like, you're like, dude, we've been literally making stuff for you. But the thing is he breaks the chaos.

He brings the, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, says no one person can be in charge of this much power. So he tells them to break up the legions, which becomes the second founding, which breaks the space reigns up into chapters. Yeah. And it's the way that for those who play the game currently, who are new to the game, that's how the game is played. Correct. That's how you have the thought of, unless you play certain factions. Yeah, which is, yeah. Screw you. Russ was a real down with this idea. Yeah. And this. was, we should, before we dive in, we should point out, this was optional.

It was, the, Gilliman did this thing. And by optional, I mean, it, I'm much sure if he wrote a pretty impassioned speech about it. It basically said that his whole thing was, is that we won't have another horse, another civil war if no one has access to all, because the legions right now aren't just Marines. Yeah. They are an entire, an endless armada of ships. Let's, let's take into that. So before the second founding, and we'll use the lion, because if you guys haven't figured out our next episode, it's going to be Dark Angels, so let's start covering this now. At this stage, the lion is not just in charge of the space remains with which he shares genetic code with effectively. He's also in charge of every member of logistics that puts the armor

on them, the Navy that moves them from planet to planet. He's in charge of... He has multiple sectors or segmentums under his... control, and they are all his. Yeah. We're talking solely his. No one. Exactly. In fact, if you want access to it, you had to get permission from him. That is, holy crap, is that a lot of power? Yeah, he's not in charge of a system. We're not talking like, hey, you're in charge of Earth, Mars, Venus, whatnot. No, he's in charge of everything within light years of Earth kind

of thing. And they all are that way. And during the Horace Heresy, the reason this matters is during the Horace heresy. And, you know, we can debate this, because they didn't really write about it very, very well. But as we'll use Emperor's children fall to chaos, that means all the systems, every ship, every single thing under the Emperor's children are now on chaos. Which, they had Civil Wars and that.

Yeah, it didn't actually work that way. But Gilliman doesn't know. Well, it did for like Horace. Yeah. But Gilman doesn't notice. Horace didn't also show up with wild wings and tentacles. So it does help not being a giant purple snake. Yeah.

It's tough to negotiate. You're like, I think you might be the bad guy. Hey, fuck the bad guy right now. What are you talking about with my forearms? I still got great hair. It's true. Still had great hair. I'm going to die from that.

That was good. It's a real thing in the model and in all the artwork. He is literally a snake demon with four. arms and wigs and amazing hair. Beautiful hair. Just like romance, romance novel. He's Fabio. It is fantastic.

Can't figure it out, but it does. That's where he is. So the issue is that so Gilman, I think rightly says, hey, um, no. Like, we're going to let you be in charge of some people. He's a huge hypocrite on this, though, because he does break it up and he makes a bunch of secondary chapters. And they're all directly under his.

command. So he breaks up the Ultramarades and they're all. He's, he's Captain bureaucracy. Yes. How else am I supposed to do this? He's like, look, man, you guys should break your chat. Look, I've broken my chapter up. You're like, yeah, you gave them like stickers with new names. It's still the same guys stand in next to you.

It's all the same guys. And they'll report to you, right? Yeah, but they could choose not to. Yeah, but they all do. Could they choose the most loyal people? That's not important. You're like, they have the same color. like nothing changed.

But the reason I do want to cover this so for everybody following is this is when you play, I want to talk about it, it's changed because when you play 40K, this is a big piece where you have, hey, what are all these chapters that were part of? They don't actually play that much. Ironically, except for the Dark Angels, is probably the only ones writing the chapters do matter because you do run

Raven Guard or Raven Wing, you do run death away. But they're not, though. Those are part of it. Yeah, but they actually run up the second founding. That breakup, they did follow as a time. Kind of, but they just didn't. together. Yeah.

Versus though, I actually don't. I mean, you have like the Emperor Spears, you have all these successor chapters, which are, here's the ultra marines, but here's the chapter with the chapter master, go do your thing. But it was already happening anyways. They all right. That's my problem in the fact that they just, everybody did, gave you face to this and just went. Well, yeah. Gilliman said do this thing and they all figure, well, how can I do the thing he's asking me to do,

but actually not change anything? that's what you end up, which is pretty common. I mean, you had some successor chapters that are way cooler. I mean, like, Black Templars came from Piero Fiss, which is my least favorite chapter. And Black Templars are a lot cooler. Yeah, they're awesome. Sons of Medusa are really cool. I do like Sons of Medusa.

Oh, those guys are badass. Those ones are really cool. I mean, Blood Angels are cool anyways, but also flesh tears are probably cooler. Way cooler. A flesh stars are way cooler. But the thing is, is that this is how Successor Chapters are, became and existed. But

we're skipping ahead here, but Bobby G eventually gets, sorry, Fulgram slashes him and things happen. And shit goes down. And we're in a, the Imperium's functioning,

but it's not at the same time, I guess. We're just sending in. Let's get, because I mean, as I said before, when we started this episode, I didn't want people thinking

that we're going to cover the scouring. Because again, the scouring is 10,000 years and running. That's what we're at right now. To be honest, it's 11,000 years. It's 11,000 years and running right now. That's where we're at on the scouring. But this early part of the scoundage we're covering really is going to set up almost everything else that's coming in the future.

Because it was this idea of, all right, I do like Gellman a lot. So I'm coming at some of the standpoint of Gellman. You're sitting there and this entire thing that you just helped rebuild. You know, you are part of the Great Crusade. You've brought all the worlds back into it. Everything was on the up and up. and now it's on, it's on, it's a, it's on fire. And it's a terrible fire.

So what do we do? Well, we've got a great idea. What if we eliminate the chaos, we rebuild, we do, make all these changes, yada, yada, yada. None of that really worked. Well, it also becomes a bastardized exact opposite of the version that you're fighting for because it was supposed to be this freedom of thought. I mean, obviously, we won't talk about how they treated Zenos. But if you were human, you had lots of, you were supposed to have these freedoms to do what you wanted to do, be who you wanted to be, serve the empire, but go as high as you could.

There's equal opportunity for all. And then the Imperium became this living hell for 80% of the inhabitants. We'll be right back after a quick break. I think it's important here to talk about really what. what is happening now for the Imperium. So it is effectively now at its weakest point, I think, since the Dark Ages technology. Since Dark Ages technologies, for sure. It's there. There is, there's no functioning government.

Because the Lords of the, Brad, we mentioned the Lords of Terror a few minutes ago, and I want to dig in. The Lords of Terror were largely figurehead. But the emperor handed over the reins to them, but at the end of the day, the emperor was still there. And they would all. Well, no, well, they had power. But the problem was is that it actually did. have power. I'm going to, I'm going to contrast this. The Lords of Terra had great power, but they were always held in check by the fact that the emperor, his, he didn't veto shit.

He went, oh, I'll just cut that guy's head off. And you can't stop me. It's Darth Vader, Star Wars, episode four. Yeah. You know, I'll just choke this guy. Yeah. He's just like, hey, man, you did some nonsense. You went a little too far. If you went a little too far, I'll just replace you. And when I replace you, it means I'm cutting you in half. Yeah, you don't exist anymore. Yeah. And then, oh, I forgot to mention that I also will ruin you, uh, psychically soul. I will murder your soul

when I'm giving you. So it's not a great death. It's not a great death. So, but now those guys have unmitigated. Well, they no have anybody. There's no checks and balances went out the, the door. And they just have, so I have unlimited power, unchecked and limited power. And I can do

horrible things. Oh, yeah. And, no one can stop me because I also have, which the Inquisition, oh, again, what a trash fire. I'm sorry, guys, but you can like Inquisitors and Inquisitoria chaplains and stuff. But I'm just saying everything awful stem from them. And we have people that are utilizing this power to solidify power. They're using the Inquisition's power to be their own personal hitman. And we're talking like, again, it wasn't a joke. There's multiple stories of Tara Highlord's going, oh, John's getting too much power as my rival.

I'll just murder all the planets that follow John. It's not cool. Because I think one thing I want to point out is these guys went from ERA. They weren't figureheads, but they were of checked power. They're then granted unmitigated power. But the problem is that they're getting unmitigated power at a time where half of the Imperium is dead. And it's on a downward swing. And so if you've ever, man, this might hit home for some of you out there.

If you ever had a boss who's your work for who's in charge of a trash fire, that boss is usually a dick. Well, it's also the thing is that we're saying that the Imperium is at its lowest point, but it's still wildly powerful. Yeah. Oh, no, yeah. It's not weak, but it's flailing is how I would describe. Right. I'm saying you're at a down thing, but you're still working for Microsoft. You know what I mean? Yeah. They're there, but they are. I look at the Lords of Terror and I see people who are great. The thing you've always wanted, which is all this power you get. Oh, they're awful. But you get that power. Every single Lord of Terror, somebody, somebody correct me on this. Give me a story where a Lord of Terror wasn't the worst. Just the worst. They're by rule, a thing. I feel like every story, every Lord of Terra has been a trash fire. Well, I guess technically, Trajan's now a Lord of Terra. Fine. Yeah, okay, you're right.

That is one. But he's not, well, he also murdered all the rest of his death. The next big problem that they are having, though, this is more for the Imperium, is Zenos. So the whole time they were waged this war, and we're going to get into this the next episode pretty hard, is that the emperor during all the stuff with the Great Crusade

and the had almost a shadow crusade he was doing where he was killing Zenos. Whoa, whoa, whoa, John. I feel like you said kill. And I feel like kill is mad that you use that word because the word you meant to say was horrifically genociting Zenos.

Zenos were... Kill would be you and I dueled at dawn. What was happening was I didn't like the planet you live on. And I removed it. Yeah, no, I killed it. I made sure everyone was dead. And sometimes they went back to make sure everyone was dead.

And so what you have is that because of that, and two of the big Zenos we're going to discuss here are orcs and Jukari, which are the worst ones that have. Well, Jukari, orcs are more of a problem because orcs are actually looking for fights, always were a problem. The problem is Dracari weren't a problem. Right. And now are about to become one.

Well, Dracari are a big problem, but Jukari aren't a problem. To be perfectly honest with you, they don't feel like a problem for Marines because Marines get into scraps here and there. Yeah. But like the Jukari just leave. And then you leave and then the triage,

go back and go, hey man, remember when there wasn't any Marines to protect you? Like, none of you guys can do anything to stop me. You're like, I literally, work at, again, at the gap, you're like, not anymore. You work at the me doing terrible shit to you plant. I'm about to introduce you the homunculus covenant. Yeah.

You're not going to love it. Stuff's going to happen. You're going to be real, but you're going to really wish you fought me to the death. That was the whole problem. The imperium now is you've got their entire fighting force. A bunch of them are dead. The ones who aren't dead are trying to hunt down the ones who are on the other side who aren't dead.

It are effectively also ignoring the pleas of the common sense. So you've got systems that used to have, because the way it worked before. this. If we go back to pre-horis heresy, there would be a garrison effective on every single planet. And that guys who might have space marines, but they could get space marines to the planet. Kind of in a moment's notice, almost. You had

enough guys, where unless it was a giant invasion, you know, a gascoe style, you know, if it wasn't, if it wasn't just a gigantic invasion, you would put up a fight long enough where someone would show up

and wreck whoever's messing with it. Believe me, obviously, we're going to talk about Drew Carly a bit, but that's, that was always Drew Carrey's problem. The Dr. Carrey would pop out of a webway. They'd come in real hard on the Raiders and the Venoms. They're going to hit you. They're going to grab people. But they didn't have a lot of time because once they showed up,

the phone call went out and the Space Marines came down to Space Marines. Yeah, they were doing the movie heist out of a bank. We got two minutes for the people show. Go, go, go, go, go. Now all of a sudden, they go and do those same rates because the Duke Carrey don't know what's going on. It also, nothing happens. Yeah. Dracari show up and they're like, we got to go, go, go.

And then they try to leave and they go, hey man, no one came. And no one's shooting back at us. Should we, let's give it a couple of minutes to the point. Like, let's just hang out for a little bit. And now that it's kind of sitting around like next to the webway and just going, do we just do a second raid? Yeah. Do we just go murder more people?

Like I got nothing on my calendar. And like, you know, another month into the raid. And then just being Dracari, I suddenly get bored and go, all right, let's try another one. But this begins to open up. So we talked about the Lords of Terra, this is the problem they're having. It's these types of raids are happening. And we're using orcs and Drew Kari because they're the ones who exist in 41K, but they're 40K, but it's 41.

There are a ton of other Zenos all over those who are in a small system who are doing. And weirdly enough, way worse, some of them. Yeah, yeah. And they're doing this. So now you've got worlds are burning from invasion. And Eldar are also starting to come back into the picture now, too. It's not just Drew Kari, but you also do have Eldar who are. now kind of, you know, the craft worlds are like doing Eldar stuff, which means that they're

looking into the future and going, if we prune this branch. Yep. And sometimes you live on that branch. And they go, yeah, but you're eventually going to be chaos. So we're just going to kill you now. And you're like, but I'm not chaos now. You're like, yeah, but in like a hundred years you'll be, you're like, I won't live on this. You're like, sorry, man, but we're going to have to kill you now. because, you know, your great-grandchild is going to be chaos. So I don't feel great about this. But there's no, the issue is that because of the scouring is going on and all the problems, there's no defense for this, which of course leads invariably to the next big problem,

which was rebellion, which also because as you, if you're sitting there, if you're part of the Imperium and you're getting this note, hey, you've got to produce this tithe to the Lord of Terror. You have to do all this stuff to them, pay them all these pieces. okay great but in return you're going to give me like protection all that you're getting nothing yeah totally but also the worlds that are worst are the ones that could have been chaos a legion went by and again killed what two-thirds the population on average and then left and went go back to doing what you're supposed to be doing you're like hey man i got a lot of animosity

towards this how but you go screw yourself and then a guy goes hey man i've got a way to get back at them and you're like, yeah, I'm down with whatever you say. This is a terrible idea, but also I'm super angry because you know, like, everyone I know doesn't, is unalived right now. World's correctly said,

hey, man, screw the Imperium. I'm out. And so now you've got worlds, because you mentioned them falling to chaos. I'm saying the ones who didn't even fall to chaos. The ones who just were like, yeah, we're an independent body now. And I'm like, no, you're not. Well, yeah, but what are you going to do about it? You guys

in the space marines, they're busy. You're going to spend your Imperial Navy? They're busy. Who are you going to send it to come tell me, tell me I do what you're going to do? Nobody, cool, then I'm going to go do what I want to do. Effectively. Because what we'll get into, kind of in later episodes,

is that these worlds, so half of, you know, when we talk about the horse heresy and half the world's leaving and Gilman's plan of rebuilding, you need a lot of logistics, you need food, you need steel, that it's steel, ceramite,

you need all these pieces. So a world that would say, hey, you have to produce a thousand bushels of hay. And I'm using a very incorrect term here. Now you go into them and saying, hey, I know you're doing a thousand bushels of hay. And I know a bunch of you were dead. But we need 1,500 or 2,000 bushels of hay now. Also with one third the workforce. Yeah, one of the workforce.

You need today. And they're just saying, it also will kill the rest of you if you don't. Yeah. And what happens if I don't? But, okay, but while I'm doing this, I'm getting raided by like all these different forces. Oh, you need to fight them off yourself too. And eventually they went, screw this. I'm not sending you crap.

Yeah. You know, I'm doing my... I can actually hire some guys to protect me if I give all of my stuff to them instead. And then I stopped dying. So I'm going to go with that. And also they've been meeting some of the other Zenos, which aren't just the psycho Xenos, which are just like, hey, you guys want to hang out with us. Yeah.

And we'll just... And also the Eldar, we're doing quite a bit of that, to be perfectly honest with you. Eldar started trading with the Imperium at this point in time because of the fact that multiple planets, not just planets, systems. We're like, yeah, man, like, there's not big giant power soldier guys to immediately kill you if you are Zenos. And no one's protecting me and you guys said you would trade with me. Cool.

Like, I would like to not die this week. Is this the origin of the rogue trader? Kind of, yeah. Let's say there's the origin of rogue trader, which is. This is before and after this. I feel this is the origin. You obviously had, we know this is the mass rogue trader, because you get the people that just would trade with anybody.

But the ability to trade with people was once we stopped having coordinated murder all Zenos. That's when you were able to trade. I guess we would have had it during like the pre-crucissade. Obviously. Pre-crucrucissade existed. That's why I was saying the rogue trader existed, but then it kind of didn't. Yeah. And then after the Horace heresy, they kind of just came back and went, okay, no one's going to kill us?

Cool. And if someone came to you and you're trading with, we'll use the Eldar, I'm trading with the LDAR. And my trade is I help give them supplies, this kind of stuff, and they keep eliminating all my enemies. And you come to me and say, you can't trade with them. And I say, do you? Are you going to limit my enemies?

No, I'm not. Screw you. Rebellion. Yep. So I'm going to bail. The last one, though, that I do think we should touch on here before we kind of bail out of this is fear. And this goes what we've been discussing throughout a lot of this.

fear this is as a citizen of the imperial this is one of the most fearful times to be alive in thousands of years which is how the inquisition actually happens though because people I mean this goes to humans right now everyone's afraid of the unknown you don't know if there's going to be another big war

you were isolated from information for somewhere between 5 and 10 15 some of these more you know, years, the whole thing was semi-longer for some people. Again, we also have warp time, you know what I mean? Yeah, so. So, but the, but the big thing is, it's like, you may or may not have been conquered. You may have not have been isolated.

You don't know what's going on. All you know is that terrible shit might happen to you tomorrow. You know what you should do? Let whoever it is make that stuff not happen. Does it make my life suck? Well, yeah, but. We're going to weed out those people that would do bad things to you. Aren't you doing bad things to me?

Don't talk about that. That's not important. That's not important. You just, you let us take care of the things. The note I left here is, who can you trust? And that became, I think, the overarching story of the entire Imperium is who can you trust? Well, and the thing is, I want to go on to one of the notes that John has, and this is why I kind of want to branch on this is, the emperor is dead. But the emperor is not dead.

The emperor. I would put it in quotation marks. No, no, no, but this is where it becomes terrible, because the emperor becomes literally the thing that he was fighting against because the emperor died. And effectively for the populace, which is what the Inquisition says, the emperor died but was ascended to better. The emperor is a god now.

The emperor is defeating chaos. personally, which now he kind of is. But at the time, at the time, the emperor is just holding at bay the problem. Sorry, Magnus, you didn't do anything wrong, but you did ruin a lot of things. So the emperor is pretty busy. He's a carcass on a throne and he's got some shit he's got to take care of. And he's also fragmented with his psyche and he's everywhere. You're like, hey, man, you have to make sure that chaos doesn't destroy the entire galaxy.

and also you get to take care of about 22,000 other things, and also your personality got shattered into a billion shards. Can you take care of all that tomorrow? And that's the thing. As a citizenry, what do you do? What do you do? And now you've got the Inquisition. It's worship now.

And they're telling you that, you know, to turn on each other. And you've got this. But it's because the- I was against you're beset on all sides. I've got Zenos attack. me. I've got rebellions attacking me. I've got space marines. Are they a space marine ship? I mean, thinking about it this way. Like if you're, if a space marine ship appears or a fleet appears in orbit. You don't know whether you're getting killed or whether you're getting saved. Exactly.

And the thing is, is that that's why the Inquisition now becomes the shining light. Because they said, the emperor protects the emperor saves. That's all you need to have. You need to take everything you had to think about and condense that into the emperor saves and or just the emperor blank and just move on with your life. I'll do all your thinking for you. Don't worry about this. We got. I got this because people are afraid.

And they have a right to be. Demons exist, man. Now, that's the thing. As a world, any moment, your world can completely collapse, die, pick your turn. Yeah, you, like the boogeyman's. real person. He lives like three streets down. Like he's not like a thing you tell the kids. Like I saw him yesterday driving down the street. Like he's a real thing. From a law standpoint, the reason this matters is that this is, we're talking 10,000 years before the current

state of 40K. And I think anyone listening to this can follow along of, oh, it's been this way for a while. No, it gets worse. It started bad and got worse. Way worse. What this leads a rise to is a term called the imperial truth. Which is where I can already win. Yeah. Which is literally you, and this is, I mean, Stalin asked, I mean, it's, if you want to go real things, you have to swear allegiance to the state in a comical way, but like, it's, it is, you have to be all encompassing.

And the problem is, is this becomes, it doesn't become the norm right away, but it becomes the, like, that's just how it works. This whole phase is setting the stage for what is modern 40K of, you know, everything is about the emperor. You worship the, worship the God emperor, all these things. Because as a member of the Imperium, I have three choices. Choice one is to rebel and be an independent body. Choice two is to join chaos.

Be a heretic. Yeah, and be a heretic. And choice three is to declare fealty to the Imperium and hope that they protect. But they only. But the thing is, is that you're downselling, though, because declaring fealty isn't just, hey, man, I'm on your side. Right now, you know what I'm a friend of? I'm a big fan of living in the United States.

You know what I didn't have to do? Declare my body and soul to the United States and also sign something that says, if I ever go against the wishes of the U.S., I'm totally. totally okay with being tortured and killed instantly. Yeah. And every imperial citizen knows now, well, in the modern word of 40K, that's just how it is, man. This is, and for those of you who do it, this is where it started.

This was it. And it came out of fear. It came out of this piece of, because you want to live and you would basically ask yourself, which are the three things, which of these three options would make me live? Now, fall into chaos, you technically do die, but chaos isn't going to tell you that. the rebellion one seems like a, it might, if you're in a system that's got a lot of old tech and weaponry, maybe it works. Also, you may not have been contacted for a long time.

Yeah, you might, or you might just be close to an Eldar craft world that's, that you can trade with protection. Which is fairly significant. Yeah, that would actually help a lot. Those are kind of hers, but otherwise, if you're just kind of on a, on the northern fringe, man. And also, for those of you who don't realize, the necrons haven't come back yet, and the Tarynids haven't hit the galaxy.

Yep. And also you might have, and for a lot of these citizens this time, there's a good chance you saw a Marine fairly recently and seeing a Marine will make you shit your pants. Like if you're just some, if you're Brad Chester and I go, oh, cool, Dante just showed up. Yeah, man, I'm doing whatever that dude said because I'm real terrified of that thing that just rolled by. He is a significantly tougher than anybody I've ever met. And this is where the Imperium becomes the modern, where everything shifts over to war, effectively. It's just, it's a war machine. It's against us. It's also, we only, we are at a constant state of martial law, but it's not even, it's martial law times 1,000. It's exponential. It's the Imperium only exist as a war machine right now.

And the modern 40K, the Imperium, actually, I don't know if modern 40K, the Imperium could exist, not as a war machine. I couldn't because it is, that's the whole thing. This is what we talked about in the beginning of the episode. When you hear about the scouring, you go online, you look it up, it's referred to as a period of time. And I just, you read, the more you read about it, and you pull the codexes and you read the novels, it never ended. It just, there was a beginning to it. Which just becomes what the Imperium is, which the Imperium is a wartime economy. And that's the only way it works, though, is because of that fact.

So with that, I think we'll break this episode and we're going to get ready for our next one. So what Brett and I have had a lot of discussions and about what we should cover next. And we agreed that I think the next big thing we're going to jump into, because we did the Ork coverage, which was great. We loved it. We want to go back into Imperium. And we want to start with a very very, very important. interesting faction, which is the dark angel. It's about to get a codex.

Yeah, they're about to get a codex, or you're listening to this later on. They already got a codex, whatever. Who knows when it's coming out? Maybe. Yeah, exactly. There's always a codex coming. We're going to the Dark Angels. And the reason we're going to go to the Dark Angels,

the reason we're going to go to the Dark Angels actually are a really good story arc that lines up a lot of stuff that we've been talking about. Well, there's a lot of bridges that come right now from them. And so that's where we're going to go next. It'll be a multi-episode casts. So at least three under the Dark Angels. So please join us for that. In the meantime, our Discord is getting larger.

Our Facebook group are there. Please come and join those. Also, if you could subscribe to the podcast and like the podcast or comment on it. It makes a big deal for us because it helps us with our metrics. This podcast is doing very well right now. Brad Knight could not be done. Don't ruin us. Yeah.

But if you could help us out, we're not asking for anything other than just a simple comment or like. subscribe on Spotify. If you engage with us at all, it just helps a lot for the analytics. It gets us pushed out to more people. And we just love to be able to talk to, literally talk to more people about this. It's something we love. It's the only reason we're doing it. With all that, again, I'm John Barsoi. This is Brad Chester. This guy. Thank you for joining. We'll see you next week.