The 40k Lorecast - Episode 154 - Armageddon pt 1 – a planet that is a hellscape, a future hero of the imperium ascends, and the greatest ork to ever be born is reborn.

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

On today’s cast we begin our coverage of the 2nd war of Armageddon (seriously this place sucks!). With an opening on the planet itself, how it got there, how it is structured, and why it is so important. Then we jump (obviously) into the Steel Legion and their value to the imperium, as well as their unique way of “adhering” to the codex. From there we jump over to the origin story of the great and only Yarrick!! Only to then talk about the equally amazing but greener Ghaz! We then close out talking about the arrival of Ghaz and the orks on Armageddon.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallBrad ChannelOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl and use my code hipebl.ai for a great deal: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Quince and use my code quince.com/40KLORE for a great deal: https://www.quince.comAdvertising 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 Barsati and Brad Chester. This guy. All right. Today we are jumping into the Second War of Armageddon with a dive into Gaz, Yarek, Armageddon, and of course, the Steel Legion, because Armageddon is just a really horrible place. Really, really, really horrible place. On the plus side, orc lore, yay! Orcler.

Also, ad mec's obsidazing a planet. Also, how did no one catch this? Sorry, I'm starting off with this before we give the intro. They literally went, hey, we're just going to put this gigantic planet, by the way. It is huge over here. And then we're going to name it Steve instead of Illinois and pretend that it's something else. I mean, it's one of those like they changed some data somewhere at some cogitator and everyone went like, oh yeah, it's always been there. I mean, they blew up a planet to do it.

But whatever. Tell us about what the 40K lore cast is. 40K Lourcast, a weekly show focusing on the Law of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern, please, as always, because like every podcaster on Earth says, follow and comment. Why do we all say that? Because it helps our algorithm and pushes us out to more people. So we're no different.

Please do that. I do get to read the comments. They're fun. And also, it pushes us out to more people. So thank you. I have them up right now, as a matter of fact. In addition, we always have links in our show. notes. The links will take you to our YouTube channel where we do monthly Q&As. We'll be doing one in

September. I've committed to it. We're doing it in September. Candle of guys, just truthfully, I've been playing a lot of 40K this month. And so as Brad and plus life, I just didn't have time. But we'll get to it in September. And if you're listening to this sometime in the future, September was in the past. You can come check on it. It also have a link to our other show, the history of 40K, where we talk about the history of the game on the tabletop with our friend Allen, mostly talking about it, God, though, that show gets off the rails horribly, but it's though, we cover it mostly, though. Good God.

Oh, just off the rails. And if you love the sound of my voice, you can check me out on my show Retro Recall, where I play old video games and talk about if they were good or not. Some of them are good. Or if you should like what Brad's voice, you can check out the Brad channel and have Brad talk about competitive 40K and people's lists. and why they're good or bad. The Brad Channel now.

Yes, it's just the Brad Channel. As always, like any podcaster, you can always support us. And one way to support us is buy our merchandise. We have stickers, as Brad's a big fan of. We have beer glasses. We might have wine glasses. Yeah, we have wine glasses. We've got sweatshirts, t-shirts, everything.

Or you can also, if you don't like listening to the advertisements, pick up our Patreon. Patreon's a great way to support people. And if you pick up our Patreon, you get this show. and the history of 40K, ad free, and it's only $4.99 a month, or 747.89 Argentine pesos, because I'm still not over this whole cold thing in northern southern hemisphere. And I looked up again, I wanted to know, okay, but what is the coldest city in the southern hemisphere that people actually live in?

And I found it. It's Ushoya, which I'd be pronouncing incorrectly, Ushuaia Argentina. where the winter temperature averages around a terrifying borderline inhumane temperature of 0.1C, also known as 32.2 Fahrenheit. Screw you guys. I also looked this up because Brattle appreciate this. They have a record for their coldest day in history. This is the coldest city in the southern hemisphere.

And their coldest day in history was negative 10 Celsius, which is negative 12, which is negative 12. negative 12 Fahrenheit. And I looked it up this year, January 24th, 2026, it was colder than that at my house. Yeah. Like for a long time also. Yeah. This is bullshit.

The reason why, by the way, I looked it up, it has to do with there's more ocean in the southern hemisphere. So it actually keeps the temperature warmer. In the northern hemisphere, we have more landmass. That allows the air to cool more. But let's talk about Oshaya. So Ushaya is known as the end of the world because it's the southernmost city in the world. It's where you go if you went to a cruise to Antarctica.

Shackleton did not stop there. Maybe he should have. It was originally a penal colony for Argentina where they sent genuinely the worst of the worst of their entire country to go die building a railway there, which later then became a city. And if you go there, you go there to, well, go on the cruised Antarctica, but also to go outside. And you got a really cool view because you have the Marshall Mountains that come through there. And they rise right out of the ocean. So that's pretty. And that juxtaposes really well against a really nice beautiful blue ocean.

It's the Southern Atlantic there is nice. You also get good hiking, good exploring, because it's really undeveloped. So you can just wander off into a almost pristine environment. And the water, because it's cold water, you get cold water sea life, also known as big stuff. So sea lions, rookeries, whales. It's awesome. And I have to give the Argentinians credit, you're getting Argentinian food, which is quite delicious. So good empanadas, great meat.

It's a good trip. And the best thing is, if you go, you can just pack a light jacket because it's not that damn cold. Still not happy about this. All right. Discord. You got to let it go, man. It's just, you know, you really think it's kind of even. And then you look it up, their record coldest day we beat this year.

Like, their average would be a nice balmy day for you and I in January. That would be a, like, it would be a, like, that would be a significant improvement to our January. Is there like, oh, it's pretty rough out today, guys. All right. But our Discord, if you guys want, join our Discord. It's fun. It's free, as all Discord should be. you can come in there, interact about a lot of stuff.

Mostly books. There's actually a lot of cool new novels that are coming out right now. Please don't spoil them for people. There is a lot of great new lore that's going to be coming with it, but also changes to the game. And just also just in general, it's just funny to kind of chat up with people about Warhammer 40K sometimes. Jump on in. Won't cost you a thing. There you go.

Now, before we begin this cast, real quick, I do want to have a quick disclaimer. This is one of the oldest. parts of 40K lore. Armageddon was first written in 1992. Gaz is that old. And that means this has a lot of books. This story appears in Warhammer 40K, second edition. It appears in a game called Battle for Armageddon. You can look up. It appears in the game epic. It appears in Forge World books. It appears in novels. in white dwarfs. It appears everywhere. As a result... They make that rhyme. You're going to do some Dr. Seuss.

I found it in a battle. I found it with a rattle. Yeah. And so I just want people to understand. The oldest part of the lore is Horace Heresy, which is 1987. This is like second oldest at 1992. We're going to go through a lot of this. And some of you may say, well, I don't think that's right. Or maybe this is right. it's because there is canon conflict.

Stuff that gets this old does get retconned. Because, for example, the squats are technically involved this conflict until they were not involved in this conflict. So they didn't exist. Exactly. So we're going to have a little bit of some back and forth here. And I just want to give everyone the heads up. I'm going to try and cover it as best I can by saying this is new and this is old. But I just do want to bring it up that this one is going to have some of the most canon conflict of stuff.

we've covered in a while. So there we go. But Armageddon, what a stupid, stupid, stupid rock. Armageddon has sucked. Yeah, Armageddon, well, technically, Armageddon, whatever the planet is, has sucked. It sucked forever and it will always suck. It's also not where it's supposed to be. So Armageddon is currently sitting in the superior right portion of segmentum solar. Yeah, we're still doing this. Really? Really? Yeah. Yeah. It is a, well, it's complicated. This is a massive hive world, but look at a map of it. It's not that big.

We'll cover more of that later. But it does produce a lot. A wild amount of goods. Yes, it is one of the more powerful hive worlds. I mean, pushing towards forge world level production. But where it is now is not where it always was. And that's because Armageddon used to be out on the dextral side of our solar system. back when it was called Ulinar.

And this Ulinar was, first, the major site of probably the greatest victory of the Great Crusade, where the emperor joined Horace in destroying the largest Wa ever seen to that point. To that point, the emperor almost died, by the way, that battle. Yeah. Then, a couple millennia later, it got re-inhabited by orcs, namely the beast or beasts. I was saying, puts the plural on that bad. Well, and ask there. And then they launched the most powerful wah in history at that point.

Also, I got to argue this. I think that still is the most successful walk of all time ever. They got the terror. Well, they did. The argument is technically the new one might be bigger. It's tricky. I wouldn't say it bigger. I'm saying most successful.

Oh, yeah, very much the most sex. But also, that was also the most useless version of the Imperium. Oh, 100%. We were in theory was like trash fire. It's like there wasn't like anything in the way. It was like, so you guys are you guys going to shoot back? No? This is getting pretty boring, guys.

I guess I'll just keep going that way. Feels like you should do something about this. But after the War of the Beast and it had been put down, Admec decided to test out their new fangled teleportation technology to do something fun. They had been told to take this planet Ulanor. It had been nothing but problems. and punt it into the sun, literally. Teleport the planet into the sun.

To the core of the sun. Yeah. Make the planet gone. And they went, gotcha. And they teleported it to the soul system. Well, they said it's segmentum solar. Segmentum solar. Yeah, that way they could better analyze and excavate all of its bits and hoping no one would

know they did that. Great plan. Clever plan. Nice plan. Except then some rogue traders found it. And we're like, oh, there's a new planet here. No idea why. Pretty awesome.

It's ready to go. Yeah. Marked it for colonization. And it got colonized. I do love all the time when no one looks back on these things and goes, hey, look, a planet that's perfectly fine. Doesn't need to be terraformed. Probably a coincidence. Flag, just go ahead.

Never investigate this ever. We're good. It's just some road career going, look what I found. I'm awesome. Everyone else is an idiot. They couldn't find this place. Yeah. But yeah, so now they've turned an former orc homeworld into a human hive planet.

And I will be, to their credit, went great. About 80 or so thousand years, problem free. People Armageddon, they build. We'll talk more of the planet. Plant's a dumpster fire. But planet does grow, massive hives. It's standard imperial life and that it sucks. and you don't die with flavoring there.

But no problems till 4-4-4 of M-41. So it does like almost hit 8,000, but 8,000 years. When Aangron showed up with the world eaters and demons of corn, got defeated by the planetary defense force, Grey Knights and Space Wolves. It was a pretty awesome coalition. Yeah. And then the Inquisition decides that everyone who was there had to die

and then sterilized them all. So they all died. But then a new population was brought in. And that's the ones who were there now. And the new population really liked that it was all pre-furnished apartments. Pretty good deal. They got there. Even pictures of families.

And if you were the same size as their family, you could just wear their clothes, which were also there. Yeah. Pretty good deal. What a wonderful thing. So fast forward a couple hundred years. And the hive is thriving again. I mean, again, air quotes, thriving. Hellscape, absolute hellscape, but not currently under invasion hellscape.

So thriving. But we should talk two things about Armageddon before we get going. First one is this geography, because I do want to set that up a little bit, and two, the Steel Legion. So let's open up with their geography. This planet is tricky to figure out how big it is. And that's because it's described, as Brad said earlier, this massive plant that produces all this stuff. But then you look at a map of it. And there's not that much to it.

So it's kind of like, for those of us who played civilization, it's like, yeah, I don't really want to play on the huge map because I don't feel like having 8,000 turns. So you play on the medium world. By the way, Armageddon is listed officially as being 86% the size of Earth. Yeah. But if you look at a map, it's not. It's fine. It doesn't matter. But also, they talk about how big it is, but then it's just not.

Exactly. I do laugh. There was one map I saw that just said unexplored for a chunk of it. I'm like, no, we have space travel. I know the scanners don't work, but their eyes do. Like, all right. But let's talk about it. First off.

Let's talk about the population real quick. Because, ready, 86% the size of Earth. But there's up. two, depending on which you get the estimated population at, 500 billion people on it. Yeah, it's not ideal. It's crowded. It's a little crowded. It's probably expensive here.

It's also really dirty. I'm going to be honest, this is not Singapore. So, but to Brad's point, at its core, Armageddon is an extremely minerally rich planet. And the cool thing is when you want to get minerals out of a planet, the best way to do it is, to just destroy the planet. And the more destructive and excessive the method, the better. And Armageddon is a hellscape because of this. It is a toxic wasteland.

You cannot go outside. Like some areas will melt a tank. The air is so toxic and everything inside of. But so just a couple of highlights there. So we have this kind of a weird setup. You've got one section, which is like the north, kind of northeast. the pollution from the factories would kill a man in seconds if they were outside without a mask. Then the southwest, despite the planet rotating, and we're talking about it's in second,

it's always frozen. It's actually the west-southwest, by the way. It's funny because they have, you go for, hey, what are your selling points? The toxic oceans or the ashen wastelands? Also, don't forget your rivers that are not rivers, they're just pure sludge. That is true. It's just toxic waste, it's factory waste, basically. It is remarkable.

But in effect, Armageddon has three continents, two-ish oceans. It's like two oceans in a sea and a really small island chain. The first one is, since this planet's kind of kiltered is the best way to explain it. When you look at a map, it'll look like it's north. You'll see one bit at the north. Then you'll see a continent in the middle and see a continent at the bottom. But that map actually you need to turn it, like almost 45 degrees, is actually where north. Well, remember the planet's

actually at a jacked angle because the admec teleported it out here and then it got caught in a rotation. That's not what it should be. Yeah. But if you look at a map of it, just understand, you'll see a map of it and then if you look off in the corner of the map, you'll see the arrow for north pointing not up.

But so that's... We've talked about this before in life of the imperial and stuff like this. Armageddon is a world where foods imported from off where they're making shit for food. Like this is a self-sustained planet. If we didn't pay attention to this,

it would be bad these bears because they pump in, they ship in, sorry, not pump in, because they actually do pump in air, but they ship in all of the food. And basically everything else that you need water, food, everything else. And let's explain why.

Because in the northeast-ish area, are the firewists, which is volcanoes. A bunch and bunch of volcanoes, but it's also where the mining. it. So effectively, it's got all this ore that they mine out of active volcanoes. I was just about to say that. I was going to go, well, you'd think that you'd want to stay away from that, but it's a huge mining operation. So just ignore the volcano over there and keep doing stuff. Yeah, but here's a fun thing. How do you mine an active volcano? Simple, penal colonies, because that's also what they use. More on them in a

minute, by the way. For the most part, everything there was extracted from the fire waste and then moved elsewhere. The only things that are up there are the penal colonies, so planetary defense force outposts and a couple of orbital cannons to kind of protect the planet. That's it. And those, even the planetary defense forces are there just to handle uprisings from the people who are being forced to mine a volcano. Yeah, every now and then they get a little no. Yeah, I don't, this sucks. If you go selfish from that, you get the boiling sea, which sounds as lovely as it is. And it separates the firewaste from the main continent of Armageddon. In it, there's an archipelago of the Phoenix Islands.

And this water is just extremely toxic. It's not boiling, but it is full of also many volcanoes. So it just sucks. This place just sucks. The thing you know about the boiling seas is just a very busy waterway because there's always shipping all this stuff out of the firewaste down to the main continent through this area for manufacturing. Then you get this useless chunk of something called the Phoenix Islands, which make no damn sense.

And I'll explain why it is now. They are a chunk of islands with one main island. And they're basically halfway between the firewests and the mainland of Armageddon. But they built a bridge only going to the firewists, not to the mainland. And then they built a spaceport on it. So it's really good at taking stuff. off of the fire waste, then shooting it in the space. But then anything that comes back from space has to then be put on a ship and taken to Armageddon.

Like, why does it build this damn thing on the main planet? 95, also 95% of manufacturing is done on the main continent. This spaceport makes no sense. Just it's like the main, like it's the main spaceport. Why? But they do also have islands that have nothing but guns on them. And I think that's hilarious in itself. They have, are just reddishing some of them.

look if you Google and stuff, to hook it up. And it is hilarious. And they do this on a lot of imperial planets. They just make armed embankment in places. And I love that they show just this little island that just has bugs, bunny guns shooting everywhere. I will say one of my favorite things about the Phoenix Islands, though, is there's a ravine there.

It's called the Nadala Gorge. This is a great example of how bad the Imperium is to live in. It's just a gorge. It's a giant gap. and now there's a river coming out of it because all the factories that they built on the gorge just dump their sludge out the back into the gorge which then has built maybe one of the most toxic rivers

in the galaxy and just and then that straight nuclear waste they run fusion reactors on these and then that empties into the ocean which then flows to the mainland of Armageddon. Good job Imperium. A plus. On the other side,

of the planet, which is like the west and south is the deadlands. This is the part that's really funny because it's actually almost more west than south and it's completely frozen. To the point that I do like this, they do call out that it's against science that it's frozen, not in a like, oh, GW screw up the writing. No, even like the ad back, they're like, yeah, we don't know why this is still frozen. It faces the sun and it just will not melt. So that's weird. So it's used for three things. One, defense, two, mining, and three, water.

So they put a bunch of orbital batteries there. They could, you know, screw it. To Brad's point, why not? This will repel invaders and any uprightings in the mines. Again, penal colonies because they're going to make the people go dig into the ice sheet that never melts. Then there's the mines for removing oils and ore from the planet. these almost suck more than the ones in the north. And then the funny one is because all the water freezes there, they're like,

well, I guess that's drinkable. So then they also go over there and I guess mine ice. I, and it's also a big deal because it's very expensive because it's a hot commodity, you know, to be able to drink water. Yeah. So that's what it's for. But then we need to talk about the north and south. the first we talk about the penal colonies because we talk a lot about how bad living in a hive is,

penal colonies are significantly worse because this is absolute death sentence. If you live in a hive and you are in maybe the lower portion of the hive, there's probably not good enough rebreathers and all that stuff to keep you from getting poisoned to death. and that's living somewhere that they don't want you to get poisoned. When you're in a penal colony. Because you're sentenced to death, your sentence to work until you die. That is your sentence. These people are, again, probably mining in a volcano with, I don't know, a wet rag.

It's not ideal. It's not ideal. So a lot of rebellions happen up in those areas. What? But on to the main part, which is Armageddon. So Armageddon, it's not ideal. itself is one long continent. It's shaped, it's shaped similar to a peninsula. And it sits going probably southeast to north to northwest. It's the best way to explain it. And it's split

into two portions, Armageddon Prime and Armageddon Secundus with a giant jungle running the middle of it. Also Armagedon Segunnus, we're going to get into some great stories. Yeah, secundus is... Stuff happens there, yeah. Well, Secundus is the larger one. So Armigan Prime has only three main hives. Well, there were four, but it doesn't last very long. But Volcanus, Tempestora, and Death Meyer are up there.

There's also a wide-open plane, which, as a plane, it's just a nightmare zone of horrible horror. So yeah, it's more actually. Yeah. Volcanus is the eastern most of them and sits surrounded by actually mountains. Tampora is the northernmost. and that's the one that works a lot more with the firewaste. And then Deathmeyer sits right next to the equatorial jungle. And it's actually more of a port city.

Then we get the equatorial jungle, which is really kind of more funny than anything else because it's really dense. It is meant to be, when they say jungle, we don't mean like, oh, it's kind of greenery. Hey, you know who can navigate this? The equatorial works. Yeah, this is going to come up later,

as part of a very fun story. But in effect, this is a extremely dense jungle that vehicles cannot get through. And there's actually only, I think there's only one roadway. There's a big giant roadway. Yeah, there's one highway going through the whole thing. Not only is it dense, though, it's also incredibly toxic like the rest of the planet. Like any water in there, don't touch that. You will melt.

And the plant life is also, we'll go with aggressive. It's one of those. It's a death world plan. Yeah, yeah. The plant life will kill you. So it's this kind of cool little jungle right in the middle of it that ends up being a nice little thing for adversaries. If you try to get through it, there's only one road and everyone knows where that road is. So boom, boom, suck it.

And if you want to go into the jungle, you're just rolling some dice into quite a more of the hazard tests, Brad, you guys used to roll for. The one you die. Yeah, it's supposed to go one to three. But if you, on the other side of that jungle, though, you do get secundus. Secundus is much larger. You've got more hives as well. You have five hives compared to primes three. Hell's reach, Infernes, Archeon, Tartarus, and, of course, Hades.

Hell's reaches on the southern coast, Tartarus and Archeron are on the mainland of the east. Infernes is like central of the continent. And then Hades sits on the northern part, like kind of coastal. fairly close to the jungle. And that's important. Hades is, if you get through the jungle, Hades is one of the first ones you're going to get to. But the landscape on both of them is just a hellscape.

Flat plains or mountains with volcanoes. There's no positive to any of this or nightmare jungle. Well, they have some rivers, but these rivers, for those of the played 40K back in the day, we used to have, we were talking about it, dangerous terrain. in a lot of the dangerous train was toxic rivers because we used to fight on Armageddon

was one of the places you would fight is part of the old GW GTs and stuff like that. So these rivers aren't anything good. They're more defensible than anything because of the fact you're like, hey man, our tank melted when we tried to drive through it. Yeah, but yeah, literally this isn't just bad for organic life.

armored things can't go through. You can't put a boat in it. But all of this makes this planet sound like, well, why bother? Why do this? And there is one major advantage to Armageddon. All of this exists because it can manufacture. All of these supplies that sit there, Armageddon is unique in that a lot of these materials that they're able to mine out. They don't actually call out what they are. It's all impossibilium, basically, and nanotechnology. But the idea of our, Armageddon is that they've got enough stuff coming in that they don't rely on as much shipments elsewhere to do their manufacturing. Armageddon is known that it can outfit an entire regiment, something like a week.

As a result, one of the most important manufacturing hubs of the Imperium in the galaxy. And with that, they also produce their own regiments, that they outfit and they train. Because remember, every regiment is outfitted and trained by the planet that raises them. And Armageddon has one that has quite the reputation, both in the lore and also in the game. And some of the game stuff, unfortunately, we'll talk about that another time. We'll be right back after a quick break. The Armaged Steel Legion were a very, very popular army to play for a while. They're back now, which is really great.

So the Steel Legion was awesome for the fact that they had the first fully mobile guard army. fully everything was I mean it was an armored company but it was Steel Legion was different because you had tons of guys with transports and special rules for those transports and they became one of the most famous

I'd say their top three of the things if you know 40K you just know about Steel Legion yeah they used to be Steel Legion are a weird one for people who had played in the game for a long time Steel Legion were one of the most famous now people aren't even aware I don't know because they haven't been away. They haven't been of a thing in, what, a couple editions, actually.

Yeah, exactly. But so the reasons the Legion are so important to Brad's point is because of the mobility. It's because you can't go outside. So they had to build a Legion built around fighting from inside of a vehicle. And they utilize a lot of armored transport. Their main thing, obviously, is the chimera. And when he plays the game, we know the chimera. They do, you know, what the Space Marines would call Rhino Rush.

They do chimera rush. They bring their chimeras out in hordes, get out there and quickly rush out wearing their gas masks to then overwhelm an opponent. Or stay inside because they have the ability to shoot everybody, well, 12, I think now, but like it used to be just everybody inside got to shoot. You still to shoot out, yeah. But they don't just make troop transports. They also made armor to support them because the Steel Legion also boasted a lot of tanks and mobile artillery, especially mobile artillery. They used to be really good with basilisks and all that kind of stuff. And their idea was they would deploy very quickly and just overwhelm an opponent with armor.

And then basically finished them off with infantry. They're super cool. The fun thing I love about them, though, is they're not codex compliant. They break all of the rules. Yeah. Well, it's funny because of the fact that the Imperium wants their legions to be the same. They want them to be basically the same size. you get the same stuff because they can go,

I'm going to take Unit A and put it here because I know I... Yeah, this... To defend the Imperian, it's something the Romans did very well. The idea is that, you know, there's one of my favorite. There's a Roman fort. I think it's in England. It's somewhere. The Roman forts all had four exits, northeast, southwest.

They always built them. And they built a fort that was next to a cliff. And there is an exit on the cliff face. And I can guarantee you someone guarded that exit. despite it being, like, 60-foot drop. It just, that's how you do it. This is the rule. And so all of the legions are meant to do this.

The Steel Legion break this massively. They've got way more troops than they're supposed to have. Way more armor than they're supposed to have. They've got all these exceptions. But there's also a reason to it. They also win all the time. They are one of the most successful legions when deployed. So, and they keep producing this level of thing.

And to be fair, they're also able to produce at this level. The truth is that the Steel Legion are able to produce massive amounts of armor. So when they raise a regiment. Yeah, say they raise a regiment. One, they have infinite amounts of people, basically. And they also equip them and go, here's your way, way too many tanks and transports. go. And that's the thing. Like most of their planets would be like, okay, we raised the regiment. Here's like three or four basilists. Here's a couple Lehman Russes. These guys like, all right,

here's 50 basilists. Go nuts. And it's like, to be fair, a lot of other planets would do that if they could. So there's that. But as a result, the Steel Legion are this incredibly powerful regiment. And the reason we bring that up is they are also there for ever present on Armageddon. Once a regiment is raised, they leave the planet, obviously, but they're always in the process of raising more regiments. Yeah. And so that's the key thing, as you can imagine, why we're bringing that up, because there's always going to be Steel Legion there. People are there training and uplifting them. But with that, let's move on to a different story, because we have to kind of do a lot of backstory before we do the Armageddon. Now, let's talk about the guard. Throughout the imperent of mankind,

Worlds come and worlds go. That's just part of it. Industrial accidents, civil wars, bureaucratic oversight, so they just stop sending food, and invasions. And when a world's destroyed, if there are survivors, they're always just scooped up and then jammed elsewhere. If the survivors are children, they're sent to the Scholar Progenium to become leaders for the imperial military. In one such world is Teos III. We have no idea where Teos 3 was because it's gone now. But we know it was invaded by orcs and the orcs won that one.

But we do know when the Imperium responded, they found a few survivors. And one of them was a boy named Sebastian Varden, who was seven years old. And this story is kind of weird. Sebastian Varden was raised by his mother's father, because I don't like saying maternal grandfather. It's just too stupidly complicated to say, mother's father. That's not right, like his maternal grandfather. Just say his mom's dad, like an adult. Anyway, he himself had been a sergeant in the Imperial Guard. And Teos was an odd world in the empire that it had hive cities, but the planet itself hadn't been destroyed by it. So we actually

had forests, quite a lot of forest. And Sebastian, and they say this, by the way, had been taught from a very young age how to survive, like lay traps and be quiet and kill. And I'm a parent. And as parents listening to this, there's no seven-year-old boy on earth who could do it, who could lay quiet. No. Full stop. No.

If you can make a five-year-old sit quiet and trap, you're concerned about that five-year-old from being honest. No, like this is not something they can do. Or keep a secret. Like, no. Jesus Christ. So anyway, but the orcs invade, Sebastian Varden flees into the forest where he survives. And this story moves a bit.

Right now, it's three years. At one point, it was a couple months. I don't know which number is correct, by the way. This is one of the ones where the cannon has moved around a little bit. But while in the forest, there's a movie that I can't think of off the eye, but this person does. They survive on their own in the wilderness. He teaches himself all he needs to know to survive. you know, cue the montage of him killing orcs, like setting traps.

I think he's supposed to killing Gretchen, but it still counts. The imperial forces arrive and deal with the orcs, but they find him and go, well, you've just killed like a lot of orcs. So scola progenium, you are not going labor. Let's go right now. Exactly. When he does this, though, everyone else is dead. He changes his name.

And he takes his mother's father's name, which is Yarek. Yarrick. This is, yeah. So he becomes Sebastian Yerick. He joins a Scholar progenium and initially is supposed to become a Scion, which is the special forces. But the people in the progenium took one look at him and were like, no, you're a commissar. You're not saying no. Like, absolutely not.

That's, we're not wasting you on that. I was going to shoot Ted in the back of the head for running too slow. Exactly. Like it's him and Gaunt. To be fair, Yarrick actually might be braver than Gaunt. It's a, I can get in trouble for saying that. I'm a big fan of Yarek. And Yarex just got this psychotic level of bravery. And they were just like, yeah, commissar, full stop, commissar. And this is, he's an amazing commissar. But he's also, he's got a much cooler story of learning than a lot of other ones. So he has, he's learned very early on that. at the true problems of corruption. So we look at Gaunt. Gaunt actually is more of a, I have a good word for it,

but Gaunt as a commissar is actually much more sympathetic to people. Yarrick is not. Zero, none. Yeah, because Yarrick is a- The first story you encounter him in, he just- He learns quickly. Yeah, when he just snaps heads

with a quickness. because he has to, and this is why I like Yarek a lot, because we talk about commissars as being bad, and one of my favorite stories is early Yark, explaining why commasars are the way they are. So the world is called mistral, and he's under Lord Commissar Rasp, and this world is just a world with bad politicians, and they need kind of a little kick in the ass. Local barons decide that they don't care for the Imperium and they want power from themselves, so the Imperial Guard is sent there to tell, no, you're going to have that.

And this novel, by the way, it's called Imperial Creed. So I won't spoil all of it here. But long story short, the line between corruption and being an a-hole. I was a-hock, I mean like chaos corruption, is not very wide. And sometimes being an a-hole doesn't get you what you want, and corruption will come in. It comes in. And that's what Yarek learned. What Yarrick learned is, I think, all of our favorite phrase, that a moment of laxity breeds a lifetime of heresy.

Yarek knows this because of this story of, yes, these look like regular humans who are just doing being idiots. And that is what they are. But these disloyal men, if you give them a chance to stay disloyal, will become. So he learns shoot them all. And then Yerick moves around for a little bit. But while moving around, he's always been obsessed with the orcs because you know what? I'm giving this one. So when we started to look it through the notes, we're doing our stuff,

John casually writes, YARC's kind of obsessed with the orcs. Yeah, man, because they murdered everyone he knew. I mean, just anyone he ever cared about love or even mildly liked. You know, he's got a thing for them. But yeah, so he ends up on the world called Varroon. And Varroon was under attack by an orcua. And a couple of things happened.

First, Yerick learns to speak or. which, and again, in the, there's three versions of this. One is he met a captured slave of the orcs who taught him how to speak orc. Another one is he actually captured someone an orc and learned it from the orc. The other one is he just picked it up kind of on his own. Three different versions. Deal with it. I can help that.

And Buster should call out like the way we do 40K with language, yes, we all think of orcs speaking with a cockney accent, but it's reality is everyone speaks a different language, and it would just be a nightmare, water, around 40K. So in reality, it's, they do it that way, but we instead do that the Star Trek Star Wars thing, where every time someone speaks, unless we need to speak a different language, it's like Star Wars, Star Trek, where unless we need them to not speak the same language, they always speak. Galactic Common. Yeah, galactic Basic. Yeah, Galactic Basic. Thank you. So, but around the same time, Yarrick establishes himself as this like foremost mind on orcs in the galaxy. He understands orcs. He knows their

combat, their tactics, their motives, everything, and especially how to defeat them. And critically, he knows what to and not to do tactically. As let's say they suddenly show up and start behaving in a way that they're not, that's uncommon to them. He knows change your tactics, something other people don't. but 60 or 80 years of service we don't really know how long it's been Yarrick is stationed on Armageddon as part of a retirement he is there at this stage to assist in the founding of the fourth regiment there because his retirement is to train regiments they're like all right this is what you do and he hated the shit out of this oh my god he hates this this is so boring he is a warrior he is a soldier

he is not there to tell green recruits how to hold a las rifle. That is not his world. Funny story, and we'll get more into this guy later, the local leader of Armageddon, Herman von Straub, hates Yarek, hates him, views him as a troublemaker who's just going to meddle in things that he doesn't need meddled. And yeah, Yarrig's got some good timing. Now, also it wasn't super good for the people of Armageddon.

No, it wasn't. But also in Segmentum Solar, on the other side, you have a planet called Erk. It's in the Zornian system. It's on the right edge of, just right on the edge of Segmentum Obscurous. And a lot of worlds in the Imperium of mankind, Erk sucked. It's been around for a bit. It's mineral and oil deposits were good. It was colonized during the age of technology.

It prospered for a bit. It actually sat in a nice little intersection of warp ties. But then some orcs came through and ruined it. And the orcs ran it for a little bit. And then some Eldar came through. So Eldar came in. And they had it. And then the Great Crusade happened.

And the First Legion came in. And they actually found some new Zenos who were there. And they killed all of them. All of them. And all trances of them. Yeah. And everything was, and then it became a human colony for like 2,000 years. Hive cities, space ports, all that, even the two moons, fully colonized.

Yeah. Then the heresy happened. And the Imperium had other stuff to do. So things got less focus. And then the star of Irk started to kind of die. It was transitioning to a red giant piece by piece, which means it wasn't really giving off a lot of heat, and it kind of started to suck. So Erk's a lot of radiation.

There's also that. I wouldn't skip on that. But the thing about Erk at this point is it's been attacked and conquered. And also, it's a cool planet with these two moons. But there's a bunch of just like abandoned space stations all around it. There's a space junk. And at one point, some orcs found one of those space stations and kind of liked it. It was shiny.

It was sparkly. I love everything about the fact that they stayed because of the shiny bits. You don't care about the radiation because who cares? They're orcs. Yeah, they're hanging out. And then went down to the planet and went, this is cool. We're not leaving. Yeah.

And over 8,000 years, more orcs showed up until the planet eventually became an orc planet. The dark angels, though, knew about this and went, well, we have two choices. We could go back there. eliminate it. But we know once orcs are somewhere and their fungus is there, that's just a pain on the ass. It's a trash fire. So instead, they just put monitoring

stations on it, literally on the planet. And the idea was... I like this, though, because the whole point is they're going to monitor it and basically go, we can now see when a log is going to happen because there'll be a bunch of orc activity monitoring, and we can get on

it sooner rather than later. Yeah, and so they put these little and these are unmanned stations all over the place so if the orc gets too powerful they show up and they snuff it now after the war of the beast so this is right now we're close to m40 now i'm going back m32 eldred who was again alive back then a boy always always knew there'd be another beast now he's doing the yoda thing like oh there is another and he knew there be another superpowered or war boss. And because he's a shitty self-centered Eldar, he knew that this galaxy conquering war boss

would be a good thing for the Eldar. I don't really care about anybody else. So he began putting some stuff in place. Somehow he knew it would be here. So he began putting in place things to aid the coming of the greatest war boss in the history of the orcs. The prophet. Yeah.

Those unmanned things on this planet, by the way, had massive century guns on them. Orks would occasionally try to raid them and then get shot. So now we get to M40. Sorry, now we get to 940 of M41. One such raid is taking place. There's a golf raid going in to try and take one of these posts because there's some shiny bits in it. You want the shiny bits. and one of the goffs who goes up there gets shot in the head.

And that we don't, one of three things happens. He gets his head blown off. Either the other orcs carried him back down the mountain. He walked back down the mountain holding his head together. Or the medic was up there and fixed in there. We don't know which of those stories is true. All you got to do is well the metal part onto his dome. Yeah.

What I do like... Better headbutt. But I like those, of those three stories, one time they did, under threat of death, ask McCarrey which one was true. And he said, whichever one makes you not kill me. I love McCarie.

All right. But what we do know is that the body eventually did end up in front of Mad Dock. And Mad Dock did root around his brain for a little bit and shove this Adamantime plate on there. And root around a little bit more. and then the boy died. So then Maddoch threw him out back. And while his body was out back,

a Gretchen was looting all that. I mean, Maddoch had a pile of these, by the way. It was looting them for teeth and shiny bits to go, you know, do Gretchen and stuff with. And while doing this, this Gretchen was right next to him. Gazz sat up and looked directly to McCarrey's eyes. And the two of them, while looking into his eyes,

both saw the same vision of Gork and Orch and or morgue. And it was a vision of Gaz conquering the entire galaxy with McCarrey at his feet. And they both got out of that vision and went, we got some stuff to do. And we cover this back in the Orkcast.

If you guys want to do it, go back and listen to it again. But I'm going to abbreviate this very quickly. Gaz has to then unite all the clans on Earth. Because Urk has all the clans, Bad Moon, Snakebites, Goughs, speed, speed, sorry. And everything. Yeah.

And so they're all there. And he decides to prove he's the biggest, the smartest, the toughest, the toughest orc on irk. And therefore he is the boss. And he also can headbutt. He is a good headbutt. Really, really hard. Which we don't have on his data sheet currently.

And we still don't 11th. Is there a headbutt in the 11th sheet? Okay, good. Because he deserves an old. He's got his regular tax and then he's got an ed butt. Good. Not a head butt. An ed butt.

Ed butt. It's always an, Then we don't need that stupid H. All right. But what I love about this is he unifies all the clans. But after doing it, he's got two problems. First, the sun, the Zornian system is going red giant right now. It's just pumping out almost no heat but all radiation.

And it's going to go supernova soon. So he's conquered a planet and they're all about to die. But the actual bigger problem is the funny one. They got nothing to do. Well, they need somebody to fight and they need a ride to get there to someone to fight. And he's just sitting there. If only we had a way to travel, then they do. Yeah.

Because the space hole shows up. This is awesome. This giant spacehole called World Killer with a U shows up. And Gadda just goes, come on, lads. And the entire planet has to go out. So what they did was from one of the moons, they fired tractor cannons onto it. and just basically harpoon this thing and pull it to the moon and they take air quotes here shuttles from the planet up to it the entire plan they know as arc this thing so they don't

know as arc this thing because that would be two by two they empty the planet every single orc ends up on world killer yep yeah and then they cut it loose and just go well now what and just thoughts floating away until world killers just kind of spirals up and jumps into the warp just as the sun goes supernova. Supernova. Yeah. I'm assuming it's like an 80s movie with just an explosion and they're just not even paying attention to it as they float away.

Fun thing about World Killer, it doesn't have a Geller field. And so they're in the warp. So are the demons. And this is actually fantastic for Gaz. Because the orcs were all kind of bored back on Urk. now we have an endless supply of combat. Well, they also, effectively, orcs have to XP up.

They're literally grinding to get levels on these orcs because as orcs fight, they get stronger. They actually get larger. They get more powerful. And this also starts to juice up the wog, which makes them psychically more powerful. What's funny is this spacewalk world killer is basically blinking

in and out of reality as it's moving through the galaxy. And the orcs basically, as it blinks in reality, all the demons appear. And they take a breath, high five each other and then get ready. Then it blinks back out of reality. You know, back to fighting. And that's the better part of their day. What's funny is we don't know how long it's in the warp for or how long as travel is. But what we do know is there are more orcs on it than when it arrives and Oregon

than when it left. All the orcs are bigger. Gaz is astronomically large. by the time that they get there. They've got more technology when they left. They're really hankering for a fight. And McCarrey is missing. And this is also one of my favorite stories.

Maddock himself as the savior and creator of guess. Well, the bigger thing is creator also, that'll be kind of 100% later, but much later. Yeah. So he was like, well, no, I should be guess as number one confidant. Not a grot. Literally a grot. And so Mad Doc had been basically experimenting on Gaz's brain the whole time under the guys of making improvements.

He did make a bunch of improvements on his armor or weapons, though. But he also was messing with his brain. Well, he was also. Yeah, Gaz, though, loved McCarrey. It was like his little pet because Macari is his luck charm. And so everywhere Gaz went, Macari went. And Mad Doc got mad about this. And one day just decided to put McCarrey in an airlock and fire him into space.

Killing Makari. Yeah. So if those don't know, McCarry died on the way to Armageddon. More on that later. World Killer reaches Armageddon in 941 of M-41, and it appears in the edge of the system and is immediately detected by satellites

because this thing is the size of a freaking moon. The skins aren't that bad. When it arrives, though, overlord of Armageddon, Herman von Straub has a plan. he's going to salvage this spacehulk. He immediately declares it as just being a empty spacehulk, and he's going to salvage it from all the architect for the imperial.

Almost immediately, he's told it's full of orcs. Yeah. And he doesn't do anything about it. Yes. Because the scanners, by the way, are working. Orcs, by the way, are not subtle. It's not like the orcs did not, this thing didn't enter the edge of the system

and all the orcs got really silent and hid. They were in there chanting and laughing. the entire time. You can probably see them walking on the outside of it. It's all orcs. And von Straub just goes, yeah, we're still going to salvage this thing. And this journey from the edge of the system to Armageddon takes a month. And in that month, the warps starts getting messed up. All the sanctions psychers, the sanctioned psychers start going insane. There's literally a statue of the emperor in the hell's reach that starts weeping blood. And everyone's like, hey, I think there's something bad coming.

And Von Straub's like, nah, we're good. It should be fine. Passing nothing. In fact, Von Straub only notifies the administratum of the presence of the Space Hulk because he has to. Because there's actually under a requirement of like, oh, yeah, his message is basically, oh, by the way, there's a Space Hulk here. That's all exists. Like nothing about orcs or any of that stuff.

the only reason anyone knows about it is that a few of the craft that were kind of in between it like satellites this thing just smashes and destroys they sent out distress calls that did reach some space marine chapters but specifically one two one's going to be a big difference yeah one yeah the other one shows up with them but yeah so this is basically this thing is hurtling towards Armageddon, ripping anything and everything to shreds. And the leader of Armageddon is going, yeah, you know, when it gets here, we'll kind of deal with it. But with that, we're going to stop. Because next week, we're getting into where this thing becomes a freaking party. Oh, Von Straub sucks. We're going to start off with that. He does, I do like the ending on him, though.

That's actually one of the better endings. But Yarrick is going to become, it's going to be. it's going to be later when Yarrick comes up and I this whole story ends up being absolutely hilarious. Yarrick fully puts on his boots and mighty ass kicking. Yeah. When Yarrick gets going, it is amazing. The story for those who don't know the story of Yark, I hope you really, you are going to

enjoy this. But the opening of Armageddon is freaking hilariously bad because the orcs, no one's prepared for this. And to be fair, yeah, this is this level of orc invasion. It hasn't been seen in 10,000 years. Yeah, because this level of tactics. The main thing to understand about Armageddon for people to understand is that up until this point, orcs were raiding parties.

So we had the War of the Beast and now we have gas. Everything in between are small wares. Nothing to this level and more importantly, nothing this tactical. And that's what's going to make this thing really flat. Because he's punning but brutal. Yeah. But yeah, we also, but YARC's awesome. He does a whole like, I'm not going out like this.

And we get a whole thing. And I do love the orcs just become. obsessed with this guy with a weird eye and a cool hand. Yeah. Yeah. So, right. Until the next week, John Barsotti, Bradchester. This guy. See you guys then. At Cox, your internet and mobile price won't change for five years. That's five New Year celebrations. Five Valentine's days. Five Fourth of Julys. Five Halloween. Five Thanksgivings. And five summers that go by too fast. Through it all, your price.

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