The 40k Lorecast - Episode 158 - Dante pt 2 – Are the tales of Dante real, fabrications, or a combo of both?

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

On today’s cast we continue our coverage of Dante. With his arrival as newly anointed Chapter Master of the Blood Angels and his rebuilding of the chapter. From there we dive deep into the legends of Dante, from killing Skarbrand, to fighting orks on a mountain of dead orks, to being the killing blow on numerous Chaos forces (everything from lords, to sorcerers, all the way to more daemon princes). We then close out with the opening engagements that led to the devastation of Baal and Dante having to be cool with some Necrons for a hot minute.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallBrad ChannelOur Sponsors:* Check out Progressive: https://www.progressive.com* Check out Quince and use my code quince.com/40KLORE for a great deal: https://www.quince.com* Check out Shopify and use my code shopify.com/lore for a great deal: https://www.shopify.com* Check out TruDiagnostic and use my code 40KLORE for a great deal: https://www.trudiagnostic.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast. I mean John Barcotti and Bradchester. This guy. Today we'll be continuing our coverage of Dante as he moves from the great leader of the Black Angels all the way full-blown BMF of the Imperium. With some great stories that are maybe fables, maybe true, and all about a man who desperately just wants to retire.

The 40K lorecast, for those who don't know, somehow, is a weekly show focusing in the lore of the warmer 40K universe. somehow. Well, wait. This is episode 100, it's ever 158. At this point, it's going to be

someone's first episode. They're just like clicking on us off. They're still going to see. There's 157 other ones. Like, you're, I'll learn it up. At least. Tell everybody about how the

Discord should be free and where we're going today. Oh, we will be doing that. All right. So, as always, links in the show notes to this and our other shows, the history of 40K.

We talked about the history of the game of Tabletop. Brad's other show, the Brad's other show, the Brad channel. It's really what's called. And my other show, Retro Recall, it's about video games. Also, if you like us, they want to help us out, two great ways to do it. First, merchandise. You can go to our website, a newly updated website. Check that out. And check out our merchandise there. Or you can support us via Patreon. There's a link in the notes of the Patreon.

A massive thank you to everyone who's already contributed. I hope you guys appreciate what we've done with it since then. That's why we're able to do some of these improvements. But if you support our Patreon, $4.99 a month gets you this show and the history of 40K ad free, or 32.48 Danish Crohn. Now, you think I'm going to Denmark, but I'm not. I'm kind of going there because I'm going to somewhere for people who like the ocean and hate people like to live, the Faroe Islands. Yeah, yeah, Farrow Islands. This is a part of Denmark technically because it's actually their own country because they have their own parliament prime minister and flag but denmark's their protection it's like greenland or whatever and it's made up of 18 islands only 17 of them have people on them and a grand

total of population of 55 000 think Toledo has more people pretty sure by a lot by a lot i don't my knowledge of Toledo stats are pretty minimal i'll be honest with you it's just the stat i need to know is where less than an hour away yeah so i have to know how to not end up in it that's really all it is. It's kind of the same. It's the same reason that I grew up in Philadelphia and I know the zip code 19125 and anyone in Philadelphia will know what that is too. There's a reason you know that because I grew up at a time where you had to use maps to get around and I didn't want to end up in 19125. But let's have us somewhere happy. Farrow Islands are fun because it is light years beautiful. A lot of you actually have seen it and don't realize you have because they film it a lot. The Farrow Islands are

used for movies and TV quite a bit. They've got a very wild landscape. They have these sheer cliffs that descend right into a blue ocean and these rolling hills of greens, browns and yellows, truly stunning place. The only knock on it is it's a place Brad and I really can't go because it is a place

that if you like talking to people and interacting, you are not very welcome. This is a very kind of calm and quiet community, which are two things that Brad and I do not do well with. The Faroe Islands,

I mean, it is commonplace, Faroe Islands that have a village of 10 people. As in, you could get everyone into a minivan and drive to the next village and conquer it, I guess, actually, technically. They're also light years polite. They didn't get their first traffic light until 2002, and that was because of tourists. Up until that point, they had no problems with it, but then tourists kept going there and almost causing car accidents because they wouldn't wait

their turn. And everyone else there was just like, all right, put up a stupid traffic light. Maybe they'll let them slow down. It's also one of those countries that, I don't hate when they do there, it's like, there's more sheep than people there. That's the same true in Wales, New Zealand, Mongolia. Australia has more sheep than people. There's a lot of people in Australia. It's a stupid phrase, but you will hear it an occasion. They have more sheep than people. Shut up. The more interesting one, they have no prisons. If you get convicted of a serious crime there, they ship you to Denmark. So yeah, go Danes. And my favorite one, though, is they have a local language. And by local, it's, I mean, local. Ferranis is the language. And its dialect shifts

depending on where you are. 17 islands, they're not far from each other, but they shift quite a bit in language. And the best part of their language is they have 70, 70 words for fog. They have a lot of fog there and decided just to give all of a different names. They have a word for snow fog. They have a word for dense fog. They have a word for regular fog. They have fog on the water, but not in the sky.

mountain fog, so in the sky but not in the ground. And even they have a special word for if it's foggy on a national holiday. That fog has its own name. How much fog is there? Look up where they are. You'll figure it out pretty quick. I think a lot. And it varies a lot.

And they've decided we're not just going to call this one fog. Because, you know, what kind of fog? It's like, well, how much fog? And then they have a word for it. So there we go. Lastly, Brad mentioned earlier. You don't have to pay for discords. And we're one of the reasons why.

Join our Discord. It's free. And then you can come in and learn about stuff or not. Just come in there and mess around. I don't really care. We have a Discord. Chill. Yeah.

So, but with that, let's talk about a severe badass, which is Dante. As we covered last week, Dante was one of the first named characters to enter the game. And so he was written as a lead from the front character. So he had to be the most badass of all badass. And this created kind of a funny thing, though, from a retcon standpoint. And we'll be going over this a lot today. But I just want to open with this. The early lore, Dante, was written when GW was a fledgling company.

Just for the record, Black Library didn't come into existence until 1999. Dante predates that. Up until then, they were licensing out to independent authors to write these kind of random books with some questions about how canon they are. which also need the continuity wild early on before they had an overarching black the shut up where we had an overarching black library keeping everything kind of together the Charlie bored where we're being conspiracy singing it up yeah we had a lot of stuff that was just very conflicting as far as what was going on in one book to the next power level and everything

else I'll give you an easy example if you're the dark angels fan there's a book of Ezekiel that just called Ezekiel. It was written in 1990. Go pull that one and be like, wait, huh? These books are all over the place. And what this does is the problem is Dante created a bit of a problem. At one point, he moved from chapter master to almost demi-God, which means- He was just crushing,

because every story about him was everybody else gets killed and he kills armies by himself. Yeah. The interesting one of- Pretty regularly, by the way. Yeah. For those of our listeners who are fans of the Grey Nights, we have Drago now. Drago got way too powerful. That's also why they pulled him out of the game.

Yep, he's not the codex anymore. Why? Because he's a god effectively. The issue there is that GW, if you're how to handle it. And they handled it. Actually, I shit on GW writing a lot, but when they do it right, I wasn't going to give them benefits.

What they did was they took the more recent lore about Dante, and they've just implied the stories that we read about, Dante back in the 90s and early zeros were not firsthand accounts. They were second to third, fourth hand accounts. And so these became like tall tales and fables about him. And this has allowed them to keep Dante in the game and make him a more realistic character again, despite the fact he did some stuff. You're like, there's no way he did that.

But unlike some of the more well-known chapter masters, you have Logan, who's just kind of everybody sees, he's a man of people. he's a space wolf. He wants to be down with. He wants the tales to be told about him, the skulls to sing about him. You've got Marnius Calgar, who's more like a honored diplomat,

almost, elder statesman of the people. Both of these people have their very public, very viewed personas. People that interact with Dante, he's like an avenging angel. I mean, he is the blood angel, but he's the dude that shows up and does stuff. but even when you see him and possibly interact,

it's him and his battle and then he just deuses out. He's not in front of you doing his thing. So they can keep that still. Tall tails may or may not be true with Dante. And I like that quite a bit, how they've kept him kind of, oh, he's always a ways and arms reach from everybody else. Is he doing his thing? Is he a bad us?

100,000 percent. But they make it some of his old tales. Are they still true? I saw Dante from down the way and there was a bunch of demons and then there wasn't a bunch of demons. Did he do it? You know, how much of this is true. Some of his stories, too, with your point, everyone else is dead. It's like Dante's a sole survivor.

Like, yeah, he's a soul survivor because he did this, this and this. The questions are like, hey, well, really? Nothing else happens. But let's actually get into it. We're going to tell some stories of Dante tonight. Let's see. That's what you guys tell for yourself. So where we left off, Dante has now taken command.

And the next bit, by the way, we're going to talk about, comes from a book called Warlords of the Imperium, which is really hard to find. Just so you guys know, it took me a while to pull some of this stuff because this is stuff that these are books that are not in print and will never be in print again. And y'ar, I found me a way to get it. But anyway, so Dante takes his promotion to Chapter Master, literally wearing power armor that he was fighting in the Kalea sector that still got blood on it. So he, you know, elevated pretty quickly. But they then take that red power armor away from him, and he puts on the gold power armor of a Blood Angels chapter master, which is something that they are unique in this, by the way.

The Chapter Master of the Blue Angels wears an armor that's meant to symbolize Sanguineas. It's why he wears this all-gold outfit, whereas every other Chapter Master just wears blue, white, green, whatever, because that's what our armies are. And he's got the Sanguineer Guard that also go into gold. which is specifically supposed to be the honor guard that are only, even though every game you put as many sanguinary guard as there are in the entire galaxy, but that's just on the table. Yeah, for,

10,000 top 40K is always a bit of a day. Wait, how many assassins do you have? I run it all four of them. No. Yeah. But they also have the, I like this because they also do the death mass and everything else. They're not.

I mean, most Marines are not trying to be stealthy. some two of the chapters are but especially when you're doing some blood angel stuff these guys are letting you know that they're commanders yeah right but let's talk about dante so the first thing dante does taking over a chapter master is he focuses on regrowing the chapter dante had been raised a chapter master because remember every other captain was dead which means most of the blood angels were dead too the attack on the calaisa sector Which is also how he got to captain. Yeah.

Bad shit happens a lot. Dante is a very tough dude. However, if you and Dante are going into combat, you're like, I'm so happy that this unbelievably powerful hero of the Imperiums here, but also, man, a lot of people wear red shirts when he's around. Well, what colors their army? That's the problem. That's what I was about to say.

That's the issue. You are the red shirt army. and then the one dude not wearing a red shirt is over there. Oh, look, he survived. Weird. So Dante knows that this chapter can do nothing right now. It's written that might only be a couple hundred Blay Angels left in the galaxy at this point. So he starts rebuilding the chapter.

He puts a call out to all the people across Ball, Primus, Ball, Circundus, and the moons of ball, that, hey, we need more recruits. And so the people there start doing what you do to make more people. So credit where credits do. and then sort of offering over all of their children to the blood angels. In record numbers, though, more than anything before. I want to see Dante's closing speech when he's coming in as a coach from a college football team and giving you the, you should go to school here because apparently his is pretty damn good

because every time he shows up, people do whatever the hell he said to do. But he also takes a step further, which I really do like in the lore, because he doesn't just say, I need more people. Someone give me more people. actually goes in works, the sanguinary priests and the apothecaries, focusing on the gene seed program, trying to make sure that they're maximizing the recruit success ratio. Something a lot of those haven't done in the past. He also starts overseeing a lot more of the recruitment itself, overseeing the trials,

bringing in the new recruits are coming into, bringing in different chapter veterans to train them. His goal was to not only have more recruits, but have them be able to get to what we call Air Corps fighting strength a lot faster. And to make things even better, he also met with each recruit as they emerged from their sarcophagus, one that survived obviously, and he handed them their blood drop pendant himself. And all of this was done, whether it meant to or not, had the function of making him this much stronger bonded leader within the blood angels than anyone prior. Because established veterans are now looking at him as this prime example of leadership. Because he always leads from the front.

He takes massive interest in the chapter. Well, he looks at the people from the very lowest, the people that are coming in, the neophytes. He knows these people by name. He's interested in them making it into the blood angels. So morale is at all time. Yeah, everyone loves him. Not to mention the fact that the whole chapter is like, oh, yeah, I used to read stories about this guy and he's there. That does help.

So within a hundred years or so, the chapter goes from the brink of extinction back to full strength. and not just in size and power, but they truly unified. This is almost great crusade level function. They are the best that they've ever been at this stage. It's super well trained at the time, too. These guys are going into the specific Blood Angels tactics. They make a point of that a couple of the stories that Dante made it a big deal to train, not just as Marines trained, but has Blood Angels train so that they knew exactly what he wanted of them from day one.

Exactly. So with this full-strength Legion, Dante launches back into the galaxy. And we don't have a lot of official dates for some of these, but we know all of this happens between M-40 and the middle of M-41. Because once you get to M-41, the stories get dates on them. So we're going to cover right now his post-chapter master, basically pre-war of Armageddonete's stuff. This couple of it bounces around a little bit. And this is a really cool time within the Imperium from his standard of right- So the Eisenhower novels are set around 200s of M41. The Sabat World Crusades, 700s of M41. The Second War of Armageddon, 941 of M41.

The Fall of Cadia, 999M41. So we're talking M40 for a lot of this stuff. Just to give you an idea of when this is, you don't have concrete dates because we don't need them. There's actually no time frame there to bounce it off of. Now, the first one we're going to get to is Skylos. Dante goes to Skylos. there is a chaos sorcerer there who's practicing cromancy, time warping.

Time, I was saying. He's cast a warp time. Sure. Anyway, no one's ever spent how this stuff works, but I move on. So the entire... Warp time is a steeple spell from chaos for a very long time. No, it is. That's just like, I made him go faster.

Double moved, thank you very much. Yeah, it's very powerful on tabletop. I'm just calling it out, though. So the entire planet gets covered in this time warp storm, and Dante deploys there with his blood angels to, you know, air quotes here, remove the stain from the planet. And it's just, this story becomes very Dante because Dante confronts the cromancer. The cromancer looks up at Dante and goes, I'm about to get my ass kicked.

And so he decides, but I'm going to cast a spell on you. So he cast a spell that sucks a few decades of life out of Dante, at which Dante effectively goes, I've been around a long time already, man. I don't really care about being here. He's like, look, good to hear, bro. You're hitting me up with a couple of decades. I'd get a hope that I'm done in another thousand. Yeah, and just hacks the chromescer to death with his ex.

Problem solved. The next chunk we see of him, that's kind of independent Dante. The next big one for him is meant to be more of an example of his leadership skills. So the McCarion heresy, which we covered at some point, I believe. Lord Solar and Macarius conquered a large chunk of Segmentum Pacificus. after he left, a lot of those worlds were like, yeah, we liked him. The Lord of Terrorists suck. And so they all went into rebellion.

So an invasion had to be done. Dante and the Blood Angels were some of the ones who deployed. But when they get there, Dante realized that because of the size of the McCarran heresy, the traditional method that a Blood Angel or Space Marine uses, which is these little lightning strikes to shape a battle towards victory, were never going to be enough. So he just goes, how about I just take command? So he does. He takes command of guard regiments, naval elements, and starts directing them around,

which I will also point out is a complete and total violation of Codex of Stardis. And actually, everything the Imperium has, because that's what made the heresy happen, was a person in charge of allegiance control of the army. Oh, settle down. G-man's the Lord came under the... Oh, no, no, no. It's fine. It does it.

But it just, I want to put it. This is how badass Dante is. I mean, it's not as a knock on Dante. It's Dante came in and was like, I'm going to do. do this thing now that everyone has written down, I'm not supposed to be able to do, but you're going to let me do it because when I do it, we're going to win. And that's exactly what happens. He starts just turning the battle around until he gets to a point where the chaos fortress, whatever you want to call, the main base of them gets exposed. And then he goes, I don't care about any of

you other guys, Blaine and Joel's ho, and they just lightning strike down into that thing. And he personally kills the warlord himself. Yeah. Because that's how it really. Bres, baby. Yeah, but I just like that story, though, because it is Dante going, hey, I can't use my chapter enough here doing to do. So I'm going to take command of more, and we're going to win the war because I not only can command space marines, I can command regular people. It's almost primark-esque and some of stuff he's doing there, which is really cool.

I mean, he did some super bad. I mean, we're going to talk about cutting scarbran in half is going to be one of the things we can talk about. I mean, everything about the ultimate Macarius sectam, there's multiple campaigns there. Worth reading, by the way, everyone. There's a lot of stories there that are very, very good. People ask us all the time, you know, what should I read as far as that? All of those campaigns have a lot of Blood Angels lore in that period.

I totally agree. Fun one, though, because I can talk about Tao. So let's talk about Tao. Isn't even that good. I like this one a lot. I like this story. John loves this a ton, but it's such a first round knockout. It's not even a real battle.

Yeah, this is great. So for those who don't realize, there was a big part of Tao lore back in the day. We don't get as much of it now. But originally under the Tao lore, the Tao would go to imperial settlements and convince them to turn their backs on the Imperium. Basically becoming human,

becoming traitors to the imperial. They would swear allegiance to the greater good, and they'd go be on team Tao. Dante got to one of these, looked around and went, yeah, how about no? And he was trying to hear that, see? Yeah, and kills all the human traders and all the towel of the planet.

And then leaves the big middle finger to anyone else wants some? Yeah. Go with it specifically, though. He went door to door killing them because he wanted to have it recolonized and didn't want to harm the infrastructure of the planet. So he could get new loyal imperial citizens specifically says that too. It's great. I'm going to go door to door get my murder on.

so that we can get some real imperial citizens here. Yeah, because Dante is not, we talked about last week, he does have a lot of morals, but there's limits, and one of them is turning your back on the Imperium to join the town. So.

When I talk about somebody he doesn't like, at all, not even a little bit. No, he's... He doesn't like the Eldar. Okay, so one, he, I think the only real times he's met the Eldar,

it's always been pirate. Corsair fleet's doing shit that you shouldn't be doing. And, well, Dante took offense to that. And he has been taking offense to that for the last 1,100 years. Yeah, this one is a Ruden 3 is the planet. Same thing we talked about last week, Eldar Pirate King. This time, the Pirate King did not escape.

Dante killed the Pirate King and all of the pirates. Yeah. They did not capture anybody and ask for any information. They just chained sort of people's heads off. Yeah. Which one has left them hidden. It's true. Yeah.

He also is a big fan of orcs. Iron helm, Dante leads his legion, there's an oak wah happening. And he breaks the orc siege that he'd been going on for a decade, by the way. So Iron Helm, the orcs have been fighting on Iron Helm against the Imperium for 10 years. And Dante eventually just, I guess, got the memo. I'll go solve this problem. Drops down and wipes out all of them ending the Waugh immediately. Although this is one of those ones that becomes kind of funny.

according to the lore the amount of orcs killed by Dante is so many that the Imperium disputes it as an impossibility because he was supposed to be standing on a mountain of orcs which he was fighting

as they came up the mountain of orcs the orcs were running over dead bodies to get to him while he's cutting him down and I'm going to make a comment now that only a few of you will get but some of you will and it'll come up and more next time Thanks, Matt Ward.

Anyway, that was his writing on that one. Fair and balanced. Yeah. But we talk about Dante. There's a couple things that really stand out, and they are his fights against the arch enemy. Let's get the Scar Brand story out of the way, because it's a story of a lot of us.

Well, a lot of us don't like this one. In the moment, excuse you, Dante. It's at the gates of pandemonium. No. No. No. Just no.

Scarbrand, Dante's not beating Scarbrand. He's just not. Whoa, whoa, whoa, not beating him. Cutting him in half, thank you very much. Or maybe he is. And I'll explain what I mean by that in the second, guys. So this is one of the most famous ones. So it's, Scarbrand is a outcast demon of corn

because he pissed corn. I think he hit corn and corn flicked him. Come on. Now, let me tell you this one. This is so funny. So basically Zinch got into Scarbrand's ear. and said, you should go hit Corn, the God. Yeah. And he effectively hit him in the leg,

hit him in his boot, basically, with his axe, put a tiny scratch on it. Corn got real annoyed and flung him through the warp, and he flew for eight days ripping his wings off in the process. Yeah. And now he is an extra angry. I don't know how you get even angrier, but he's a more mad bloodthuster.

He is the angriest bloodthirster in the galaxy because he's trying to show corn that he still is, should be his favorite. Because he was corn's favorite up until then, maybe sort of. So, 975, in one of the, in the Acadian sector, is a world called Luthorus Epsilon. And a revolt, what I mean is all the guardsmen on the planet just started killing each other. That's what they started. It seemed like no reason. And the reason was is because deep down. further in the planet, a chaos gate had opened and Scarbrand had come through it.

So just the presence of Scarbrand was fueling rage and violence all across the surface. Which is super cool, actually, because in the game, they do a good transfer of this. Yeah. He has an aura that makes it. It's not as cool as it used to be because he used to make... It was way better before. Yeah. Everyone was plus attack, right?

Everyone got plus one attack. Loyals and enemies. Scarbram was cool. Yeah. He just made people go nuts about stuff. It's fantastic. Scarbrand's great. But what happens is Dante leads the blood angels there,

and he discovers, with his sanguinary guard, that this is chaos gate there. And the thing about Scarbrand, to be fair, is he's not very sneaky. So it was not only is there a chaos gate there, but we also know who's by it and how to get to it because it's a very loud and angry demon prince. And he also has to open a gate for corn in this way.

you have to kill enough people to make it a stable gate. So it's not like you don't know what's happening. Yeah. A lot of stuff's going down. There's a lot going down here. But the long story shortened down is Dante and his crews are just chewing through demons until they get to Scarbrand. And Scarbrand, and I do love this line, yells out a challenge to Dante that screams so loudly it's heard both in the materiae and the immaterial. So there's an audience to this battle.

And Dante ain't no bitch. He grabs his boots, throws a few extra pumps into them, and he and Scarbrands start, you got to juice up the boots and mighty ass kicking. You got to put the full pumps on. Yeah. And the story is great because in the story, when their blades strike into each other as Dante's parrying blows, it actually causes so much force that some of the demons in the area blink out of reality because there's just that much force coming into these blows.

eventually though the battle keeps going and scar brand makes a mistake dante leaps up and into the air and then comes down acts first anime style he holstrons him yes come on use it as the verb he definitely voltroned him in half anime anyway but let's talk about this story for a second is the reason i like the story is interesting is there's two ways you can interpret this story and i like these options one is one is you is that it's a tale of exaggeration, that in reality the blood angels fought, they ended up killing Scarbrand with concentrated fire. Maybe they brought some tanks, I don't care. And they defeated Scarbrand. But the cult of personality that is Dante and the way legends grow,

the story has shifted over time to a mortal man took down one of the key demon princes of porn. Yeah, and the thing about it is when you're telling the tale, and they've had a couple of this in the space with laws, where you're like, sure, I don't really care what the reality of the story is because for inspiration to get the troops moving, this is what makes people fight harder, fight against. You have to have some pretty motivational speeches to fight against actual demons. Hey, you know those stories that we would tell people? Yeah, those are all real and we fight them on kind of the regular.

So you've got to be pretty juiced up in sight. somebody's got to give you a pretty good halftime speech to continue to fight demons from the war. But there's another interpretation. And the other interpretation is not that Dante is this powerful, but that Dante is the chosen precursor of Sanguineus. And so when he fought Scarbrand, it was Dante physically fighting him. But Sanguineas had reached out in the power of Sanguineas

is what was actually fighting Scarbrand, which would make sense. because Sanguarez did beat the crap out of Cabanda. So I like this idea. It's your choice how you want to interpret it. Is it that it's a tall tale and whatever? Or are these tales of Dante's incredible power and incredible success actually Sanguinius himself powering Dante from a fog?

But he is a vessel for sanguinius. I do believe that in the writing 100%. Yeah. We'll be right back after a quick break. Now, let's talk about some stuff that did happen for sure. and some of the ones involved, Dante is not a huge fan of the chaos space marines either. I mean, Godine is kind of a grouch.

If I'm being asked, he's the nicest grouch of the Imperium is how I look at him. So the world of Tarion, the night lords join up with a chaos traitor war band, which means, you know, it's a collection of chaos space marines, known as the Brotherhood of Darkness. Ugh.

And so they- I love that. I knew you were going to uff it. As soon as we were right about that, it's the Brotherhood of Darkness. It's so dumb. Oh, it's the British accent. Whatever attempt you just made it a British accent there.

But I just went for a catch-all. Actually, I can't tell if it was a British accent. The fact that Brad's having some breathing issues today, maybe it's just that's the new accent for the day. I always say, I'm about to have a different accent just because I can't breathe at all. Does it involve a monitor going, beep? I'd come back. I said, yeah, it's fine.

I told you. I'll replace you with AI. So Dante and the Blood Angels descend on this planet and they kill the traitors to the man. Every single one dies. And the story I like about this, they don't get a lot. It's one paragraph, by the way, in one book. It's just written that on this, the planet is now a paradise world. This is a world that was under assault by the night lords and the brotherhood of darkness.

And it's now a paradise world. And in the middle of the paradise world is a massive marble. statue of Dante. Because they basically sainted him there. Similarly happens, the world of Orana. This is a collection of chaos space Marines led by a demon prince.

They descend onto a hive world. Dante and them, they arrive and discover it's a trap. As soon as they land on the planet, the whole sky goes dark. And this warp storm severs their contact. This is wild though. Because they come down

and it will, the trap is, The entire hive basically gets engulfed in warp flame and all the buildings become a living creature of the warp. It's bone and flesh. Yeah. Demons start flying. I mean, this is, again, a wild nightmare. I'm not knocking it.

But if you guys want a good visual, it's any one of those video games, a Resident Evil thing does this a little bit, where it's a, if you're playing that video game, and all of a sudden you realize the place you are actually doesn't look the way you think it looks. You actually are in hell.

that's what they guess you. So the main hive, to Brad's point, it engulfs itself in warp flame. And when the flame extinguishes, they realize that it's not a building. The building's now made up of flesh and bone that's been fused together. And by the way,

hordes of demons start rushing out of this thing. And they're completely separate from everything up in orbit. And even what's in orbit is just blind firing down into the planet. And as the shells hit, the surface becomes almost like flesh where it absorbs the macrocan

and then reheals itself. It's sick, though, because Dante effectively sees that there's a psychic presence, like a beacon. I mean, it's pretty easy, I'm assuming, to go, hey, I'm getting a terrible migraine, and that's over there. Yeah. So he calls it another thing that just went to legends, a bunch of Storm Ravens, to basically punch a whole. Oh, they want to over there with the legends. Oh, man, I only own six of them from the time when there was no rule of three. But I did play Dante and six Storm Ravens in ATC, V.

here. It was a dumb list. But this is another one of those super ultra heroic things. Dante just grabs his sanguinary guard, goes, I need a hole. I'm going to wreck it. Give me a hole through the defenses. And I'm going to jump through

and shit's going down. And well, it does. Yeah, that's what happens. They blast a hole into the cathedral where they realize this demon lord is. And he shoots in there with a sanguinary guard. Big battle goes, traditional. You know, they get the upper hand, then they have the lower hand. They're winning.

And Dante's about to lose completely. And then Dante just goes, how about no? Turns on going out like that. And with his junk pack, like blaring, goes axe first into the demon lord, piercing his heart with his axe. And this banished the demon back into the warp, causes all the lesser demons in by to explode into mists of blood. And then they leave and the planet gets exterminatist because, Yeah, at a certain point. There's a point where like, look, that one we talked about a minute ago where the nightlords were there, we can salvage this. This one, no. Not so much. No, this one's. Also, again, it's one of those things where the people that did survive with, I can't believe we survived these days and nights of terror. Yeah. See you later. Deucees. Don't look up. Yeah. If you've got some stuff you need to take care of, you should probably do it like soon.

One of my favorite stories, though, involves Cabanda. So a quick reminder, those who've forgotten, Cabanda was the demon prince from the Horace heresy that almost killed Sanguinius. He almost got to seem he actually turned traitor for him as well in order to get rid of the red thirst. And then Sanguiz came to his senses and decided, no. And then later, Sanguiz beat the crap out of him on the walls.

Flew him up over the walls of Terra for the palace of Terra. Broke his spine while talking. giving a game time speech to everybody and threw him down. So Cabanda's not a super Blood Angels fan, but he does want to make sure that he's the one that kills the blood. Which we'll cover more in the next episode, but Cabanda has a thing for the Blood Angels. So this is 911 of M41.

Dante gets a strange visitor. A bunch of space marines wearing silver armor show up. And this is because this is still a point where the Grey Knights were a secret. The Grey Nets stayed a secret until M-41 to most legions, for the record. They're not. No, but they were. The thing is, but it's kind of... If we read First War of Armageddon, that was actually one of the deals that Logan

then made was, up until then, they were a secret. It was at that point, only Logan and a few other chapter masters knew about them. It was after that, that more had to be told. It's still very early. The Grey Knight Prognosticars had read the runes, and they knew Cabanda was about to reemerge in the materia. And they needed to help the Blay Angels. They couldn't do this alone.

But there's a catch. The Grey Knights didn't want the Blai Angels regular to know of their existence. More importantly, they were concerned about them having any memories of fighting a demon prince like Cabanda. So they went to Dante and said, look, we need to have a deal. We will fight with you side by side. We can banish Cabanda back into the Imitarium. But afterwards, we have the men in black your entire Legion. And Dante goes, all right, let's go for it.

Also, if you have this technology, you could have just killed so many less people, but continue. Yeah, we're not going to, they have this weird ability to, we could memory wipe everybody or just murder them all. And apparently the memory wiping is like two or three steps more involved than a bolder. I was just like, this is tiring. Let's just kill everybody. So, but it works. They banished cabanda back into the immaterium. And no one outside of Dante has a.

memory of it. But let's also go back a little bit. Because of the fact that we just covered it, we didn't get really into the wild badassery that happened on Armageddon. Because Dante, he's Hogan leg dropping all kinds of people there. Yeah, but the reason I didn't want to cover it is because it's kind of a weird story. Him and the Blaynor are doing work all over Armageddon. But the thing is, there's two pieces of that story that don't really fully add up. One, he never fights gas and two there's a ton of orcs left on Armageddon after he leaves so whereas some other spots he's gone to he's signaling wiped out the entire enemy on Armageddon he's been like yeah it was enough of pain in the butt that Gaz left and then the rest of them went and hidden the jungle

and then I left well it's funny because one of the things about Dante that I do want to point out story wise and again he's not the guy that everybody's seeing he's always from afar you know he does stuff, the blood angels see it, but other people don't. Also, he's wildly busy. Like, Dante personally, yeah, he's just conflict after conflict after conflict. For sure, he's been in the most engagement because he's the oldest. But just for pure frequency, he personally is in battle after battle after battle. Well, we spent maybe 20 minutes there going through some of his achievements. That's less than a quarter of the stuff we could have gone into.

is nonstop what he's done. Yeah. But he's just there at a lot of big battles too, without even stories. Yeah. Where I want to get to in the cast, though, is the next bit. So by the end of the 41st millennia, the ravages of time are starting to affect Dante. He is 1,500 years old. And that is old.

It's just old. And so it's cool for everyone around him, because we mentioned earlier, if you're a blood angel, you've joined the belangels hearing stories. of this great chapter master named Dante and how cool he was. And you get there, he's still the chapter master and he's still doing badass stuff. So great for them. But for Dante, it's a bit of a drag. He is aging. His skin is wrinkled. He's covered in scars. His hair is white at this point they talk about. He's getting old. And he also is kind of just depressed. Tens of thousands of blingels have died under his watch. And he witnessed a lot of that. He knew a lot of them.

Millions of civilians are dead. Even though he can save, can't save all of them. And in addition to that, he's 1,500 years old. He's like a vampire. Everyone, more literally than I wanted to be, actually, but everyone he's ever known or bonded with is dead. So his soul is tired, but he has to go on. And the reason he has to go on is there's a prophecy within the blood angels about a leader who saves them from extinction. And the idea is that one day a threat arises that's so massive that only the blood angels themselves can stop it. The bringer of light. Yeah. And only the sacrifice of their great leader can actually achieve this victory.

And so a lot of the scholars used to believe this was just the tale of sanguineas. Sanguineus existed to fight Horace. And because Sanguinius died, that gave the emperor the ability to kill Horus, which ended the Horace heresy. He effectively saved the galaxy through the sacrifice of a blood angel. Dante, though, started to realize that this story might not be about sanguinius. And it unfortunately might be about him. And so that's one of the reasons why he doesn't step down because he's convinced that not even it's necessarily true, but it may be that he's going to have to step up and save the gregnors.

galaxy. And there's no chance. He's taking that chance. Yes. Yeah, I'm not going to retire. Yeah, I'm not going to retire because what if I'm needed and then the galaxy dies because I just got, because I was tired and wanted to have a rest. Right. Now, let's talk about the tyrantids. So that you guys know it's going to be coming up next because this story is going to get a lot rougher. Quick reminder, tyrannids. Well, there's a reason it's tougher. A lot of times when your story starts with the devastation. Yes, it's not going to be ideal. So for those who don't know or don't remember, I don't care what,

Ternids didn't come into contact in the galaxy till 745 of M41. So this is like. So crazy. It's very recent. It's so crazy because of the fact that Ternans have so much lore in the game from the very early times. They are technically the newest faction, to the game, air quotes there. Obviously, they've been in the game

from us playing the game. They've been there since the early 90s. But as far as their presence in the galaxy, the Tao and the Votan have been in the galaxy interacting a lot longer than the Tyrannids have. So there we go. Now, they were first contacted 745. It's the planet as Tyranes. It's why they're

tyrantids. That's what it's for. This was high fleet. That's why you get tyrannic veterans. This used to be the coolest rule too. Oh, that was really great. And now they're on legends. My metal ultramarines are somewhere in my house. I don't know where. The High Fleet Behemoth was the first one to come in. It made its way to McCrack. Calgar and company defeated them. Brutal casualties. Then a hundred and fifty brutal casualties. Yeah. But they did kick the shit out of them, by the way. They did. 150 years go by. The next one is High Fleet Cracking comes in. This one actually does. They get some help from the

Eldar, sort of. Also, it's a big deal for this also because this is, a wildly different type of fleet. They learn from, they come with way different forces. Because the tyranids, we talked about them in different casts, they adapt to whatever they're fighting. So they'll actually bring different things. So this was a much, much different fight. Yeah. So we're talking first tyrantids are about 745. Next tyrannids are right about 900. Around 997. So this is before the fall of Kadia. The next. Ex-Tiernit invasion comes in. And this one isn't coming in from one area.

It's all around the galaxy. They're enveloped. And this is High Fleet Leviathan. The reason it matters a lot more, obviously, for the cast, I think you'll know where we're going. But 998 of M-41, so a year later, one of the tendrils appear is just outside the status system. And originally, it actually goes unnoticed, which is kind of the funny bit here, because

when a tier and it's coming with force, they just overwhelm the defenders immediately. And the shadow and the warp shuts off communication. I was to say, a shadow of warp, too, it cuts off all communications because of the fact that it silences the warp. Also, I love the Inquisitor to figure this out. But how did no one figure this out before that? So Inquisitor Kripman, who is like the foremost authority on Tyrannids, he realizes that there's something is wrong in the galaxy. He's seeing something he doesn't like. So he begins a campaign to search for the tyranids by just,

looking for blank spots because he knows there's no calls of aid that go out. And what you can do is if you just follow these absolute dissections of nothing. Because it's just complete silence. Yeah, because the imperial makes sense. No, no ass for aid, no answer for anything. They're not filing their daily six billion emails like, hey, where are the places of silence? And goes, oh, that is where the tenants are. We can now see their movement through this and start to prepare.

You follow them by, it's a blank. You follow the spot that's missing. Now, this brings us the world of cryptis. So High Fleet, the Viathan originally descends on the planet of Vitria. There's some really cool writing on this guys if you want to read its old campaign books. And the Imperium sends Imperial Guard and Sions to defend the world. It doesn't go great. They try, but after consuming the world, the High Fleet suddenly makes an abrupt change of directions.

It had been going in one path and just. flips towards Cryptus, which is the next system. But if it was going to the left, now it'll say it turns to like the upper right. It's a hard turn. Left to Albuquerque. Yeah, exactly. Effectively any time that Gene Steelers get into a planet,

they eventually pop a beacon up. And the high fleet knows that is where they should go because it is now right for the taking. And it's going to be a great world to harvest. And that's exactly what happens. Cryptis has a massive, as the tyrians get closer, massive genus level of nowhere there. Now, the problem for the Imperium is they're more than happy to sacrifice Cryptus.

It's a wealthy system, but it's just people, whatever. We'll bomb it. The problem is that if you look at the direction of the tindril, its next stop after Cryptus is Ball, the home of the blood angels. So the Lords of Terror decide that this Tangeral has to be stopped, and they order it to be stopped, but not like the lazy, the Lords of Terror. Someone should do something. Now I'm going to go make myself a sandwich. You know, that's lunch, guys. They do actually order quite a lot of stuff there.

And they inform Dante of, hey, you have something horrible coming. You need to fortify ball because the Ternids are coming. Dante, of course, does this, but he's also, he's Dante. He knows what he's doing. So he also grabs the first and second company of the Blood Angels and his closest advisor. So he brings Mephisto. Corbolo, who's the sanguinary high priest, whose model, by the way, is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Gabriel, Seth, Chapter of the Chagos.

I want to talk about the Corbolo model. If you guys don't know the Corbolo model, because he's not in the game anymore, but he was. Corbolo's job as the sanguinary high priest is he has to carry the, take the chalice of sanguine. Chalice. The blood. So his model is him holding a sword and a chalice.

Like Indiana. A wildly oversleys chalice. He's chalice. Oh, it's giant that chalice. It's so big, dude. It's so dumb. He's effectively duel-weeting. But he also brings Gabriel Seth and the flesh terrors, who are somehow the loyal group of the

Blind Angel's successors. It's fine. Gabriel Seth is a badass, though. And what happens is because the Hyde Fleet's block out communication, Dante wants to go see for himself what's going on. So they head out to Cryptus. They also want to help Cryptus if they can. Which they can't.

No, they can't. He was not ready for the level of ass kickery that the tyrantons were putting on. This was wild. So he gets to Cryptus, and Cryptus has Cadians, Sions, the Order of the Sisters of the Order of Sacred Rose, they're all there, Imperial Navy. They are getting Thunderdome. It is like laughably. Yeah. Millions of bioships appear.

And what happens is, first off, they eat the Navy. like it's nothing because they come in and the tyrantids had learned basically how to deal with imperial weaponry. So the bio-ships, because they're living, secreted like an ooze that in space froze. So they actually built a force field of ice around them that the macucanans are bouncing off of. Which, how thick is the ice? I don't know. It's not, look, let's not get into physics in 40K. But the naval battle between the entire Imperial Navy and the Tyrann invasion fleet lasts a couple hours before there is no imperial navy. Yeah, I was saying they wipe the entire interior Navy and then just start dropping spores. Yeah, the sky of cryptis goes black because of the

amount of spores, and not just spores drop pods. Those things are Tyrannocytes. They're still spores. It's a different type of sports. Yes. Sport. They hold out for a little bit. The imperial defenders just go, well, let's use all of the flamers. And it's holding for a bit, but the issue they run into is effectively kill ratio, where in order to defeat the tyranids, they have to hold a 2,000 to one kill ratio. And the tyranids, because of the size of the fleet that hits Cryptus, is so big, the hive mind there is very powerful. And the hive mind begins adapting. So what starts off with, all right, drop pod lands, flamer goes, drop pod problem solved, they start shifting, lictors start deploying and picking off leaders.

All these things start calling apart because the hive mind's adapting and adapting and adapting. To the point where basically after the first day or so, the battle for Lathistin is falling apart, and Dante decides, nah, I'm not going down like that. And he deployed hard. Yeah. Well, he's not even deploying to win. And he's deploying to get as much butchery as possible and to get people the hell out of there. Yeah.

He also realizes that if he can get more people to escape, in a cool and not cool thing, Dante realizes that, hey, man, these guys use all of our dead everything and take all of their biomass and make new guys. If I get more people the hell off this planet, I'll have less to deal with where they come to ball, basically. So you're like, I want you guys to survive because I really don't want you being tiered warriors in a minute. Now, at the same time, we also have the flesh terrors deploy. It's a whole bunch of black rage, all these things. But we need to talk about why 7th edition was such a horrible version of this game. All was written in 2014.

So two things were going on. We had 7th edition, which mean we had, allies. And we also had Matt Ward. And Matt Ward decided to combine those two things into a story that drives a lot of people insane. So we're going to do it. And we're going to go through this. Shortly after their victory in one of the plants called Asphidics against a tyrantids, a new threat gets detected. And when I say a new threat, Dante and everyone are on a ship, and they just see this fleet appear on the far side of the system and start launching itself right at them in Asphabics. And as it's coming, it just destroys every tyrannid between where it started

and where it finishes. And so they get there, they identify the ships as Necron. So this giant Necron fleet appears above Asphidix. And the Necron just teleport down. And outside of the walls, Dante and them are looking at the walls going, well, today was going pretty bad. Looks like it's about to get worse. And this Necron goes, you guys want to parlay? And it's on Iraq the treas. who had a model until 10th edition. I don't know why does that model anymore. It was a cool model. It was a cool.

Yeah. On Rock had encountered the tyrannives elsewhere in the galaxy. He'd actually come to the system to awaken the tumor. If you read the book, it's a funny story because the overlord wakes up and On Rock just standing there like, we got to go now. And then it's like, well, we're under attack. Yeah, yeah, I know. We got to go now, now.

Time to go. Everyone. Pop, chop, chop. Let's go. And he gets everyone up and they go over there. They meet with the blood angels and Dante. And Anorok proposes something to Dante. The necrons have the technology that there's a gas giant in the system.

They can blow that thing up. Blown up. Destroy the entire system. But somehow they don't have enough necrons to do it. So they need the help of the blood angels, basically provide covering fire for us. And we'll go blow up the gas giant. And then that'll be an awesome system. This is the dumbest damn thing of any story.

I've ever heard. It caused nothing but problems in the addition. Because this is not allies of convenience. This is full-blown come the apocalyptic allies. So stupid. So, but the story is kind of cool. In the writing, you do get some cool stuff. You get necrons. You get sisters. You get Gar. You get space marines. You get transcendent C-Tans, hierophants. The sanguador shows up. Oh, you mentioned. Shield of Ball. There's a supplement, at these three or four books, there are supplements in the seventh edition. They're called Shield of Ball. You can read. it there. Got some cool stuff in it.

So this is where... Eventually they're successful. Writing was super cool in seventh, by the way. It's just the game got. The game sucked. But that was the problem. They started writing really cool stuff. And they were like, we should put this in the game.

What could go wrong that they let me combine necrons with space marines and I don't know, chaos space marines? That makes sense, right guys? Right? No? Okay, never mind. So they are successful.

and they blow up the red giant. And in doing so, a massive percentage of the high fleet are destroyed. But it's so big. Yeah. I was like, and right afterwards, the necrons go, yeah, we're out, by the way, peace. Good luck with everything else.

Yeah. Yeah. Here they give the dolphins. Thanks for the fish. And just peace out. You're like, hey, man, there's still a lot of shit going on. Dante rolls back the ball and goes, cool.

shit is not great here. Yeah, he gets back to Ball, which has been doing everything he told you. They've been fortifying, fortifying, fortifying, and he does the full-blown jaws. We're going to need a bigger boat. After what he just saw back there. And he begins actually this weird evacuation process.

Because on the one hand, they arm everyone on ball, but anyone that they can't arm, they're like, you're just going to be in the way. So if you could get out of here. I love everything about this because Dante does the most passive aggressive message of all time. Oh, it's great. Because he's got billions, basically, of all these people coming cryptos,

and he's got all these people that are coming from Ball that need somewhere to go. And he knows that all these worlds are not going to want to take them in because they're all overpopulated disease because, well, the Imperium. And that he just sends his whole message of, hey, I know that things aren't going super great for you, but just letting you know, I'm not, the blood angels won't help you with the Ternids if you don't accept these guys. I'm not telling you that you have to take them.

I'm just telling you that I'm not going to show up if you don't. Yeah, his message says, take these refugees, and if you don't, I'm deleting your phone number from my phone. Like, full on, hope you can fight Tarynids without needing my help. It actually does kind of work. The flip side is ball, it starts to really flip into something else. They turn these planets and moons into just artillery. Like, it is, it's loony.

Yeah. Guns on guns on guns on. It's the goose with a blade in its mouth when it's being running around. Like, everything's getting armed. That's literally also one of the rash guards I made for myself for Jiu-Jitsu. It's one of the ones I wear. Peace was never an option. Peace was never an option.

one of my rash guards. The next thing he does, though, is he takes a gamble and he reached out to aid from all the successor chapters that the Blangels ever had, asking everyone of Blangels is letting him saying, hey, ball's going to fall if you guys don't come help us out. When we say he sends this to everybody, he sends it to everybody. I'm talking the people that are gone, cut off, excommunicated, the people that have the knights of blood. The knights of blood, we'll talk about this sometime. They are not welcome. You know, knights of blood push to the edge of heresy as far as you can go. Them and the Carcaryodic. Actually, no, they make the Carcadon's look pleasant, if I'm

being perfectly honest. They are, not to blood or rough. He even gets the Angels Vermillion. The chapter master of the Angels Vermillion hates Dante more than anyone. I would say personally, like a lot, lot. Yeah, that's a fun story. Just a quick side note. The Angels Vermillion, the whole thing with there, there's a massive long history because they do horrible stuff. And Dante effectively excommunicated them himself from the galaxy because they they would hold rituals where they would slaughter the entire population and drink their blood that's what angel and verily doing dante went also there's a great youtube short on this go with it and put in angels for a billion one of the things is they say

the things that they do and they keep coming back to the angels for being the rest of the marines keep going dude no yeah but because it's ball the chapter master of angel for million says we're not helping, screw you guys. But because it's ball, a bunch of individual squads of Angel Rebellion show up. And they're like, yeah, I know I'm going to get yelled at next week when I go home. If I go home. But we don't want our whole world being destroyed. Even I can't turn my back on ball.

And so these people all start to arrive just as the Hyde Fleet breaks orbit. And obviously, you guys know how long, where we're on the episode, we're going to break there. And that's because next week we're going to close out our Dante coverage with kind of a two-part, about the two-fer because we're also going to cover the devastation of ball. It's something that we need to cover at some point. So let's throw it. It throws hands and a half. Exactly.

And then we'll even do some of the arcs of omen to come afterwards. That's a little bit shorter if I'm being can. I think we can, I've written it. Yep, I'm pretty sure we can jam them both in. And this is just awesome because this is all the event Dante has been waiting for. He realizes this is the moment where the chapter master has to basically die off to save his Legion, except he doesn't die. Spoiler alert.

And then it gets even more badass. because it lets me talk about Gilliman for a little bit. What? He's important in this. You're like a factory that produces suck. A never-ending line of suck. This is the best part of the entire devastation of ball is when Gilliman shows up. It's the most critical element, probably.

Commandant will say something different about this. I don't know. One of them still in the Materium. I'm kidding. But next week, we will dive very heavily into devastation of ball, how the battle has progressed, and really what I think is one of the best endings of a fight ever. So until then, John Barcati, Bradchester. This guy.

See you guys then.